Equilibrium v. The Matrix

On the wall of my office hangs a framed one-sheet of The Matrix. I'm a big fan of the cyberpunk aesthetic, so I find the poster to be just plain cool, with Keannu Reeves inhabiting the role he was born to play (most memorable line: "Whoa.") and, perhaps more to the point, the über-hot Carrie-Anne Moss wearing leather and holding a gun. What's not to like?

The movie, too, floats right near the top of my list of favorite films, sci-fi or othersise, almost inexplicably just below Blade Runner, and quite a bit above just about anything else. I remember when it came out; from the first frames, I felt the same gut-deep emotional connection that I'd felt way back in ninth grade when Luke Skywalker first wielded a light saber--and, of course, when Princess Leia first wielded a blaster... (Do we sense a pattern? I blame Emma Peel...)

So when a few different students saw my poster and told me that I must see Equilibrium because it's even better than The Matrix, I was pretty skeptical; not only would it need to qualify as better by criteria my students and I might agree on (tightness of script, philosophical depth, special effects, whatever); it would have to overcome that mid-life cathexis I mentioned. Taste in film is subjective enough already; when one film has the support of an unabashed adult-fanboy...

But I must say, I was surprisingly underwhelmed with Equilibrium. Sure, Christian Bale nails his character, running the gamut from emotionless ice to weepy sap. And sure, the plot twists fairly admirably (though nothing surprised me, even if I couldn't predict each turn).

And yes, the action scenes were engaging enough; the closing fight scene was especially fun, and a perfect example of the dictum I try to instill in my Creative Writing students: if you want your audience to be impressed when your hero wins, you need a really competent villain. But--aside perhaps from the first time Bale takes out his enemies--the action was all pretty straightforward--nowhere near as interesting as scenes in The Matrix, which, even when not employing the new-tech bullet time, had surprising subtlety (look again, for example, at the last fight scene between Neo and Agent Smith and the way the two seem to be fighting at different speeds).

But eye-candy violence aside, I was underwhelmed by Equilibrium's philosophical stance. My wife put it perfectly: she found it "heavy-handed," at times even "painful." (At first, I balked at the term "painful," but on reflection I realized that I did indeed wince a few times during the film.) The film hit the intended irony--at least, I suppose it was intended--of a hyper-violent war-free world so hard that it ceased to be irony. Worse, the philosophical debates over the paradoxical role of emotion, and its status as human essence, came across with all the subtlety of bad exposition--the kind where the butler and the maid talk about the master's crazy night out the previous evening (or, I'll admit, the type that crawls across the screen at the beginning of Star Wars... sigh.)

Having said this, though, I think I understand why these students--not all, perhaps, but certainly most of them--connected to Equilibrium so deeply. As are most of my Creative Writing students, they are children of Wordsworth--or, at least, of that oversimplified notion that good poetry (and, by extension, all art, including film) is an expression primarily of emotion, for emotion is the thing that makes us human. Take away emotion--whether through Equilibrium's Prozium, or Brave New World's Soma--and you destroy that thing that makes us human.

I know this will sound patronizing, but I can't help it: in my experience, students love that kind of thing.

The Matrix movies (if you ignore most of the last film--don't get me started) strike me as much more interesting. It's not that The Matrix's philosophical stance, at least on the surface, is any more radical: Humans are meant to be free, not enslaved by machines--oh! and, don't forget! No matter how bad things get, love will always save the day!

But there's always a question lurking behind this humanist optimism: is this real?

Near the end of the second Matrix film (Matrix Reloaded), there's a strange moment where the characters are all, it would appear, in the "real world," running from real life "squiddies," and Neo turns and--lo! and behold!--finds he has the power in the real world to shut them down. How intriguing... is this the real world? Or are we still in the Matrix?

I liked the second answer; it reminded me of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of carnival and its celebration of how carnival inverts the established order--and, especially, the critiques of Bakhtin that dismiss this inversion as an escape-valve that actually serves to reinforce the established order. And, in great post-structuralist tradition (heh), Neo does indeed learn that he's only the latest in a long line of failed messiahs necessary to the Matrix's survival...

Unfortunately, the Wachowski brothers dropped the ball at that point, as far as I'm concerned; the last movie could have fallen into the vertiginous uncertainty of infinite regress, but chose instead to (somehow) link the real and simulated worlds through Neo. Alas, the series ends up embracing science fiction's largely conservative bent--philosophically, even when not so politically. A disappointment...

But at least The Matrix had those moments of uncertainty. In Equilibrium, all is presented about as directly--indeed, as pedantically--as imaginable. A man who has literally never felt anything in his life suddenly feels deeply and automatically: he weeps when he hears Beethoven, despite having grown up in a culture that has not socialized him to appreciate the organized noise we call classical music; he melts at puppy dog eyes, despite an inability to understand even the concept of having a pet. Etc...

Meh. Give me the failed questions of The Matrix any day.