OM, SHANTI, KEANU

So a couple weeks ago, one afternoon when neither of us had anything better to do, my friend Bastard Keith and I were Facebook chatting about whatever, and after a brief discussion of Johnny Mnemonic (which BK had just recently beheld), the following (unedited) conversation took place:

Me: ....and at the center of it all, the inimitable keanu

Bastard Keith: He really is a law unto himself.
Sometimes utterly right as the center of a film, sometimes almost glaringly not.

Me: never unmemorable, though

Bastard Keith: NEVER

Me: which is odd considering everyone always talks about how blank he is
and i think sells him short

Bastard Keith: I think he's kind of a monolithic presence.

Me: but he IS a presence

Bastard Keith: That's my point.

Me: unlike people like sam worthington
whose name i had to take a second to remember while typing

Bastard Keith: Worthington is almost astonishingly unmemorable.

Me: exactly
everything about him, down to his last name being too long, is anti-memorable
you always remember keanu

Bastard Keith: There's an essay in that.

Me: even this shitty serial-killer movie [name of ex-girlfriend redacted] made me watch once, there's this indelible moment where keanu's dancing around like a jagoff

Bastard Keith: Doesn't it feel like he's always been with us?

Me: THE ETERNAL KEANU: AN ACTOR WITH NEITHER BEGINNING NOR END

Bastard Keith: He's a room you enter and never leave, perhaps without realizing it.

Me: he is the cinematic image of one hand clapping

Bastard Keith: He is Om.

Me: heh there we go, i'll call the essay om shanti keanu

Bastard Keith: NICE

Me: this actually has to be done

Bastard Keith: I struggle to think of an actor with a career as indestructible.

Me: oh yeah

Bastard Keith: ANY other actor, ANNNNNNNNNNY other actor who'd given some of those performances would be on the outs.
And yet his iconic roles are so perfect, so RIGHT.

Me: but keanu, he bombs in something and then a quiet few months later there's a thing in the trades about keanu being in talks for something new that sounds kinda cool
and frequently is

Bastard Keith: I have this image of, like, studio heads talking in a conference room and Keanu just sort of walking and sitting down quietly and they all slowly realize he's there.

Me: actually on further reflection the fact that when he goes down, he goes down SO HARD is actually kind of admirable
yes! meetings with keanu must be the GREATEST FUCKING THING EVER

Bastard Keith: And they ask what's up, and he just sort of calmly talks about what he'll be doing next.
And they're like, “So...so that's....we're making that?”

Me: “yeah.”

Bastard Keith: And he's like, “Yes, this is what I saw happening.”

Me: “i was riding my motorcycle along the pacific coast highway, and the film came to me in an instant”

Bastard Keith: No threat, just this ineffable sense of zen inevitabllity.

Me: yeah, in a totally even, slightly ethereal tone of voice

Bastard Keith: And the studio heads are just so beguiled by him.
So the movies get made.
Like, can you say no to the tide?
To the phases of the moon?

Me: nor to the wind

Bastard Keith: Basically, I'm saying he's the closest thing to a shaman that modern film has to offer.

Me: oh absolutely

Bastard Keith:
I'm loving this conversation, by the way.

Me: and it makes hugo weaving's speech about inevitability to him in the matrix an extremely meta moment
i am too

Bastard Keith: OH GOD YES.

Me: i'm writing this essay

And for the last couple weeks when I've had a spare moment I've been trying to gather my thoughts about the essay I repeatedly said I was going to write. For the most part, I've been failing miserably. Keanu “the reification of one hand clapping” Reeves is one hard motherfucker to pin down. He's had an amazingly durable career, and long, too. Make sure you're sitting down before you read this next bit: the year after next Keanu is going to be fifty fucking years old. Isn't that kind of fucked up? But, more to the point, isn't that kind of fucked up because you don't think of Keanu as being any age at all? One of the reasons I excerpted that chat with Bastard Keith is that Herr Bastard raises the excellent point that “Doesn't it feel like he's always been with us?” I know it feels that way to me. Bill & Ted dropped when I was 9 or 10, and Keanu was very much a fact of life in it. He's continued to be that way ever since, showing up in a variety of pictures of variable quality. In each, though, at its center, was Keanu.

I get a little defensive when the topic of acting comes up for discussion, until the other party's credentials come up for discussion, because I spent a lot of years studying acting in a variety of different disciplines, with almost a decade as a working theater artist. Which, yeah, whatever, I don't want a gold star or a fuckin lifetime achievement Obie or anything, but even the most cursory glance at these pages or at my other critical writing will show you that I think the deep thoughts about stuff. Acting is one of the handful of subjects on which I can discourse with confidence, erudition, and insight, joining movies (obviously), basketball, and the ways and means of bringing a woman to orgasm. Having spent all those years trying to figure acting out, it thus pains me how people who've never done it and barely even know what it is hold forth about acting as experts. (For a longer and more eloquent kvetch on this same topic, Uta Hagen's Respect For Acting is a surprisingly fun read.) I bring this up because it's largely these armchair experts who will, with ruthless brevity, dismiss Keanu's acting as “shitty.” Most often because his performances aren't naturalistic. Sometimes because, yes, he actually isn't very good. But this misses the larger truth of Keanu, his Om, if you will. He is as he is. To try and mold him into something he isn't is folly. Also, it means something that Bertolucci cast him as the Buddha. Sure, that was no Last Tango In Paris and it sure wasn't The Conformist but Bertolucci's not some schmuck off the street, and he could have had any number of actors, but he chose Keanu.

