The Wachowski brothers created many situations in The Matrix that can provoke discussions and arguments over what they wanted to symbolize by particular characters of pieces of dialogue. These moments and scenes can relate to our modern day lives and how certain aspects of the Matrix perfectly resemble our imperfect world. The Matrix shows the world that certain aspects of life that sometimes people wish didn’t exist have to be there for the wellbeing of humanity.
The Matrix’s imperfections are what makes it so convincing to all of humanity because mistakes are how man learns and progresses through life. When the Matrix was first constructed, it was a perfect world where nothing went wrong. This proved problematic because as Agent Smith says to Morpheus, “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. ” (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) In retrospect, this is what everyone wants in life, no problems, no war, just peace and serenity.
The problem with a perfect world is that everyone would start to notice discrepancies because it something goes well for someone, it should go worn for another, and when people started realizing this, their brains interpreted it as a dream and they were waking up. Agent Smith expresses this by saying, “It was a disaster. No one would accept the program…. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) This relates back to our lives in the modern day because everyone goes through some sort of struggle in their lives, whether major or minor, that struggle and how it is handled defines decisions that are made in the future. It is like when a child touches a hot stove after being told not to, when the child touches the stove he/she gets burned and learns not to touch it again.
Agent Smith interprets it as, “But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) If this quote is applied to pretty much anybody in our modern world, it would apply because it is the sad truth of our society. Marcus Tullius Cicero once said, “The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory. ” This quote is just another way of ving what Agent Smith says about how our lives are defined by suffering. Just as Agent Smith says to Morpheus, it is our lifestyle, “the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization,” (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) To think one could perfectly design an imperfect world with such skill that no one could tell the difference between the real world and the Matrix is something to fathom. The amount of specificity that would have to be incorporated to accurately depict all of life’s difficulties and problems takes time. Though, as Agent Smith says, once the agents started thinking like us, they turned our civilization into theirs because they control what happens inside the Matrix.
This also throws into question what is believed throughout this false reality. The Matrix tests it characters and their beliefs many times and provides insight on how people in the modern world base their beliefs on their version of reality. There is a big difference between what is real and what a reality is. If something is real, that is a undebatable circumstance because something that is real is, “Actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious. True, not merely ostensible, normal or apparent.
Existent as opposed to nonexistent. Actual as opposed to possible and potential. ” (Dew, 2009) A reality is something that is relative from person to person, like someone’s own personal Matrix. One’s reality is defined on what they believe the world to be. This idea is first exposed when Morpheus is talking to Neo about the Matrix and says, “You believe it’s the year 1999 when in fact it’s closer to 2199. ” ( Wachowski Brothers, 1999) Neo believed that the year was 1999 because of what was around him.
Using what he thought was real, he formed a reality different from Morpheus’s because what Morpheus believed to be real was different from what Neo believed to be real, therefore forming two completely different realities. This shows in today’s society through the world of religion. Religious beliefs are often disputed throughout the world because there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to interpret all of the different religions throughout the world. These different interpretations create people who take everything a religion says literally, and people who read religious texts through the curtain of figurative language.
These interpretations can cause radicals in a religion who can cause trouble for those who are normal believers. These radicals are equivalent to those who have seen the world outside of the Matrix. They can cause problems to those who want to just go about their lives like a normal person within the Matrix. The prime example of this is shown through Cypher when he sits down with Agent Smith and utters the line, “Ignorance is bliss. ” (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) This line is very short but one of the most powerful of the movie.
In the world of the Matrix, all is normal, every human is going about their lives as if nothing is abnormal, but outside the Matrix, it is a world of always being on the run from an enemy you have virtually no defense against and one city where everyone is living in some form of poverty. One could relate to why Cypher wants to have his memory of going outside the Matrix erased. No one wants to live in a world like the one outside of the Matrix. But what Cypher does is basically the equivalent of rescinding his beliefs in the face of certain death if he stays on the run.
Just like in real life, belief has a way of making us do things we wouldn’t normally do because we believe we can do it. When Morpheus is captured, Neo wants to rescue Morpheus because just like Morpheus, he believes in something, “Morpheus did what he did because he believed I am something I’m not….. Morpheus believed something and he was ready to give his life for what he believed. ” (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) The power of belief is what creates martyrs, those who die for a belief.
The power of belief, while it can distort one’s reality, it can also shape someone, like Neo, into person he believes he isn’t, “Because I believe in something. I believe I can bring him back. ” (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) Through this experience, Neo discovers, despite what he thought the Oracle was telling him, she told him exactly what he needed to hear to become “the one. ” When beliefs are tested, one either holds firm and becomes like Morpheus, with an iron will, or is willing to open himself to the possibilities like Neo, and become something that he never would’ve thought existed.
The Wachowski Brothers showed humans what is like to live from an outside perspective and how what is real and what isn’t shapes us. The Matrix shows us that perfect worlds are just a figment of our imagination and no matter how much they are wanted around the world, they will never work out because when someone is happy, there is always someone at the other end of the spectrum. Overall, The Matrix is a movie that gives a perspective on humanity that people don’t usually question in their day to day lives but those questions are always there, waiting to be answered.
