Blockbusters and Birdwalks

1999 Best. Movie. Year. Ever., a conversation – Episode 4: “The Matrix”

• Blockbusters and Birdwalks

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 24:54

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa worry whether their bots enjoy shoot ’em up entertainment.

This is part of a series that overlaps with, and extends, Brian Raftery’s 2020 book “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen”. Screenings include: “Following” (Christopher Nolan, 1998), “Varsity Blues” (Brian Robbins, 1999), “The Blair Witch Project” (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), “The Matrix” (The Wachowskis, 1999), “Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace” (George Lucas, 1999), “South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut” (Trey Parker, 1999), “Free Enterprise” (Robert Meyer Burnett, 1999), “Eyes Wide Shut” (Stanely Kubrick, 1999), “Twin Falls Idaho” (Michael Polish, 1999), “American Beauty” (Sam Mendes, 1999), “Three Kings” (David O. Russell, 1999), “Boys Don't Cry” (Kimberly Peirce, 1999), “Topsy-Turvy” (Mike Leigh, 1999), “Magnolia” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), and “Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes” (Cass Paley, 1998).

***

Referenced media:

  • “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” (2020) by Brian Raftery
  • “The Matrix Reloaded” (The Wachowski Brothers, 2003)
  • “The Matrix Revolutions” (The Wachowski Brothers, 2003)
  • “The Matrix Resurrections” (Lana Wachowski, 2021)
  • “The Odyssey” (Christopher Nolan, 2026)
  • “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003)
  • “Cloud Atlas” (Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, 2012)
  • “Speed Racer” (The Wachowski Brothers, 2008)
  • “The Terminator” (James Cameron, 1984)
  • “Eternals” (Chloé Zhao, 2021)
  • “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (Stephen Herek, 1989)
  • “BiRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014)
  • “Zabruder film” (Abraham Zapruder, 1963)

Audio quotation:

 

Style Becomes Substance And 1999 Setup

SPEAKER_02

Sometimes the style is the substance. 1999, best movie year ever? Episode 4: The Matrix.

Meet The Hosts And Ground Rules

SPEAKER_04

Welcome to the Blockbusters and Birdwalks podcast. I am the curator, Garrett Chaffan Kirai. Today we have a conversation with a friend, Ed Rosa.

SPEAKER_02

That's me. Hi. My filmmaking partner and I have a YouTube channel, Toothless Richard Productions, where you can see a number of our short films.

The Wachowskis And A Trans Lens

SPEAKER_04

There's so much academic work that's been devoted to The Matrix, and I don't really want to go into that field. I do want to peel away a couple of things which have only gained traction for me in the years since this came out. I'm going to deadname it, and that is to say, in my copy of The Matrix, when the movie ends, the first in credit is by the Wakowski Brothers. Yeah. Because this movie broke open the reputation of Larry and Andy, who were then coded as heteronormative men. They have both transitioned into being transgender women, Lana and Lily. First one and then the other, and it caught the world in some ways kind of by surprise. But I participate in this acknowledgement because the movie now, as it's deepened over time, is only something I can view as their wish fulfillment for possessing control over their environment. The way that the movie's superstructure of a human being recognizing the code of software that wraps him up in a lie is something he slowly learns to peel away and express his truth. It's played as an action movie, and it does a very good job in certain ways of doing that.

Leather BDSM And Image Making

SPEAKER_04

This movie has also got subtle perversity everywhere. I thought this movie was a paraphilia fest, not just about violence, not just about bullet time, not just about innovative special effects, but a lot of BDSM. A huge amount of leather, a lot of metal, much sort of facial stamping, whether it's tattoo or different coiled things stuck in people's noses or ears. Things that seemed alarming and unusual that seemed subcultural in the late 90s when this movie appeared is now kind of everyday. But it's partly because it's naturalized in our popular culture through the likes of things like this. I was hip to that pretty early on. And that it's nice, that it has a fantastically beautiful looking cast that I've always responded to in their separate careers that roll into this one er text of reality breaking consideration of how images are made, which is largely what the movie is about thematically. These are a bunch of noise words. I just mean to, again, point out this is a trans movie by trans filmmakers who were probably kicking around their truest identity as young adults turning into middle-aged adults when they make this movie. And it created the wealth that allowed them to enjoy, I hope that's not just in quotes, but to enjoy the life they wanted for themselves, which they've explored in the 21st century, as a marker for where the world was ending at the Fend des Secla when the second millennium

