Matt Watson

I rewatched The Matrix and was unsettled

Matt Watson

I just rewatched The Matrix. It has always been a favorite of mine, but the last two times I’ve watched it, I’ve been left with an uneasy feeling. The Matrix has come to represent in my mind false beliefs that predominate in the second millennium and are very gnostic in nature.

I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about gnosticism, but that’s the word that kept popping into my head as I rewatched The Matrix, so I’ll run with it… I know broadly speaking that it refers to a category of heresies in the first few centuries that sought salvation in secret knowledge and a repudiation of the body or material existence.

Here is a definition from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The doctrine of salvation by knowledge. […] Whereas Judaism and Christianity, and almost all pagan systems, hold that the soul attains its proper end by obedience of mind and will to the Supreme Power, i.e. by faith and works, it is markedly peculiar to Gnosticism that it places the salvation of the soul merely in the possession of a quasi-intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and of magic formulae indicative of that knowledge.

In particular, I thought of Manichaeism, often used as a synonym for “dualism,” as the chief component of the Manichaean heresy was the dual conception of matter and spirit. In Manichaean and most other gnostic beliefs, to my understanding, marriage, sex, food, and other corporal realities of existence were thought to be evil, or at least to be forces opposed to the spirit, the forces of light, or some sort of principle of the Good, and therefore inconsequential at best and to be mitigated as much as possible.

This is similar to orthodox Christianity, in which, as we read in the letter of Paul to the Romans, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:6, RSVCE). But the key difference is that in Christianity, “flesh” refers not to all material creation or bodily existence, but to the body separated from God. In the same letter, Paul says that if we live not according to the flesh, that is, to our bodies apart from God, then we will experience “the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23) and that “he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit who dwells in you” (v. 11). For this reason, what we do in the body matters. In fact, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19).

Steven Greydanus, the great Catholic movie critic, says that The Matrix plays on both Christian and gnostic beliefs and cannot be pigeonholed neatly into one or the other. He points out that it also touches on René Descartes’ and others’ philosophical inquiries on whether we can know that the world is not an illusion. Austin Cline, writing for Learn Religions, similarly argues that The Matrix brings together “a variety of religious themes and ideas […] to make us think differently about the world around us” but does not fitly neatly into a certain religious or philosophical system.

I remember murmurings in the early 2000s that The Matrix and other movies of the time were increasingly dealing with Christian themes. I looked up Bishop (then-Father) Robert Barron’s review of the film, and he does well in pointing out the Christian themes while briefly acknowledging there are other potential readings that are less than Christian. But he had an overall positive view of the movie.

My own opinion after rewatching it a few days ago is that The Matrix is a gnostic film opposed to Christian beliefs. It portrays undeniable Christian elements — the Messianic figure of a Chosen One, a love interest by the name of Trinity, a remnant of humanity called Zion, among probably a hundred other symbols, large and small. But a lot of gnostic groups also shared similarities with Christianity. It is what they got wrong that is important.

What does The Matrix get wrong? It’s driving emotional force lies behind the idea that the material world as we know it is evil, that it is a simulacrum created by a force that wants to control us for its own gain. Consistent with gnosticism, we are saved by knowledge rather than by obedience to a higher power. That knowledge comes by way of being “unplugged” from the Matrix by another freed human, after which we must decide to take the red pill of enlightenment or the blue pill of illusion. Every other human still plugged in to the Matrix is “part of the system” and cannot be trusted, which is used to justify killing them indiscriminately, such as in the shootout scene in the lobby. Alan Scherstuhl of Vulture says the movie has long received criticism as a potential inspiration for mass shooters. I think it’s a valid complaint.

It is true that there are aspects of The Matrix that fight against this interpretation. The movie does not completely deny the material world. The Matrix invented by the machines might be fake, but there is nonetheless a real world outside of the Matrix, not a disembodied spiritual plane of existence consistent with gnosticism. Greydanus argues that “the movie’s one true gnostic” is, in fact, the bad guy, Agent Smith, a computer program who contemptuously confides in Morpheus, the captain of the rag-tag team that unplugs the main character Neo, that he is tired of being assigned to the Matrix, “this zoo, this prison,” and presumably longs to escape back to the disembodied world of ones and zeroes.

But even with all those caveats, the real world outside of the Matrix is not exactly one where body and spirit live harmoniously. It is more akin to a materialistic existence in a world not governed by anything like God, where humans eat goop for mere survival and can upload knowledge to their brains like inserting a disc into a computer. In the sequels, we catch more such glimpses of this world in the form of a massive dance orgy and bio-hacking techniques.

In other words, what’s done in the body or to nature, even in the “real world” outside of the Matrix, is still of little significance. As Neo says to the machines at the end of the first movie, while we hear a song from the band Rage Against the Machine start up in the background, “I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”

The real world outside of the Matrix is one characterized by an invitation to unconstrained freedom, to modern libertine values, not to religious virtues or obedience to a higher power. It seems clear what the message of the movie is: We live in a Matrix, maybe not one created by literal machines, but one formed by arbitrary constraints imposed by society, which would include family and faith. Breaking free from these is our high calling and resembles being our best ’90s, grunge, hard-rock listening, MTV-watching, internet-surfing selves.

Besides all that, or maybe because of it, the real world is just not very interesting and certainly not where the emotional appeal and excitement of The Matrix lies. The fun part of The Matrix is the Matrix, specifically when a character discovers that the Matrix is not real and attempts to break free from it while practicing superhuman kung fu moves on evil agents. The real world is just standard issue dystopian sci-fi.

The ethos of breaking free from societal constraints is driven home even more by the latest installment of the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), which I also just watched. In it (spoiler alert), Trinity is imprisoned in the Matrix, made to forget about her life in the real world and beholden to a husband and children. She secretly longs for a different life, and she can only break free by telling her husband where to shove it and confronting the program that tried to satiate her by making her a mother. Even after she breaks free, the program tells her she’ll never convince most people to leave the Matrix, because they are “sheeple” who don’t want “freedom or empowerment.” (Yes, they used the word “sheeple,” but it’s in keeping with the meta, non-serious vibes the writers seemed to be going for in Resurrections.) While I generally believe the first movie in a series should not be blamed for the sins of the later ones, it really seems like these anti-family values in the fourth Matrix are the logical consequences of the premises established in the first Matrix.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about all of these issues when I first watched The Matrix as a kid. It was just a cool movie with great action sequences. But even then, I realized I was watching something more cerebral than the typical action flick. It fascinated me by causing me to think about things I’d never thought about before, which is to its credit.

But its overall effect on the soul is not a good one, I now believe. Watching it this last time around, I was hit with just how morally and spiritually bankrupt it is. Paradoxically, I liked it. It drew me in. Part of it was surely nostalgia for the late ‘90s. But it’s also just a cool movie. The fight scenes are awesome and the rebellious struggle against “the system” is emotionally satisfying. It certainly was satisfying as a teenager, and rewatching it brings me back to those days.

But that’s not good. Those emotions aren’t the best ones to foster, and it subtly introduces false concepts of God and nature into the mind and heart of the spectator. It encourages nihilistic notions about existence and truth. It might not be technically consistent with historical gnosticism, but it’s close enough, mixing gnostic influences with a hodgepodge of Eastern spirituality, freethought and postmodern liberal progressivism (in spite of its pro-gun problem). Whatever traditional Christian influences there are, they are overshadowed by these other elements.