on the tenth year anniversary of The Matrix
Ten years ago this week the world of conspiracy theories found their pop cultural reference point: The Matrix was released to theaters. And with it, the question for hacks looking down at the masses who aren’t following the shadows closely enough on the video for a 9/11 trade tower falling: Red Pill or Blue Pill?
It was a world with a recently impeached President. There was great uproar when he bombed a chemical lab in Sudan — an aspirin factory, the collection of Republican hacks and Left-wingers roared. There was greater uproar when he accidentally bombed a Chinese Embassy. The nation was readying itself for a new baseball season with the homerun champions who had broken a half-century old single season record, to be broken a couple times hence with the same chemical diet — I wasn’t fooled: Steroid Addled Freaks.
Clinton was readying a bombing raid of Kosovo to oust Slobodan Milosevic. With that, a taunt rang out against one of my high school’s graduating Seniors, entering the reserves: “[Name] to Kosovo! [Name] to Kosovo!” Not the war he’d end up in, obviously, but it was good to keep current. Today, Bill Clinton is heralded as a hero in Serbia, as he is in Northern Ireland for brokering the peace treaty with Britain — only now showing the tiniest of cracks of a few disgruntled IRA Nationalist acts of violence, somewhat easily lumped to the bad economy. Too bad things didn’t work out as well in Palestine / Israel.
MP3 players had eked into circulation. We were still a couple of months away Napster. Which only meant that the file-sharing was un-coordinated: unfortuantely, whatshisname was filling his with that hot new act, Limp Bizkit (a rise to prominence aided by the old method of Radio Payola.)
When The Matrix came out, the computer geeks in my class started wearing the sunglasses — uniformly. I can’t say it looked cool, nor can I say it looked dorky — it just sort of was. It was a good thing they didn’t cotton to the rest of Keanu Reeves’s outfit, I gather — we’re a couple weeks away from Columbine and they’d probably want to shuffle away from the Trench-coat as quickly as possible.
There is a discussion at play at this moment of economic disaster which focuses on the rise of various types of conspiracy theories as a reaction to economic bad times. At the end of the 90s, economy humming along albeit with certain cracks, the X-Files was the major water-cooler show, and people were bracing themselves for such a thing as the “Y2K” breakdown. I don’t think anybody quite believed that one, honestly. Another facet of the economic troubles coming to sway — particularly in line with yesterday and today’s events — the cracks of mass violence incubated with growing societal stress. Never mind in the “dot com economic bubble” in the middle of 1999 we can count a particularly nasty mall shooting spree and Columbine, from my memory.
All of which, I guess, is supposed to be part of The Matrix we must free ourselves from, from the grip of some puppet-masters throwing us on the red pill (or is it the blue pill?) — a giant plot, all of it. In an alternative universe, where a completely different set of events unfolded over the next decade — nothing to do with the wars we ended up fighting or the terrorist attacks we ended up having or the financial crises we ended up having– those wanting to use The Matrix as a metaphor would have had still had this movie to slam everything into.
I take the purple pill, thank you very much. The red pill takes you ignorance, and the blue pill just takes you into a fantasy world — two sides of the same coin — or two dyes to the same pill.