Plot Basics And The Matrix World

SPEAKER_04

fell. This is perfect.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_04

Now, I assume that anybody listening to us knows the story. A Jesus figure saves the world. That's Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, and he lives on for three further sequels. And he saves the world from an AI that has used human beings to power itself after human beings destroyed the natural environment with thermonuclear war.

SPEAKER_02

The movie's cityscape that the Matrix creates. The world of 1999 or the world of 2199?

SPEAKER_04

The world of 1999, where he does battle with the agents. That world, which is in fact kind of a smash up of 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s references.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there.

SPEAKER_04

Which is also sort of like Toronto, sort of like New York, but there's almost nobody in it.

SPEAKER_02

Which is uh not really possible in New York.

SPEAKER_04

Yes. It is a very populated place. I didn't notice that maybe in earlier viewings, but I did now. So another ball to throw in the air. This movie was not cheap for its time. My research tells me it was around $63 million in 1999 money, which would be something comparable to say $150 million for the $200.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, yeah, that's pretty that's that's pretty that's a lot.

SPEAKER_04

It's far from nothing, but it's not top dollar, which is now rolled out for whatever MCU things about.

SPEAKER_02

What did they what did they spend on the Odyssey, do you know?

SPEAKER_04

I think I've read $250 to $300 million. Okay. A lot of money. This movie is not cheap. It makes a huge profit, and still the money's packed into certain key sequences, which are still talked about, still excerpted, still referred to and quoted, still given homage. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02

Re-watching it for the first time in 27 years. Okay, I don't know about the idea of life being a simulation. That might have come from some corner of philosophy that I'm not aware of. But the rabbit hole thing and the red pill-blue pill thing have become so ubiquitous in modern discourse and kind of popular consciousness. In a way, the film didn't seem as important as I thought it should, based on how significantly these concepts have taken hold.

Mirrors And Layered Reality Design

SPEAKER_04

I am just once again needing to praise Bill Pope, the cinematographer.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I uh absolutely.

SPEAKER_04

There are certain shots in this that I just pick my jaw up. Yeah. And the one, the red and the blue pill scene, when Neo has met Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne, who's kind of his his St. John figure, who's gonna take them into the divine and help him understand the truth of his world. Are you willing? Take the pill, take the red pill, follow me down. He's got reflective sunglasses on, they're mirrored sunglasses.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And the perfection of watching Keanu Reeves deliver his oh, which pill am I gonna take through Fishburne's placid face. But this recurrence of mirrored shots that give us something happened over and over.

SPEAKER_02

Right. There's another one later on where you see a similar reflection of the glasses, and this time it's like not a hand, it's like it's like a gun.

SPEAKER_04

And because it happens in a delicious little bit, barely lasting a few seconds, you're like, oh my god, that was remarkable. I've tried my hand at lighting things to make a cooler image, and I can make a cooler image, but they're not that cool. No, it's the it's the hardest. Much of this movie is successful because it looks so very good. And then there is something to point out there that we have layered realities because that's what the movie is about. We have the ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, which is Morpheus' vehicle in the quote, real 2199, a future Earth, which has no environment where people can can live except in this in the one city which we never meet in this movie, deep in the earth, which is hidden from view because they're keeping it safe from the AI that's always trying to hunt the surviving people of planet Earth. So there's that environment, the Nebuchadnezzar. There is the environment outside of the Nebuchadnezzar in 2199, which is populated by these sentinel robots hunting the people inside of the ship. Then there are multiple load programs that allow people inside the Nebuchadnezzar to enter the Matrix, which is this artificial reality. The most prominent of those is where Neo gets to be played in all of his gear and take on the agents. But there are other programs where he learns how to do kung fu memorably. Each of those environments looks different. And so it allows for a variance in how the movie looks and feels. There's another moment, too, where he says, I need guns, lots of guns, and suddenly he's rushed into an archive with tens of thousands of weapons on these carefully uh procured shelves that he's whisked down. It feels like the ultimate blockbuster video for reference. Everything that you could possibly want is available to you. It visualizes the way that computer archiving works in a way that's very satisfying for an action movie bent around gunplay and fisticuffs and weird kicking angles and unusual acrobatic effects because the fights are kind of terrific.

