Introduction

In this paper, I argue that The Matrix franchise – the first three films written and directed by the Wachowski siblings, the fourth directed by Lana Wachowski and written by David Mitchell and Aleksander Lemon – are fin de siècle texts. The turn of the twenty-first century was marked by a consistent and pervasive sense of dread mixed with hope in the Occidental world as humans faced the encroachment of technology. Many scholars have argued that the eye-catching nature of the films' action sequences, special effects, general tone, or style pale in the face of the theoretical ideas with which the filmmakers engage. But, as Neo (Keanu Reeves) and his band of humanist rebels fight for the salvation of the human race against their machine overlords on both sides of an onto-existential divide known diegetically as The Matrix, the philosophical underpinnings give way. The franchise falls back on the comforting notion that there is a threshold to be found and breached, beyond which lies an objective reality that may be experienced and is, indeed, real, regardless of how arid, desolate, or apocalyptic that space may be. The films ultimately argue that something remains that is worth fighting and even dying for. Thus, the series is not as transcendent as it may first appear.

I. No Off-Ramps in a Desert:
The Theme of Transcendence

The Matrix (1999) follows Thomas A. Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a man living a dual life. By day, Mr. Anderson works as a computer programmer, has difficulty with punctuality, and is generally depicted as an average everyman. These day-to-day demerits are due to Mr. Anderson's second life, namely his nocturnal activity as a hacker known as alias Neo. Under this nom de pirate, Neo pursues a truth: he doubts the veracity of his reality. His investigations into a phenomenon known as The Matrix in the hacker underground lead him to Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), a hacker, and subsequently, to find himself targeted by the police when he is contacted by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), a legendary computer hacker described as a radical terrorist by the government. Eventually, Trinity brings Neo to Morpheus who, through a series of existentially shattering revelations, unveils the simulacra of reality known as The Matrix used to keep humanity complacent and docile, unaware of the fact that the real world is, in fact, a desolate and inhospitable wasteland. In this real world, most of humanity has been captured by a race of machines governed, reproduced, and designed by artificial intelligence. These machines generate their requisite energy needs by converting human body heat into bio-thermal power while simultaneously imprisoning minds within the artificial reality known as The Matrix.

Given the leitmotifs of neo-messianism and psycho-spiritual enlightenment through techno-organic hybrid interfacing that run throughout the franchise, some scholars have argued that the entire overarching premise of the four films is predicated on the notion of onto-existential, psycho-emotional, and spiritual transcendence. Aside from the commentators, scholars, and researchers cited here, a preponderance of literature exists on the three films written since the first film's 1999 release. While these works approach the franchise in a variety of ways, certain themes circumscribe this analytical corpus. Examples include the dialectic between human contra machine as well as reality contra simulation that the characters transgress through organo-synthetic interfacing.

This central distinction between the so-called real world and The Matrix prefigures its own preoccupation with transcendence. In the film, the latter is coded as a simulacral prison that functions as reality; one that is, indeed, malleable and even escapable, but too vast, complex, and internalized by those it imprisons to be totally understood or eradicable. The former, in contrast, is coded as a real space predicated on hardship, environmental holocaust, Earth as an unchanging post-apocalyptic, war-torn tableau where survival is difficult and extinction imminent. Despite the overwhelming hopelessness and destitution of said chronotope, the real world is coded as more valuable because of the onto-existential and psycho-emotional verisimilitude of it; that is, the real world is more valuable because it is real; the matrix is less valuable because it is not real. In view of this latent valuative hierarchy, the direction of transcendence is clear: if one values the truth, regardless of how arduous, Sisyphean, morose, inclement, or saturnine, then one will seek to transcend the carceral illusion that is The Matrix.

