Nov 03 2009
Multiple Perspectives Obilerate Truth
I’ve seen the Matrix a few times but I understood it was a very intellectual movie but Rosen’s analysis of the many apocalyptic readings made me want to see it again.
The Wachowski Brothers said that they tried to incorporate as many ideas as possible into the films. The dualities etched by Rosen: Neo as both messiah and antichrist, the tethered humans as both sinner and saved, the machines as both “nurturing protectors and tyrannical parasites” highlight the importance of prospective in the apocalyptic narrative.
The case can be made for both a human apocalypse and a machinist apocalypse since both species are working towards creating a New Jerusalem free from the other but as Rosen argues in the world they live in they can’t survive without one another. This calls into question the need for evil to define good and the need for good to define evil. Can there be a Christ without an Anti-Christ? Is this why Satan gets released after a 1000 years to tempt humanity again?
Today, technology and humanity are co-existing. Humans use technology to make life easier but they also have come to depend on it for survival. If any of us were asked to live off the grid and wash our own clothes and do cook our food without assistance for more than a weekend camping trip we would have great difficulties. We also depend on technology to keep us alive in medical emergencies. We create these machines for both convenience and survival, but for many IT workers, it gives their life purpose. While many people complain about living in a cubicle with only a desktop as company, they, no doubt, choose to live such an existence. We voluntarily live under technnoppression. We create the need to constantly check our e-mails or Facebook accounts. We create the conditions by which we can allow ourselves to be dominated by technology by placing a value on the benefits of the sprawling world of ones and zeros.
Quinby states, “Access to information banks is redefining truth and complicating whether truth can be established amidst an overwhelming flow of data. (135)” The spread of information can allow everyone to look at the numbers and define their own individual truth. This reveals the other sides of the coin that technology can be both liberate as well as imprison humanity. Rosen’s acknowledgement of the multiplicity of truths in the Matrix comments that with many truths comes the obliteration of Truth with a capital T.
Simone, I particularly like the point you make about the multiplicity of truths and have some questions along those lines, especially about individual truth. Is this a matter of looking at the “numbers”? Is there a distinction between statistical data and truth as we now understand it? In other words, what I am searching for here is something in between the Capital T and data per se–something that we might call truth that is neither transcendent nor simply data–yet something that is sharable with others. Have you seen expressions of that version of truth in works of art–films, literature, etc.?