thepermeableboundary:

So, at the pop Culture Weekend at our local cinema, situated at Sylvia Park, apparently the largest shopping-mall in the Southern Hemisphere, I saw The Matrix on the big screen for the second time, the first being the triple-feature when Revolutions came out, that was quite the night/dawn out.

I love The Matrix. It’s tight, it’s well-paced, it’s archetypal as fuck –

And, of course, that means it’s also really quite, um, sexist. And a tad racist. Just kind of -ist all up in this thing.

Given that this film is essentially a huge (rather simplified) commentary on the constructed nature of social reality, or rather the idea that there is a ‘real world’ outside of social reality, that’s kind of sad. Also that’s where the ‘simplified’ part comes in. I don’t agree with Baudrillard when he says that everything is simulacra, but I do think that if you’re going to invoke Baudrillard, going so far as to put an actual copy of Simulation and Simulacra in your film, you should do it properly. Zion is a copout if we’re talking conceptual purity here.

And while I do appreciate that the Big Bad is, in fact, a construct – and the form that this evil construct takes is that of a white authoritarian American (ostensibly) male – that doesn’t get the film away from the archetypes that the characters fall into along gendered and racialised lines. Or, indeed, sexualised lines, or at least visual codes of sexual identity. I mean it’s nobody’s business what Switch is into or not into, but it’s telling that she’s the only other woman on the crew, the only one of the two who’s not destined to fall in love with a man, is visually a tad ‘unfeminine’ in conventional terms, and she’s also one of the first to go, in a really unceremonious way, with a total of like five lines beforehand and zero exploration of personality. Granted, no character in this film or any other has much of a personality because character stuff kind of isn’t the point with these films, but still.

More ranting after the break, but I warn you, I’ve read a bunch of things today interrogating the feminism or lack thereof of Joss Whedon and now I’m being forced to think about things.

You wouldn’t like me when I think about things.

Or maybe you would. I do. It’s fun.

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This review is very long. Also, at least to me: Interesting.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/66573365536.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, November 10th, 2013 at 10:07 am and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.