In terms of contemporary scholarship on the franchise in relation to the theme and aesthetico-narratological representation of the concept of transcendence, collections including William Irwin's The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Glenn Yeffeth's Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in  The Matrix, and Matt Lawrence's Like a Splinter in Your Mind: The Philosophy Behind  The Matrix Trilogy. All discuss how the films gesture toward and avail themselves of longstanding philosophical traditions and theories concerning transcendentalism and the nature of reality, ranging from Plato, Descartes, Marx, Putnam, to Nozick. Even co-creator Lana Wachowski sees The Matrix  franchise as transcending the typified notions and expectations of the action-adventure genre, calling the films a new type of "intellectual action movie" (qtd. in Gordon 103). Catherine Constable suggests in "Baudrillard Reloaded: Interrelating Philosophy and Film Via The Matrix Trilogy" that the movies transcend "key [postmodern] philosophical concepts" and thus require "a new model for interrelating philosophical and filmic texts" (233). In Chapter 7 of DiagnosingContemporary Philosophy with The Matrix Movies, O. Bradley Bassler covers the notion of transcendence throughout the entire series, offering commentary on the theme of dreaming and waking, and the increasing indistinctness or heightened permeability between the real and the virtual in the first three films (Bassler). Some examples he focuses on come from The Matrix Reloaded, particularly the scene in which Neo uses powers previously sequestered to The Matrix outside thereof to stop real-world sentinels from destroying his crew and ship. Another scene involves the transcendence of a program (machine) outside of The Matrix in the real world, namely, Agent Smith's (Hugo Weaving) onto-existential hacking of Bane (Ian Bliss) (Bassler 135). For some scholars, The Matrix has come to be viewed as a gateway to broader ideas, further reading, and as such, the franchise transcends philosophy as well as popular culture itself. To this end, Constable states that "the films are often treated as an introduction to a series of diverse and difficult theoretical concepts, meaning that – at best – they are seen as examples serving to make theory accessible" (233).

Thomas Foster's "The Transparency of the Interface: Reality Hacking and Fantasies of Resistance" speaks directly to the question of transcendence and agency in the franchise. He does so by contextualizing the movies within the broader aesthetico-narratological history of science fiction/cyberpunk traditions and by noting how they alter "a typical cyberpunk thematic: the constraints placed on agency and free choice by the programming structures that characters must negotiate" (Foster 62). In this way, the first film in the series is predicated on the protagonists' refusal to accept limitations on their agency, both in and out of The Matrix, the implication being that refusal and agency are undifferentiated, that refusal "is in itself capable of objectively altering the programming structures of the Matrix" (Foster 67). In terms of the theme of transcendence, here Foster points out that it is inextricable from a negative action. Through negation, the characters in the films are able to transcend the programming limits of the system as well as its approximations and facsimiles of ostensibly inviolable phenomena, such as time and gravity. Refusal allows reality hacking, as such (Foster 67).

Kate O'Riordan's "Changing Cyberspaces: Dystopia and Technological Excess" similarly discusses the franchise's concerted interest in engaging with science fiction/cyberpunk discourses that speak to the radical transvaluation of values, alterity, Utopia, contemporary cyberculture, communications technologies, and the networking thereof. According to O'Riordan, the movies represent cyberspace as an aesthetic and narratological space that acts "as the grounds for subjectivity, as technological excess and [a] re-working [of] technologised culture" (O’Riordan 139). She further notes how these transcendent thematics manifest in the series' "visual representation of the spatial re-configuration of the universe, already constructed in cyberpunk novels, postmodern criticism and conceptualizations of cyberspace" (O’Riordan 148). O'Riordan also makes the important move of drawing attention to the precariousness of the theme of transcendence the series relies upon and, paradoxically, simultaneously undermines, as she notes that the films manifest "a regressive politics in the production of a paranoid sense of totality and closure where technoscience is all" (O'Riordan 149). In Baudrillardian terms, O'Riordan points out that there are no off-ramps in "the desert of the real": there is nothing outside of The Matrix (Zizek; Baudrillard 1733). 

