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¶ … oppression the movie The Matrix is the theme of consciousness. In the movie's most dramatic plot twist it turns out that Neo, the movie's protagonist, has not been living inside the real world, but a computer-programmed simulation of one. He has been held in this state so that artificially intelligent machines may harness his body heat for energy (and, of course, we as viewers suspend our belief regarding this conceit even though it completely ignores the laws of thermodynamics and the conservation of energy). In freeing himself from the matrix, however, Neo-had to make a choice to free himself, to become his own person. In this way, he resembles the sort of man that Freire describes in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not men living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" -- inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but form that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves." Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the concept of education...
In assuming his own individual nature and existing outside of the system, Neo-literally exits the Matrix and is suddenly able to realize his own identity and thereby effectively alter his consciousness.
Similarly, the idea of ideology becomes very important within the film as well, because the general ideology among most humans, which is propagated by the Matrix, turns out to be radically different than the actual state of affairs. Indeed, in the expression of this illusory ideology, The Matrix reflects the ideas of Baudrillard:
Either we think of technology as the exterminator of Being, the exterminator of the secret, of seduction and appearances, or we imagine that technology, by way of an ironic reversibility, might be an immense detour toward the radical illusion of the world.
Baudrillard)
Here we, see that in the world of The Matrix, technology presents an ideology that is as illusory as any that Baudrillard could imagine. Here, the movie asserts a more empirical proof of this sort of illusion, while Baudrillard's analysis is perhaps more psychological, but this distinction is not significant.
Spirituality is similarly significant…
Bibliography
Antonio Gramsci." May 19, 2003. http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm#role
Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Illusion. May 19, 2003. http://www.techdirections.com/html/vi.html
Buddhism and Gnosticism in The Matrix." May 19, 2003. http://terje.bergersen.net/mt/archives/000021.html
Ford, James L. "Buddhism, Christianity, and The Matrix: The Dialectic of Myth-Making in Contemporary Cinema." The Journal of Religion and Film. May 19, 2003. http://www.unomaha.edu/~wwwjrf/thematrix.htm
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. May 19, 2003. http://www.nd.edu/rmacrori/fyc110/design/appendices/freire/f02.shtml
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" (p. 78) This leads us to the very question that the Wachowskis struggle with in their work, casting figures such as Neo and Trinity, or Violet and Corky, into a struggle for individualism against a culture defined by demands for uniformity and male-driven values of violence and domination. Where Bound relies on highly grounded visual effects to express this idea, the Matrix explores the very same themes using innovative and
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