Taking the Red Pill: Science, philosophy, and religion in The Matrix edited by Glenn Yeffeth, with an introduction by David Gerrold, Summersdale, 拢7.99, ISBN 1840243775 Reviewed by Wendy M. Grossman
THERE is something about the earnestness in parts of Taking the Red Pill that made me want to say, 鈥淚t鈥檚 just some movie, you know?鈥� The feeling begins early, when the introduction tells you not to compare it to The Pooh Perplex, the 1970s cult-hit collection of satirical academically styled essays on A. A. Milne鈥檚 children鈥檚 classic.
The Wachowski brothers鈥� blend of kung fu, video game leaps, special effects, comic books, science fiction, and alienated youth is an eye-catching and fresh retelling of Joseph C. Campbell鈥檚 monomyth, but that doesn鈥檛 make it a philosophical treatise.
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This would probably be clear to anyone who鈥檚 seen the sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, which manages to be both formulaic in its reuse of all those elements and needs the third film in the trilogy, The Matrix Revolution to make it interesting. The film is due for release this autumn.
Some of the writers whose essays are included in Take the Red Pill, however, take it just that way (the essays were written before Reloaded鈥檚 release). The Matrix is not philosophy, certainly not new philosophy. The idea that we live in a fake 鈥渞eality鈥� that is far different from the real thing is an old one, explored by writers from David Lindsay in Voyage to Arcturus all the way back to the shadows on the walls of Plato鈥檚 cave.
It鈥檚 not even new science fiction; its themes have been explored many times before, as James Gunnably demonstrates in his essay on reality paradoxes.
But the ideas in The Matrix are broad enough for anyone to project more or less any pet obsession onto it, as several of the essays in this book make plain. For example, Bill Joy, head of the computer maker Sun, uses the movie as an excuse for a lengthy ramble on the dangers of technology to human values.
Robert J. Sawyer thinks it is all about AI, which would be all right, except that a chunk of his essay also insists that 2001 was really about artificially intelligent monoliths that wanted to meet HAL. Even the infinitely better discussion by Ray Kurzweil of the potential for symbiotic man-machine intelligence will probably be familiar to readers of his The Age of Spiritual Machines.
My favourite is Peter B. Lloyd鈥檚 effort to rationalise the apparent inconsistencies in the technical workings of the Matrix itself. But the silliest of them all has got to be Mercer Schuchardt鈥檚 contention that this movie is a parable of the original Judaeo-Christian world view and therefore a new testament for a new millennium.
So is it a good present for the Matrix-obsessed geek in your life? I tried Schuchardt鈥檚 essay on a small sample of geeks. To say that they were not impressed would be an understatement.