I seek renewal and inspiration from sacred texts... Emerson, Tagore, the Tao, Shikasta I just finished rereading a few months ago so it's too soon, and all the Sandman I have helped me get through the week Kimberly died, so I've been ringing in the New Year with Blade Runner (NYE), which would be the best SF movie ever if not for the Matrix (Thursday night) and, I will insist to my dying day to anyone who will listen, ALSO Matrix 2 and 3.  Someday I would love to do for these movies what Gardner did for Alice, what Frye did for Blake and the Bible, what Eliot did for Eliot, what everyone who wasn't stoned or tripping needed someone to do for Pynchon's early work: provide an authoritative annotated version that explicates all the incredibly rich subtext.  Like Shakespeare, the Matrix movies are thoroughly unoriginal, recombining a wide range of older sources to make the literary/cinematic equivalent of a unified theory, a huge and comprehensive statement about human nature that can be understood on many levels and which rewards those who return for a closer look with an open mind.



Perhaps the core paradox that confounds some less intrepid readers is that these are violent and sensual Buddhist movies, but paradox is nothing new to Buddhism.  With every reviewing I'm increasingly convinced that every seemingly gratuitous or casual line and moment belies an underlying rationale and lessons to be learned about karma and dharma and choice and causality.  (Using the words "karma" and "dharma" would have really alienated the audience, though, so the Wachowskis (who, as I have pointed out earlier, are probably time travellers) were very clever in almost avoiding them.)

This even applies to every seemingly gratuitous awesome fight scene.  I saw Matrix 2 for the second time in a Times Square theatre with a woman who I assume was on crack, and who naturally loved the trippy fight scenes but didn't stay long after them.  And a person could enjoy these movies just as action movies just as a person could enjoy Shakespeare just for the jokes or poetry, but the mark of true greatness is that, when you look closer, you see more, even when there was no apparent need for the creator to provide more.  On one level, the fight scenes are the reason for the movie, and indeed they are the reason millions of people watched the first one and thereby made the second/third possible, but each fight scene also carries important subtext.

In Neo's first fight scene, the surface reason for the fight is that Neo wants to buy his friends time to escape from the Agents.  The fact that they are, as he notes, "Upgrades," gives a hint of a further reason: he wants to fight them to better understand the capabilities of these new models.  Having beaten them to his satisfaction, he flies away...the nerdy question might be, "Why doesn't he zap 'em the way he zapped Smith?" To which, this being Great Literature, the answer is: part of what makes them upgrades is that they're impervious to his inside-out attack/infection thing.  The Matrix, unlike most cinema villains, isn't stupid: once one Agent was destroyed the way Smith was, it adapted.  It's possible that Neo fights them this time because at first he didn't know they included Anti-Neo software; luckily his own abilities have improved enormously.  Fight One: Neo fights because he thinks he can enter and destroy Agents like he did Smith, but his enemy has adapted; he wins because he's still got mad skills enough to disable them.  (The fact that his skills, and arguably those of Morpheus and Trinity as well, have increased in the six months between M1 and M2, is important and established early on.)

Neo's second fight scene pits him against Seraph, who explains this and many of the other fights in one of his few lines: "You can never really know someone until you fight them."  So Fight Two he fights as an ID check, and it's a draw.

So in the third fight scene, armed with this wisdom, Neo fights Viral Smith instead of just flying away because he wants to learn more about the nature of this new enemy.  Viral Smith has all the basic speed and abilities of an Agent plus the ability to, y'know, be all viral n' stuff.  Smith, having compared the human race to a virus in Matrix 1, and having given us a helpful definition of virus nature (replicate without limits until the environment is saturated and/or destroyed), brings in more and more reinforcements because he is now a virus.  And, like a virus and unlike an Agent, the Viral Smiths of this new army do not fall down, die, get KO'd, etc. - viruses, being not really alive in all conventional senses, can't really be killed by, say, antibiotics.  Neo, learning that he can't even kill an individual Viral Smith, begins to fight using his ace in the hole, his ability to fly.  Then he picks up a metal pole, adding creative and resourceful use of technology (very human) to his special skill, and in this way can fend off quite a few more, but he still can't actually kill or even stun any of them.  In addition, the Viral Smiths, as the battle goes on, begin to show some ability to fly (or at least leap dramatically in combat, which they haven't done before) themselves, showing the mutation and adaptation that's so powerful in viruses as well as adding an additional layer of meaning to Seraph's advice: when you fight your enemy, your enemy is getting to know you better, as well.  So, realizing neither his skills nor his creative use of tools will achieve anything at all against Viral Smith, he flies away to escape the battle.

And if I annotate every other fight scene tonight I won't make it to the gym, which is much more important.  Maybe more tomorrow.