When Action Loses Weight

SPEAKER_04

They have no impact, though, because we know that these fights don't have physics attached to them.

SPEAKER_02

That was kind of part of my problem.

SPEAKER_04

It's avatars fighting one another.

SPEAKER_02

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Or uh it reminded me too of uh right. It reminded me too of the uh the the the big battle towards the end of the very first Pirates of the Caribbean where Jeffrey Rush and John Depp both realize they're already dead and they can't hurt each other, so they keep fighting.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. This unreality component will become a problematic part of sequels. It didn't bother me so much in '99. I was more blown away, really, by the acrobatics. I hadn't yet seen much Hong Kong action stem.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, because there's that scene uh like that gun battle they have, like in the lobby before they get in the elevator. Right.

SPEAKER_04

I find this movie satisfying, but I know that I also find it empty because I am familiar with the Wakovsky's subsequent work. I have increasing disappointment with most of the stuff they've done since The Matrix, with the exception of Cloud and Atlas. Trinity, who ends up being Neo's match, they are perfect for each other, or so we are told. We get no heat from that combination.

SPEAKER_02

No, no, in fact, like when it's like at the end, when it's like, oh, I love you, and they start Frenching out. I'm like, okay.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, whatever. And I think it's an aspect of these filmmakers aren't making the performers into very much more than clothes horses. Because, in a way, that emptiness of emotional affect is perfect for a movie that is about a software land of avatars doing battle with computers who don't have affect. Another way to attach that is saying Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith is perfect because he's empty of humanity. And I think that's a set of choices that performer may be in cahoots with the director, maybe they had long sit-downs to work this out, or he just made choices because he may have been left to his own devices. What do you think this ought to be? We're gonna be over here concerned with where the helicopter is gonna strafe you with a gatling. Right. You figure out how you're gonna articulate this role. And his way of doing line deliveries has been part of popular culture. It's a gag reel on how there's the man, the white man, the guy in the black suit, oh, he's the bad guy, and his name is Anonymous Agent Smith. Right. This movie cements his bond to this affectless, flat environment where we're in urban centers created by artificial intelligence to mimic and lull people into living inside of the software as a way of keeping them alive that they will be satisfied in, but there's no human warmth. It's just a rabble of background, the way that I think a shoot-em-up game looks. Right. Which for me is one reason why I don't really play video games. And in some ways, I'm unsure if this movie's great strength is it leans into that on purpose, or these filmmakers, at the time they made this movie from 97 and 99, couldn't do anything else but deliver this flat, affactless environment, which coincidentally works.

Why Escape The Simulation

SPEAKER_02

I was I was I was trying to keep up with like the philosophy of the whole thing. And I read on uh I read on the IMDV trivia that there's one philosophical tome in particular that like the Wkowski's like made everybody. Baudrillard. Is that what it is? I think so. Okay. And the movie I think the movie made an attempt to address this, but not in a way that was satisfactory to me. And uh Okay. So the AI needs human bodies to generate the bioelectricity they require to power themselves. In order to do this, they have human farms where they're growing people, and so then they create this artificial reality for people so they don't realize that they're just basically flash batteries. If the world of 2199 is what's real, why am I gonna fight to live in that world? Why would the AI create a world, a fake world for people that's gonna make them not like it and want to get out of it? I don't understand why you would want to fight to not be in the Matrix.

