Notes from the Couch: Following the White Rabbit (some spoilers)

  It always feels so strange to reminisce. When I dig deep into my memories I am always taken aback by how past moments seem. Sometimes they feel like they happened an eon ago—as if they happened to another person. Sometimes they feel like they happened yesterday—as if it is impossible to believe that they happened as long ago as they actually happened. It’s this strange dichotomy that makes memory so interesting to me. Maybe it is a bit of why so many memories are endearing to us, and maybe that is why so many memories are frustrating,  or painful.

Sometimes when memories bring us back, it is as if we are putting on a comfy pair of flannel pajama bottoms and having a nice cup of hot—but not too hot—chocolate. We can live there, in that moment—warm, safe, happy.  Other times memories cut us like a knife, the nasty gash from the original incident never fully healing, the scars we are left with feeling cut open once again.  Those incidents and our memories of them damaged us. Now we are bitter, maybe smarter in some ways, too.  But maybe some of those ways are not necessarily beneficial. Sometimes memories showcase a moment when you realize something about yourself that you are pretty sure you didn’t want to know. Lessons you have learned that you would rather forget.

I graduated from college, in spite of my better judgement and desires, in the summer of 1998. Moved by personal drama over “some guy”, I didn’t really want to leave. You can tell yourself time and time again that when you change schools, change jobs, change cities that the people who truly care about you will stay in your life, but who ever really knows what is in the heart of another person? Or maybe, if we dig enough, we all do—we just don’t really WANT to know. We want to stay ignorant that the only reason why the relationship remains or the friendship stays is because we find a way to keep that person close. That if we don’t put in that time, the other person won’t either. For me this was one of those times. I knew once I was “out of sight, out of mind” I would be “out of sight, out of mind” permanently. But try as I might, the parents were not going for another semester, and I had the credits and the requisites to graduate. I’ve always been a stubborn and creative soul, though, so I found a way to stay in the area and around people who would be around, and still in, the school. I started interviewing in the area and took the first job offered to me in Boston. 

Even though it was a low paying, entry level job, it was still the late 1990’s and that meant “corporate casual” was only a Friday thing. Wait, that’s not entirely true. It was a Monday and Friday thing during the summer in my job, but once summer was over, it was suits four days a week and khakis (oh no, not even jeans were allowed) on Friday.

Wow, writing about it, considering how I can choose to go into work as an attorney now, makes the late 1900’s sound positively primitive, doesn’t it? But such is memory. We adapt, we forget, we move on. Because we have no real choice. We either adapt, or we go extinct.

This is starting to feel like a long lead in for a memory that happened 24 years ago, but such are the feelings of looking back at another time. What I wanted to express was how it felt that first day, in the summer of 1998, going into work for the first time. Sure I had previous employment. I had held jobs pretty steadily, excepting for a couple months here or there, since I was about 13—the first job being a paper route around my neighborhood. If you’ve ever read Calvin and Hobbes comics, you know how Calvin’s bike would seemingly jump him. Moi, aussi. I fell off that bike countless times. It’s probably key to why I’m not big into Spin class now. But I digress— the job I wanted to discuss was the first one where I wore a suit and drove into a city every day to join the rat race so to speak.  Which is what I’m trying to really hit on. When I decided I wanted to stay out in the area of the college, I found two acquaintances who had gone to my college that could use another roommate due to the high cost of rent (unfortunately it meant I had to sleep on the couch because there wasn’t another bedroom).  The best lease car I could get was on a silver Honda Civic with literally no whistles or bells. I remember that first morning where I left my apartment in my grey Express suit, drove out of the lot and up the ramp to the entrance to 93, I then joined the traffic into the city.

That is the actual moment. The one that sears in my memory.  But if I really think about it, it isn’t so much the memory I remember, but the feeling. That this was it. This was who I was now. All those years of being told I was special, that I had the potential to do great things, that I could do anything I wanted in life, be anyone I wanted to be in life. It all amounted to this. In the end I was just another cog in a wheel of the great machine of industry.

