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PHYSICIAN HEAL THYSELF
The New Yorker & The Matrix Reloaded ...

Film criticism is in an ugly place these days.  Critics feel impotent, unable to influence the fate of major studio releases.  Newspaper editors just don’t care.  And the best way to get attention has been to attack, attack, attack. 

While it is true that some of the more complex critics have gotten top jobs at major dailies (Wilmington replacing, essentially, Gene Siskel at the Chicago Tribune and now, Manohla Dargis in line to take over for Ken Turan some day), the biggest outlets in the country have moved away from serious conversation about films.  There are venerable critics, like Sarris, Morgenstern, and Kauffmann, who have remained steady in a sea of feces.  Roger Ebert has become a bit like A Tale Of Two Critics, the newspaper man with the thoughts and the TV guy with the thumbs.  The trades’ critics are a breed apart.  Reiner, Denby, Kehr, Hoberman, Feeney, Rosenbaum, Taubin, White and others form the current, respected, middle.

With due respect to what Harry Knowles has built, the most important thing to come off of that site is almost never what Harry says about a movie, but what is said first. 

And then there is Anthony Lane, arguably the most admired film critic among the “media elite” these days.  Equally clear, Lane is a man who doesn’t really much care for movies.  He is well educated on the subject.  He has screened the entire pantheon.  He makes elite references.  But his best work is always in regard to films he does not like.  He is a masterful writer… and a horrible film critic.

But even Anthony Lane is now forced to give up the crown as the most disconnected, most pretentious, hard-writing, ego-spinning critic at The New Yorker.  The well-respected writer Adam Gopnik took on The Matrix Reloaded in last week’s New Yorker and managed to spin almost 4000 words of gop.

Why is this particular review so offensive to me? 

Because it contains so many of the elements that are currently driving film criticism into the grave.  It comes from a high-profile media outlet with a long history of quality.  It is written by someone who can really rock a keyboard.  It is far more interested in scoring cleverness points than in actually considering its issue with the movie in question.  And it is mostly about things other than the movie itself.

Now, The New Yorker can hide behind the fact that Gopnik is bylined as a “Critic At Large” and that this review does not appear in the traditionally review section.  And since Gopnik is not a film critic by profession or training, the fact that only 30% of his article is really about The Matrix Reloaded and that 70% is about The Matrix and its four-year wake, they can position it as a cultural analysis and not a review. 

But the sad fact is that Gopnik’s article is extremely influential and has become the primary text pointed to when people want to jump on the anti-Reloaded bandwagon. 

Let’s take a look:

GOPNIK DOESN’T REALLY “GET” THE MATRIX

Gopnik makes two comments on the original Matrix referencing two other iconic fantasy films.  Both references are misguided.

The first quote:  “There hasn’t been anything quite like it since 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had a similar mix of mysticism, solemnity, and mega-effects.”

35 years later, it is still hard to get consensus on the meaning of much in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Kubrick did have some cutting edge imagery in his film.  But there were no “mega-effects.”  There is nothing solemn about The Matrix as a film, give or take a speech.  And the “mysticism” of 2001: A Space Odyssey is man vs. nature stuff, combined with issues of man’s relationship with God.  The Matrix, for all of its mystical references, focuses on man versus man… a status that includes machines in the Wachowski’s idea that the machines were once an oppressed minority and not a simple reflection of the machine paranoia of the 60s.  HAL 9000’s motives were simple.  He did not want to be turned off.  There is an element of that in The Matrix trilogy.  But it is only a small part of the puzzle.

The first Matrix film had a much more simple story structure and was far less ambitious regarding the mystical.  If there is any Matrix comparison to 2001, it is to Reloaded, which has proven as dense, as complex, as willing to occasionally pander, and as frustrating to viewers as A Space Odyssey.

The second quote:  “When, in the first film, Neo sees the Matrix for what it is, a stream of green glowing digits, and thus is able to stop bullets by looking at them, the moment of vision is not simply liberating. It is also spooky and, in a Dickian way, chilling. This moment is the opposite of the equivalent scene in Star Wars, a quarter century ago, when Luke Skywalker refuses to wear the helmet that will put him in contact with his targeting machinery, and decides instead to bliss out and trust the Force, the benevolent vital energy of the universe. Neo’s epiphany is the reverse: the world around him is a cascade of cold digital algorithms, unfeeling and lifeless. His charge is not to turn on and tune in but to turn off and tune out.”