Just as filmmakers and writers can be stylists, not conforming strictly to a rote transcription of the world “as it is” to give some illusory sense of “real” life, actors can be too. In fact, most movie stars give off a sense of being larger than life, of being above such mortal concerns as reality. John Wayne did John Wayne. Bogart did Bogart. Clint did (and may at some point again do) Clint. This may even be the very thing that does make them great, that they are stylists. I don't know whether Keanu qualifies under this category, because it's not entirely certain he's doing it on purpose. This sounds like I'm saying he's some kind of holy fool, but that's not it. It's basically like we were saying in the chat: he's a force of nature, like wind, or the sea. He is as he is.

And, even though I know he won't, it feels as though he ever shall be. The genuine joy I've felt watching him act is more like the joy of a summer breeze or the ocean gently brushing my bare feet on a beach than it is watching an actor. The inflection in his voice on “whoa.” (Specificially the “whoa” after watching Morpheus jump in The Matrix, though at least one of his Ted “whoa”s qualify as well.) The triumph of “Yeah? Well I'm taller” is every triumph. The genuine awe of confronting the mysteries of the universe contained in “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” It's part of the great beauty of the work of Keanu Reeves that this piece is at once kind of kidding, a little ridiculous, and absolutely sincere at the same time. At a certain point, pondering the mysteries of the universe is pointless, because the universe is us and we are it. That's the great thing about Keanu. He is. His apparent comfort in simply being radiates off the screen. Sometimes it means he isn't very good in the given movie (and a lot of times the given movie's a piece of shit, too) but for those moments of absolute perfection when everything clicks together, he's one of the finest mediums there is.

IT IS GOING TO SUCK AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

(Ed. Note: Part one, about the first movie, is here)

There was, perhaps, an unfair level of expectation for the Matrix sequels. This may have been the first instance—and was certainly the most notable early one—of the Internet totally fucking everything up for a movie. You have to understand the impact The Matrix had on a) nerds, b) potheads, and c) pop culture junkies. It was massive. A devotee of The Matrix could fancy him/herself cooler than Star Wars nerds because of all the mangled Baudrillard, capable of getting high and, thanks to The Matrix, finding deeper meaning in Alice in Wonderland than the actual gibberish written by a pedophile tripping on mushrooms (sorry, y'all, I know the truth stings), and due to to the immense new possibilities presented to solipsists by the exponential growth of the Internet, the Matrix fan could become a Serious Pop Culture Theorist on his/her “blog.” (Ed. Note: the hypocrisy of pissing on blogs on a blog is not lost on the author. He requests that you merely nod your heads and agree.)

So long story short, nerds who thought they were cooler than other nerds had spent about three and a half years feverishly discussing what was in store in the Matrix sequels, to be released months apart in 2003. We had worked ourselves up into such a state that the fucking Warner Bros logo got a standing ovation at the midnight screenings. I even—and I swear on the immortal soul of Alain Robbe-Grillet that it was an accident—went to see The Matrix Reloaded in costume as Neo: long black coat, shades, blank expression (mine due to coming down from something rather than Reevesian mental absence). But was it really an accident? I prefer to think of it as the universe reminding me what a fucking geek I was. Am. Ever shall be. Whatever, moving on.

The Matrix Reloaded starts off with an almost desperate stab at awesomeness: Trinity flying through the air on a motorcycle, a huge fucking explosion, and a slow-motion shot of Trinity's ass in those vinyl pants as she sticks the landing perfectly. Then she and an Agent are flying through mid-air with bullet ripples all over the goddamn place, and Trinity's plummeting through the air off a fucking skyscraper with the Agent firing and firing and firing and finally he hits her just under the tit, big blood spurt . . . HOLY SHIT TRINITY'S GONNA DIE IN THE FIRST SCENE WHAT THE FUCK????? And she wipes out on a car—and Keanu wakes up. Goddammit, you cocktease ass Wachowski punks.

Well, hey, it's not like we wanted Trinity to die in the first scene (see Fast and Furious as an example: killing off a hot chick main character, no matter how shitty an actress, in the first reel is a mistake). Next up we have a scene where we see some Agents crashing a summit of several ship captains. Morpheus makes his typical dramatic entrance. We're told that the machines are closing in on Zion and within 72 hours or something, arrivederci Zion unless Neo does something. First, the presumed-dead Agent Smith shows up and asks this guy to thank Neo for setting him free (whoops . . .) and then some actual Agents show up. Neo doesn't even take it seriously. He flexes his nuts for a couple minutes and then the Agents mysteriously vanish. Neo is troubled. Keanu's brow furrows. And he goes flying off to go see the Oracle, but she's not there. A promising beginning.

