by Ben Spatz
The following elements are discussed in no particular order.
The music was not there when it needed to be. The thing that is unique about _The Fifth Element_ is the way it matches certain scenes (the opening and the fight) to music. One of the most powerful things you can do is to do a cut on the beat. I understand the argument that cutting on the beat is a cheap trick that real artists wouldn't use. But that argument has to come on the side of director's who have worked with the trick and know how to do it, and then they can break away from it and explore new ways to use the music. Just like dancers should work with their music until they know how to do that, and then begin work against it so as to make their own art and not just extend the music into their body. But I don't feel like most directors have mastered the "music video" style and moved on, I feel like most of them have never thought about using music that way. _Lola Rennt_ and all the German Techno Films are another move towards that. This film could have been twice as good if rhythmic techno had been placed in a phat (lierally emphatic) way in the background in one third of the scenes.
I kind of like the fighting of the fresh people, but it was extremely hurt by the fact that it was mostly guns, at the expense of fighting and (more importantly) FLIPS. Even the handfighting just looked like a video game. The reason I love the Leeloo fight scene is because it takes its time and allows you to see all her fresh flips. For example when Zorg comes and just flips up through the ceiling. _The Matrix_, for all its fresh fight scenes, had very few flips. This may be because flips don't actually help you much in a fight, and that may be either because the Wachowski Brothers actually care about that or because they are catering to a generation that was raised on Street Fighter rather than Super Mario Brothers. But it did have a ton of people standing up freshly after getting knocked down, which is related to doing flips but not the same. Also the fighting was too fast. In the first scene, when Trinity kicks the police's ass, you couldn't really see what was going on very clearly, because it's too fast. And while the freeze-frame movement in the middle of the scene is cool, sometimes it just looks silly, like from the Will Smith "Los Angeles" music video.
There is also a political side to that. One of the things that makes the Jedi much more acceptable is that there really is no big problem with sword murder, at least in the parts of the world that I know about. I actually believe that there couldn't be much of a problem with sword murder, any more than there is much of a problem with karate murder. There can be evil skilled people, but they are far fewer than evil unskilled people, partly because fewer people are skilled but also because killing people with a sword or hand takes work and personal contact. Things like kids shooting other kids at school belong to the world of guns. This may be the reason why I also don't find gunfights as powerful. There could be exceptions, like if one person had a gun with x bullets and each bullet was accounted for and the person got through the scene because of their skill. But limitless shooting with unskilled weapons like machine-guns is really no good, either aesthetically or morally.
This movie (through its whole VR deal) illustrated very well the powerful archetype of becoming skilled at something without doing any work. Neo learned a billion martial arts in just a few hours. The reason why this archetype is fresh is because it allows Neo to be in a certain position which basically no one ever gets to be in. That is the position of being able to do stuff and then afterwards feel about his ability the way we feel about such abilities in other people. That is, he gets to feel magic. I have often mourned that nobody ever really gets to feel this way. The process of learning a skill actually removes a certain quality of magic from it, so that nobody who can do the skill feels that it is magic. This is the same as realizing that I can never experience a play I've directed as magical, because I worked on it during its process. So nobody who can really do flips ever gets to feel that they are magic, because they have worked on it and know from whence the ability comes. Neo, on the other hand, gets to do martial arts like a master after only ten minutes, which means he probably gets to feel magic. The only ways a real person can feel this magic, as far as I can tell, are through identifying with a character who possesses abilities that you really don't have: 1) Simply identifying with a fresh character in a movie. 2) Playing a fresh character in a video game such that in some sense "you" are doing flips. 3) Dreaming that you can do flips, as I once dreamt that I was a Jedi knight and it was awesome because I got to feel magic. If I had come to be able to do those flips through having to carry Yoda on my back through the Degoba forest for months or years beforehand, I would no longer feel the magic in the same way (except to the extent that the Force always makes you feel magic because you are utilizing a power that is not your own).
Of course, I also love the idea of being able to control reality like that. I mean, who didn't try to float their pencil after reading Matilda? But I guess that if I could mess with reality I would do more flips and less shooting.