In "'Reloading' Movies into Commercial Reality: A Multimodal Analysis of The Matrix Trilogy's Promotional Posters," Arianna Maiorani notes how this theme of transcendence also formed an important part of the film's promotional material and campaign. Positioned on an interstice moment, an arguably transcendent moment, Maiorani notes that The Matrix series is predicated on consumer experiences distinguished "between the 'world before the internet' and the 'world after the internet'" (Maiorani 46). In her close reading of the semiotics employed by Warner Brothers in the promotional campaign for the first film, Maiorani notes one of the film's slogans – Believe the unbelievable – that appeared on one of its posters: "Here the slogan focuses on the oxymoron realized by the opposition of a mental process, 'believe,' whose phenomenon, 'the unbelievable,' suggests its impossibility. The clause hints therefore at something astonishing in the movie's plot, and the repetition of certain syllables/sounds makes it also highly cohesive" (Maiorani 52). In terms of the myth of transcendence forming the core of the film's philosophical content, the promotional material always-already draws attention to it. The oxymoron of escaping out of The Matrix into the real world where any and all phenomena occurring and/or experienced in both real and simulated worlds are ultimately undifferentiated by their hyperreality, which means that the notion of transcendence within a hyperreal milieu always-already suggests its own impossibility. In this way, the only thing that is truly astonishing about the plot is the fact that its humanistic and hopeful cohesion predicated on the difference between real and unreal, and the ability to transcend from the latter to the former, is, in fact, bound by a broader and more nihilistic cohesion; namely, the cohesion of the vapidity of reality and images, all of which are circumscribed, in the last instance, by the hyperreal.

II. The Matrix as Fin de Siècle Text   

Stacy Gillis, editor of The Matrix Trilogy; Cyberpunk Reloaded, draws attention to the films' importance as fin de siècle texts. She describes the franchise as "a vital point in the history of popular culture, film studies and cultural theory" and observes that "the films have had more material published on and about them since the release of the first film than any other films in the same length of time" (Gillis 1). In recognition of Gillis's observation, I argue that an important factor in any discussion of the series and its relation to the cultural context in which it was made, released, and analyzed is the fact that the movies are fundamentally fin de siècle texts. The turn of the twenty-first century was marked by a simultaneously consistent and pervasive sense of dread and hope in the Occidental world. Within the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural issues surrounding the increased mechanization of onto-existential being – the threat and uncertainty of technological apparatuses as inextricable constituent elements of everything from the human sense of self to its forms of governance and commerce on one hand, and the anticipation of the imminence of the singularity on the other – the zeitgeist of the years leading up to, including, and following the Y2K era were predicated on the conflict over technology, particularly the internet, and transcendence. As such, the success of the films is due not only to their then transcendent aesthetics and storytelling, but their incisive and timely response/reflection of/on the computer syndrome of the time. Though not the first film to engage with the relationships and tensions between technology and transcendence, it was certainly the first to do so in ways now generally considered to be innovative and revolutionary.

In his essay "Fin de Siècle, Fin du Monde?," Michael Heffernan notes that the original French expression fin de siècle, which denoted the end of a century, morphed into a widespread term that brought together under its aegis a range of disciplines, including architecture, art, fashion, design, and technology – all the while superimposing upon these disciplines issues and debates centered on their past developments, present experiences, and possible futures. One of the key aspects of fin de siècle thinking Heffernan draws attention to is the view that the end of the century marks a radical break from the chronotopes preceding it. He states that most fin de siècle scholarship or broader cultural debates reflect "the anxieties, fears and hopes of the last fin-de-siècle and [are] highly – sometimes wildly – speculative" (Heffernan 31). Taking the example of the passing of the nineteenth century whereby fin de siècle authors, theorists, philosophers, economists, and politicians – especially those active in the then burgeoning field of geopolitics – Heffernan states that they tended to view their own fin de siècle as representing a "fundamental historical discontinuity, a clear break with the past [marked by a] conviction [that] reflected a deeper cultural conviction that centennial endings must, by definition, be accompanied by profound upheavals" (Heffernan 31). Heffernan also notes that in the Occidental world, this phenomenon takes the form of what he calls the syndrome of fin de siècle, a syndrome which – in and around the year 2000 – took the form of computer syndrome or terror concerning technology. While fins de siècle concerns are accompanied by future expectations as well as future anxieties or fears, Heffernan counters with the commonsensical assertion that 

there is no reason why the turning of a century should carry any particular historical significance. The idea that history falls neatly into hundred-year blocks and can be assessed in these units is obviously ludicrous. Yet in the supposedly Christian parts of the world where the larger sweep of time is measured in such terms, the passing of a century tends to give rise to wistful reflection on the past as well as intense speculation about the future. (Heffernan 31) 

