The Fundamental Immorality of The Matrix

by D. A. Madigan

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Luke Skywalker’s choices were very limited, and thus, simple; blow up the Death Star, saving himself, his friends, and a bunch of people he’d never met, while killing a whole lot of people actively engaged in attempted mass murder, or, do nothing and allow said mass murder to occur.

Neo, on the other hand, has the ability to manipulate the virtual reality he finds himself immersed in, in pretty much any way he can conceive. He chooses to use this ability to make himself very very fast and agile, to defy what we would consider to be normal physical laws restraining his movements through physical space, and to produce firearms out of nothingness which operate at a much faster rate of speed than normal firearms, and which apparently never run out of ammunition, which he then employs to kill dozens if not hundreds of pawns of the Enemy, the vast majority of whom (rather disturbingly) are dressed as policemen from our culture. (Yes, I honestly do think there are profound moral issues raised when creators deliberately produce images of police officers being slaughtered by gunfire simply because they know this will entertain and gratify their target audience, most of whom are young adolescents. But that’s not the point of this essay, although I may write another one just about the relatively recent media trend of vilifying the police.)

It’s been a while since I watched The Matrix, but as best I can remember, no reason is ever given for exactly why every confrontation between Neo and the vaguely defined forces of evil is inherently violent. You’d think that an alien computer which can create and maintain an entire collective virtual reality would also be capable of doing more subtle things to retard Neo’s rebellious activities (like, for example, creating a windowless steel cube around him and his friends, or turning the atmosphere around Neo into chlorine gas). You’d also think that Neo and his friends, all of whom can manipulate the physical parameters of the virtual reality around them pretty much any way they like, would be able to take any number of productive actions besides (a) create magical automatic weaponry with an unending supply of bullets and (b) shoot evil police officers over and over again while bouncing off the walls and ceilings.

Live in their world. Kill in ours.

I understand why the story was structured to include these fight scenes (beyond the simple, if rather twisted, ‘our audience is going to love watching a guy in a long black leather coat killing hundreds of cops’): The Matrix is meant to emulate one of those point and shoot video games that are so popular with its target audience (and that were so influential on the behavior of the Columbine killers, among others). But that’s an external reason; a conscious decision on the part of the creators of the artifact. If any reason was ever given for why the stupid alien computer kept sending heavily armed legions of brainwashed drones after someone who could demonstrably kill them by the hundred all week long without being scratched, and especially for why Neo would repeatedly choose to confront these evil lackeys with murderous violence after he’d been informed that in fact, these agents of the Enemy were actually real people being mind controlled by the Enemy at that moment, and when he shot them, real people died, I don’t remember it.

However, even if some reason was given for exactly why Neo, upon being convinced that he had effectively undefined and unlimited superpowers, would decide to use those superpowers to become a player character in a three dimensional game of DOOM, instead of just using them to walk through walls, create doorways in partitions, turn invisible, fly around his opponents, and otherwise avoid the conflicts that he knew would result in the deaths of innocents, it couldn’t possibly be a good enough reason to justify Neo’s ongoing and deliberate acts of mass murder... especially given that these acts of mass murder are presented to an audience primarily consisting of adolescents, for purposes of entertainment.

Once again... when Neo hauls out his magic guns and starts shooting bad guys who look like police officers, he is causing the deaths of innocent people who have been momentarily mind controlled by his real enemy. This was made clear in the movie, to the audience and to Neo. And even if this course of action could possibly be justified by saying ‘well, in this case, the freeing of the entire human race from virtual slavery justifies the loss of some innocent lives’ (which I don’t concede; it’s not very noble for your Hero to willingly sacrifice other lives for his cause), the fact is, Neo and his friends have many, many options they could exercise before they resort to deadly force.

The Matrix is simply an immoral movie. It presents mass murder as heroic, necessary action, when in fact, its ‘heroes’ could fairly easily try a lot of other options before they get to the ‘let’s kill everything that moves’ slot. Even if the opposition encountered (and slaughtered) by Neo during the film were just computer generated phantasms, I’d still have deep moral issues with the presentation of such gratuitously violent and provocatively anti-social images as entertainment for adolescents. Given that the film makes it clear that each ‘virtual’ death of an opponent corresponds to a real death of a real person whose participation in the gunfight is entirely involuntary, The Matrix is simply unconscionable.