 

NO!  Exactly wrong.  The journey of Luke Skywalker and Neo are very much the same, certainly not opposites.  Both men are “taking off their helmets” and learning to trust their instincts, wherever this instincts come from.  In both films, intellect limits the power of the hero. 

 

I can’t quite get over how far off Gopnik is on this one.  “Luke Skywalker refuses to wear the helmet that will put him in contact with his targeting machinery…?”  The word machine is there! 

And again, there is a theme that Gopnik misses throughout his piece.  The machines are not presented as “a cascade of cold digital algorithms, unfeeling and lifeless.”  This becomes an overwhelming reality in Reloaded, where many critical characters are specifically defined as programs.  But even in the original, Agent Smith is behaving well outside the norm, expressing raw emotion, especially in his speech to Morpheus about his hatred of the human species for such things as their smell.

 

WHEN “REVIEWING” RELOADED, GOPNIK SPINS CLEVER INSULTS, BUT DOES NOT BACK UP HIS OPINION, AS THOUGH IT IS SO OBVIOUS, IT MUST BE TRUTH

Gopnik’s entire attack on The Matrix Reloaded lasts about 1188 words.  He does his best to beat it to death, using critical clichés that connect in familiarity, but not in reality.  Ironic, because that seems to be what he is accusing the movie of doing. 

AG. “It would have been nice if some of that complexity, or any complexity, had made its way into the sequel. But—to get to the bad news- Matrix Reloaded is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie. It feels not so much like “Matrix II” as like “Matrix XIV”—a franchise film made after a decade of increasing grosses and thinning material.”

DP:  How is Reloaded like any conventional comic book movie?  Is there an example Mr. Gopnik would like to cough up?  In his 4000 words, he manages to make some pretty obscure references.  Does Reloaded somehow fail to continue the story?  Does he think, say, The Merovingian is some comic relief who has no significance other than a delay and a laugh?  Does he think that this is just some Bond-like return to the well that prays that a bigger explosion is all anyone wants? 

As a critic, I would argue that The Matrix Reloaded is infinitely more complex than the original, as The Empire Strikes Back was to Star Wars but even more so.  I know everyone has forgotten how underdeveloped Lando Calrissian and Boba Fett and even Chewbacca were in the entire series. 

But forget what I think as a critic… where is Gopnik’s argument? 

AG:  “The thing that made the Matrix so creepy—the idea of a sleeping human population with a secondary life in a simulated world—is barely referred to in the new movie; in fact, if you hadn’t seen the first film, not just the action but the basic premise would be pretty much unintelligible.”

DP:  I agree… it is rarely referred to this time around.  And the constructs that were the scene of such min-blowing training sessions are gone too.  Were they supposed to go back?  Were The Two Towers, The Empire Strikes Back, Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets, etc, etc, etc damaged from this problem?  Were the Wachowskis supposed to come up with a character who could go through Neo’s journey with Neo as his Morpheus?  Would that have been conventional enough to be considered unconventional by Gopnik?  Or did he really just want the same movie as the original with a different set of actors?

AG:  “The first forty-five minutes—set mainly in Zion, that human city buried deep in the earth—are particularly excruciating. Zion seems to be modeled on the parking garage of a giant indoor mall, with nested levels clustered around an atrium. Like every good-guy citadel in every science-fiction movie ever made, Zion is peopled by stern-jawed uniformed men who say things like “And what if you’re wrong, God damn it, what then?” and “Are you doubting my command, Captain?” and by short-haired and surprisingly powerful women whose eyes moisten but don’t overflow as they watch the men prepare to go off to war. Everybody wears earth tones and burlap and silk, and there are craggy perches from which speeches can be made while the courageous citizens hold torches. (The stuccoed, soft-contour interiors of Zion look like the most interesting fusion restaurant in Santa Fe.”)

DP:  He’s so clever!!!  Zion is like a parking garage.  He must have HATED Gangs of New York’s design.  Never mind any architectural significance.  Much better to be witty.

And Zion’s colors look like a “fusion restaurant in Santa Fe”?  Please… what would you prefer, Adam?  Please tell us, what would be edgy?  Cave drawings by Basquiat?  Should Charlie Rose have had a seat at the counselors’ table?  What would have not been a cliché?  Do tell!

