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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30523 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

My take will always be that the Watchiwski's ideas were smarter than they themselves were. the Matrix 1 was riding on a lot of heady concepts and stylistic anime stuff (cinematically it owes a lot to Ghost in the Shell), that they couldn't actually execute any further because it was beyond them intellectually.

My guess is the exposed cockpits is basically the same thing as the Mandalorian/HALO Master Chief/Avengers always taking their helmets off. It's a way to let people act.

I guess the other way to do it would be the 'Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit' method which would have made more sense.

Yeah, my take on it is that they threw everything including the kitchen sink into the first one as a mix of "what if we use this cool SF concept?" and that the huge success meant that people were trying to read deeper meanings into it than were there, so they had to pile on the bullshit about the next instalments (because it did so well of course the studio wanted sequels) having all this deep Gnostic whatever meaning, but it didn't.

It was just about "wouldn't it be cool if we did kung-fu with guns? in slo-mo?"

Another post-post-modern(?) reading I've seen that is popular with the trans lot is that the movies are about being trans (see the Wachowski Brothers becoming Sisters) but I dunno about that, either.

I don't think there's any deep inference going on to see the parallels between The Matrix and gnosticism. That's not even subtext, that's pretty much straight text.

For what it's worth the Wachowskis said they originally intended to make the trans analogy more explicit by having Switch be male in the real world and female in the Matrix (or vice versa) but changed their minds because they thought it would be too confusing for the audience. In any case you don't have to read between the lines too much to see how they intended a trans analogy (you're born into a body that's not your own which is a prison, you can set yourself free by taking a red pill [i.e. HRT], once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look). One of the Wachowskis was so distraught by her gender dysphoria that she nearly threw herself in front of a moving train, lending a deeper resonance to the scene in which Smith holds Neo down on the subway tracks.

once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look

That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.

I know, I said "once you're free" i.e. after you've been redpilled.

I think anyone who feels alienated from the modern world will read their own personal struggle into The Matrix. https://youtube.com/watch?v=N2LkM-tBT4o

The Wachowski Sisters actually outright claimed that. The Wachowski Brothers, on the other hand, seem to have just wanted Rule Of Cool.

I've said it elsewhere here, but the 'trans allegory' of The Matrix is a blatant retcon. The first film openly postulates that it is sometimes necessary to kill innocent civilians that are too brainwashed to be saved, and then executes on that idea with the lobby shootout in which multiple hapless security guards (plugged-in humans) are gunned down in slow-mo. There's a good deal of revolutionary themes on display in that film; although the horror of that one in particular took a bit to really register with me on a subsequent viewing.

...Unless the Wachowskis really were saying "kill all TERFs", in which case they should really own it while I take the appropriate precautions.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

Yes, I remember thinking "They replaced special effects martial arts with this?"

And it turns out true zero-G fights look a lot more CG than wire-work.

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