Here's a thought.

[truepenny]

So I was standing in the bathroom combing my hair and wishing vaguely, as I occasionally do, that I looked more like Carrie-Anne Moss, and then I had this thought that would have made the Matrix movies radical SF instead of good-natured sci-fi hackwork presented with visual innovative genius:

What if the tall beautiful people existed ONLY inside the Matrix? What if there was no physical one-to-one correspondence? What if Keanu Reeves wakes up in that nasty little tank thing and discovers that not only is he bald and terrified, he's also Steve Buscemi? What if, when he wakes up on the Nebuchadnezzar, he finds that Trinity really looks like Margaret Hamilton (Miss Gulch/The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz), and Morpheus is Ron Perlman? (That last would also do some interesting things about the movie's racial assumptions, and in fact I think I would encourage cross-racial casting all over the place.)

Suddenly, it would be so easy to understand why people would be complicit in the Matrix; it would give so much more poignancy to Neo and Trinity and Morpheus fighting to bring the system down. ('Cause frankly, I would rather live in Zion.) And there comes the question of whether the romance between Neo and Trinity can be sustained outside the Matrix, or if it is really all about being Tall Beautiful People. It would also make the movies much more pointed commentary on our current society and its love affair with the internet, because it would trope a phenomenon that we're all (meaning me and all of y'all reading this) incredibly familiar with: corresponding with someone online for months or years and finally meeting them face to face and discovering that our mental image of this friend is completely and utterly wrong.

Prose can't do this really effectively, because it depends on the visual shock. But somebody could write a kickass graphic novel. And I wish and wish and wish that the people working on the Matrix had been willing to make the plunge themselves.

Take the red pill.

Comments

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Good idea, but painfuly discordant and confusing for a movie to work with, I think. Isn't it the plot in Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And, see, painful and discordant is exactly my point.

Don't know about the Tanith Lee; haven't read it. It certainly is the point, or one of the points, of Tiptree's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," but I would want to turn that around, so that the shock and cognitived dissonance of being dumped out of the Matrix would be real.

I've been thinking about narrative theory and sf tropes a lot this weekend, and I suspect it's starting to show.

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Harder to do as a movie and less likely to be a blockbuster and make tons o' money.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, which is why they should have done it just as much it is one of the reasons they didn't.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I think Vernor Vinge did it first in True Names. But Vinge is very good at doing things first...

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Now that would have been way cool.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I don't see the similarity to The Silver Metal Lover. The Silver Metal Lover is, as many of Lee's books from that time were, a coming of age story for a teen-aged girl. It's about the difference between freedom and wealth, love and fashion. It's about of what the self is comprised, it's about love and sacrifice. Not very deep, maybe, but I loved it passionately when I was younger, and retain a findness for it now. The robot is the only person in the whole book who loves Jane, and she sacrifices everything she has in order to be with him. The world in which Jane lives is soulless and coming face to face with true love, destroys it. Like Romeo and Juliet, which the robots perform early in the book if I recall correctly, Jane and her lover are star-crossed, driven asunder by the culture into which they are born, denied happiness because of the circumstance of birth.

[vass]

Yeah, that'd be good.

But about the internet thing, I'm not sure if I don't know what you're talking about, or I'm just misinterpreting you. When my friend Erik came to Australia, it was profoundly weird (and cool) to meet him in person, but the mental image of him (of who he was, not of what he looked like - I knew that from photos) *did* correspond to what I got from him face to face: it just took me a while to fit the two pieces together. And the fitting them together was the profoundly weird bit.

I have two other net-friends I know face-to-face (they live in my state, but far enough away that we see each other online much more often than we meet up) and it wasn't so weird with them. I guess my sample isn't large enough. I haven't seen anyone and felt like I'd just been all *wrong* about them.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I was being unbelievably shallow and only talking about physical appearance. I met several people face-to-face this weekend whom I'd been corresponding with online and had no idea of what they looked like. Except that we always imagine a face to go with words, even if we don't realize we're doing it. As a random and trivial example, I always assume that people will be taller than I am and am surprised when people I know online or as authors (as, for another random example, Ursula K. Le Guin) turn out to be shorter than I am. I'm low-average height for a woman (5'4"), so really this shouldn't be surprising at all, but it always is.

That's the thing I meant, the meeting people whom you've never seen and discovering that they don't look as you thought they would (on no basis whatsoever, let me add), or--possibly even more important--that they don't sound the way you thought they would. Voice higher or lower, speech faster or slower. I'm always surprised at how fast people talk when I meet them in person, but that's most likely from growing up in the American South and becoming accustomed to a slower rhythm of speech. (Which I don't think I have anymore myself, although others are welcome to comment.)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Oooh.

I like it.

A lot.

Mer

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There's definitely a movie in this, but I don't thinmk it would be the blockbuster that The Matrix is. And why expect the in-Matrix characters to be the same gender as the out-of-Matrix characters?

I think I could argue, from the premise, that the characters wouldn't change race or gender, but a less-black Morpheus, or an older Trinity, and a certain degree of imperfection, would be possible. Even, thinking about amputees and 'phantom' limbs, some kinds of physical disability.

And the Reals, they might be the sort of people with the mental ability to do that sort of improvement.

But there is a link between the two worlds, in how the real bodies can react to virtual injury. I think you have something rather different in your version, maybe something that would work better written, even with the difficulties of showing the change.

[leadensky.livejournal.com]

I actually thought they were already doing this to a degree - Carrie-Anne Moss wears makeup inside the Matrix, has slicked back hair, etc. In Zion (and on the ship) she is barefaced, hair stringy, etc. This does not come across as well with the darker characters, and the people of Zion are not as grubby as the ship-board characters of the first movie, but I definately saw a change in appearance.

I think a 'body swap' change would be difficult to pull off as a story telling device, but definately more severe physical changes - crippling, less beautiful, less imposing (maybe even a gender change or exageration) - would be possible and very interesting.

Because not everyone would rather wear plain, unfitted clothes, the face they were born with or the lines that life gave them. Hence the robust cosmetics and clothing industries.

- hossgal