AG:  “…Official exchanges in Zion put one in mind of what it must have been like at a meeting at the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard before Larry Summers got to it. (And no sooner has this thought crossed one’s mind when—lo! there is Professor Cornel West himself, playing one of the Councillors.)”

DP:  Cool!  He knows who runs the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard.  He’s so smart. 

AG:  “No cliché goes unresisted; there is an annoying street kid who wants Neo’s attention, and a wise Councilor with swept-back silver hair (he is played by Anthony Zerbe, Hal Holbrook presumably having been unavailable) who twinkles benignly and creases up his eyes as he wanders the city at night by Neo’s side. Smiles gather at the corner of his mouth. He’s that kind of wise.”

DP:  Gotta make sure to smack Anthony Zerbe.  Gopnik probably snuck in a lot of Harry-O as a kid (can’t be seen going as low brow as TV).  Funny how Gloria Foster, whose spotty on-screen career was all but killed by Leonard, Pt. 6, was one of the Wachowski’s master strokes in the first film and how Anthony Zerbe, who has had a remarkable stage career, gets the shiv. 

And that cliché kid… don’t bother noticing that he is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the deification of Neo among humans… not that such a concept means anything.  Every comic book movie has masses lining up to be touched/healed/blessed by the hero.

AG:  “More damagingly, once Zion has been realized and mundanely inhabited, most of the magic disappears from the fable; it becomes a cartoon battle between more or less equally opposed forces, and the sense of a desperately uneven contest between man and machine is gone. “

DP:  So it’s the movie that’s being simplistic… I see.  Adam Gopnik’s Matrix trilogy would have a Zion that does not reflect the reality of humans… we are mostly mundane.  250,000 Sentinals versus 250,000 people in Zion… hmmm… “more or less equally opposed forces.” 

It would be my argument that anyone who would make this kind of argument turned off his brain at the theater door.  Let’s see… billions still under machine control in pods, powering the matrix… 250,000 humans, 5 kilometers underground… a scorched earth… how can one say that the humans are not still extreme underdogs?

But, more to the point, isn’t the increased complexity of increased human power more interesting?  How can one argue that this movie is too conventional and that the conventionality of superhero movies is being too diminished?  Seems pretty damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t.

AG: “ The Matrix, far from being a rigorously imposed program, turns out to be as porous as good old-fashioned reality, letting in all kinds of James Bond villains. (They are explained as defunct programs that refused to die, but they seem more like character ideas that refused to be edited.) Lambert Wilson appears as a sort of digital Dominique de Villepin—even virtual Frenchmen are now amoral, the mark of Cain imprinted on their foreheads, so to speak, like a spot of chocolate mousse. He is called the Merovingian (“Holy Blood, Holy Grail” having apparently been added to the reading list) and announces that “choice is an illusion created between zose wis power and zose wisout” as he constructs a virtual dessert with which he inflames the passion of a virtual woman.”

DP:  Yeah… they must have dubbed in that French accent after the Iraqi Pseudo-War.  And how about that smart ass, “You’re not so smart, Larry & Andy” smack down for using The Merovingian as a symbol….  (Could it be that Gopnik hasn’t even thought of why he is called The Merovingian?)  God forbid that Gopnik consider whether the virtual dessert has any significance as anything other than a gag.

AG:  “The stunning Monica Bellucci appears as his wife, who sells out his secrets in exchange for a remarkably chaste kiss from Neo, while Trinity looks on, smoldering like Betty in an “Archie” comic. (But then Monica is Italian, a member of the coalition of the willing.)”

DP:  Again, what probably has deeper meaning in this trilogy is written off as Betty & Veronica by the very brilliant Mr. Gopnik.  Too bad he doesn’t make any effort when he goes to a movie.  Hmmm… I wonder whether he spends time parsing every idea in an art film… hmm… but it’s the Wachowski’s fault here… hmmm…..

Here comes a big one…

AG:   “In the first film, the rules of reality were bendable, and that was what gave the action its surprises; in the new one there are hardly any rules at all.”

DP:  There are the same old rules and there are a bunch of new rules.  In fact, much of the chat-chat-chat of the film is about how the rules are changing.  How can you watch this movie and not connect to that incredibly obvious fact?