However, the next fucking forty years of The Matrix Reloaded (taking us to about minute 30, objective time) are goddamn torturous. It's all in the “real world,” for one thing. Oooh, they show us Zion. Ya know what? Fuck Zion. It's dirty, there aren't any stores for the girls to buy nice dresses, the people are all a bunch of humorless religious fanatics . . . it was one thing to hear the zealot techie guy (who, hilariously, is not back for the sequels due to excessive salary demands even though nobody knows him as anything other than the zealot techie guy from The Matrix) rhapsodize about Zion in the first movie, because you could imagine this cool place. I took one look at Zion and did not give a fuck about any of the people there, and by the middle of the third movie I was actively rooting for the machines to blast this ugly shithole out of existence.

Actually, let me rephrase. If we stopped off in Zion for like five minutes, set up the plot, then took back off to go fuck around in the Matrix, I wouldn't have minded Zion so much. Harry Lennix is awesome, and he plays a good right-wing tightass, and seeing Cornel West as one of the old hippies who run the place fucking rocked, and hell, Anthony Zerbe brought a good “fuck it, I'm slumming” vibe as one of the other old hippies who run the place. But Jesus fucking Christ, we had to learn about every single nuance of Zion politics in exhaustive detail, we had to sit through that ludicrous rave scene that followed Morpheus' “I am TALKING . . . very WEIRD and very LOUD . . . as though I am the black Christopher WALKEN and moreover haven't taken a SHIT in like a WEEK” speech, and put up with the complete absence of sexual chemistry between Neo and Trinity (apparently exacerbated by actual off-screen mutual loathing between Keanu and Carrie-Ann Moss) for one of the least sexy sex scenes ever filmed.

Fortunately, at the exact moment when I'm always tempted to pick up the remote and throw it through the TV screen, Morpheus rounds up his crew—now including the criminally wasted Harold Perrineau in the stead of the dude who wanted more money; how's that for irony, ya whine about your contract and they replace you with someone more famous—and they take off to go hack into the Matrix and talk to the Oracle. And things start picking up quick.

First, Keanu makes his way through a virtual Hong Kong, and encounters a small
Chinese man named Seraph. (Phillip Chou, who although cool, is not capable of making the viewer forget that this part was written for Jet Li; oh, what might have been . . .) with this weird golden glow about him, not the typical green Matrix source code. Hmmm. He then apologizes to Neo for having to do this, which is to say he starts throwing rather deft kung fu at Neo. Wait, what's that, Neo?

“I know kung fu.”

Exactly. They fight to a stalemate, and it turns out that “the only way to truly know someone is to fight them.” This was how Neo needed to prove he was really Neo. So they go through a literal back door that is, in fact, a back door in the code of the Matrix, and Seraph brings Neo out into a housing project courtyard to talk to the Oracle.

Here we get a bunch of fairly cool exposition, written in patented clunky Matrix dialogue, about how the Oracle is a program serving a purpose in the greater Matrix. (Vampires, aliens, werewolves, and ghosts are all buggy software, which I kind of got a kick out of). After a bit though, Seraph hustles the Oracle out of there, which Neo soon sees is because the resurrected Agent Smith is approaching (after Smith has “possessed” one of the other Zionites). Hugo Weaving gets to do a bit of declaiming about the nature of purpose (sounding hilariously like an Australian Ayn Rand on Valium in so doing) and reveals to Neo his latest party trick . . . he can make copies of himself. Lots of copies.

Let the record reflect that I find the ensuing fight scene to be one of the coolest fucking things I've ever seen. I will have none of your lip about the CGI looking fake (especially if you're gonna trot out some argument about the CGI being better in Lord of the Rings; the difficulty curve is higher CGIing a person than it is Gollum or anthropomorphic trees and shit, because Gollum isn't real and trees stand still) and I'll certainly have none of this balderdash about “why doesn't Neo just fly away?” Look, people, I said it before—having shamelessly stolen the phrase from my friend Greg—The Matrix Reloaded is a movie about Keanu flexing his nuts. That's it. Bottom to the top. Flying away is not the act of a testicular being. Neo could fly away, sure, but he could also beat the shit out of 100 Agent Smiths at the same time. And that's what he does. And holy fucking shit do I enjoy this scene. They spent like two years doing the effects for this one fucking scene. Sure, at the end of the scene Neo does fly away, but that's because he flexed his nuts, he had his fun, now it's time to go. It's kinda like when you're having a battle of wits with a male cat. Eventually, when you've bested him, the cat will pretend to have never given a fuck about the battle of wits and walk away with his tail in the air. Which is exactly what Keanu does, except with a lot of Hugo Weaving clones in suits walking away and adjusting their ties afterwards.

Next up, Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity have to go negotiate with a French computer program for the release of “The Keymaker.” (Ghostbusters flashbacks permitted, encouraged, and endorsed). Not a computer program written by a French person. A computer program so nefarious, oily, and devoid of scruples that he has decided there is no other option but to be French. Welcome to 2003, where Francophobia briefly supplanted even the time-honored hatred of Negroes and Jews! Actually, Lambert Wilson is so great, and is clearly having such a blast, as the French computer program, that it's hard to complain too hard about the prevailing political climate at the time (which was terrifyingly right-wing that spring and summer) especially since the Wachowskis were such insular wackos that their thought process was actually “We really like the sound of the word 'Merovingian' . . . the Merovingians were French, so I guess we gotta find a French guy.” And the computer program has that loose, “I guess it makes sense, but then again I'm high” connection to the historical Merovingians shared by nearly all the Wachowskis' forays into academia.

