Chiasmus cult cinema trailers - "The Matrix" (1999). *These will be ongoing posts, courtesy of the A.Glass DVD collection. As I offer via Chiasmus Cult trailers, my summarized overviews*

There were two movies that were released in 1999. One was the long awaited Star Wars prequel, "The Phantom Menace", the other, "The Matrix", and you would be forgiven if your excitement was to choose the Phantom Menace over The Matrix as the movie of choice, and also very much forgiven at how dreadful George Lucas's attempt at explaining the Star Wars canon turned out to be, and yet you would have been pleasantly redeemed when you went, soon after, and viewed The Matrix, directed by the Wachowski sisters.

And what a movie it was, conceptually layered with both Eastern and Western philosophical cues, and released at the cusp of the new millennium (1999), without essentially predicting what may come next for us in this new digitalized world, it did offer, via The Wachowskis screenplay and script, that we may all indeed become trapped in a simulacrum of recopied events, or simulated realities, directly taken, as a main influence for "The Matrix" out of the 1981 "Simulacra and Simulation" book by the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

As mentioned, the layered conceptualization and many influences and themes of "The Matrix" is what give it its long standing charm, if you are able to grasp those visual influences the Wachowskis inserted into the production, which range obviously from cyberpunk, whilst relying heavily on Japanese 'cityscape' anime and Hong Kong martial art movies of the 1980s, 'programmed' consumerism, while questioning what is real and what not, that is based around simulated realities and manipulation.  Which actually dates back to the late science fiction writer Frederik Pohl's 1954 short story "The Tunnel under the World", of deceased human memories and experiences uploaded into humanoid looking robots in a recreated 'town', where captive real humans are placed (with no memory of the events once they have awoken), forced to try various consumer products, while being viewed by nefarious advertising executives.  And then there is the German film "World on a Wire," (1973), based off the 1963 novel "Simulacron-3"  by Daniel F. Galouye, where a simulated reality, used for marketing research, created a perfect computer generated reality, as the people who are 'living' in this reality begin to realise it isn't real.  

So, the concept of a computer generated realities as a science fiction postmodern theme is not new, yet the Wachowskis sisters, were able to create major a Hollywood production which would offer a blockbuster glimpse into an idealism, or at least philosophize that reality could indeed be more unreal, or hypereal than real.   Unfortunately, two decades later after "The Matrix" was realised, the Alt Right blogosphere hijacked the main tenet of the movie, via the "red pill, blue pill" mythos, of either staying in the unreal world, or be awoken to the real world, as a precursor to paranoia that the Left Wing, and ironically, the "postmodernists" were taking over the world, which as we know now, has now very much evolved into a Proto-Fascist reworking of the "The Matrix" theme.  A sort of borrowed propaganda against the Left, to which Wachowskis years later interjected, by saying the subtext of The Matrix was about the two sisters transgender experiences.

"The Matrix" stands alone as popular culture concept, despite the three sequels that came later, that failed to capture the energy, ideas and rawness of the first movie.  It is, first and foremost only entertainment, with a philosophical overture.  And on cult movie night, when the infamous red pill, blue pill scene does beam onto the screen, we place two bowls down onto the table of red and blue jelly beans.  Which one will you choose?

___

(A.Glass 2025)

All CHIAMUS Cult Cinema trailers/commentary to date: chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/search/label/Chiasmus%20cult%20cinema