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?