Posted on 12/02/2003 1:45:13 PM PST by gobucks
Are you fully aware of how Hollywood is attempting to control the idea of the boyhood-to-manhood process? The agenda of Hollywood producers is simple: get the watchers (the younger the better) to believe a boy doesn’t become a “man” until he submits, in some way, to a woman.
More precisely this boyhood, or "guyhood", is a state of “sin” that has to be redeemed prior to the gift of being seen as a “man” by a woman. Of course, exceptions exist, especially in older movies. But the culture wars are nourished by these films. Below, I will refer to a few movies to illustrate my point.
SABRINA: A Harrison Ford remake that’s very popular with typical “modern” women. Ford, as Sabrina tells him, is viewed as a cold businessman who doesn’t care for anyone; the "world’s only living heart donor”. At the end, his family confronts him and says he really needs to abandon his multimillion dollar company, and go to Paris to ask Sabrina to accept his love despite his previously heartless acts against her. “Save me” he says to her at the end in Paris on a dark street. She does, his sins are redeemed, and fade to music!
BRAVEHEART: Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, doesn’t work to free Scotland until AFTER his secret wife is killed. Up to then, he is not a fighter, he’s a lover, not to be dragged into messy politics. Only after the fateful mistake by an English thug does the brave heart appear (there is no historical basis for her role, but she is very pretty). It ends with his clenched fist slowly opening as he dies, her tattered handkerchief fluttering down to the executioner’s wooden deck, and him yelling the word “freedom”. Hmmmmm.
THE MATRIX (first one): Neo is dead, having just been shot many times by Agent Smith in the Matrix. In the real world, Neo is actually Thomas A. Anderson (Anderson = “son of man”) and he is lying in the chair, his heart no longer beating. Trinity (Trinity? Gimme a break!) a raving beauty who asserted earlier that she is the "ranking officer", leans over and says he can’t be dead, because he is the “man” she is in love with (the first time he is referred to as a “man”).
She kisses him, and THEN his heart starts beating again, and Neo now proceeds to see the matrix world as it actually is; he's enabled to stop bullets and defeat evil. This film is about as blantant as it gets. (Read anything about K. Reeve’s dad, and you'll get why he picks these roles).
WHAT A WOMAN WANTS: Mel Gibson, womanizer, single, ruthless falls under the spell of Helen Hunt. At the end, he begs “Rescue me” as he tells her that she is not fired from her high visibility corporate job after all, a firing he engineered.
She fires him on the spot for his crime, at first, but then claims she would be a poor knight indeed if she didn’t rescue him ... fade to music after the kiss of redemption. Of course, it’s only after reading women’s minds, including hers, that he agrees he is a creep that really needs this rescuing.
FIGHT CLUB: very violent movie, but popular with the gen X and gen Y crowd. A divided personality is trying hard to find the masculine side of himself, and everything goes downhill after he meets Helen Bonham Carter. The "Fight Club" at first is serving its purpose – he feels more tough.
But at the end, he ends up killing the tough blond-haired alter-ego – and magically, for the first time in the whole film, the woman he has been aching for suddenly appears by his side, her arms around him. Fade to black as the evil capitalist world crashes down. Moral: kill your toughness and get the woman.
TITANIC: he sacrifices himself for her at the end, and what does she do? Avoids the evil “guy” at the end who had money. Nope, the husband she should have had is dead. He stood up for her – but he had also gotten a bit of a reward too in a model T ford. He was a drifter, gambler, but a man at the end.
The list is endless (Beauty and the Beast – even cartoons don’t miss out on this). So, my point is basically this: most folks in Hollywood who make movies clearly grew up in households where Dad was absent, or submissive to the will of a powerful mother. They’re certainly not making movies about their Dad!
Boyhood to Manhood movies are simply missing where they show a high integrity Dad bringing his Son along (unless it’s a show like the Godfather, or some other Mafia type flick – so being strong is associated with being an outlaw!! - but I digress).
The culture wars have as their root these types of films. They can still be enjoyed, but they should be in the same way a cigar is every now and then. Too many can be bad for you, or maybe society. But then again, maybe that is the point of the agenda...