Anyway. The Merovingian tells Neo and company to go fuck themselves, but his wife catches them on their way out and promises to help them if Neo will kiss her. Trinity is not amused, but Neo takes one for the team. Oh, right, the Merovingian's wife is Monica Belucci! Right, my bad, Monica Belucci is so hot Keanu actually looks hetero for a second when he's smoochin her. Fuck, I forgot. So yeah, Trinity is staring death at this Eurohussy even as she's sneaking them all into the Merovingian's mansion to go grab this little Korean guy with a gajillion keys all over the place.

Naturally, the Merovingian is pissed, and sputters Gallicly, before sending these two albino Welsh rastafarians who can walk through walls after Morpheus, Trinity, and the keymaster while Neo gets into a pitched battle with an all-star team of stuntmen (the DVD featurette about this fight was almost as much fun as the fight) which ends with their sloppy deaths and the Merovingian saying something cryptic about Neo's predecessors. Hmmm. Neo chases him through the castle, but the Merovingian gives him the slip and he ends up hundreds of miles away from where Morpheus, Trinity, and the Keymaster are.

Where they are is In The Shit. They get into this spectacular car chase involving a suspiciously high number of late-model Cadillacs that eventually takes Morpheus to the top of a tractor trailer (after blowing up the albino Welsh rastafarians) and Trinity onto a smokin-hot Ducatti (the only thing my mom remembers about any of the Matrix movies, which I find hilarious) and Keanu, at the very last second, grabbing Morpheus and the Keymaster off the top of the tractor trailer just before it explodes in flames. As Harold Perrineau says before collapsing on his computer monitor in exhaustion: “YES!”

(One note: Jada Pinkett Smith, as Niobe, a character introduced in a shitty Matrix video game, figures large in this car chase and in a bit of the story so far as a love interest for Morpheus, which would work if she and every single other woman in Zion—including, of course, the legendarily androgynous Trinity—wasn't motherfuckin Butch Patrick, dude. I guess the femmes all died out due to natural selection . . .)

So after this rather satisfying climax, there's still another 45 minutes or so of movie (Ed. Note: the structure fucking sucks) and the Keymaster gives this allegedly expository speech that's more math than text, and Morpheus gives a typically fanaticism-on-Quaaludes speech about fate and the nobility of dying for a cause, and through a series of weird events, Trinity ends up having to hack into the Matrix to save Neo, and that scene from the beginning where she gets killed starts to play out exactly as it did before.

Meanwhile, Neo's fine except for the dozens of Smiths who turn up to get in his way and plug the Keymaster just as he's opening the door he was “meant to,” and since the Keymaster's purpose is served, he dies. Thus begins what is, simultaneously, the most interesting and most incomprehensibly dense scene in the whole trilogy: Neo's conversation with The Architect, the creator of the Matrix.

The upshot of the scene is that there have been other “One”s and that they're part of the system, just like everyone else. The purpose of The One, according to the Architect, is to keep the system from crashing, but even though The One thinks his purpose is to save Zion, Zion always inevitably gets destroyed. And they've done this six or seven times so far. This is, of course, assuming that you can trust this guy. Anyway, Neo is given a choice—he can save Trinity or save Zion, even though the Architect tells him there's no way around the fact that Trinity is going to die, or around the fact that Zion is fucked. Neo chooses to save Trinity. He flies in, so fast that he destroys half the Matrix, and grabs Trinity, reaches inside her chest and starts her heart again. Sigh. Shame they ain't go no chemistry cuz those kids sure are in love.

So the Nebuchadnezzar blows up. Neo telekinetically stops a whole bunch of those stupid looking robots even though he's not in the Matrix and goes into a coma. And the ship that comes to rescue Morpheus, Trinity, Harold Perrineau, and Sleeping Beauty has found someone . . . THE GUY WHO SMITH POSSESSED! Kthxbai see ya in November!

Boy, if the anticipation for the first one was intense, May to November 2003 were ridiculous. The entire Internet slowed to a crawl as nerds freaked out about where the story was heading. Everyone had their own pet theory. I didn't really, I was willing to wait and see where the Wachowskis were going with the whole thing, because as much as Reloaded was clunky and overstuffed with crap I figured that the best was yet to come. Or at least a resolution.

There are a couple cool moments in The Matrix Revolutions. The whole bit where Neo is trapped in the train station talking to the Indian guy and his family (all computer programs, not real people) is okay, or would be if it had anything to do with anything (the fact that we briefly glimpsed the Indian guy in Reloaded getting frogmarched out of the Merovingian's restaurant doesn't make him relevant), and if it made any sense whatsoever that a computer program would be religious. Bruce Spence is always welcome to the party, but he has nothing to do. When Morpheus, Trinity, and Seraph swagger on into the Merovingian's nightclub and negotiate Neo's release at gunpoint, that's cool. (Ed. Note: All these things happen in the first 20 minutes of the movie) After Neo gains his release—and we've had no good explanation as to why his powers as The One now carry over to the real world—the rest of the movie is one gigantic turd. The whole rest of the fucking movie takes place in the boring, derivatively designed “real” world, including the most mind-numbing, interminable waste of a ten-figure FX budget in the history of the cinema, The Battle of Zion, which has no dramatic stakes, no reason to care whatsoever about any of the people under attack (since Neo and Trinity are flying a hovercraft out to talk to the machine mainframe, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, the actual drama in the narrative). If you completely excise The Battle of Zion, you save probably $50 million bucks at the minimum, the most boring 45 minutes in the history of cinema, and stop your movie from grinding to a halt and never regaining its momentum.

