Contextual and Theoretical

Notes
Plato’s cave – Philosophically living a whole life in shelter (the realm of the forms), forced to live and die in this cave. All they know is shadows which are caused by fire. The images on the wall of this cave are all these people know of reality. However if you are born and live in this system and that is the only information you get, this then becomes your reality. Although it is not reality it is a simulation of reality.
Prisoner in the cave escapes, sees reality, goes back to save the rest on them. They think he has gone crazy and kill him.
A lot of people would like to choose their reality rather than the reality.
Simulacrum of reality.
We buy into manufactured or limited reality. We are very resistant that there is another reality/ alternative form of life or thinking to what we know and have been brought up knowing.
Core idea of humanity, they are mortal, wither and die. But the core idea of what it is to be human lives on. People are simulations of what it is to be a person.
Artists, designers poets and musicians perpetuate 3rd order simulations (produce a hyper reality) artists project ideologies with more floors than the world its self.
Immolation, weaker copy of what it could be, the ultimate truth, the idea of simulation. The idea of life as we see it is not what it could be.

Renati Des Cartes
A radical sceptic, to uncover the truth about something, to try and prove an idea, you try and disprove it in as many ways as you can until you cannot disprove it anymore, therefore it must be true.
Prove what can be known about reality, I can’t trust what I see with my eyes, All the ideas about the world, what if he is in some transindential dream? A demon that manipulates all he knows about the world.
‘How do you know your real?’
‘How do you know I’m talking to you?’
Peter Ungars ‘Evil Scientist’ (1975) & Hilary Putnams ‘Brain in a Vat’ (1981)
How do you know your not a brain in a pot, being shocked different impulses to create an alter ego of sub consciousness?
Marxism
Most people understanding of the world and lives within it, are fundamentally false and do not understand their true relation to the social system. Their understanding of reality and thus themselves is wrong.
Communist Manifesto (1848)
‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind’
all they know is not real.
Walter Benjamin
what happens to art, when people have the power to reproduce that art over and over again, what philosophically happens, it loses its value.
Bruadrillard
That original is just the original of a million copies.

1) Conservative – People only engage with such art in the devaluation.
2) Benjamin – Now there is the possibility of that art to come to you and have your own meaning for it. Create your own reading and your own version of culture

‘Baudrillard himself stated in interviews that The Matrix has nothing to do with his work, and is at best a misreading of his ideas. It has been suggested that Baudrillard never saw the film’
http://themasticator.blogspot.com/2007/03/quote-of-dayobituary-jean-baudrillard.html

THE MATRIX

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television…It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
Everything in the Matrix seems to be real to us as it is something we can relate to in our everyday life, police, crime, city, cars. Agents – FBI, higher suspicious authority. The film questions us to whether or not this is real life we live in today.

Key elements in the film suggest something isnt right when trinity and the agents jump a buildings rooftops and the police officer even says ‘that’s impossible’ Which leads us to think of it as a deep desire, or dream wanting to be able to do that.

‘The Matrix makes explicit reference to the work of Baudrillard, especially the 1983 essay "Simulacra and Simulations". Baudrillard assumes the proliferation of images in advanced capitalism, with the expansion of commodities and the relentless advance of technologies of visualization and simulation. In the essay, Baudrillard describes a movement from "representation" (of something real) to "simulation" (with no secure reference to reality). This movement from representation to simulation changes the relation between sign and referent, so that we lose the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both were thought to refer. To develop this argument Baudrillard asks us to think about situations where the simulating sign or image usurps the priority of the reality it is supposed to "serve":
1: the perfect map as that which duplicates the extent and every detail of the territory of an "empire" (in a Borges parable): as the empire decays, the fragments of the map shows bits of its former grandeur
2: the patient who simulates symptoms of madness so well he/she is declared to be mad
3: the infantile simulation of reality and history that is Disneyland: it secures the (comparative) "reality' of Los Angeles
4: the simulation of a hostage drama turns real when a hostage dies of a heart attack and the police shoot
5: the image is supposed to help believers worship God; but they come to rely upon these images so much that they become the true object of worship; therefore iconoclasts (in the Byzantine Empire) attack the images as an usurpation of the priority of the true God’
http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english122tg/MartixBaudrillard.html

‘Ever had that feeling that you don’t know whether your awake or dreaming’
Neo matrix

‘Maybe you just need to unplug’
This is a reference to entering the ‘real’ world
When neo try’s to escape he is to scared to step on the scaffolding which suggests an anziety of fear, but is this real fear?

‘You have been living two lives’
This is suggesting two lives, reality and fantasy
‘One of these lives has a future and the other does not’
The reason that he says this is because the fantasy life cannot last as it is fantasy whereas reality lasts.
When Neo has his mouth shut by skin. Neo woke up. And he thought that it was a dream which links into many of theories.

‘You know that road, you know where it ends and thats not where you want to be’
This means that there are two roads which means one is the real road and one is the fantasy, We are led to believe that that road was the reality road
‘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, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.’