As I sat in the slow moving traffic pressing on toward the city in my grey suit and silver Civic, I cried.

I have found that the most important art to me, the most endearing, are the pieces that perhaps I didn’t quite understand in that first moment of contact.  Sometimes that initial contact can even make me mad. I might feel like the work has somehow done violence to me.  I need time to process it, it feel it. For example I felt that way about Andy Warhol’s “Portrait in Camouflage”.  When I first saw it, I remember it being all alone on one of those special standing “walls” that are put in the middle of a gallery and finding myself angry at the audacity.  “Did this asshole think he was a soldier?” And then it hit me like a punch in the face. Yes. That is EXACTLY how he saw himself—as a soldier in the war for the human soul. Another was reading Mark Ravenhill’s one act play “Product”.  After my initial reaction I actually started using the opening few pages as my monologue for auditions. Art that means something to me does that. It takes me outside myself, sometimes by aggressively slapping me hard across the face.  And I’m never the same after the experience. I have witnessed something profound that has given me a glimpse to something I maybe didn’t want to see, but needed to see.

Last Saturday I was on my way to my parent’s house for a quiet Christmas Day dinner mulling over The Matrix Resurrections in my head. I had stayed up until 3am watching it on HBO Max.  Something about the movie stayed with me and I found myself thinking of scenes, characters, and then why it was different than I thought it would be and how I felt it should have been and that I needed to write something about it, maybe more than one thing about it—when it hit me like a ton of bricks and I said out loud to myself, in the car “No, it was perfect.” 

One big thing I mulled over was how Hugo Weaving was not Agent Smith, because of being contracted elsewhere, and that I initially felt that Jonathan Groff should have used more of the affects Weaving gave Smith…But then I realized that being a program, and one that had learned how to be more than his programming and was rogue, why would he?  Why wouldn’t he almost entirely reinvent himself?  I think this realization was what triggered my “epiphany” if you will…

The original Matrix came out at the end of March 1999, and watching it, seeing the life that Neo was forced into, felt painfully similar. The movie seemed to shinea light on my own experience.  And it really wasn’t just my experience. It was all Gen X’ers’ experience. There we were, the youngest of the adult generations, just entering the work day world of “the grind”. We were where late Millennials and early Gen Z’ers are now in our journey, finding out that even though we were promised we were special and that the world was our oyster, we were now being told to take up our place in the Matrix. “You believe that you are special, that the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken.”

Even Neo’s reasoning for hating the idea of fate I well understood—“I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my own life.” Most noticeably, my feeling on soul mates is close to that sentiment. I have always felt the concept of the soul mate is a beautiful idea, what it would mean is untenable. I you think of all the decisions we each had to make in our lives to bring us to this very moment, and add to that all the the decisions that other person would have to had make to find themselves precisely in that spot to meet you. If you were always destined to be together, doesn’t that mean that every step you took specifically lined up so that end result was possible? That there was never a choice? That everything you did was contrived? That choice was a lie?

In that red chair scene in The Matrix, Morpheus relates to Neo that the truth was that they were all slaves, in a prison built for their minds.  I remember hearing this for the first time and being floored by it. The Matrix was a manifestation of what was happening to Gen X.

I am not going to go into Reloaded and Revolutions because quite honestly I wasn’t particularly happy with them. When ScreenRant’s site owner tweeted he was going to watch the three great Matrix movies for the first time on blu ray with his kids, I joking/not jokingly tweeted him that if he wanted to watch three great Matrix movies with his kids he might consider watching the first one three times. But there is a perfection about them as well. I just didn’t like the message being conveyed.  Even in our specialness we aren’t particularly special. And like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Under Siege, “A revolution get’s its name by always coming back around in your face.”  So nothing ever truly ends, does it?

That is why I knew upon seeing it I had to write up something in honor of The Matrix Resurrections—if only because I see reviews by Millennials and Gen Z’ers who want to talk about the changes made to suit them, and make the movie franchise relevant to younger generations because they saw things differently and the Matrix storyline wouldn’t work today. They have their points, their truths, but I still see the Matrix movies as very much a Gen X story. One that now seems to be moving toward resurrecting us to help fight the good fight and not just allow ourselves to go quietly into what is easy.  “I’m done fighting”. “Are you?”  