When Neo finally gets to talk to the machine mainframe (following the “tragic” death of Trinity), he asks to be plugged back into the Matrix, which is now populated only by copies of Smith, to keep it from crashing (in exchange, the machines agree to let Zion be). And, for some reason, despite the fact that only 100 Smiths managed to fight Neo to a draw, one of the Smiths throws down one on one. More overblown special effects. Smith kicks Neo's ass, and Neo gives his life to save the Matrix, by letting Smith absorb him. But Neo's code makes Smith's code untenable, and the whole Matrix has to do a system reset. So Neo's dead, Smith's dead, Trinity's dead, Morpheus is “fucking” Jada Pinkett Smith again, Zion's full of robot and human corpses, and in spite of the fact that there's no reason whatsoever to trust the machines, who can still wipe out Zion whenever they feel like it, the remaining Zionites are convinced that the war is over and all shall be peace forever after. There's a final scene inside the Matrix where the Architect and the Oracle talk about the coming peace, and the Architect crankily concedes that the Oracle was “right.” The End.

Unfortunately, the last movie being such a worthless piece of shit for the last hour and forty-five minutes casts a shadow over the whole trilogy. It makes the clunky narrative of Reloaded seem worse than it actually is. It casts all the dumb stuff in the first movie that you can ignore most of the time in very sharp relief. There comes a point, usually during the credits of Revolutions, where you, as a nerd, chastise yourself for wasting so much time and energy geeking out about this bullshit when the creators clearly cared so little about making a good movie. The myth, repeated endlessly by the ardent defenders of the series on the Internet, that the Wachowskis had “planned it all out ahead of time” was laid bare; they may have had a plan for three movies before the first one, but had to put a whole bunch of stuff originally intended for the sequels into the first one at the behest of Warner Bros. Then come sequel time: “Oh, shit, what do we do now? [scramble to meet deadline]”

In the interests of full disclosure, I've periodically talked myself into liking the sequels more than the above would indicate. It helps to be high, and in a really generous, sentimental mood. Even with that caveat, I always skip the stupid fucking Zion battle scene. That scene has always sucked and will always suck. The frustration I have with the sequels is that they could have been so much better, so much easier. If we can, for a moment, step into a parallel reality where Warners immediately greenlit three movies and gave the Wachowskis final cut, here are a couple quick fixes that would solve everything:

Keep Joe Pantoliano and the rest of the original crew around for the whole trilogy

This makes us care more as they all die off one by one, and makes Joe Pantoliano's betrayal in the third movie have more dramatic impact, since he will have been at odds with, befriended, been at odds with again, and so forth, Neo for the whole trilogy.

Edit the Zion time down by 90%

The series is, after all, called The Matrix. Because it's about the fucking Matrix. The fact that they have to hack in to best the machines highlights our protagonists' underdog status, and also spares us the intelligence-insulting sequence where somehow, even though the combined forces of humanity have never gotten within 100 miles of the machine mainframe, one ship piloted by two unarmed dumbasses is able to get through.

Hire a script doctor to fix the fucking dialogue

Because, ya know, I joke about the shitty dialogue being an aesthetic choice, but man there is some shitty dialogue in the Matrix trilogy, and by the third movie, that shitty dialogue is completely taking us out of the movie. While Carrie Fisher/William Goldman/Callie Khouri/Richard Price are at it, they can beef up some of the characterizations, too. The audience needs to care about the characters, not be told they do.

Still, when all is said and done, the Matrix trilogy is an impressive achievement. Not necessarily because the movies themselves are so great, but getting three movies this weird, arch, arcanely literate, and violent made within the studio system doesn't happen very often. For that, we should applaud the Wachowskis. It's a shame the movies weren't better, though, they could have started a trend. Instead, the trend is toward geeking out on TV. This decade, we've seen that large, complex narratives work better when you have 65-100 episodes over which to tell your tale. If some lunatic had greenlit The Matrix as a TV series, the Wachowskis could have had enough time to pack all the mythology in and still have their characters be more three-dimensional. But considering the pilot to Lost cost $15 million and that gave TV execs heart attacks, the idea of someone giving the Wachowkis $300 mil to make The Matrix TV show is a little unrealistic. The great thing about the “what might have been” game though, is that all it costs is the whiskey.

THERE IS NO SPOON

I would argue that year 1999, in my lifetime (which is to say, since 1978), was the greatest year for American movies that we've seen. This was largely due to the hybridization between the aesthetically and thematically adventurous independent cinema of the late 80s and early 90s and a studio system that briefly saw a fiscal value in producing mid-budget movies for adults. The result: Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Election, Boys Don't Cry, American Beauty, Eyes Wide Shut, The Sixth Sense (hey, the first time through it was fuckin great), The Iron Giant, The Straight Story, Magnolia (love it or hate it, that was a work of balls). Even oddities like The Blair Witch Project were interesting at the time.

