For this Blogging Around, I read both Kara and Ruxi's posts. Ruxi discussed the Matrix, and Kara discussed love being a cliché. Here are my responses to them:
Kara, I come to you once again to enjoy your fantastic yet cynical views on love. I agree with you on the fact that love stories are often overused, but I disagree with the fact that love is always cliché. Sure, when you get down to it it's still love, but if you take away all other elements from a story the bare bones of it are still the bare bones. It's the situation and characters and location and details and conflicts that differ, and I think while the theme is common, love stories are not all clichés. Are "clichéd" themes something we should eliminate? I understand that it might be overused, because I do think love has become such a pop-culture ideal, but will that take away anything from the story?
Ruxi, this post is very insightful. I really like your question "What if in the movie, the Matrix and Neo's "real" world are actually both fake?" It again brings up that idea of truth and reality. We'd like to think that what we know is true, and we'd like to think that what we perceive as truth is our reality. If the worlds actually were both fake, how would that change the message of the film? It's impossible to know everything about everything, so I'd think that having two fake worlds would probably be similar to the way we actually perceive things. We become aware of one reality, but there are still many more fragments that we will never be able to completely grasp.
Classic procrastinator me walks downstairs to get a snack before starting this blog, and on the television plays the show Mad Men. "The future is something you haven't even imagined yet," Don Draper's trenchant voice says.
In The Matrix, we see Don Draper's point exemplified as the future not being held in an ideal of progress. We'd like to think that all of our advances will be used for the better, but as is evident in our history, there are two sides to every form of 'progress'. So how is progress progress if it makes our future regress?
To me, The Matrix was not so much making a drastic point about a fatalistic view of what our world will come to if we don't regress to the stone ages, but more a nod to literally living in a bubble of ignorance. However, I do think there is something to be said for a fatalistic view to our bubble of ignorance. In a world that is becoming more and more interconnected, it is crucial that our perceptions are not media-centric, and that we still have the ability to think and speak for ourselves. Sure, an advanced computer organism may be progressive, but that does not necessarily mean our futures should be dependent on what this organism wants us to see?
And yes, living in a protected bubble would be wonderful, but what if you were blind to something happening that you are morally opposed to? In essence, our world and the world of The Matrix might have different standards of morality, but in both worlds, your mind is still your mind. I'd like to think that we can shape our future to be less embedded in progressive things and more embedded in actual progression of knowledge. I'm not necessarily saying that this progression means we're all going to wake up, jump out of bed (although honestly, does anyone actually jump out of bed anyway?), and all go parading down the street to take the red pill and bask in our newfound pool of consciousness. But maybe we'd at least slowly lean toward a future where there wouldn't have to be a choice between a red and blue pill in the first place, where knowledge is a universally accessible concept.
I'd like to dedicate this last paragraph to the creator of the names of the characters in the Matrix. Neo=new, Morpheus=greek mythology god of dreams, Cypher=cipher=either a secret or a nonentity, and other assorted computer names. You go, character namer.