The more and more I thought about the movie, the more brilliant it felt to me. The idea of being stuck in loops that were the same yet different very accurately describes our lives in an uncomfortable way.  For example, looking at politics and counter culture, there are many similarities to the 80s.  A celebrity turned world leader, loud right wing groups trying to push “tradition” while others are seriously questioning of the societal construct of gender norms, just to name a few. But the media doesn’t seem to see it. I recently have seen a lot of Millennials mentioning different things from their youth that have been appropriated by the younger generations. They aren’t wrong. What they might not see yet is that they did it, too.  In our own way, so did we. My parents always talked about how our music stole from theirs. (Grunge, FOREVER! Don’t @ me). In many ways we are stuck in loops. Until we notice them, see what is different this time around and how those can be changed (instead of exploited and ridiculed like can happen), we won’t see the change we want to see.  

I feel that this movie is important for Gen X because we are being told we need to be present. And we need to be vigilant.  Neo’s teacher/trigger program Morpheus explains they “made you believe their world was all you deserved.” And I think in many ways we’ve been beaten down into acceptance of that. Particularly diabolical in the movie is the insidious Analyst who essentially tells Neo and Trinity that people are less interested in true knowledge and more interested in sensationalism. That isn’t wrong, really.  People tend to seek out things that promote and justify their own opinions regardless of information to the contrary.  

The Analyst also defines reality for 99.9 percent of the human race as “quietly yearning for what you don’t have while dreading losing what you do.” 

The original idea for the Matrix was utopian, per Agent Smith in the first movie.  He says that human beings would not accept it and what was gleaned from the original failed attempts at the Matrix was that humanity thrived on adversity. And maybe it does.  What keeps humanity sharp, ready to fight is adversity.  A fight one can really sink their teeth into and charge in guns blazing.  

The Analyst explained that the way to numb people into acceptance of their station was actually about the desire/fear pull. Adversity made people want to fight, but for people to have an actual fear of losing something, while still retaining the possibility of acquiring more kept them in check. The movie speaks about how it seems the will to fight was gone in many people, and proffers this relationship as the reason for acquiescence.

And this is what I mean, when I said that I felt that The Matrix Resurrections was perfect—because this is exactly what is happening to Gen X now, 23 years after the original movie was released. Just as it happened to the Boomers before us, and probably every generation before that. We are at that middle time in our lives when we have acquired some things. Some of us have acquired more than others, but regardless, what we have acquired also has created a fear of losing that which we have gained. Just starting out, one can’t be afraid to lose what one doesn’t yet possess, but after a certain level of comfort is achieved, no matter how tenuous, one has something to lose. It makes breaking away and joining the fight again more difficult, because we have more invested in the system the way it is.   Take a look at Trinity’s dilemma.  Once Neo knows Trinity is out there, he wants to find her to bring her back into the fold.  But for Trinity, that life created by the Matrix includes a husband and children that she needs to break away from.  Neo is alone and not particularly happy in his life. By appearances, Trinity seems to have more to lose by waking up to what the Matrix has to offer.

This only touches on the Neo/Trinity dynamic and really they deserve their own treatment—with the inclusion of all four movies. This time out though, suffice it to say that from my Gen X referencing, what I felt was most important about the Neo/Trinity storyline was the idea that we have the ability to change cycles and create new systems, to continue the fight, but that Gen X is tired and that has made us complacent. Gen X entering into a fight would perhaps have to be because of love—maybe not necessarily love like Neo and Trinity’s, but a motivation to pull us back and make the risks of losing what we have acquired worth it… 

Much more can be gleaned from this movie even just limiting it to a Gen X critique.  For now though, let me finish with saying that should the Wachowskis, or even just Lana again, ask us to follow the white rabbit another time, I will choose the red pill and follow it once again.