But the picture that opened the floodgates that year, released in early spring because Warner Bros didn't know what the fuck they were dealing with, was The Matrix. The brainchild of Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix was an alternately frustrating and fascinating melange of various different kinds of SF, comic books, Hong Kong action movies, and a whooooooole lotta “look at how smart I am reading this!” college student bookshelf porn. I remember seeing the trailer in something like February and going “what in the . . . what is . . . is that Keanu . . . wow . . . this is either going to be ridiculous or awesome, maybe both!”

Turns out, it was both. The Matrix is the story of how Keanu Reeves is the one man with the ability to bring about humanity's salvation, which is pretty fuckin ridiculous. But The Matrix is also the story of how two smartasses from Emerson and Bard convinced a major studio to give them $65 million to rip off William Gibson, troll Jean Baudrillard through wanton misinterpretation of his work, invent a new kind of special FX to make action scenes look cooler, openly endorse leather, latex, and sunglass fetishism, and actually get the line “It's our way or the highway” past all the layers of people who are supposed to read scripts at studios. That, my friends, is awesome.

The Matrix opens with a mysterious, appealingly androgynous woman named Trinity in a tight spot. Whoever she is, she's got every cop in the city interested in her, as well as some “Agents” (agency not specified) who warn the cops that they've got a live one on their hands.

Cop: I think we can handle one little girl.
Agent (Smith): No, lieutenant, your men are already dead.

Cut to Trinity beating the shit out of a roomful of cops. Mid-ass-kicking, she briefly levitates in slow motion and holds position before putting a boot to some cop's jaw. This is the first “huhwha wait what the fuck” moment in a series of several dozen. So, Trinity busts out a hot-shit-for-1999 cell phone and speaks briefly with a melodious-voiced gentleman named Morpheus, who tells her to believe that she can escape. It takes a whole bunch of evasive ability, and some supernatural athletic ability, to do so but eventually she does, vanishing into thin air a split second before one of the Agents drives a garbage truck into her phone booth. However, Trinity may have escaped, but the Agents know what she was after. Someone named Neo . . .

Introducing Keanu Reeves, aka Thomas Anderson, aka Neo. Keanu is a hacker and dealer of illicit software who keeps discs of questionable legality in a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra and Simulation. He's woken up by his computer, telling him “The Matrix has you.” Keanu, predictably, is confused. The computer tells him to “follow the white rabbit.” There's a knock on the door, and the mysterious text disappears. At the door is a customer for Keanu's black market software, a dipshit who believes “mescaline . . . [is] the only way to fly” (an acceptable sentiment if you're throwing an SF-ish Aldous Huxley reference in to show that you've read books, but utterly retarded if you pretend to know anything about actual drugs). In the first of many Alice in Wonderland references, Mescaline Guy's girlfriend has a white rabbit tattoo, so Keanu goes out clubbing with them.

At the club, Trinity approaches Keanu, who hilariously tells her “I thought you were a guy.” Oh, Keanu. The simplest things confuse you . . . Trinity tells Keanu she can unlock the mystery of what “The Matrix” is. The Matrix is apparently a point of interest to tin-foil hat hacker types, but no one quite knows what it is. EXCEPT TRINITY.

Right when things get interesting, the club beat turns into Keanu's alarm clock. He's late for work at Metacortex, “one of the top software companies in the world.” Keanu's boss, an asshole, lectures him in very arch tones about punctuality, and the effect thereof on his job security. So Keanu, aptly chastened, goes to his cubicle, where a courier delivers him one of those hot-shit late 90s cell phones, on which Keanu gets a call from Trinity's boss, Morpheus. Apparently Bad Dudes are on their way to bust Keanu, and Morpheus tries to get him out—somehow he knows the exact layout of Keanu's office, prompting a “How do you know all this?” from our Most Blessed Intellect—only Morpheus' instructions require a leap of faith Keanu's not yet ready to take, and the Bad Dudes succeed in hauling Keanu's ass in.

At this point, we see Hugo Weaving get to be fucking stupid awesome. As the head Agent, he breaks it down to Keanu in an impossible-to-imitate monotone:

“It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you . . . help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias 'Neo' and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.”

Keanu is unimpressed. He gives Hugo Weaving the finger, and (like many poorly informed civilians who watch too much TV) believing he is entitled to a phone call, asks for one. Hugo gives a great “oh foolish mortal” smile and—seemingly magically—revokes Keanu's power of speech, before getting his dudes to hold Keanu down as he drops this really gross robot with tentacles down Keanu's bellybutton.

Keanu wakes up, convinced that the previous scene was a dream, until Morpheus calls him up on the phone again and apologizes for the business with the Agents, and informs Keanu that he is “The One.” It is then incumbent on Trinity to pick Keanu up in a really cool car and remove the gross robot with a big science-fictiony looking device, which she does, following some truly vomitous dialogue from her Scandinavian lesbian friend. They then take Keanu to a beautifully photographed building, inside which is a beatific black man with a shaved head, sunglasses without earpieces, and a long leather coat. He introduces himself thus.

“Hello, Neo. As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus.”