AG:  “The idea of a fight between Neo and a hundred identical evil “agents” sounds cool but is unintentionally comic. Dressed in identical black suits and ties, like the staff of MCA in the Lew Wasserman era (is that why they’re called agents?), they simultaneously rush Neo and leap on him in a giant scrum; it’s like watching a football team made up of ten-year-olds attempt to tackle Bronko Nagurski—you know he’s going to rise up and shake them off. Neo has become a superhuman power within the Matrix and nothing threatens him. He fights the identical agents for fifteen minutes, practically yawning while he does, and then flies away, and you wonder—why didn’t he fly away to start with? As he chops and jabs at his enemies, there isn’t the slightest doubt about the outcome, and Keanu Reeves seems merely preoccupied, as though ready to get on his cell phone for a few sage words with Slavoj Zizek. There are a few arresting moments at the conclusion when Neo meets the architect of the Matrix. But by then the spectacle has swept right over the speculation, leaving a lot of vinyl and rubber shreds on the incoming tide.”

DP:  Apparently, Gopnik has nothing to say, so he drops some names.  He knows who Lew Wasserman, Bronko Nagurski and Slavoj Zizek are!!!

The issue of “why does Neo fight” has been covered by me before. 

And that pretty much covers his review of The Matrix Reloaded.

In the other 1800 words of his story, there is plenty more pretense and nonsense.  He praises the “reddish grungy reality of Morpheus’s ship” in the same story that smacks the production design for Zion. He praises the fact that “few movies have had so much faith in their own mythology,” but attacks the Wachowskis for extending the mythology. 

And the ego bath goes on… we get 340 words on the Cathars, who believed that the physical world was a trick of Satan, holding the faithful hostage of a sort.  Gopnik once again reasserts his false notion that The Matrix is made up of bytes that mean nothing, conveniently forgetting that we have had the fact that every human in the Matrix is connected to a body that will die if the body is killed inside of the Matrix. 

We get a 259-word treatise on Phillip K. Dick.  (No one ever made that connection before.) 

Then we get 638 words on the “brain-in-the-vat problem,” allowing Gopnik to cough up a whole bunch of impressive knowledge that really has nothing to do with The Matrix or The Matrix Reloaded.  Once again, Gopnick misstates the state of the Matrix.  Nozick’s theory involved a choice to give up the body in exchange for your brain living on and experiencing, in a simulated state, anything it wanted.  But The Matrix states, and Reloaded repeats, that the Matrix that gave people everything they wanted was a dismal failure. 

I want to give you one paragraph of this to let you know how much smarter Gopnik is than the rest of us… you might want a virtual shovel here: 

AG: “Like most thought experiments, the brain-in-the-vat scenario was intended to sharpen our intuitions. But recurrent philosophical examples tend to have a little symbolic halo around them, a touch of their time—those angels dancing on the head of a pin were dancing to a thirteenth-century rhythm. The fact that the brain-in-a-vat literature has grown so abundant, the vat so vast, suggests that it has a grip on our imagination as a story in itself.”

DP:  I think there was some thought in that vat.

In his last paragraph, Gopnick makes some sense.  And then, buries himself again:

AG:  “Especially in view of the conventionality of the second film, it’s clear that the first film struck so deep not because it showed us a new world but because it reminded us of this one, and dramatized a simple, memorable choice between the plugged and the unplugged life. It reminded us that the idea of free lives is inseparable from the idea of the real thing. Apparently, we needed the reminder. “Free your mind!,” the sixties-ish slogan of the new film, is too ambitious to be convincing, and betrays the darkness that made the first film so unusual. “Unplug thy neighbor!,” though, still sounds just possible.”

DP:  Indeed, the comfort zone of The Matrix has been abused by The Matrix Reloaded.  The first film was clearly about “a simple, memorable choice.”  This one is not. The game, which we all loved and felt we understood, has been changed. 

But what exactly does this – “ It reminded us that the idea of free lives is inseparable from the idea of the real thing.”- mean?  Does he mean that the idea of a free life is inseparable from having a truly free life? 

If only Gopnik could free his own mind --  and review the movie and not his education.

What Would Neo Do ...||||....Character Arcs (spoilers)
Review... |||.....Spoilers

 

- by David Poland