Give in to your anger, young Jedi

Nobody likes me when I hold forth on The Matrix. As far as I can see, this is because of one thing: Everybody likes the goddam film, and nearly everybody understands that immoral fiction is a bad thing that they shouldn’t like (or support with their cash), and therefore, everybody really resents the hell out of it when I pretty much irrefutably demonstrate that this thing they love and they really enjoyed watching, and that many of them own on video or DVD and love to watch over and over again, is, well... evil.

Look... I enjoyed watching The Matrix too, on a visceral level. It’s more or less internally consistent (not at all common in science fiction or fantasy films), it’s dialogue doesn’t resolutely suck all the way through like the dialogue in most SF and action movies tends to, and it does indeed bring some very interesting and rather provocative philosophical issues into the popular gestalt. Over the past few years I’ve discovered I can now have a conversation on solpsism with nearly anyone, since nearly everyone has seen The Matrix and has a, well, matrix, to put the essential concept of the objective/subjective dichotomy into.

Nonetheless, the fact that you really enjoyed the movie doesn’t excuse the film, or its creators, from its moral responsibility, or, for that matter, you from yours. Yes, it’s a very entertaining media artifact. It’s also a media artifact that basically teaches its viewers that it’s okay to kill people, especially people in cop suits, even if you don’t have to, if you’re the Hero and they’re the Villains.

An argument can be made that this is only a story, and even the most retarded adolescent can tell the difference between this movie and reality. Only the truly deranged are going to start believing that the fictional reality presented in The Matrix is real, and it is only within that fictional reality that the actions taken by Neo and his pals are justifiable (or even, really, possible).

However, morally, that makes no difference. Within the fictional reality of The Matrix, it is clearly established that every ‘enemy agent’ is a real person being controlled by the actual enemy force, and when Neo kills an enemy agent, a real person dies. Neo and his posse are committing mass murder, without bothering to attempt to, you know, not commit mass murder, and since they are the Heroes, mass murder is being held up as a socially acceptable, valid, necessary, and even admirable activity. That’s simply reprehensible, and everyone I’ve ever had this discussion with knows its reprehensible; that’s why they dislike hearing it so much.

Do the right thing

The final argument I generally hear from really exasperated action film lovers at about this point is ‘well, so what, it’s just a goddam movie, who cares if it’s moral or not? What practical difference does it make? Do you really think the people who go see The Matrix are so impressionable they’re going to put on long black trenchcoats and wraparound mirror shades and go shoot a lot of cops in a parking garage? How often has that actually happened in the ten years that people have been watching this ‘immoral’ film, anyway?"

First: Yes, of course, nobody in their right mind is going to believe that in the real world, we are all immersed in a shared virtual reality and they should go out and kill cops in order to save the human race from a lifesucking alien computer. And, of course, no one in their right mind is going to come to believe that real teachers and real high school students are simply targets/opponents in some weirdly three dimensional, true life version of Doom or Rise of the Triad, either. It’s not the people in their right minds we have to worry about; it’s the borderline sociopaths who are simply looking for a credible and attractive framework to hang their paranoid persecution fantasies on. And these people exist, they go to movies, or watch TV, or play video games, or all three. And then, sometimes, they get a gun and they kill people. It may not happen very often, in statistical proportion to the total population, but just how many dead bodies are acceptable to you, so that movie producers can make a few million dollars and you can watch a really bitchin’ DVD?

Second, you care. You obviously care, because this is pissing you off so much. On some level, you understand, even if you don’t like it when I articulate it to you, that immoral fiction is wrong, and it should not be supported, much less rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales, rentals, and video/DVD purchases.

And apparently we all understand this, because I watch way too much TV, and I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I cannot think, just off the top of my head, of any TV show or other film than this one in which the heroes blithely commit mass murder against innocents (much less against opponents largely dressed as police officers) without being punished for their actions in some way before the end of the movie.

