“Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation.”
– Cornel West making his Hollywood film debut in The Matrix Reloaded
More people – including Black people – have seen The Matrix than have ever heard of Herman Sonny Blount. Blount was a pianist, composer, band leader and sci-fi visionary born in Birmingham, Alabama, almost a century ago. Once migrated to the North, he took part in community action, developed a singular big-band musical style then announced to the world an unprecedented theatrical cosmology under his stage name Sun Ra. Fancying jazz’s relatively esoteric mid-century scene – and the license its artists took to originate and agitate – Sun Ra extended bebop intransigence into a personal political withdrawal from Americas discrimination and disrespect. He intuited a space age myth about Black peoples history – and their future. This creative leap of imagination and self-edification used art – music – as a vehicle for escape and salvation the way others more commonly and frivolously used movies.
Performing in costumes redolent of ancient Egypt as well as Old World mysticism, Sun Ra looked upward and outward; alternately labeling his band Myth Science Arkestra or Solar Arkestra or Astro Infinity Arkestra. He acted as a jazzy-theological combination of Garvey and Noah and Ellington, providing a berth for such stalwarts of avant-jazz as Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, but above all promising to take his listeners out of the mundane and back to the superior space from which they were spiritually, and perhaps literally, displaced. Blount’s priestly musical mission seemed weird and ahead of its time until George Clinton grooved to it, concocting the 70s cartoon-ethos he and graphic artist Pedro Bell built around the Parliament-Funkadelic colony. Clinton made popular what Blount proudly would not (he had learned the need for intransigence from early work in progressive social organizations). It would take several decades for Blount and Clinton’s vision of metaphysical entertainment to be popularized – commercialized – into The Matrix movie phenomenon.
Not simply a space opera like Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey, both The Matrix and its sequel The Matrix Reloaded derive from the hipster sensibility; awareness of Black and Asian subcultures has turned into the basis for a new kind of pop consciousness. More hype than either George Lucas or Stanley Kubrick landmark, The Matrix movies demonstrate a timely fusion. They blend kung-fu martial arts spectacle with whatever resonance remains of the countercultures old idea of racial intermingling and social justice. It’s an underground ethos transmitted through youth pop (sci-fi, comics) and esoterica like Sun Ra (once a favorite of 60s radicals). Not only do Black intellectuals and buppies respond; The Matrix (with an ad campaign that combines computerized numerals with Asian ideograms) confirms the global consumerism to which African American pop culture is now insidiously pledged. The cooptation of Sun Ra’s already baroque vision, cannily adds the speed and glamour of Hong Kong action flicks. Because discontented urban youth made a hero of Bruce Lee in the 70s – buying out of white western mythologies (though not altogether conscious why) – The Matrix uses the appeal of non-white mythology to bring pop culture back into the hegemonic fold. It flatters youth cults need for heroic-identification by populating its story with Black and Asian archetypes as if there were an authentic expression of African American hope in its metaphors.
Casting Cornel West as a member of an underground city’s tribal council trying to determine mankind’s fate shows that the creators of The Matrix, Andy and Larry Wachowski, are undeniably hip to the most fashionable currents of Black pop culture. There’s genuine conviction in West’s bromides (he’s not one of those shallow, noisy race hustlers like Michael Eric Dyson and gives a more credible performance than Samuel L. Jackson in The Phantom Menace) but it’s not clear that the Wachowskis take West seriously because they keep things on a predictable, cartoon level. To see a new generation of Black intellectuals embrace a form that bowdlerizes Sun Ra’s unleashed dream of freedom shows how susceptible Black pop culture has become, taking its cues from mainstream media rather than authentic Black marginality. Black hipsters esteem for The Matrix comes out of their unquestioned regard for the persuasive power of the mainstream (envy is, in part, what motivates the movies characters). They’re seduced by Reloaded‘s calculated folk celebration. After Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) urges his people to fight against the tyranny of “the machines,” an orgiastic mating ritual ensues with mostly black bodies writhing and sweating, saliva dripping from their mouths. It’s a cartoon of tribalism and paranoia: Spike Lee’s “Da Butt” linked with Gangs of New York. Fetishing Black sexuality this way (showing the masses in large-scale bacchanal) uses Blackness as the Beats did, to vivify an unarticulated wish for human liberation. It is, in a word, exploitation.
Despite Black intellectuals usual reflex to distrust Hollywood offerings as Trojan Horses, The Matrix has been ushered into the center of contemporary discourse through the back door of structuralist race theory (and nationwide cultural studies programs). That’s why Cornel West can unashamedly pop up in a cameo role. His key dialogue -“Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation” – sounds like capitulation because it is. In West’s quasi-apology for The Matrix‘s nearly impenetrable plot, Black academia has colluded with Hollywood – made it ok to buy a ticket – rather than pursue the more difficult roots task of resurrecting Sun Ra.
