The Wonderland of Science Fiction (and the Matrix)
The Matrix: Revolutions is playing in Shanghai. If you’re in town, I recommend that you stop by and see it. It’s in English with Chinese subtitles.
I invited one of my best Chinese friends to see it with me last weekend. She happened to take the English name Alice before I met her three years ago, which is a beautiful coincidence to anyone who has seen the Matrix films. I imagined that this movie might make her feel a bit like that Alice, following the white rabbit to Wonderland, so I tried to catch her up on the main idea of the story as we had lunch before the movie, to show her just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
“Ok,” I said, “actually, not many people realize this, but the word Matrix literally means ‘womb.’” We were still waiting for the food to come. The restaurant was decorated with strips old China Daily newspapers on the walls, and strange spiraling glass decorations hung from the ceiling. “In this movie, though, it means something very different.”
She nodded in confirmation as she checked in her electronic pocket dictionary, and the Chinese words for womb appeared on the small screen. “Ah, yes. I see.”
“Well, the idea in this movie is that everything you see around you is not real, it’s all part of this giant computer world called the Matrix. These bodies we think we have are actually just computer programs—our real bodies are sitting in little red capsules somewhere just making electricity for intelligent machines, while our minds are trapped in this false virtual world. The main characters in this film are people trying to save humanity from this ‘prison for your mind,’ and awaken everyone to the truth.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “It sounds really complicated…”
- * *
Most Chinese are not used to science fiction stories. Although science fiction has made great strides in recent years (the popular Chinese magazine Science Fiction World being a notable example), it has nothing close to the volume and diversity that western countries have. The cultural atmosphere, from Confucian traditionalism to Maoist crippling of the educational system, has not always facilitated the development of the imaginative arts.
I had feared that Matrix: Revolutions would be a huge, confusing mess to Alice, but when she came out of the theater, she was giggling to herself. “It’s just like a video game! In the end, they saved the world by using Chinese Kung Fu!”
- * *
When I was small, I used to watch sci-fi movies and television programs with my father every weekend. When he came to pick me up and drive me an hour and a half away to his home in Denver, he used to tell me science fiction stories in the car.
He made them all up on the spot. Of course, years later he admitted how difficult it had been, how many times he had said “uh” and “um” while thinking of what should happen next and keeping his eyes on the road at the same time.
But I was enthralled, waiting on his every breath. When I wasn’t listening to his stories, I used to ask him about all kinds of scientific possibilities, and draw cartoons of my own sci-fi stories in my sketchbook. Somehow I began to see science fiction as way to envision the future so as to give people some sense of where they were going in their lives right now, and would ask them to think about where they really wanted to go.
- * *
On the surface, the Matrix really is just like a video game, with flying kung fu, laser guns, and hordes of mean robots to blow up. Of course, our reality is about none of those things. Reality means making friends, cherishing your family, and working hard to accomplish goals; it means waking up every morning to a world in which the most important thing is to serve other people and to make yourself a better person.
From another perspective, however, the Matrix is an excellent example of a fantasy story unlocking something much more than dazzle and hype. Underneath the fantasy, action-flick context of the story-line, there is a message about striving and transcendence, choice and fate.
Whatever form it takes, a good story should bring out the beautiful reality in us, show us a deeper layer of our own selves, and make us desire to bring others into that new reality as well. It should liberate our minds from the forgetfulness we fall into, where we worry too much about things that are somehow less than real. Any faithful journey into the wonderland of human imagination is ultimately about a very real understanding of human nature. By creating a fantasy world so unlike our own, we can highlight the basic things that make us what we are—truths that all the worlds cannot change.
(...dedicated with special gratitude to my father, for all the stories, all the patience, and all the “uh”s and “um”s…