Included among these wistful recollections is a will to predict the future, whereby the temporal and social pressure of the oncoming landmark dates engender not only a heightened sense or awareness of temporality, acceleration, change, and the tensions between traditionalism and speculative futurity, but also a bricolage of subtending meanings. Therefore, while "the 1890s, a decade of 'semiotic arousal' when everything, it seemed, was a sign, a harbinger of some future radical disjuncture or cataclysmic upheaval," so too did the pre-Y2K era of the late 1990s engender both premonitions of technological dystopia (Heffernan 31).

In terms of the twentieth century fin de siècle, Heffernan notes how this particular turning of the century was marked by a belief that unlike those preceding it, said century should be countenanced in its entirety, a global-political, social, economic, ecological, and cultural whole. The impetus behind this conviction was the emergence of then radically new, efficient, and popular technologies. According to Heffernan, 

technology and global transportation by steamship, road, rail and telegraph would make the world of the future a “smaller” place, one that could be interpreted as a single system. The rise of the USA suggested lessons about the future world order but some optimists predicted that US-style, continental-scale systems would be supplanted by a new planetary consciousness, a utopian "one-worldism," that would arise on the back of the new space-defying technologies which, in the twentieth century's own fin-de-siècle would achieve its maximal expression with the advent and increased globalism of the Internet. (31)

Much in the same way Y2K brought about a global phenomenon of mass hysteria, panic, and future-shock anxiety, Heffernan notes that in the fin de siècle marking the transition from nineteenth to twentieth century, optimism regarding the future was not predominant. Instead, the pervading sentiment was one of fearful ambivalence. "While some welcomed the prospect of a new age and saw rapid change as energizing and liberating," Heffernan notes, "many others worried about the dislocation and disorientation these imagined upheavals would create and lamented the destruction of cherished traditions and values that seemed destined to ensue" (31). As a result, this tension, between optimism and negativism concerning the future and the role of technology therein, is the source of aesthetic and narratological experimentation, tension, and disintegration of longstanding cinematographic techniques as well as science fictional/cyberpunk tropes and leitmotifs. All of which are renegotiated in The Matrix movies. In this way, the franchise can be accurately interpreted and described as fin de siècle works of art. They represent the end of old ways of making films and the simultaneous discovery of new techniques and methods of aesthetico-narratological storytelling, the amalgam of old leitmotifs and new audiences, ancient ideas and new subcultures to (re)interpret and disseminate them. This mytho-historicity speaks to transcendent time, or a transcendent moment therein, demarcating a conclusion and an opening up, old and new, which, I argue, evinces all the same dialectics as the notion of transcendence (it does so ironically in the franchise). While the films are often regarded as highly original, the ideas, aesthetics, and narratives are reliant on preceding traditions. In other words, the concepts of transcendence and fin de siècle ideology might latently suggest a radical or clean break with all that came before, but the series could not exist without an essential amalgam of ancient ideas and new technologies, longstanding concerns and new audiences.  