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Funny how some Black American film buffs and political geeks conveniently scoffed at the idea of a “white savior” as an excuse to avoid movies from Mississippi Burning to Cry Freedom, Amistad to Rosewood, and yet action-fantasy like The Matrix – which indeed offers a white savior – gets them open. Their racial anxiety latches on to the chimera of identity transcendence (Black people as cosmological “viruses”) – a crackpot bohemian notion recently distilled from Sun Ra in the sci-fi documentary Last Angel of History by the Black British filmmaker John Akomfrah. This postmodern disaffection, garbed in New Age trendiness, repeats Hollywood’s continued avoidance of the difficulties in real-life racial, political alliance.
In The Matrix‘s plot “reality” has been constructed from computer software, tripping the clock forward one millennium and enslaving people to an artificial intelligence – a sham existentialism that replaces philosophy with the rules of Sega-Genesis. This Helmut Lang Terrordome suits the dystopic fashion but is primarily a power/race pantomime. That’s why neo-Black nationalists are The Matrix‘s most surprising fans; they’re thrilled with Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, a black “underground” leader, teaching Keanu Reeves, as the putatively white cyberfreak Neo (anagram for The One), to save humanity – those Dionysian legions of the oppressed whom Morpheus calls “Children of Zion”. Religious parallels are only decorative, race is the true currency of the Wachowski brothers script. They use race and ethnicity as dramatic ballast – from Morpheus ebony skinhead and mottled facial contours to Neo’s mercurial, Asiatic features. Aboard his cybership Nebuchenezzar (the Biblical allusion is meaningless unlike Sun Ra’s witty Arkestra), Morpheus explains to Neo “The world…has been pulled over your eyes to hide the truth. You’re a slave in a prison to hide you from yourself” – making political fodder of mythological/sci-fi/fashion mag/Afrocentric aesthetics.
Follow the allegory: Morpheus trains Neo in vast, white virtual spaces recalling THX-1138, 2001‘s colonial room and TV commercial cycloramas in one. (“Welcome to the desert of the real,” he half-quips.) Morpheus lessons come down to a slave’s truth: He warns against oppressors – whites dressed like Men in Black – who intend to exploit mankind’s energy, turning people into batteries. (Slavery in post-Marxist metaphor.) Morpheus educates Neo about their enemy, warning that “many of them are so hopelessly dependent on the System they will fight to defend it.” So he’s a futuristic Frantz Fanon – but he acts as butler, too: “I can only show you the door, you must walk through.” And the old white-negro concepts of black exotic efficacy characterize his advice: “Free Your Mind – don’t think, do.” Naturally, when tiny bad guy Joe Pantoliano jumps onto an incapacitated Morpheus’ lap, he seems a bug like supplicant before a gigantic African idol.
Approved by Al Gore as “sophisticated”, The Matrix compresses its racial allegory so completely few people can see it. After his lessons, Neo confesses, “I’m not the one,” expressing temporary hollow faith. Yet, action-figure Keanu (a white man with a Bruce Lee aspect) achieves what mainstream action movies never allow Black characters – a valiant rescue, thus the film’s appeal to politically unconscious white viewers. It’s shocking that not a single review in 2000 mentioned the film’s racial games-playing. So much virtual reality has virtually canceled realistic perception. Yet those Black intellectuals who latch onto Morpheus secretly dream that this multi-million dollar summer action flick actually has something to do with what they perceive as The Struggle. In Reloaded when Morpheus says “I am here not because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me,” it’s familiar Afro centric cant. The Wachowskis tweak the spiritual view expressed in Amistad where Cinque intoned “My actions at this moment were the only reason my ancestors were alive at all.” The Matrix‘s fantasy takes the onus off contemporary Black behavior; it makes dreams of tenure sufficient unto itself, as the reward for the struggles of the past.
The spectacle of Keanu Reeves among the Black underclass has gone unremarked not because critics are color-blind liberals, but because they are almost always inattentive to the significance of race in our culture. Black pop artists must sustain this diligence themselves – even in facile parables like the recent Black motorcycle movie Biker Boyz – or else the alternative is vapid appropriation by hipsters like the Wachowskis. (Critic Gregory Solman has dubbed them “The Watch-Outski Brothers”). The Matrix‘s evocation of soul-weary underworld blues looks music-video chic. Evidently the Wachowskis, like many boomers, have traded too many comic books, played too much Play Station and watched too much cinema trash to make genuine Afrocentric commentary. A cultural phenom, nonetheless, The Matrix is a Caligari machine, reducing contemporary moviegoers to zombies whose brains short-circuit from their souls (like Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari who follows the orders of his titular mountebank master). Hollywood conditioning makes The Matrix seem a masterpiece to overanxious academics and children with overactive fantasy lives. The white hero and simulacra of the racist world provides a “residual self image” for embattled/benighted viewers. Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving), the films’ Big Brother threat, warns: “Your civilization – as soon as we begin thinking for you it becomes our civilization” (in other words, hegemony). The Wachowskis uncover anxieties about race and politics as if revealing society’s hidden agendas, but then turn those fears into hallucinations – a big-screen game – so that audiences actually leave unenlightened. Not inspired or enraged but temporarily, foolishly sated.
