A spoonful of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go down-wown, the medicine go
down.
Just a spoonful of
sugar makes the medicine go down, in the
most delightful way.
I have to admit that
I was floored the first six times that I saw "the Matrix"
The frenetic pacing, the cool costumes, the slick martial arts were all a plus,
but what I was really taken by was the idea of the Matrix itself, "a prison for your mind".
Though one really
needs to see "the Matrix" to properly understand this essay,
in brief, the hero, Neo, aka Thomas Anderson, is a programmer by day and hacker
by night. He is intrigued by Morpheus, a hidden, illusive figure and contacted
by Trinity, a beautiful ex-hacker messenger of Morpheus. He is then arrested
by "agents" who look like Hoover's prototypical G-men and finally meets Morpheus.
Morpheus engages
him in a philosophical discussion of reality and then offers
him a chance to find out "what the Matrix really is" Neo takes the blue pill
and discovers that the consensus reality is false, that humans have been
enslaved by conscious machines and kept in compliance by a web of illusion,
the Matrix, piped directly into their cerebral cortext.
The rest of
the movie consists of Neo's training, encounters with the mysterious
Oracle, an inspired bit of casting as an elderly African American woman in
public housing, and duels with the superhuman agents, guardians of the Matrix.
Neo, anagrammatically, is the One, the human messiah who will free the humans
enslaved by the Matrix.
Heady stuff indeed!
The initial movie spawned endless discussion, web sites,
even Ph.D dissertations and books. It was extolled as modern gnosticism, myth
and messianic storytelling of the highest caliber.
I was definitely intrigued by the film.
I bought my own copy and put a special
links section on my web site. I looked forward to the upcoming sequels.
Boy, what a disappointment they were. The plotting of the original Matrix had
been almost impossibly fast moving, but always on a direct trajectory.
The sequels Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions were confused and sprawling,
leading nowhere. While increasingly spectacular the special effects and fight
scenes were meaningless, comic book exercises.
And indeed, this appears
to be the received wisdom on the Matrix
movies; the first was great, the sequels, duds. The critical
opinion seemed to be that the real meat of the film were the Gnostic
and visionary themes that played out around the central metaphor of
the Matrix itself, the great interactive program of mind control.
That such a deep and traditional esoteric philosophy, one that had
been found heretical almost two millennia ago, could form the core of
a modern and massively popular film, was of great interest to scholars
and film cognoscenti and spawned a mini-industry of writing and thought
based on the Matrix. The original movie, that is, not the unfortunate sequels.
So what mattered
about the Matrix was the philosophy, this was the real
message while the martial arts/comic book violence of the first movie
was necessary for mass consumption.
However, as I researched
further in the area of mass media, I began
to have some qualms about my earlier enthusiasm for the film.
I read of the murders of Paul and Margaret Cooke in Northern Virginia. Their
son, obsessed with the Matrix, had killed with a shotgun at close range.
In fact, further research revealed that the Matrix and other movies had
a connection to murder and violence.
This connection is highlighted in Loren Coleman's
The Copycat Effect
A well researched and compelling account of how media accounts of violence,
particularly suicide trigger off further deaths. In The Copycat Effect
Coleman, a respected authority on suicides and the author of "Suicide Clusters"
goes into exhaustive detail and carefully documents the phenomenon of copycat
suicides.
After reading
the extensive documentation that Coleman provides I had no doubt
of the existence of the suicide copycat effect. What
is interesting about Coleman's account is that he never descends into a
polemic about media violence and it is clear that the media does not
"cause" violence, but rather triggers off these occurrences in
susceptible individuals. Coleman notes the connection of
The Matrix to the Columbine school shootings and to Lee Boyd
Malvo, part of the Washington sniper murders.
The film, "The Deerhunter"
is perhaps the most notorious media
trigger of violence, particularly obvious due to the signature
Russian roulette suicides associated with it. Coleman gives so
many examples that the connection can scarcely be doubted.
Upon viewing the film again recently, I can see why it has
such a strong effect. First of all, we might note the term
"Russian roulette" itself. It is a game and sounds rather
domesticated, almost like Russian dressing, or Canadian football.
There is not one, but many scenes of Russian roulette in the film,
increasing its effect by repetition. The hero that willingly "plays
the game" is portrayed as brave and survives. Those that refuse to
play are shown as cowardly and end up insane or dead.