I didn't think this movie would be philosophically complex, and for the most part I was right. It's true that the basic question, "Oh, shit, what if the world is a VR sim" is not interesting to me, though it was interesting in seventh grade. But it did bring up an interesting thought. I do not agree with the movie when he implies that the life being lived in the VR sim is worthless. One of the ways it implies this is by not showing any of Neo's childhood. To do so would be to raise the deeper question that the movie completely ignores, which is that maybe the VR sim world is not actually worthless. If the VR world is so similar to our real world that most people don't notice anything weird, then that world has inherent worth. That is to say, any human who is living a life that they think is real, is living a life that has real value. This is why I was extremely uncomfortable with the shooting of security guards. I mean, those people had kids and families, and even if the kids and families were "really" still sitting in tubs of goo, and the hugs they exchanged were "just" VR synthesized physics, the hugs were real in the sense of having human value.
This is only the beginning of the philsophical deepness. I got to thinking about why it is that the question of whether this life is real doesn't give me angst. It's not that I am sure this world is real. People who try to base their happiness on a sure knowledge that this world is real either 1) succeed because they are fundamentalist in a way that goes against my positive view of skepticism or 2) fail and have angst because you can't be sure of anything. My solution to this is to point out the following: The basis of the scientific method, which I believe in outside of empirical evidence, is that you have to settle for coming up with your best thesis and going from there. Right now my best thesis is that all the material objects around me are real. If I am ever given evidence against this I will question it, but until then I will not. Furthermore (and this is the key), that's the best I can do. Therefore, if it turns out that my best hypothesis is wrong (as it always does, because on a long enough timeline the survival rate of any hypothesis), I was not tricked.
I want to talk about this idea of being "tricked." The "trickster" is a character in every mythology I know, but I have heard less discussion about the role of the Tricked, maybe because this role switches around from character to character. But certainly Pantalone is always being tricked by Harlequin. The point is, I think that this archetype has a huge amount of power in my culture, which is largely uninvestigated. I wonder whether this power extends to other cultures, and whether it is part of the virtually universal human archetypes. Here's what I mean: Why is the Matrix world considered worthless in the movie? I do not think that the answer lies in the literal distinction between "real" and "unreal," but rather in the connotations of the distinction between "real" and "delusion." While "unreal" is fairly neutral, "delusion" carries with it the very strong connotation that you are being Tricked, and I think that is what makes the Matrix worthless. I think this comes from a huge fear of being Tricked, which plays into a ton of macho archetypes involving the more macho guy Tricking the less macho guy. In short, I think Tricking is an undiscussed but very powerful social construct.
I do not think we should have such a fear of being Tricked. If you can get rid of that essentially ego-based need for truth (and commute it to the simple desire to know the truth), then suddenly the Matrix world becomes valuable. The people in it are going by their best hypothesis, and really there is no reason to believe that the world of Morpheus is the top level of reality either. But you can either say that everyone except people at the top "real" level of reality is stupid because they are being Tricked, or you can discard the fear of being Tricked and say that everybody is just doing their best. They aren't stupid. I don't think their lives are devalued even if they are living in a world in which their entire surroundings (including other people) are programmed by a computer--although I could maybe hear a case for that. However, in a world where only the physical surroundings are VR and where the actual other people are real other people's brains (as in the movie), then they are certainly very real.
As I just implied, there are multiple kinds of VR worlds. I can think of three. 1) The kind in the movie, where everything is a VR sim but real people really do interact and some laws of physics hold. 2) The kind where everything except my one brain is fake, i.e. even other people are just AI sims. 3) The kind where there is nobody else making stuff up, it's just me. This last kind is the kind that I experience in dreams, but I know for certain that it isn't going on right now (for example) because right now things exist that are more complicated that I can generate. When I want to know if I am dreaming or not, I just focus on a fractal pattern such as polished marble or dust patterns or woodgrain. If I can focus in on details while scanning the pattern, I am not dreaming. My head simply cannot hold the details of a complex pattern. Also, in dreams, I don't think there is quite the same experience of surprise. Or if there is, it can be attributed to the subconscious, in which case dreams aren't really VR3. In VR3, nothing exists except me. This excludes my subconscious, obviously. Once something else exists (whether it is a whole universe or just a really good VR program), I consider my life to be meaningful when I interact with that other thing. I still have a gut reaction that people living in VR2 are being Tricked, but I think that is false consciousness on my part. There is no reason why people in VR2 are more Tricked than people in VR1, if we allow the AI sims in VR2 to be as complicated as the real human brains in VR1.