Neo is back, though he's looking somewhat paleo for a guy who's only been around four years. When first we met him in The Matrix he was some computer programmer in an anonymous metropolis who gets roused by Morpheus and offered a choice of pharmaceutical producrs. "You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill," teases Morpheus, "and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Neo takes the red pill, and wakes up to find his so-called real life is a fiction. And so is everyone else's. All his chums are lying down in incubators wired up to the "Matrix", which feeds them a continuing simulation of experience. Mankind has been put in a collective comatose state by evil computers. The only real reality is that of a small band of renegade humans holed up in an underground town called Zion until they can figure out how to deMatriculate mankind.
The notion that reality is an illusion is an eminently respectable one these days, particularly for French intellectuals, understandably enough. The line in the original film about "the desert of the real" came from Jean Baudrillard, a great proponent of the philosophical idea that reality is simulation and author of, among other books, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He could probably sue for plagiarism, though in turn the film's producers could argue that his theory that reality is a simulation is itself a simulation and that their alleged film did not take place.
The point is Andy and Larry Wachowski figured they'd hit on the perfect wrinkle for a classic post-modern nerd franchise -- the Star Wars of our generation. And if you say, "Hang on, old boy, surely Star Wars is our generation?", I'd say, nah, it's too 1930s radio serial, and its grandiosity is plonkingly squaresville instead of coolly impenetrable. Sadly, Matrix Recycled ...I mean, Reloaded came overloaded, lacking anything like the first film's sudden peeling away of surface reality and so attempting to duplicate it over and over: Was Zion perhaps a Matrix-within-the-Matrix? Was Neo maybe a Matrix-within-the-Matrix-within- the-Matrix? He was supposed to be "The One". But maybe one of the others is The One. Maybe The One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
By the sequel, the Wachowskis' "innovative visual style" was looking a lot less innovative: they did all same things they did in the first film all over again, just more expensively and even more arbitrarily -- the scene in which Keanu Reeves (Neo) is fighting a hundred guys in black and doesn't win, doesn't lose, but just gets bored and flies off after 15 minutes pretty much sums it up. By the second movie, Keanu had perfected his morose blank look; fine actors like Laurence Fishburne were turning in performances so clunkily solemn you'd think they were auditioning for George Lucas; the subterranean city of Zion proved to be just the usual generic dystopian underground parking garage, and the orgiastic dance party looked like a provincial rave.
But, having fallen for the series' self-importance, the Matricians or Matricists or Matrons or whatever the anoraks are called were reluctant to admit they'd bought a dud. In the original film, Neo discovered that the meaning of our lives is an illusion; in the sequel, the meaning of the film is an illusion. It doesn't make much sense as it's flying by, and it makes less if you buy the DVD, slow it down and write out all the dialogue. The rabbit hole doesn't go deep at all; the buck stops about four inches down. But it has the illusion of meaning. Halfway through, at the moment when a severely cropped Monica Bellucci (in dystopian movies, there is, alas, no Charlie's Angels hair) asks Keanu to kiss her, I became convinced that my watching the film was only an illusory reality; somewhere, there was another me watching Monica Bellucci seducing Italian schoolboys in Malena and having a much better time.
Which brings us to The Matrix: Revolutions -- that's "revolutions" as in "coming round again". This is one rabbit hole that's looking pretty tapped out. This is the big final showdown between the denizens of Zion and the Sentinels, and the Wachowskis lay off the psychedelic LP liner notes philosophizing to concentrate on a not altogether comfortable mix of your basic up-against-the-clock action sequences and celestial choirs on the soundtrack serenading Keanu as if it's consecration day and he's the last gay bishop on the planet. The romance between Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is barely less comatose than the mass of humanity they're supposedly trying to save. Unlike the first sequel, the dialogue isn't pretentiously obscure, just perfunctory: "I'm afraid hope is an indulgence I don't have time for." Or maybe "indulgence is a hope I don't have time for". Or "time is a hope I don't have indulgence for". Makes no difference. It's modular furniture. Say it portentously enough and it fills in the time until the giant steel bores tunnel into Zion and the explosions start.
Is Matrix a myth for the ages? No. I doubt it will resonate through the end of the decade. Why then did so many intellectuals go ga-ga for it? Because it confirms their view of the world: huge corporations manufacture a reality that sedates the masses and only a handful of supersmart humans know enough to spot it. Needless to say, the film series confirming the great thinkers' worldview is itself made by a huge corporation, which suggests they -- and not the philosophy profs -- are the really supersmart guys. Or, as they would say, The Ones.
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