SPEAKER_04

There is an important secondary character, Cypher, played by Joe Panther, Joey Pants. And he's a traitor. He is selling himself No, but he's he's right. Correct. He is selling out the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar so they can bring down Morpheus, get the code to the hidden city, destroy all of humanity, get rid of this Neo threat, and just control everything in their battery fields of humans. He doesn't want to be on the Nebuchadnezzar anymore. He wants to be plugged back in. Yeah, he wants to be fuel for the machine as long as he can have his wish fulfillment. He wants to be rich, he wants to enjoy the flavor of steak in his mouth, he'd like to be a person of notoriety in the fantasy of the Matrix, and he wants all of his life memory of being on the Nebuchadnezzar array. So why wouldn't they do it for everybody? Isn't that really what we're all trying to do, those who are trying to escape into the AI now in cells that are playing their games endlessly? Absolutely. The way the internet works is to function as your own private oasis.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely. Like go on anybody's social media. It's not real. It's what they want you to think. People that you know I know personally, and then I'll look at their social media and be like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, that's what I mean. Right.

SPEAKER_04

That's not quite how I you know what I mean. So it's like if we hyperbolize 200 years in the future and the advancement of these systems, these computers that can do this kind of engineering in an auto-directed way, they would improve how they iterate very much in the way that we've watched anthropic improve its various tools over the last five years. Right. And it would become an environment that could be completely bespoke for every single human battery in those fields that Morpheus says are endless, there would be no need to do anything but create the perfect environment for everybody. Right. It would be a utopia. So And if we're raised as people who have never seen the world before the end times when Skynet took over, we wouldn't know what you don't know, and we would be satisfied with so much.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely. And here's another thing, too.

Morpheus Explains Real And Residual

SPEAKER_02

So when we first when Neo and Morpheus are talking when they first meet, and Morpheus is telling the story, telling Neo what's what's what's really going on.

SPEAKER_00

This is the construct. It's our loading program. We can load anything from clothing to equipment, weapons, training simulations, anything we need. Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different than close in your arms and head or your hair. Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image. It is the mental projection of your digital self-image. What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

SPEAKER_04

The real is a construct we have agreed on. So we do have to give over a certain measure of trust. Inside of that mechanism of trust is where religion just parks itself, but that's also the spot where the endlessness of popular fictions, whether in literary form or here in movie form, takes shape. All the things that you've just described about why it's so intoxicating to listen to Morpheus describe what the Matrix is, and geez, he does it so efficiently. And then I remember leaving the theater back in '99 in April when I walked away. What exactly is the Matrix? And trying to, I even remember trying to like email friends because I was still emailing friends out of the time zone. Like, I saw this movie and it's about this, and then you try to explain it. It's just nonsense.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

The Wakowski's managed to put together a non-nonsense monologue multiple times in the movie to explain really dense material in a way that a common person could understand long enough. Oh, here comes the agents. They're going to fight Neo or Trinity or Morpheus, or look, there's a training software program.

SPEAKER_02

It's basically the same thing as the Eternals film that Chloe Zhao made. It's just gigantic exposition dump fight. Gigantic exposition dump fight.

SPEAKER_04

And the fights look terrific. And the dumps of information you'll accept because you're kind of both really confused, but it is delivered by the right character. And he just he looks cool, shiny head, he's buffed, he's been in the gym, he's got those rad threads everywhere you look, and he's got this cool way to fold his arms behind his back when he's walking. It's very he comes correct. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04

There's a really important moment when the Nebuchadnezzar has liberated real-world Neo from the battery farm where he's lived his whole life encased in goo. Right. And they have to heal him and make his eyes work, and they have to turn his turn, literally turn with acupuncture, give his muscles tone so he can be a functioning person. And gradually he gets strong enough to undertake training as how a person can participate by being jacked into the matrix. And he gets into a load program with sensei Morpheus to then go through a fighting exercise. And Morpheus says, hit me. And the entire exercise, which is a thrilling kind of mano, a mano kind of fight, is helping Neo realize that everything inside of the load program where he's learning to do kung fu. All of it is not true. At one point, Morpheus lays him out on the deck and he's breathing hard and sweating. He's really a mess. And Morpheus comments that are you even breathing air to point out this is not the real. This is the fabrication you've bought into so intensely you can't give up how you know your body actually functions in the actual environment where your body is. This is just your imagination. And once you can wrap your head around that notion, all of your imagination is endlessly malleable.

