Mastering the Real: Trinity As the "Real" Hero of the Matrix (Critical Essay)

Many recent films seem concerned with how human beings relate to simulated environments. The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998), Dark City (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), and Existenz (1999), among others, all depict alternate realities created to simulate the real world. The protagonists are forced to deal not merely with human conflict but conflicts with the nature of reality in the face of these alternatives. Many of these films--especially films like The Thirteenth Floor and Existenz--seem to have a curious underlying project that involves a desire to create and, in doing so, to possess reality. At the same time, there is a significant move against this notion in some of these films. Most notable of these kinds of films that reveal a backlash against and fear of simulation is The Truman Show, in which Truman, whose entire life has been filmed in a gigantic television studio, is broadcast to the "real world" without his knowledge. Truman's initial ignorance of the simulation that he lives in mirrors most other films of this sort, but his reaction against it and effort to break through the simulation to reality is a definitively negative response to the idea of simulation itself. The very nature of Truman's situation and the medium of the simulation--television--has a very direct relationship to this favoring of the real over the simulation. Television is a passive and voyeuristic medium, making Truman not an agent but a subject of the camera's eye, which is an omniscient force in his life that creates a parallel between the director behind the camera and God. The notion that life itself may be a kind of simulation is one possible reaction of the audience of the actual movie (not the fictional television show). The same sort of feeling evoked by Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (1973) when Vonnegut's protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, decides that he alone is real and that everything that exists around him exists only to test his reactions in some great, unknowable cosmic experiment is found in viewing The Truman Show this way. (1) This idea may seem somewhat at odds with my description of how the film's theme concerns an animosity toward simulation. Instead, it would seem that the film is one that grapples with more traditional religious and philosophical concerns about determinism, predestination, will, freedom, and--even more classically--Fate. These notions underlie many of the core concerns of contemporary postmodern thought.