So classes are finally over with, and I’m hard at work at my new summer job. Yesterday, I started working at a fledgling mortgage bank. I’m putting together a business plan as well as a company policy, among other thing. Despite the fact that I’ve never done anything like this, ever, I’m surprisingly good at this work. I’ve already completed a draft of the new company policy which is making its way to the President and VP. Damn I’m smooth.

I feel the need to blog a bit about The Matrix Reloaded (by the way, the Old Oligarch has an interesting take on the movie, though I think it’s ultimately wrong and incomplete). I’ve seen it twice by now (once in New Haven with Gene and some other friends, and once with my younger cousin), and was stunned by how good it was. I liked it better than the first one, actually, its only flaw being unconvincing CGI (the characters looked, for lack of a better way to put it, clay-ish in the computer generated scenes). The philosophical depth of the new movie was quite compelling and engaging, not to mention confusing—hence the need to watch it twice.

Be forewarned, I write for those that have seen the movie, or those who don’t care to have it spoiled (that latter should be ashamed of themselves, and should go see the movie early and often).

A major theme of the movie is choice. The Oracle, since the first movie, has been a character central to that theme, insofar as there are inherent questions about her predictive ability and what that means for human freedom. In Reloaded she tells Neo that men are free; they approach her in order to understand why they have made the decisions they have already made. That is a very weird take on freedom. Though still located in individual men, according to the Oracle, it is not located in the present, or even in the Matrix. When Neo dreams of what appears to be Trinity’s death as he lays in bed in the real world—the Oracle identifies this as the power to see outside of time, the Sight—he is witnessing choices that he has already made, but choices that he has not yet acted out in the Matrix. The Matrix is taking on an even more detached quality, as it seems it is somehow more removed from reality than we first believed.

Of course, the Merovingian flatly contradicts the Oracle and, as I’ll discuss momentarily, the Architect. The Merovingian claims that there is not freedom, only an illusion of freedom. The powerful in exerting force over the weak give them the illusion of choice. Existence, he claims, is nothing but a never-ending chain of causes and effects. He is a vicious man, though, who cannot see farther than this twisted view of reality; he never anticipates Persephone’s betrayal. Oddly, when Persephone does confront him about his vicious ways, he says something to the effect of “this is all just a game.” Keep that in mind.

As for the Architect, he sheds new light on the Oracle. If he is the Father of the Matrix, then she is the Mother. She was originally created to be a program to delve into the human psyche, and she ended up finding a way to balance the Architect’s flawed equations: with a contradiction. To control human beings and keep them confined to the Matrix they needed to be free, or at least to have a subconscious feeling that they were free. The Architect admits that Neo is in the sixth instantiation of the Matrix, that his equations keep turning out unbalanced. The Architect agreed with Neo’s simple statement as to the Architect’s problem: “The problem is choice.” Human free will prevents the Architect from creating a Matrix perfect enough to last perpetually. It is not a Gnostic issue as some maintain; it is not chaos theory or some other lack of information on the Architect’s part. The Oracle solved this problem by recognizing it and accepting it. Of course, to solve the question of control through allowing for the issue of freedom will lead to a collapse of the solution eventually, as the Architect admits. That singularity is Neo.

So where does this all lead us? It leads to the conclusion that, in fact, there is a second Matrix. Take Neo’s amazing power to stop the sentinels even after he is outside of the Matrix (notice the parallel to the end of the first movie, where Neo can suddenly stop bullets as he becomes aware of the Matrix around him). Take Agent Smith’s ability to download himself into one of the men of Zion. Fit that with the idea that freedom and exists exist somewhere outside of the Matrix, seemingly outside of the “real world” too. Reality, at least as far as the men of Zion understand it, is anything but.

The clincher is the Architect’s statement about Zion’s future. He says that millions of sentinels are boring straight down to the subterranean city, and that it has been destroyed five times before. Once for each previous instantiation of the Matrix that has failed. But if Zion has been destroyed before, how does it stand now? Though decaying it is a well put-together city that shows no signs of a previous sack. For Zion to actually have been destroyed (five times no less) and still stand would suggests that it was destroyed in yet another level, and therefore exists in another level, of computer generated reality.

Smith is a very interesting character, too, one I don’t fully understand yet. If any character in the movie isn’t free, it seems like he’s the guy. When Neo destroyed him at the end of the first movie, Smith was apparently unplugged from the rest of the agents. As he says, he still hears and understands the commands he received, but he feels compelled to disobey them.

He also speaks at length about purpose. There are a couple of ways the movie seems to take this word, and its not well fleshed out. At times purpose seems like fate or determinism. At other times it seems like telos, the responsibility characters in the Matrix are trying to uphold. Smith seeks to remove purpose from Neo after it was removed from him at the end of the first movie. When Smith corners Neo and begins to take away the latter’s purpose, Neo says it felt like dying in the hallway at the end of the first movie. That death set Neo free from the rules of the Matrix, gave him perception and control over himself and his surroundings. The death Smith offers is a perversion of that, which causes one to loose oneself and become a slave to Smith’s will, or lack thereof. It’s a very Mannichean, yin-yang, necessary coexistence of good and evil idea. Somehow, in destroying Smith, Neo imprinted a bit of himself on the now former agent, which became a perverted version of the strength and freedom that Neo enjoys.

Gotta go. Lunch is over.