Ending Questions And Lasting Legacy

SPEAKER_04

So jump to a different detail, which is one of my problems with the movie, but I also like it. At the very end, we leave with Neo in this fabricated 1999 reality where we don't even know what he's doing anymore. Right. He's just dressed rad, leaves the phone booth because he's jacked in.

SPEAKER_02

Because he's Ted Theodore Logan, and that's how he travels from place to place.

SPEAKER_04

And then he supermans away towards the camera, and we're hundreds of meters above the surface of the world. And then we go to credits raised against the machine. If the shape of the the pseudo-reality of the Matrix is malleable and you're basically Jesus Christ and all other Godheads informed by you and your presence, if all of that's true, why do you not just snap your fingers and go wherever you want to go? Right. Why don't you just bend everything the way that you want it to go? Because it's all fabrication. Right. Why don't you just go to pornoland? Right. Right. Why don't you just couple with all the tentacles you could possibly do?

SPEAKER_02

Exactly. Why would you like uh to me the idea that like if you could really like you know manipulate you know the nature of your own reality that's to that degree, it would be utopia.

SPEAKER_04

When we realize that NEO is equal to the agents, who are these super informed bits of software, but how can that be? They're just bits of software. It is to say that the code that people are uniquely able to supply the AI supersedes the capabilities of the AI. And this was even pointed out in one of the bits of dialogue I noticed at this time that there are rules the agents can't escape. Well, why is that the case?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, because even Agent Smith has that one little monologue.

SPEAKER_01

I hate to do it first. I must get out of here. I must get free. And it's the key. Once Zion is destroyed, there is no need for me to be here. Do you understand?

SPEAKER_04

This movie is a treatise on the transformational possibility of the human imagination to bend the reality that the body can't escape. And if that's not a better description of what all creative arts are, I don't know of one. Right. And if it's not on the nose as a description on what trans identity has become, since we've acquired a vocabulary to acknowledge that there are people who don't conform to the binary, I can't think of one. And that it bundles all of that with what were then mind-blowing special effects work for the mere price of $63 million is kind of stunning. The point of this entire series is about reflecting on whether Brian Rathri's claim is right that 1999 was the best movie year ever. We're not going to come to a conclusion that refutes or fully celebrates that idea, but it's a useful way to unpack certain key movies. I believe that The Matrix is one of those key movies that forever after changed the face of what movies can be. In particular, because its special effects work is still a connection between what computers can do to photographic creation. The bullet time effect is a rigged set of cameras that are fluidly made to look clean because computers take over the moment, the gap between those simple photographs and make it look fluid.

SPEAKER_02

Right. Like how they like how uh Inuritu did uh Birdman.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. So when I see CGI that is married inside of a live-action analog world, it strikes me as a better shot to convince me and be useful. The point. This movie matters because it reshaped what movies could do, and it gave permission for the flipperheads among us who do read French post-structuralism, who do grapple with the big ideas of the antiquities, who do try to understand what is the nature of the real is if you and I are nothing but flesh bot neural networks, but we can still enjoy having French fries together? How is that possible?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

But let's wrestle it into the format of popular genre fiction that we can cause people in the Hinterland of the United States, indeed, of Madagascar to buy tickets and enjoy themselves. And this movie proved that can happen.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

It did so so well and became eventually a critical treat that it's now in the Library of Congress in the National Film Registry. Yeah. Because why not? This matters. It belongs with the Zapbruder film, which is what movies can be.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you know, it's funny, it's funny because like watching it this time, a lot of the movie just felt like really silly.