What is most striking
about "The Deerhunter" is the emotional intensity
that the director is able to bring to the film. The long opening
sequence in the Pennsylvania steel town ends with a very quiet,
contemplative scene immediately juxtaposed with brutal violence
and the cruel murder of women and children in Vietnam.
We identify with the characters and are gripped by the
harrowing initial Russian roulette scene. This heavy
emotional connection is exactly what garnered such critical
praise for the film. It touches us on a deep level.
But, this is why it is
such a strong trigger for suicide!
What most in the audience felt deeply, a few are affected profoundly.
By seeing these images and sounds when one is emotionally affected,
the message portrayed has a stronger and more significant effect.
We might term this extreme advertising since it "sells" these susceptible
individuals on Russian roulette.
One of the legal tests
for pornography was whether or not the material had,
"redeeming social value." We can say that filmmakers in "The Deerhunter"
and "The Matrix" did include material that raised these films above the
comic book and mass pop level. Yet, in paradoxically, it is the
"quality" mass media that is the most dangerous. By juxtaposing
material with a strong emotional impact and philosophical context
"The Matrix" does pack a psychological punch and the accompanying
sounds and images of violence are absorbed by the viewer with a
correspondingly strong emotional charge.
We may ask
"what is really going on here?" If we limit
ourselves to the modern consensus reality we can veer
off into modern medicine and hem and haw about brain
chemistry and DNA without being able to cause or even
predict results or we can follow a left/liberal political
"science" bent and bemoan the evils of corporate media leading the
passive people by their collective nose. Neither of these approaches
gives us a way to explain why, for example, some advertising campaigns
work and others do not. Mass media practitioners themselves, for all
their empirical sophistication, have no overarching theoretical explanation
for what they do. No modern approach gives us a theoretical understanding as
well as a way to put that theory into practice.
For a cogent and
clear understanding of what the mass media are and how they
are made use of, we had best realize that we rational and scientific moderns
actually live in a world of magic, in the most literal, not metaphoric sense.
Professor Ioan Coulianu in his
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance notes that
magicians have not disappeared in the modern world, "...they have simply been
camouflaged in sober and legal guises...Nowadays the magician busies himself
with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys,
publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship,
espionage and even cryptography..."
Eros and Magic, page 104.
The methodology
used by the mass magician, says Coulianu, is identical
with that laid out by the 16th century philosopher Giordano Bruno.
Bruno, mistakenly seen by moderns as a martyr of science, was in fact
a magician of great note. Bruno describes his magic as involving the
creation of vincula or magical bonds. The mage must understand the
weaknesses and desires of his subject and then create appropriate sounds
and images in order to control and dominate his subjects. Bruno says,
"The most important of bonds is the bond of Venus and of love in general,
and that which is primarily and powerfully the opposite of love's unity
and evenness is the bond of hate."A General Account of Bonding" in
Cause, Principle and Unity, page 173.
All magical bonds, therefore depend on either love or hatred and these
are but the two poles of unity of attraction and repulsion.
Mass media thus present
powerful exemplars of magical bonding.
We have been trained to associate the strength, grace, athletic
prowess and wealth of Michael Jordan with Nike, $200 shoes, mere
rubber and nylon, literally talismans of magical power. Movies like
The Deerhunter and The Matrix are careful assemblages of moving
images and music, amplified and greatly enlarged for viewing.
Their success in casting magical bonds can be seen in the success
of their "extreme advertising"; that is, not just their box office
receipts, but the copy cat violence that they trigger in susceptible individuals.
There is currently no evidence that creators of the
Matrix movies, the Wachowski brothers, or other filmmakers are consciously
attempting to trigger off violence. Certainly they are making every effort to
make popular and emotionally effective movies. In doing so they are dabbling
in modern day black magic, for in punching the emotional buttons of the masses,
they inevitably hit the occasional viewer for whom a mere psychological reaction is
not sufficient. Their fears, desires and weaknesses are touched on a deep level and
the copycat effect is triggered.
Given the dangers of unintended effects, we can
therefore gain some idea of the possibilities inherent in the conscious use of
modern media magic, which runs the gamut from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Hitler.
So we must therefore consider what is the sugar and what is the medicine that we
are unceasingly imbibing from the mass media? Those who are convinced that they
are unaffected by its sounds and images, are among those most susceptible to its
effects.