Intros don't get any better than that, man. Morpheus discourses on the nature of the Matrix, describing it vaguely but vividly as an omnipresent infrastructure of power, oppressing the entire human race. Morpheus explains to Keanu that he has two choices, symbolized by two pills. One will put him to sleep, and he'll wake up, untroubled by any of this Matrix business. The other, however, will reveal the truth to Keanu. Keanu, reflected in Morpheus' sunglasses, reaches for truth, and after a final warning that after he takes the pill, there's no going back, Keanu knocks it back. Morpheus escorts Keanu into the next room, where Trinity, the group from the car, and a bald, squirrely Joe Pantoliano await. They strap Keanu into a chair and then some Weird Shit Starts Happening.

Suddenly, a bald, eyebrowless Keanu wakes up in this weird goop with all kinds of wires sticking out of him. These wires explode off him, and he's unceremoniously dumped out his goop pod into a sewer, where a futuristic looking craft grabs him with a grappling hook and reels him into safety.

Introducing Morpheus et al once again! It turns out, as Morpheus explains to Keanu, that the reality Keanu has grown up knowing is a massively complex virtual reality simulation created by malicious autocratic machines so that they can keep humanity dreaming in goop pods while the machines use the bioelectricity generated by the human body to keep running. (This is but one of many “what the fuck?” moments that show the Wachowski's passionate fidelity to the latter half of the phrase “science fiction.”) In reality, it is somewhere in the late 22nd, early 23rd century, but no one exactly knows.

Also, in reality, Morpheus' sexy, stylish crew is grungy, pasty, and needs a shower. As Keanu's hair grows in a bit, he gets to know the crew—two of whom are from a place called “Zion” that is described as “the last human city”—and experiences the joy of direct-to-brain martial arts training. Keanu, legendarily, wakes up from this training with this timeless line:

Keanu: “I know kung fu.”
Morpheus: “Show me.”

They beam to this awesome, high-ceilinged dojo and begin to spar. The ship's dork scampers into the break room and announces: “Morpheus is fightin' Neo!” and everyone hauls ass to watch. Morpheus spends most of the fight beating the piss out of Keanu, all the while exhorting him “You're faster than this!” and coming up with gems like, “You think that's air you're breathing?” Finally, Keanu does some blurry fast kung fu, shocking the crew.

Morpheus puts Keanu to some more tests: one involves jumping off a building and forgetting that you're supposed to fall (that everyone flunks the first time, Keanu, The One or not, being no exception) and another intended to teach the lesson that hot blondes in red dresses are really Hugo Weaving in disguise (Ed. Note: the author nodded sagely at this lesson upon first seeing the movie, having always preferred brunettes). Once Keanu, like all true intellects, learns that gravity doesn't really exist and blondes are no fuckin' good, Morpheus takes him, in the Matrix, to see the “Oracle.”

Meanwhile, Joe Pantoliano is selling out Morpheus to the Agents, in exchange for being put back in the Matrix (in fairness, reality fuckin sucks in the Matrix trilogy; no running water, no clean clothes, dickheads like Morpheus walking around babbling their Zen/Zoroastrian/Christian/Hippie religious jive, and all there is to eat is amino acid snot). This, narratively, is one of the biggest no-brainers in the whole picture—how the fuck do you have Joe Pantoliano in a movie and not have him be a duplicitous scumbag? That was why The Fugitive was so innovative; the idea of Joe Pantoliano as a good guy was almost as cinematically earth-shattering as the introduction of color.

Keanu goes to the Oracle, and meets a bunch of precocious psychic kids in the living room. One little Hari Krishna with an English accent is bending spoons with his mind, and Keanu (being, presumably, stoned) sits down to dig it. The English Hari Krishna kid drops some knowledge:

EHK kid: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead . . . only try to realize the truth.
Keanu: “What truth?”
EHK kid: “There is no spoon.”
Keanu: “There is no spoon?”
EHK kid: “Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

Keanu then bends a spoon, before being informed that the Oracle will see him. The Oracle sits Keanu down, flirts with him, calls him a retard, offers him a cookie, and doesn't really say much of anything definite, but Keanu assumes that she's telling him he's not The One—because he doesn't believe it—so she bids him a fond farewell, and warns him that something fucked up is about to happen to Morpheus, which jolts Keanu.

On the way out, he tries to warn Morpheus, but Morpheus cuts him off and won't hear it. They then, naturally, walk right into a trap set by the Agents with Joe Pantoliano's help. There's a massive gun battle where the ship's dork—in the Matrix—gets cut to shreds by machine gun fire and dies in real life since “the body cannot live without the mind” (more horseshit science: how the fuck do you explain Terri Schiavo, John Mayer, or the Knicks front office, huh, Wachowskis?) and the Agents capture Morpheus.

Joe Pantoliano gets back to “reality” and hijacks the ship, killing the two not-in-Matrix crew guys, and then, all the while creepily professing his love for Trinity over cell phone, unplugging the taciturn brown dude and the Scandinavian lesbian, before one of the “dead” crew members picks up some kind of laser gun, wastes Joey Pants, and gets Trinity and Keanu back to “reality.”

Here we have a bit of a dilemma: Morpheus let himself be taken by the Agents so that Trinity could get Keanu away safely, because Morpheus believes Keanu is The One. Keanu believes that the Oracle told him he isn't The One (even though she didn't tell him shit that could be definitively interpreted either way, the mark of any good oracle) so he's hell-bent to go back into the Matrix and get Morpheus out. Trinity is not having it, believing that if Keanu dies, Morpheus will have sacrificed himself for nothing. Keanu then contradictorily explains that he isn't The One, but that he has an absolute confidence that he can get Morpheus out, something only The One should really be able to do. So they arrive at a compromise, which Keanu articulates thus:

“Guns. Lots of guns.”