Sun Ra knew better. Jazz historian Ted Gioia described how a Sun Ra concert offered more authentic and challenging entertainment: Sun Ra’s coterie of fans came to expect the unexpected, and were seldom disappointed. The Arkestra lineup might include, on a given night, as few as ten musicians or as many as thirty. Dancers, costumes, slide shows, and other extras might be included with the price of admission. The Arkestra’s music could be equally changeable. Elements of bebop, hard bop and swing loom large on the bands mid-1950s recordings. But over the next decade, the Arkestra would embrace an even broader palette: swirling layers of percussion, spooky electronic effects, disjointed echoes of rhythm and blues, hints of Asian and African music, dissonance, atonality, at times aural anarchy. Sun Ra’s jargon-laden talk of the cosmos and interplanetary music may have sounded like a half- baked script from a Cold War sci-fi movie, but his appetite for he new and anomalous truly spanned a universe, or at least several galaxies, of sound.
But The Matrix and Reloaded are too much like meaningless sci-fi (rather than the highly metaphorical sci-fi of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany) to do proper justice to Black struggle. The Wachowskis’ epic vision is too conventional and formulaic to approximate Sun Ra’s dream. Except for Keanu, the films only sign of humanity not dictated by comics and video games comes from the late Gloria Foster with her sultry yet stentorian voice – one of the glorious sounds of American theater. Throughout her career Foster worked in the tradition of Sun Ra, demonstrating the fierce integrity of an enlightened Black person expressing her intelligence against the odds (she gave legendary performances in Nothing But a Man, To All My Friends on Shore, Genet’s The Blacks and Bill Gunn’s The Forbidden City). But Fosters Matrix appearance went unnoticed by most critics. As The Oracle, ordaining Neo’s quest and ascension, Foster, preposterously but poetically appears in a kitchen baking cookies, symbolizing an archetypal Black matriarch. Yet Foster’s the right punctilious, principled actress to give such a role distinction. Her wit seemed spontaneous: “No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it. Balls to bones.” Calling Neo “Kiddo,” she’s flesh, style, education, weight – experience. Her light skin and blackheads, crinkled eyelids and careful coif exemplify a multiracial conundrum (Toni Morrison in Octavia Butler drag) and she dismisses the villain’s propaganda with a fillip that bespeaks no-nonsense Black toilers – and describes the films own pretensions: “Fate crap.” Toni, Octavia, Gloria – take a bow!
Left to his own virtual destiny, Neo goes into action. But action-overwhelming character – what kids love most about The Matrix – exposes the genre’s cheapness. Neo prescribes “Guns, lots of guns” setting up the films famous “bullet time” special effect – but I prefer the moral bullet trajectories in Korn’s video Freak on a Leash or Tracy Chapman’s Bang, Bang, Bang. Offering comic book violence as an answer to existential despair is mere placation. Sun Ra – and Foster – offered art that provoked. For all The Matrix‘s extravagantly stylized fight scenes, the movie basically indulges the audience’s sense of powerlessness. In this f/x-crazed era excessive retaliation should remind movie lovers why in the history of cinema Griffith superceded Melies; his climaxes were real-world-based and superior. The Matrix‘s rope hanging climax, with Morpheus and Neo extending their hands in mid-air, takes the classic situation of The Defiant Ones then cheats its humanist point. The Matrix starts with race reversal of black/white social positions but, in essence, its “sophistication” gets so overdeveloped that moviegoers no longer discern reality in it. Unfortunately, they come to prefer comic book trivializing.
Seeking high-brow justification for this frivolity, the Wachowskis put Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in one shot. If there is a reference to Sun Ra I have not caught it but apparently nothing trumps an obscure Black jazz artist like a European intellectual (especially for Black academics). Using Structuralist chic to justify a $60 million teenagers action movie – instead of analyzing and clarifying the way politics affect people’s daily interactions – may be trendy but in the end it’s also trash. Or to paraphrase debutant Cornel: You don’t have to know shit to support the Hollywood system.
From June, 2003