There are plenty of violent films, of course, and some of them I love. However, the only other movie I can think of at the moment in which the hero commits mass murder, besides the aforementioned Star Wars, is The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, in which, at the end, Buckaroo targets a spaceship full of evil aliens (who are, admittedly, sentient beings) and blows them straight to hell. And, like Luke Skywalker, Buckaroo really didn’t have much choice... if he’d let the shipful of Red Lectroids skate, the Black Lectroids in orbit would have incinerated Earth. Beyond that, like the minions of the Empire in Star Wars, the Red Lectroids were pretty clearly shown throughout The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai to be evil; they kill anyone who remotely crosses them, and they also seem to enjoy kidnapping and torturing people, too.

Other than those two, though, I’m at a loss at the moment to come up with any movie where the putative hero kills a lot of people (or sentient beings). Hmmmm... well, I guess Arnold Schwarzenegger tends to kill a lot of criminals in most of his action movies... he certainly wipes out a small army of them in Commando... but, again, Schwarzenegger is killing criminals, generally, criminals who have attacked him first. Tony Soprano has probably whacked a dozen or so people on screen by now, but I can’t recall him ever killing anyone who wasn’t also a criminal... and even if he has, while Tony Soprano is the protagonist of his fictional artifact, nobody has ever tried to say he’s a hero, and his behavior is socially acceptable.

This is very different from Neo, who is presented as the noble, admirable hero of the movie, and who is killing temporarily brainwashed drones that, in their right minds, would never have attacked him, and which Neo could simply walk around if he felt like it, anyway.

As a pretty much universal rule in our culture, if a fictional character kills innocent people, that fictional character is ‘bad’ and generally gets arrested, or killed horribly in turn, by the end of the film. The Matrix is simply the only movie I can think of where the hero kills a lot of innocent people, when he doesn’t have to, and the immorality of mass murder is never even acknowledged.

Our popular fictions are a reflection of our culture, and, synergistically, our culture also tends to over time begin to mirror our most popular fictions. Whether we want to accept that or not, it’s true. Do we really want to be part of a culture that is reflected in, or starts to reflect, the values (or complete lack thereof) depicted in The Matrix?

Famileeeeee VALLLLyewssssss

Yeah, I know. When I start talking about the corrupt Hollywood media and its lack of values and the horrible impact this has on our culture as a whole, I sound just like Rush Limbaugh. I realized that as I was typing my closing sentence above, and it horrified me as much as it probably did you. But let’s get one thing straight: I’m not pissing and moaning about a movie in which members of the same gender kiss each other, or sex occurs outside the sacrosanct boundaries of holy matrimony, or the fucking American flag gets burned by someone. I’m tolerant of alternate lifestyles (if a movie features guys kissing each other on the mouth, I’m not gonna watch it, but on the other hand, if a movie or TV show has the phrase My Big Fat Greek ANYTHING in it, I’m not going to watch it, either... but on the other hand, I don’t write long diatribes saying these things are objectionable or immoral, either. Other people want to watch guys kissing each other, or even engage in that behavior, well, that’s fine for them. Other people want to go watch movies about Big Fat Greek Somethings, that’s cool, too.

What I’m talking about is not something that can be dismissed as simply my narrow minded, provincial views regarding aspects of human behavior that really aren’t anyone else’s business but the people performing said acts. What I’m talking about here is the fictional depiction of mass murder as a socially acceptable activity, for purposes of commercial entertainment. And, personally, I think the sanctity of human life is a concept that can legitimately be described as a ‘value’... and a ‘value’ worth defending at length on a weblog, at that.

The fact that conservative twaddle mongers have co-opted the word ‘values’ and sullied it with a lot of narrow minded and hateful bigotry doesn’t mean I can’t use it properly and appropriately, when I feel the need.

The Matrix is, flatly, an immoral film, one that undermines the cultural values that you and I and pretty much everyone we know depend on to keep us safe and comfortable. You may hate acknowledging that, and you may hate even worse acknowledging that as a member of this culture, you have a moral responsibility not to support ethically toxic crap like The Matrix with your disposable income. Nonetheless, the fact that you really don’t want to admit that your favorite piece of cinematic eye candy is reprehensible and morally atrocious, and you’d really rather not be a conscientious, morally consistent grown up in just this one instance, does not justify your abdication of your responsibility to actually be a conscientious and morally consistent grown up.

Even I have to admit, though, that Carrie Ann Moss is a major babe...