Alice in wonderland reference to where things are not as they seem, an hyper reality
‘A prison for your mind’

‘Buckle your seatbelt Dorothy cause Kansas is going bye, bye’
This again is another reference to a hyper reality story
‘What if when you woke up, you didn't know the difference between the dream world, and the real world?’

After this scene it shows the rebirth of Neo into the ‘real world’ all of reality seems to be what we know as fantasy and is not anything like what we could ever believe to exist, However the pain aspect of things seams more real than the matrix world.
‘why do my eyes hurt, you’ve never used them before’
This gives us all a curious thought on whether or not we are in the matrix and everything we see and believe is all a lie, a fantasy built up by someone else
‘you thought it was 1999 whereas it is closer to the year 2199’
The future

Everyone is dressed as a scrubber in the real world whereas in the matrix they are all dressed nice. This is our fantasy to look good and be desired.
‘
What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can hear, what you can smell, taste and feel, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain’
‘as we gave birth to Ai’
Artificial intelligence taking over the world, we are dependent on machines to survive and we therefore think it would be great to see a more technical future where we as humans had to do less and it was all done for us. We become lazy. AI gets out of control, thus we are not the ruling species of earth then.
‘the matrix is built to keep us under control’
Surveillance panopticism

‘I know kung fu’
This is the desire to learn things this fast and be able to do things to the best of our ability. Everything we want to be. Some of the moves are to the highest physical desire of being able to do things, run faster, jump higher. However the jump thing... is far from reality or reality as we know it.

‘if your killed in the matrix you die here? The body cannot live without the mind’
This shows that reality is physical and that fantasy is thought.

‘sweet dreams’
This was interesting to me as in all essence what is a dream in the real world?
Also technically neo is still a virgin.
When he is eating a steak it reaches a point where it explains how your brain can tell you anything i.e. he knows his food is not real yet his mind tells him how it tastes and it makes him full.
‘The matrix cannot tell you who you are’
Reality tells you who you are, fantasy tells you who you want to be.

‘Do not try to bend the spoon — that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon’
How the hell does Morpheus’s glasses stay on? Is it a hyper reality that he doesn’t need the glasses arms to hold over his ears? As its not real what is real?
In a way your mind controls you, if something happens in a fantasy/ dream this can lead you to believe that it is going to happen/ is happening in reality?

The ringing phone in the matrix is the source, the mirror, the entrance/ exit from one world to another.
When Sypher kills everyone, it is because he wants to live in a dream world, he would stop at nothing to get his dreams fulfilled, it shows how the imagination can drive people insane, are people in mental institutions really crazy or more sane than the rest of us?

‘human beings are a virus, a disease’
This means that the matrix is AI therefore it is saying that human beings are a corruption, vice versa role play to the reality we know.

‘there is no spoon’
Even though neo seems confident in the matrix he is really scared of everything he is doing, he says this to remind himself that in the matrix nothing is as it seems
When neo gets shot in the matrix, he gets shot and dies. This kills his thought which therefore effects his body. Then in reality trinity says something to him which causes his mind to think something else and therefore believe.

He is still alive, as he starts to believe his hyper reality slowly develops into the Males perspective of the perfect being.
At the end neo speaks to the matrix i.e. speaks to hyper reality its self, letting it know that he is in control of it and not vice versa be starts to show how anything is possible and changes from the perfect human to a superhero if you will.

THE MATRIX RELOADED

Neo dreams of Trinity falling in the real world/ whilst she is in the matrix, this is a hyper reality that is built into another hyper reality.

‘hmm upgrades’
In the matrix the computers are fighting back and have gotten stronger in order to stop the ‘anomaly’

‘He’s doing his superman thing’
This is based on the fantasy that everyone has to be a superhero, have special abilities.

In the real world everyone sees Neo as a super hero and the answer to the problem which is that the machine world rules all were as neo is fighting against the matrix from the inside (like a disease)

The party in Zion resembles the fantasy that humans have of sex. Hence it being a full on sex fest, this on the other hand is led to be ‘real life’
‘I can’t sleep much, it’s a good sign, shows that your still human’
This means that he has not yet lost himself to his fantasy self

‘what is control’
We need machines and they need us.

‘all i want is a kiss, but i want you to make me believe its her’
This is based on the fantasy and desire of having something you don’t have, in this case a sample of what it is like to be loved

‘something is different’
Towards the end of the film, neo begins to turn what was hyper reality into reality, due to the power of belief he was able to demonstrate that reality and hyper reality is what you make it out to be.

THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
Neo’s body becomes a vessel from reality to fantasy
In this movie the neo becomes trapped in hyper reality, a prisoner to its torment, almost like a coma.

In hyper reality the rules do not apply it is all fantasy, no gravity etc
Good and bad reality not everything in fantasy is as you want it to be.

‘Nothing this week is meant to survive’
This basically is comparing reality to sub-consciousness

When neo loses his vision in reality he uses his hyper reality to paint a picture of what he believes things look like. He sees agent smith as agent smith and not the vessel whos body he had possessed.

In the end there is a big battle between hyper realities in order to save reality, as hyper reality has got so out of control