III. There Is No Operator on the Other Side of the Receiver: The Phone That Keeps Ringing, or Troubling Transcendence

It is true that The Matrix films and the various theoretical concerns raised in Baudrillard's essay "The Precession of Simulacra" coincide. Baudrillard describes reality as "the desert of the real itself" whereby

the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. (Baudrillard 1733)

Within the diegetic remit of the franchise, The Matrix itself is produced from miniaturized units whereby the programming language employed by the machines resembles that of semiological lexicons, which humans employ daily. These arbitrary miniaturized units of meaning, namely words themselves, are used in the creation and perpetuation of the reality matrix within which human beings live. This statement is true for the multitudinous machines that maintain the existence of The Matrix by maintaining the binary code, which ensures the existence and perpetuation of The Matrix remains undisturbed. Furthermore, the subjects on whose minds The Matrix operates implicitly protect The Matrix by accepting the manifestation of the code, that is, by accepting reality as they perceive it (unaware that it is a synthetic reality). The subjects act as memory banks in which the code of The Matrix both exists and functions. In an Althusserian sense, The Matrix is ideology codified, stored, and reproduced in the minds of those subjected to The Matrix itself. As such, the evil genius or elegance of The Matrix is that those imprisoned by it substantiate and sustain both itself and the mechanisms that comprise it and facilitate its effects. In short, The Matrix acts as a space within which humanity unwittingly sustains its own imprisonment. In this sense, the condition of being, delineated along clear meridians of real and unreal, reality and derivative images thereof, breaks down. In the hyperreal, there is no longer any hierarchy between the image and its referent resulting in the precession of simulacra, whereby the image and the model supersede any conception of reality. In terms of transcendence, the very concept itself is troubled by hyperreality because hyperreality forces us to concede, "well, if there is no difference between reality and simulacra, then there is nothing outside hyperreality toward which or into which to transcend" (Constable 238).

The Matrix, like the simulacra, is a purely operational system of control, which is because The Matrix does not exist for super-machines but for their human slaves who, suspended in vats in a dream-state, serve to energize them. It should also be considered that this artificial reality (The Matrix) created by artificial intelligence is infinitely reproducible. By having the fundamental building blocks of the world reduced to binary code, the film implicitly states that The Matrix can be maintained forever, provided that its code remains undisturbed and that there is a programmer adept enough to continually program the code into the multitudinous minds of the imprisoned subjects as well as regulate anything that might occur within the synthetic world: the entire gamut of onto-existential phenomena covering everything from pain, the taste of cookies, the sound of polished leather, the weather, to the stock-market. However, judging from the scale and intricacy of The Matrix depicted in the film, namely as a near-perfect simulacrum of extradiegetic socio-political and cultural reality, such a feat of programming would require a specialized network of machines. In other words, The Matrix can only be sustained and maintained by a matrix of super-machines. The machines that control and regulate the code and, therefore, reality have little care for the comfort of the imprisoned subjects of The Matrix. The machines only care that The Matrix is convincing enough for those subjected to it to accept the synthetic reality they experience as reality itself. Therefore, The Matrix is merely operational, a system of control that, while controlling the subjects of The Matrix, allows for the predicating operation of the harvesting of their real bio-thermal energy emissions. The description of synthetic reality produced by The Matrix as "hyperreal" and as an "irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere" could not be more apt (Baudrillard 1733). The Matrix has no atmosphere because it is not real and sustains no reality. It is simply a hyperreality created from a binary code. Therefore, the reality of The Matrix is, and is sustained by, a "perfect descriptive machine, which provides [its subjects with] all the signs of the real [while short-circuiting] all its vicissitudes" (Baudrillard 1733). From this perspective, the films posit that the enslavement of humanity to a matrix of super-machines can continue forever, provided that the code that creates a convincingly real synthetic reality is undisturbed and that there are enough super-machines to maintain it.  

The principal merit of The Matrix films is that they offer the viewer a visual apparatus through which to conceptualize the radical ideas presented by Baudrillard. In a sense, the movies imagine for their viewers a completely simulated world and present it in not only an accessible and familiar medium, but also in an innovative and interesting manner as well. Zizek states in his essay "The Matrix: Or, The Two Sides of Perversion" that, "[t]he idea of the hero living in a totally manipulated and controlled artificial universe is hardly original: The Matrix just radicalizes it by bringing in virtual reality (VR)...VR marks the radical reduction of the wealth of our sensory experience to – not even letters but – the minimal digital series of 0 and 1, of the transmission and non-transmission of an electrical signal" (Zizek 241). Therefore, it would ostensibly appear that the films simply co-opt Plato's cave allegory and amalgamate it with certain tropes and leitmotifs subtending modern science fiction to create a seemingly different and apparently radical re-conceptualization of an ancient concern, namely the nature of reality. However, there exist certain inconsistencies between the films and Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum that make The Matrix franchise less revolutionary or radical than they may at first appear. 

