Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

May 16, 2003

Tom, Dick, Harriet, Neo and Jane

Buenos Aires is a city that seems like Paris and Barcelona and Rome all at once, a Blade Runner kind of construct with familiar globalized brands advertised in local slang, local products presented in exotic graphic design or odd color combinations, a European city in a Latin country where the largest of the many large advertising signs I saw while there a couple weeks back was a three story glowing billboard of trickling green vertical datastreams. The product: 05:15.2003. (Otherwise known in the U.S. as, "Didn't you say you were going to the 10 o'clock show? We missed you Wednesday night.")

Going home to write after Monday's screening of The Matrix: Reloaded, my friend Big John steps out of his restaurant into the street, arms folded over his chest. "Well?" he asks. "How much do you want to know?" I ask.

"Nothing. Just... are you..." He stops, just widens his eyes. I think, raise an eyebrow, barely smile. He nods. "Excellent!"

A couple hours later, I'm having about the tenth conversation like that. Another friend and I are talking up the Matrix and the first movie and how not to talk about it while talking about it. She's got tickets for Friday night, my friend Susi. She crosses her long legs beneath herself on her barstool, a gentle swoop of flowing black pantleg that suggests the dreamy gyroscopic slowed-motion of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in his Dries van Noten-goes-clerical garb or her feral PVC slink-suits in Reloaded. I scowl at her unintentional joke. She catches herself, now leans backward in lolling sway, evading invisible bursts of movie gunfire.

Funny, we're in a dark tavern on a Chicago street corner, and yet it's an instinctive pop-cult reaction, feeling like we live day-to-day within the reigning metaphor that makes the Wachowski Brothers' strikingly multiracial, religion-steeped allegory so memorable. A construct of media and data surrounds us, streaming past, never to be stemmed, and we react to its flow instead of more considered instincts. Ask the big questions. Dress in the good stuff. Is that what she's taken from the first movie?

It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harriet I've talked to since seeing the first of the Wachowski Brothers' sequels to 1999's The Matrix to know nothing but if it gets a nod or a nay. They want to have their own fun.

And despite my modest quibbles about the movie, this is one of the rare occasions that a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" has really been all the review I've cared to give. Spoiling the dense play of blunt allusions should be someone else's fun. (For an article that almost seems to have been drafted before the writer saw the movie, check out this tromping, "Hacking the Matrix Code" from Jane Dark, whose previous Village Voice contributes include Voice ass-kickings Josie and the Pussycats, Queen of the Damned, and Britney Spears' Crossroads. (Actually, Dark liked Josie, and for the right reasons.)

But me, I've taken too many blue pills: I have to stop reading reviews of Reloaded. As I dodged the Abbott and Costello-meets-Gertrude Stein Zen-isms of the Wachowski's dialogue, I remembered something the superb Canadian poet (and Greek studies scholar) Anne Carson wrote.  "The Greek word 'eros' denotes 'want,' 'lack,' 'desire for that which is missing.' The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting." She quickly adds, "This is more than wordplay." Thus the eros of reviewing The Matrix Reloaded: you can't imagine what you haven't imagined being what someone else has imagined that might make you imagine... and so on up to the sky.

A few less-than-committal notes. Neo (Keanu Reeves, at his lean, earnest and monosyllabic prettiest), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, battling for cheekbone supremacy with her perhaps-otherworldly lover) and Morpheus (Larry Fishburne) still battle against the big sleep of all humankind. There will be ever more tiresome exegeses of thematic elements drawn from mythology and religious history, yet I'm more concerned with the way the movie feels, the way it looks as it rushes past, barrels confidently across tens of millions of dollars of computer power on ever-expanding pixel frontiers.

With their sleek appropriation of the flow of interactive videogames, I feel older than the not-yet-40 pair of brothers. Yet their gargantuan ambition, to make popular entertainment that bothers to examine questions more weighty than the dulling range of cultural product and propaganda, has been held in contempt by several critics. Notable among them are Time magazine's Richard Schickel,  whose unrecorded age must be at least approaching his early seventies (or the early 1970s, considering his close friendship with Clint Eastwood), who dismisses the movie as "philosophical tosh" with its good guys "basically, terrifically buff liberal humanists." (Dick? You're old.)

The grunge of the begrimed Industrial Age compound of Zion is a little disappointing, yet its intricately etched embellishments on the machine-world of Fritz Lang's Metropolis impresses. Don Davis' score, in collaboration with other musicians, is important as well, combining postmodern minimalist notions with an intense style of electronica, particularly in the three pummeling, sustained action set pieces.

