It is more than 20 years since the first Matrix film popularised the idea that we could be living inside a simulation. By the time the second instalment came out, an article written by academic philosopher Nick Bostrom presented a serious argument for the truth of the core idea. After the initial trilogy ended with the main character’s sacrificial death, The Matrix: Resurrections wants us to reckon again with the classic philosophical dilemma: what’s real and what’s not?
The idea that reality is not what it seems has been around a long time. Plato famously said that we consider as real, things which in fact are just fleeting appearances, like shadows cast on the walls of a cave, because we derive comfort from such a world and become absorbed in its power games. But reality is the truth behind the appearances; it lies outside the cave and the path towards it is so packed with obstacles that only a person hungry enough for truth can overcome them.
In the films, the computer simulation updates the stuff the cave is made of: a rain of green-coloured code, which has become the trademark of The Matrix franchise, spawning countless cultural imitations. In Resurrections, an “upgraded matrix” lulls humans into unquestioning acceptance. Its architect is not a mathematician (as in the early trilogy) but a psychoanalyst, known as The Analyst and played by Neil Patrick Harris in a superlative parody of the Freud-for-dummies West Coast intellectual. His subjects disintegrate into tears of code with a twitch upon a thread.
The philosophical ideas at play are encountered not just in Plato but in the work of Lewis Carroll, Orwell, Baudrillard and many more, casting a high-brow aura over the whole series. But Resurrections paves its own original path. Bostrom claims that technological progress makes the simulation hypothesis ever-more probable, on the basis that an evolved AI-led society would likely investigate its past by recreating the conditions of its formation. We would thus not be living our lives but rather playing our part in a simulation of our lives, like extras on a crime-scene reconstruction which ends with our own deaths. But while Bostrom focuses on tech advancements, for Plato, it is a weakness in the human mind which keeps us tethered to the cave-matrix. And it is the Platonic insight that the writers of Resurrections deepen, as Lana Wachowski, who created the franchise with her sister Lilly and also directs Resurrections, David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon draw our attention back to the faults in our minds, and not in our tech. It is our unwillingness to face reality and fight for what truly matters, that enables the matrix to dominate our lives and virtual realities to keep us plugged in.
Resurrections is not a conventional sequel. It is a set of clarifications, which turns on its head the very idea of a Hollywood franchise. Neo (Keanu Reeves), the messianic hero of the early trilogy, discovers that he has been trapped in the upgraded matrix, tricked into believing he was a video-game developer who created a game called “The Matrix” twenty years earlier. “They took my life and turned it into a video game,” he says after he is freed once more. Video games are excoriated in Resurrections, knowingly subverting the very tropes which the first Matrix films helped to establish (most famously bullet time). It is a masterful twist, which upbraids the film industry for trivialising its own creations.
If we cannot escape being in a simulation, does it matter? Bostrom’s position denies us both the possibility of escape and the capacity to worry about our predicament. Yet the fact that we do worry surely indicates the posbility of resistance. The question then is: do we want to resist? Resurrections, with its ties to Plato and the divide it calls for between real life and games, poses a challenge to the current enthusiastic embrace of VR.
Where Bostrom, pessimistically, sees simulated life as one and the same for everyone, David Chalmers, professor of philosophy and neural science at NYU, is enthusiastic about VR because of the spectrum of different realities it allows. In his new book Reality+, he argues it is still possible to have real experiences and develop meaningful relationships within a fake world. What matters is that, consciously and emotionally, we relate to a world outside of ourselves enough to have a sense of being alive; and if we get that feedback from a computer simulation, so be it.
It is a message of capitulation to the tech gods—one which Resurrections refuses to accept. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) almost surrenders, as acceptance of routine, social duties and especially the weight of time draw her deeper into the simulation (‘”it’s too late” she says, until of course it’s not). The Wachowskianswer has always been that love leads you to truth and that only by looking reality in the face can you truly love. That is the strength of the bond between Neo and Trinity, that each drives the other to rise beyond the falsity and be free. Resurrections is a profound work on the tyranny of technology that only the love of truth can defeat.