New topic, but related. I was interested in the concept of "breaking through" which was given as the explanation of why Neo believes Morpheus so easily and trusts him and stays in the car and stuff like that. I have thought about this concept a lot in terms of "portals," but after all is said and done, I just don't think it gets you anywhere. I love the idea of portals, but I think I basically have to give them up. Like Camus said, the wish for another world is fundamentally a betrayel of this one. People who look their whole lives for the Truth are kind of noble, but I don't think you can succeed. Or rather, success would be equivalent to becoming a fundamentalist, and I wouldn't want that. How can you separate the fundamentalists who believe in stupid things without question from the noble seers who have stopped questioning because they've found the Truth? I think you have to keep questioning always, and I personally accept that I will never stop questioning, which means that I can't have the feeling that I am looking for a portal. Again, the danger of stopping the search for the Portal is that you might get Tricked into not stepping through a really obvious portal, but I just don't think this Tricked thing has much merit.
Totally new topic. The Wachowski Brothers really like phones. And it's not just that they like them. I feel like I get to say: The Wachowski Brothers have done work on phones. I get a kick out of this phrasing, because I mean it the way people talk about work done by a critical theorist or a "real" artist, as in "Julia Kristeva has done work on alienation in language" or "Georgia O'Keefe does work on flowers." I don't just mean they use phones, I mean they kind of explore the theoretical implications of phones. Maybe I am giving them too much credit. I am referring to their treatment of the way phones illustrate the abrupt collision between the world of information and the world of physics. The best example is the moment from BoundÊwhen Caeser hears the phone through the wall. We are so used to thinking of phones as pure information that we are surprised and shocked to realize the implications of him hearing the phone ring. And it doesn't even occur to Corky, because she too was thinking of the phone as something secret, embodied purely in the information connection it creates. The fact that the phone betrays her physical proximity via real airwaves (rather than electronic pulses) shows this juxtaposition. Then there is the magic of cordless phones, both in the elevator scene with Violet and all through The Matrix. The ability to send huge quantities of information to people who are walking around anywhere unconnected is one of the most philsophically interesting new magics of technology.
I was interested in the viewscreens where they watched the Matrix in the form of code. Since the symbols weren't alphanumeric, I guess it's possible that they were really watching the entire Matrix go by, if the alphabet had an inordinate amount of symbols or something. But of course, no human could decode that in realtime. More likely is that they were watching a kind of scorecard, like in a video game the little indicator that shows your Life Points. Their screens couldn't possibly convey all the information that the Matrix would need to process in order to make physics work. Probably it just said things like "Neo got kicked" or "The building exploded."
The movie was beautiful. Just as The Rock and The Hunt for Red October were blue on black, this movie was green on black. Green on black is the color for this kind of movie. That is also the color scheme of Aliens 3, and of course it resonates with old computer screens, which is a powerful image in post-Atari modern times. Command line displays in movies are almost always green on black, although most dumb terminals nowadays do white on black. It's gorgeous. I love it.
I have to mention that when Neo wakes up in the real world in their ship, he is wearing a grey waffle shirt and has very short hair. Just before his first training session with Tank he goes and sits behind a computer bank. The computer bank is black and so are the walls, and the light is green, and Neo is chilling there with a fuzzy head and a grey waffle shirt. That is the only moment out of all movies in which I too could fall in love with Keanu Reaves.
I wish the characters had been more developed. Although just introducing them was already fresh, since they of course do the whole "little band of warriors" thing just like in Seven Samurai and Alien 4, in which each member of the band has traits, and because the band is so small, those traits come to represent them as if they were the major arcana of their own Tarot deck. Like in Seven Samurai there is "the teacher" and "the student" and "the skilled silent master" and "the friend" and "the silly child-loving guy" and "the drunken wild freak." And although some of them were hardly developed, I did love Tank because he had a great face. And the blond woman basically didn't have much to her until the very end of her part, but when it zooms up on her face and she's like "No," to the asshole who's going to kill her, and then she dies... That was one of the most powerful moments in the film for me and it instantaneously made her such an amazing character.
The relationship between an illusion, which is false but provides
some key insight or ability in the real world, and a delusion, which is given to
be purely negative, also appears in the parallel fantasy worlds of Terry
Gilliam.