There's a lot of setup, a bit of exposition that leans scarily (but not too far) toward the kind of bureaucratic gibberish that George Lucas laces his latter-day releases with. But the look is as convulsively watchable as slapstick. The Wachowskis elaborate on variations of screen action drawn from many sources, particularly Hong Kong "flying" wirework. Silent comedians had a name for all their bits, such as the moment where you have to escape the Kops: spreading one's legs, leaping in the air, then running for dear life. That's called the "spread-eagle and scram," an equivalent to Neo's flying to the sky when the film's battles open out from aggravation to exponential mayhem.

There's a scene indicated in the coming attractions and commercials where Neo battles legions of Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith. It's generous and beautiful in its urgent pandemonium and, at times, insanely detailed (the playlot set is the Ur-Chicago corner park). It's not dramatically suspenseful, however, and that aspect of these killingly expensive sequences makes up a large part of what others have been condemning in their essays. But the film itself offers a key insight into martial arts: the repetition, the formal play, the intense threat of losing face or footing, is in fact a form of honoring your opponent. "Why couldn't you have just asked me?" Neo asks one apparent opponent. "You actually do not know someone until you fight them," the fighter responds. Overkill becomes the point of the film's sustained sequences, the effortless thrust and parry of struggle that take place in imaginary space, dreamed time.

Hackers have often declaimed that information wants to be free. So, too, signifiers and metaphors. Stories within stories, stories outside of stories. Are movies dramas or dreams? "Why am I here?" is Neo's key question, one he knows that has no answer. In six months, an answer. Or, perhaps, larger questions.

The Language, Reloaded

There's a writer with a small volume just out that's ripe with the intense ambition displayed by  filmmakers like the Wachowskis. John Haskell's debut fiction, "I am not Jackson Pollock.," is also the same sort of shape-shifting, insinuating literary mimesis as Geoff Dyer's jazz-figure fantasia "But Beautiful," film scholar David Thomson's "Suspects," a miasmic smash-up of Hollywood characters, fictional and factual; and the genre "persona" poems, such as those by Anne Carson, in whose "Men in the Off Hours" we find an impassioned consideration of the life of Sappho through a contemporary character once played in a French film by Catherine Deneuve. Haskell's turns are Borges-spare, literary feuilletons rather than the contemporary historical novel's catalogs of artifacts and behaviors. With a title that pinches Magritte's infamous "this is not a pipe" joke, Haskell dares you to define what his work is. His stark prose consists largely of plangent post-Gertrude Stein iterations that approach the poet's remit: to show what has not been heard before.

Haskell imagines Vermeer's "Girl Asleep at a Table," waking, escaping "along the cobblestones in her little Dutch shoes." Writing about scenes not seen in Psycho, like Thomson, he confuses figures for their shades, the familiars we know as actors, writing of Janet Leigh and "Janet Leigh." Most often, he tots up the thoughts of the lingua-less, such as how Glenn Gould played music, not the piano. With a poet's aptitude for discursiveness, he alternates an actress' on-set desire for William Holden with a self-immolating Quaker protesting the Vietnam War. He returns several times to a disregarded elephant, star of Edison's 1901 short, Electrocuting an Elephant: "She didn't have the language." Like the drunk, seething painter Jackson Pollack, the pachyderm wants to express feeling as it is felt within: "Elephants remember so well because their experiences are stored in their bodies and they have big bodies, and her big body was filled with unpleasant thoughts and emotions." This is his voice: a catalog of cascading clauses, making lyrical work of staggered syllogism, always "struggling with a ghost who might as well be dead." This is a suicide's final sensation: "listening to the world as it passes across her face." He examines Aristotle's idea of "habit and happiness" through the thoughts of Laika, first dog shot into space. A late piece invokes editing's Kuleshov Effect, described by the Russian filmmaker as how a shot is modified by what is placed next to it: a neutral shot of an object becomes comic or tragic depending on the very effect that Haskell's calibrated montage thrives upon, collated flashes that ask, what stilled moment makes the memory? What states of hopelessness, such as unreciprocated affection, desire, injustice? Haskell's Glenn Gould longs for something in the best of the writer's own obsessive alignments: "The farther north you go the colder it gets until finally the superfluousness of everyday life is frozen off and you're left with nothing but purity."

"I am not Jackson Pollack.," John Haskell, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.

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