There is No Spoon

Seriously. Look around. You won't find it. It's not there.





Or is it?

Still No Spoon

Nope. Sorry. Its not here either.

Dreams

Dreams: we all have them. Some of them are wonderful-fantasies of power, happiness, and joy. Others are terrible- nightmares of death, fear, and agony.

Sometimes one wakes up in a daze, unsure of whether or not what just happened was a dream... unsure of whether or not what happened was reality, or if waking is reality. This is an experience that Neo has several times during the course of the movie. After being tormented and bugged by the agent, he wakes suddenly, short of breath, reassured that he mouth isn't sewn and he isn't in pain. Later he learns that his dream was in fact real, and a strange machine is used to forcibly remove the bug from his body.

But then Neo finds out the truth. His dream was not real because his experience of having the bug removed was not real either. Nothing to that point had been real for him (at least, we are led to believe this much. How can we ever be sure?) He had been living in a dreamworld all along, and he is forced to reconcile the difficult truth(?) that nothing is as it seems.

Cypher

***SPOILER WARNING!*** Joe Pantoliano plays a creepy character! ***END SPOILERS!***

In Christian lore, Lucifer was once an archangel, one of the Lord's most trusted companions and servants. As some stories go, though, he eventually grew tired of the way Heaven was run and rebelled. His rebellion was unsuccessful and he was cast into Hell as a fallen angel.

Cypher, whose name is a reference to Lucifer, followed a similar path. He grew tired of Morpheus's rhetoric and promises and betrayed his crew, hoping for an ignorant life filled with carnal pleasures and bliss. His rebellion was unsuccessful and he was killed, making him the fallen member of Morpheus's crew.

More on Morpheus

Morpheus's significance extends far beyond his awesome shades. If Neo is to be considered a Christlike, messianic figure, then Morpheus must be looked at as the "Father." After searching for most of his life, Morpheus is largely responsible for liberating Neo from the Matrix and "awakening" the savior. Furthermore, Tank acknowledges the wisdom, compassion, and influence that Morpheus has on his whole crew when he states that Morpheus is "more than a leader," and is "like a father" to them.

The Sunglasses

Morpheus

Has awesome sunglasses

Best Actors of All Time

The following is a list of the best actors of all time. Disagreement with this list is impossible, as it was compiled by a team consisting of God, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Charles Bronson, and Batman.

Without further adieu, here is the list.

The Best:
5. Ben Affleck
4. Harrison Ford
3. Keanu Reeves
2. Nicholas Cage

aaaaand.....





Drumroll please...






1. Laura Mulvey?

Neo

This is a blog entry about a character in the Matrix. For the American R&B singer, see Ne-Yo. For other uses, see Neo



The character of Neo is played by Keanu Reeves, one of the finest actors of our generation. Neo's name is an anagram for "One," a role that Morpheus and the rest of his crew believe that Neo was born to fufill. Though he initially expresses doubt, eventually Neo progresses and obtains total manipulation of the Matrix coding, proving that he is, in fact, The One.

Neo's role in The Matrix extends allegorically to that of a messianic figure. His predessor, the "original" One, liberated the first humans from machine control and foretold his second coming, a hero who would end the war and save humanity. Neo escapes early persecution (when he was an oblivious sofware programmer/ computer hacker) to fulfill his destiny as savior of the humans (apparently, all he needed to do was realize that there is no spoon).

The Desert

"Welcome to the desert of the real"

What is real? Morpheus wants to know. Neo wants to know. You want to know and so do I. We all want to know. Unfortunately, Morpheus makes it clear in this scene that wanting to know isn't good enough. Jean Baudrillard agrees. In his Simulacra and Simulation, he asserts that society has effectively replaced meaning with a vast array of signs and symbols. In The Matrix, reality seems to have been masked rather than replaced. The AI that has enslaved humans has pulled the code over their eyes and altered the way they sense and perceive. A common saying states that "perception is reality." As Morpheus explains, the machines have exploited this by using a program to manipulate electrical impulses sent to the human brain. As a result, the humans have "been living in a dreamworld."

Beyond the scene's obvious significance in progressing plot, it raises important theoretical questions. Every viewer has to wonder how they define "real." They must think about how they can know for certain that what they are experiencing is, in fact, "real." And they have to wonder, after seeing the Desert of the Real in the Matrix, if maybe Cypher was right all along. Maybe "ignorance is bliss," and if the real world is as barren and miserable as it is in the movie, then people would be happier to go on unaware of the horrors that actually surround them.

A final point of consideration is the way the film mediates its representation of the real, further blurring the line between what is real and what is not. After all, when Morpheus takes Neo to the Desert, he is not actually taking him there. He is manipulating the very code that masks reality to instead illustrate reality. Neo is only experiencing a simulation of the real, not the real itself. Furthermore, the viewers get a doubly mediated representation of the real, raising even more questions. They are only seeing a filmic representation of a coded representation of the real on a screen. How is one to trust such a representation and accept it as real?