Baudrillard states that 

[s]cience fiction has always...played on the double...either artificial or imaginary, whereas here [in hyperreality] the double has disappeared, there is no longer a double, one is always already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without a mirror, a projection, or a utopia that can reflect it – simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority – we will no longer even pass through to "the other side of the mirror," that was still the golden age of transcendence. (125) 

Commenting on this assertion, Constable argues 

within the hyperreal, mirrors do not function as reflective surfaces, setting up the possibility of a space beyond as in Alice Through the Looking Glass. The distinction between the real and dream worlds, between interiority and exteriority has been lost, thus removing the possibility of escaping from the universe of simulation. (238) 

Thus, the primary theoretical or philosophical shortcoming of the franchise remains the fact that it stubbornly clings to the notion that there is a veritable difference between reality and non-reality. The overarching moral of the first film is entirely predicated on the notion that non-reality is bad due to its deceptive nature and can be circumvented, provided the subject is able to successfully distinguish between the two categories of reality. The series goes so far as to posit that its heroes are able to overcome the illusion and "exit from the predicament in the Matrix" and successfully "free" their minds from the illusionary hold of The Matrix (Garcia and Sanford 65). However, according to Baudrillard, the "age of simulation begins with a liquidation of all referential[s]," which are then "artificially resurrected in systems of signs" (Baudrillard 1733). Therefore, reality, in the Baudrillardian sense, is merely a semiological soup devoid of any referential truth, a milieu within whose gyre no reliable or practicable reference to anything beyond or outside of its semiological matrix, and the inexhaustible matrices within that constitute it, can be made.  

This notion is echoed in the first film and acknowledges that humans "live in a world of things and of representations of things" and that in the postmodern world of 1999, the one that forms the diegetic chronotope of the film, humans lived "in a world so thoroughly saturated with representations, both linguistic and pictorial [that] words, signs, and especially images are ubiquitous and have usurped the immediacy of the material world, so much so that the world we experience is better described as a spectacle" (Weberman 230). In his seminal 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord offers a similar understanding of the relation between social relations and matrices of spectacular images stating that "the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images" (Debord 5). Therefore, postmodernity, which is a dense network or matrix of signs and images, "constitutes a spectacle," which is so much more immediate to us "than the non-representational that the non-representational has become unreconstructible abstraction" (Weberman 230). Furthermore, due to the precession of simulacra, reality cannot be distinguished from "non-reality" because, according to Baudrillard, all reality is simulacral in nature. The films disagree, however, and posit the notion of a threshold, which separates reality from non-reality. 

According to Zizek, this may be seen as a compensatory gesture against the trauma of our lack. He states that "the Matrix also functions as a screen that separates us from the Real, that makes the 'desert of the real' bearable" (Zizek 250). Zizek goes on to describe the real as "the anamorphic distortion of the direct image of reality...an empty place, as a structure, a construction which is never here...but can only be retroactively constructed and has to be presupposed as such – the Real as symbolic construction" (Zizek 255). According to Zizek's claim, The Matrix can be viewed as a distortion of the direct reality which it synthetically controls and reproduces through code. In other words, what those within The Matrix perceive to be reality is not only synthetic but distorted because it is artificial. Furthermore, The Matrix can be regarded as an empty apparatus or cage in the sense that there is nothing within The Matrix that has material reality. The Matrix was, in fact, never here, so to speak, because it has always-already been simulacral; it has always-already been virtual. In his statement, Zizek uses the term retrospectively. The act of retrospection is itself a conscious action. In this same regard, the virtual reality of The Matrix has always been a construction and is the product of a highly conscious system of symbols (in this case binary code) designed to paradoxically create a reality that bears/bars no trace of its own artificiality. According to Zizek and Baudrillard, all reality is and always has been a product, a construct of signs and symbols that has been accepted and consumed by those subjected to it. Furthermore, due to the precession of simulacra, the only reality that may be experienced is simulacral; thus, reality and non-reality fuse and become indistinguishable. However, Baudrillard's radical assertion asks the following question: if you have been unplugged from The Matrix, where are you? The films naively suggest that there is an objective reality that can only be experienced by an unplugged mind, that is a mind that has been liberated from the binding construct of The Matrix. 