And so Keanu and Trinity beam into the Matrix and proceed to have one of the coolest gun battles of all time (watch here). After dispatching all available bad guys, they hop on an elevator and blow it up so they can get up to the top floor faster (hey, shit, I'm just along for the ride at this point, fuck logic), Keanu gets the chance to say “there is no spoon” again, and they end up on the roof. An Agent draws down on Keanu, and we have the iconic “Keanu bending backward to duck the bullet while the bullets ripple through the air toward him as the virtual camera circles Keanu, concluding with the bullet grazing Keanu's leg” shot. Which Trinity immediately almost ruins with the retarded line “Dodge this” before lickin' off a shot right through the Agent's head. But shitty dialogue is as crucial an element to The Matrix as the green tint in the Matrix or bullet time or pretentious literary and theological references, so we need “Dodge this.”

So Trinity and Keanu get Morpheus out, and the Agents shoot down their helicopter—which, in a massively awesome moment, Keanu asks Trinity “You know how to fly this thing?” and Trinity goes “Not yet” before calling her techie for a direct-to-brain helicopter pilot program download, which he gives her, and her eyelashes flutter before she up and flies the thing expertly—only to have Keanu basically stop the fucking thing from crashing into the building before Trinity gets killed with his bare hands. This, of course, leads to a push in on a breathless, aroused Morpheus murmuring “He is The One . . .” and telling Neo “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” (Ed. Note: the great unresolved mystery of The Matrix is where Morpheus buys his weed.)

Our intrepid heroes get to a payphone in the subway where they can be beamed back home, only Keanu is trapped after Hugo Weaving shoots the phone. Morpheus and Trinity can only look on in horror as Keanu has a balls-out kung fu fight with Hugo Weaving, which Keanu actually kind of wins, only to see Hugo Weaving cheat and respawn, at which point Keanu says fuck it and runs. He steals a cell phone, calls home: “Mr. Wizard, get me the hell out of here!” and Morpheus' dude sends Keanu to a hotel room (the same one Trinity started the movie in, interestingly) where Agent Hugo Weaving is waiting for Keanu with a big ass gun. He puts a clip in Keanu, who collapses. Dies. AND THEN RISES FROM THE DEAD! Right as a bunch of stupid looking robots are tearing Morpheus' ship apart! Morpheus says “He is The One!” again. Keanu only truly becomes Neo in this moment, as he stops a barrage of bullets from the Agents in midair, sees the Matrix as source code while inside it—something no one else can do—and kills/absorbs Hugo Weaving by flying through his stomach, after which the whole Matrix goes BWOMMMMM and the other two Agents fucking run their asses off. Neo then remembers “oh shit, I have to get back home before Morpheus has to set off the EMP to duck the stupid-looking robots” and he grabs the phone just in time. Epilogue: Neo calls up the machines to talk some shit before flying away as Rage Against the Machine (hurf hurf hurf) blasts over the closing credits.

I left a couple things out. The whole stupid-looking robot/EMP subplot is introduced way early, but everything that happens on the Nebuchadnezzar (Morpheus' ship) is so fucking stupid that I tend to either fast-forward or check my e-mail or read a book during those scenes. And, also, I left out the whole thing about Trinity and Neo falling in love, because the only screen couples I remember having less sexual chemistry are Keanu and Lori Petty in Point Break and Keanu and Sandra Bullock in Speed (for some bizarre and inexplicable reason—wink wink nudge nudge—Keanu had terrific sexual chemistry with River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho and with Patrick Swayze in Point Break). And it's not because I'm one of those cynical shitheads who rolls his eyes every time love is the all-powerful force that conquers evil; it worked in the Harry Potter books, it works on Lost, it works all over the place. It just doesn't work when Keanu has to be interested in a chick, especially when that chick is Trinty, goddess of leather dykes.

Those caveats aside, The Matrix is a fucking terrific ride. As an action movie, it's top-notch. As an action movie to smoke weed to, it's nonpareil (sample quote, circa 2001: “Dude, did you realize the Matrix is green, dude? And fuckin the English Hari Krishna kid is clearly blazed when he fuckin tells Keanu there is no spoon, dude! That's how come he has an English accent! He's telling Keanu to smoke weed, but the machines want you to do smack. Dude that's fuckin' hardcore, dude, this movie is so smart.”) As a deep philosophical statement about the nature of autocracy or dystopian SF about recalcitrant computers, you're better off reading Neuromancer. However, The Matrix looks so cool, and sounds so cool, and has such a great cast—Laurence Fishburne joins the Eddie Sakamura All-Stars of actors who will forever be called by their most iconic character name, becoming Morpheus forever—that the plot holes and truly fucktarded science really don't matter. Look at Keanu doing kung fu, man. Just look at that man go.


STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO: THE SEQUELS! WHEREIN THE AUTHOR BREAKS HIS OWN WORLD RECORD FOR USE OF THE WORDS “FUCK,” “RETARDED,” AND “FUCKTARDED!”