Because I'm all about the meta.
May. 21st, 2003 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyPatrick Nielsen Hayden has a meta-comment on The Matrix Reloaded:
Depth and significance are what the reader brings to the text. The author can put in everything they want, including the kitchen sink, and if the reader doesn't want to find it, they won't--like the dwarves in the stable in The Last Battle. Conversely, as a book like Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather shows, a passionate and critically aware reader can find patterns of significance in soap advertisements. Depth, no--McClintock isn't arguing for depth. But she is arguing that these Victorian advertisements show us a great deal about their conceptions of race and class via hygiene, and when we bring those conceptions back to works with Depth and Significance (like, as a random example, Heart of Darkness), our understanding has been deepened.
Literary criticism--if I haven't said this already--is all about finding, delineating, and explaining patterns. The pattern I found in The Matrix Reloaded was its abhorrent sexual politics, but there are other patterns, about choice, about identity, about technology and humanity's love/hate relationship with it. I'm not saying that any of those themes are handled with profundity or originality in TMR, but they're there.
The other aspect of this collective dissonance, I think, is that the first time (or, I suppose, any time if you aren't habituated to it) you learn to see an underlying pattern of this sort, it is VERY profound and VERY important, regardless of how the text and its patterns fit into the wider canvas of history, aesthetics, and culture. This is something anyone who's taught classes or been in classes with people (mostly but not uniformly young; likewise mostly but not uniformly women) who are learning to see the effects of patriarchal structures in our society for the first time. 2nd wave feminism called it "consciousness raising," and although the term is hopelessly passé, I think it's really accurate, and so I tend to use it regardless. Because there is a kind of stagger-step, between the point where you're wandering along assuming that the world has to be the way it is just because, you know, it is, and the moment when you (to use a Matrix-y metaphor) take the red pill and suddenly, boom! Everywhere you look, everything you read--it all feeds into this new pattern. People in this stage are very passionate, very indignant, and have no idea that they're reinventing the wheel. (At that point in my personal chronology, I was watching Batman for the third time and counting the number of times Vicki Vale screamed. 23 times, if you're wondering.) The fact that their amazing new insights are obvious, banal, and boring to those who have been there, done that, and are probably wearing the T-shirt, does not in any way trivialize or mitigate the mind-shattering importance of the shake-up going on inside their heads. It can be really hard to remember that sometimes, but it's true.
I picked feminism as an example, but I've observed the same pattern (see? it's all about patterns) in a Shakespeare class, in conversations about books, in people's reactions to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Suddenly, they learn how to read this whole new language, and it doesn't matter if the thing that's opened their eyes is a cheerful, chauvinistic rehash of thirty thousand SF clichés with some terrible acting and worse dialogue. Because it's what they bring to it that's doing all the work.
Now, hopefully, you go on from your first consciousness-raising experience and learn how to speak your new language instead of limping along with a phrase book. And eventually you look back and cringe at the platitudes and shallow invective over which you got so incredibly worked up (*cough*Naomi Wolf*cough*). But just because the vehicle is unworthy doesn't mean the journey isn't worth taking.
I think The Matrix Reloaded is an unworthy vehicle because of the previously mentioned sexual politics. (To me, it feels like a car that somebody's been smoking cigars in for the past twenty years, and maybe a squirrel died somewhere in the chassis.) But that's a subjective opinion. Whatever your opinion is, it's worth just as much as mine.
(There's a whole 'nother post about why academia sneers at genre fiction and denies it value, but this post is really just about reactions to The Matrix Reloaded. Just so we're clear: I think TMR is an unworthy vehicle; I think genre fiction (sf, fantasy, horror, mystery) is a very worthy vehicle indeed.)
I feel like I'm making my way by touch down a darkened hallway with a blindfold over my face, but I think I'm becoming radically opposed to the notion that we should "boggle that there are actually people reading depth and significance into the Matrix" [quoting this review]. It's hard to avoid noticing that, on the commanding heights of literary culture, the official position on writers like Philip K. Dick is to boggle that there are actually people reading depth and significance into their work.
Depth and significance are what the reader brings to the text. The author can put in everything they want, including the kitchen sink, and if the reader doesn't want to find it, they won't--like the dwarves in the stable in The Last Battle. Conversely, as a book like Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather shows, a passionate and critically aware reader can find patterns of significance in soap advertisements. Depth, no--McClintock isn't arguing for depth. But she is arguing that these Victorian advertisements show us a great deal about their conceptions of race and class via hygiene, and when we bring those conceptions back to works with Depth and Significance (like, as a random example, Heart of Darkness), our understanding has been deepened.
Literary criticism--if I haven't said this already--is all about finding, delineating, and explaining patterns. The pattern I found in The Matrix Reloaded was its abhorrent sexual politics, but there are other patterns, about choice, about identity, about technology and humanity's love/hate relationship with it. I'm not saying that any of those themes are handled with profundity or originality in TMR, but they're there.
The other aspect of this collective dissonance, I think, is that the first time (or, I suppose, any time if you aren't habituated to it) you learn to see an underlying pattern of this sort, it is VERY profound and VERY important, regardless of how the text and its patterns fit into the wider canvas of history, aesthetics, and culture. This is something anyone who's taught classes or been in classes with people (mostly but not uniformly young; likewise mostly but not uniformly women) who are learning to see the effects of patriarchal structures in our society for the first time. 2nd wave feminism called it "consciousness raising," and although the term is hopelessly passé, I think it's really accurate, and so I tend to use it regardless. Because there is a kind of stagger-step, between the point where you're wandering along assuming that the world has to be the way it is just because, you know, it is, and the moment when you (to use a Matrix-y metaphor) take the red pill and suddenly, boom! Everywhere you look, everything you read--it all feeds into this new pattern. People in this stage are very passionate, very indignant, and have no idea that they're reinventing the wheel. (At that point in my personal chronology, I was watching Batman for the third time and counting the number of times Vicki Vale screamed. 23 times, if you're wondering.) The fact that their amazing new insights are obvious, banal, and boring to those who have been there, done that, and are probably wearing the T-shirt, does not in any way trivialize or mitigate the mind-shattering importance of the shake-up going on inside their heads. It can be really hard to remember that sometimes, but it's true.
I picked feminism as an example, but I've observed the same pattern (see? it's all about patterns) in a Shakespeare class, in conversations about books, in people's reactions to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Suddenly, they learn how to read this whole new language, and it doesn't matter if the thing that's opened their eyes is a cheerful, chauvinistic rehash of thirty thousand SF clichés with some terrible acting and worse dialogue. Because it's what they bring to it that's doing all the work.
Now, hopefully, you go on from your first consciousness-raising experience and learn how to speak your new language instead of limping along with a phrase book. And eventually you look back and cringe at the platitudes and shallow invective over which you got so incredibly worked up (*cough*Naomi Wolf*cough*). But just because the vehicle is unworthy doesn't mean the journey isn't worth taking.
I think The Matrix Reloaded is an unworthy vehicle because of the previously mentioned sexual politics. (To me, it feels like a car that somebody's been smoking cigars in for the past twenty years, and maybe a squirrel died somewhere in the chassis.) But that's a subjective opinion. Whatever your opinion is, it's worth just as much as mine.
(There's a whole 'nother post about why academia sneers at genre fiction and denies it value, but this post is really just about reactions to The Matrix Reloaded. Just so we're clear: I think TMR is an unworthy vehicle; I think genre fiction (sf, fantasy, horror, mystery) is a very worthy vehicle indeed.)
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Seeing it
Date: 2003-05-25 12:35 am (UTC)