In semiological terms, this notion suggests that there is an objective plane of existence completely independent of semiology, or onto-existential phenomena mediated by language Jacques Lacan calls the symbolic, a transcendental reality. It is impossible for us to imagine such a reality as we are so entrenched in semiology that without a system of lexicons, the pillars of civilization will be destroyed. Zizek describes this transcendental reality as the realm of the psychotic, as a place where semiology breaks down and resembles – to the semiological mind mediated by the pervasive and presiding forces and effects of discourse, language, and signs – psychosis. However, since the heroes of the film are clearly portrayed as not being psychotic and yet are also clearly immersed in semiology (in that they still use language and symbols in both post-apocalyptic realities within and without the construct of The Matrix), the notion of the unplugged mind does not accord with the psychotic, and, therefore, those who are depicted as unplugged are still subject to a matrix: the inescapable matrix of semiology. Thus, in the Zizekian sense, the notion of an unplugged mind is a fantasy, a screen, or a barrier that protects us, the viewers, from the truth that there is nothing outside of a matrix of signs but more signs: there can be no appeal to a unity-out-there to redeem the fractured spectacle of being. There is no Mysterious X as suggested by Nietzsche, no "writing in the Zero Degree" as suggested by Barthes, no Kantian "noumenon" of the thing-in-itself.  

Baudrillard commented on this particular shortcoming and stated that The Matrix  franchise confuses the old, that is Platonic, notion of illusion with the new problem of simulation. Baudrillard calls this misidentification a "serious misunderstanding" as the problem of simulation, which goes beyond the notion of illusion and cannot be explicated in a similar fashion (Detmer 102). Baudrillard states that the problem of simulation is intensified by "the unprecedented dominance in the present age of public relations and advertising, of disinformation and propaganda...of increasingly sophisticated, high-tech tools for artificial reality creation" (Detmer 102). Therefore, the difference between the films and Baudrillard's theory is that they lack the radicalism of Baudrillard's hypotheses and instead only "follow Baudrillard metaphorically and symbolically" (Detmer 102). Baudrillard's hypotheses go well beyond the notion of a transcendental reality. Instead, Baudrillard "claims that the forces of artificial reality creation have become so powerful as to have abolished reality and truth altogether – all that is left is the 'hyperreality' of simulation and simulacra" (Detmer 102). The Matrix  movies, however, "insist that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between real truth and the artificial reality that is used to control and enslave them" (Detmer 102).  

Conclusion

In conclusion, The Matrix movies provide an innovative artificial environment in which the viewer may observe a simulacral world at play. The radical reinterpretation of Baudrillard's theory of the simulacra is stunningly symbolized and visually portrayed. That said, this interpretation is not without its problems in that the films fall short of the radical extent to which Baudrillard pushes his theory. Again and again, the franchise returns to the comforting notion that there is a spoon: there is a threshold to be found and breached, beyond which lies an objective reality that may be experienced and is a reality, regardless of how theoretically and/or philosophically arid, desolate, and apocalyptic. According to Baudrillard, this construct is false, and, according to Zizek, such a notion is only an important fantasy, which makes our condition of lack bearable. In this sense, the movies are not quite radical enough to match the theories they implicitly carry and to which they refer.

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---. "From The Precession of Simulacra." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton, 2001, pp. 1732-1740. 

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