As hard as it is to believe, The Matrix is 16 years old. As I sat in the movie theater, watching The Matrix for the first time, I had two distinct impressions. First, as I watched the black leather-clad Trinity vault herself into the air and commence to wipe out the police officers who were trying to capture her, I distinctly remember thinking, “I am in love!” …not because I have some grudge against law enforcement, but because it was Carrie-Anne Moss in black leather. But I digress…I’m allowed to—it’s my blog. For what it’s worth, here’s the clip from the movie that made my heart go all aflutter.
On a serious note, the other impression developed over the course of the movie: this was a deeply profound movie, and I saw Gospel themes throughout the entire thing. As I originally wrote my analysis of The Matrix for what was to be my discarded chapter for my master’s thesis on Jonah, I focused, of course, on the parts of the movie that could be compared with Jonah. What follows is my analysis of the Jonah themes in The Matrix.
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The story of Jonah and the Whale became symbolic in the early Church for the death and resurrection of Jesus, and for the past 2,000 years of Western culture, that is the primary theme that has been taken from Jonah: Jonah as a prototype of Jesus, and the “great fish” as a prototype for the grave. Thus, Jesus’ resurrection is seen also as the beginnings of the new creation. This theme of the new creation has its roots within the Old Testament itself.
When we look at Jonah within its Old Testament context, we find that just as God re-created the world in the time of Noah’s flood, and just as Jonah took this theme of re-creation and applied it God’s recreation of His people after the exile, so does the resurrection of Jesus signal the beginning of God’s “re-creation” of the ultimate “New Creation.” Jesus’ resurrection was simply not the coming back to life of Jesus. It was not simply resuscitation. It was, in fact, a transformation from the old kind of corruptible life that we all experience every day, to a new kind of resurrected life that we one day will experience after death, in God’s re-created New Creation.
This is precisely what is meant by Jesus’ resurrection being the “first fruits” of God’s new creation. In short, the New Testament interprets Jesus’ resurrection in light of the Old Testament themes found in Genesis 6-9 and the book of Jonah, and ultimately testifies to the belief that resurrection means re-creation. These themes often find their way into modern literature and movies…The Matrix obviously being one of them.
The 1999 movie The Matrix is an excellent example of intertextuality in modern cinema. Given the “global consciousness” of today’s world, The Matrix not only draws its story and themes from the Bible, but from other philosophical and religious worldviews as well. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the main theological thrust of the movie is undeniably biblical (although the latter two movies took things in an unbiblical direction). I, though, would like to show how The Matrix incorporates the “Jonah theme” of re-creation/rebirth, into its own story concerning the main character, Neo, who is clearly portrayed as a Christ figure who must undergo a death and resurrection of himself before he can begin to recreate the world into which he was born.
The Plot in The Matrix
The Matrix takes place roughly 200 years into the future, approximately around the year 2199 A.D. The world has been devastated and overrun by machines of artificial intelligence that had, ironically enough, been created by human beings at the height of their civilization in the early part of the 21st century. There are essentially “two worlds” in the The Matrix—the real world, which is the vast wasteland of the earth around the year 2199 A.D., and a computer generated “dream world,” much like the popular computer game “Sim City,” that the A.I. machines have constructed for reasons that will be revealed shortly.
Within the real world of 2199 A.D., there are a handful of human beings who are still fighting the machines, and who hope to someday defeat them. The majority of human beings in 2199 A.D. are “grown” in fields, placed into pods, completely unconscious, and then hooked up and plugged into what is essentially a power-plant, run on the energy and heat produced by the human body, so that the A.I. machines can survive.
These people, though, never know this, for from the moment they are grown, these A.I. machines have “plugged” their minds into the computer-generated program, set during the height of human civilization—the late twentieth century. While their bodies are being used as batteries for the A.I. machines in 2199 A.D., human beings live their lives in this computer program, thinking they are living free in the late twentieth century. The small group of human beings who are free and conscious in 2199 A.D. live in the real, devastated world, and are constantly fleeing from these machines. Yet they are able to tap into the Matrix, as one would tap into a computer program, and free the minds of certain people. How they do this will be described shortly.
The essential “problem” in The Matrix, therefore, centers on the computer-generated “prison” that these A.I. machines have made. Early on in the movie, the character Morpheus explains to Neo this basic problem, and how these machines came to dominate the world:
“At some point in the early twenty-first century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I. [Artificial Intelligence], a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us who scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would not be able to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”
“The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120 volt battery and over 25,000 BTU’s of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born—they are grown. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into [a battery].”
The Message of the Matrix
This may sound simply as a rather far-out science-fiction movie, and some may wonder how a movie like The Matrix could possibly relate to the Bible, let alone the book of Jonah. Yet when one reflects on the basic plot and theme of The Matrix, one will find that this movie not only re-interprets and weaves together a number of biblical stories and themes, it ultimately re-contextualizes the story of Jesus Christ to speak to our modern culture. The message of the Gospel is essentially the same message put forth in The Matrix.
That message is essentially this: the very world we know and are familiar with is a world in bondage. “The Matrix,” as Morpheus tells Neo at their first meeting is “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” And that truth is that, “you are a slave. Like everyone else you were born into bondage; born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
The computer-generated Matrix of the movie can be equated with our fallen world. We are born into this world, and it is the only one we know; yet at the same time, all of us sense that there is something wrong with it. We are “slaves to sin.” The battle for freedom from, and destruction of, the Matrix, and the machines that control it, is essentially the same battle that we find as we read the Bible: a battle for freedom from the power of sin and death, and the ultimate destruction of evil and Satan himself.
Tomorrow I will discuss the five basic biblical themes we can see in The Matrix.
