Fear and Technology in Blade Runner and The Matrix

Introduction: When the Movie Becomes Real

On September 11, 2001, many people reacted to the news reports as if they were advertisements for another Hollywood blockbuster like Independence Day. All of it seemed like a movie, including a scene with the WASP president addressing the nation in a moment of maximum danger. Not since December 7, 1941 had Americans felt so threatened on their own soil, although in general they had been spared the worst horrors of the twentieth century that so many other countries had experienced. This time, however, the movie was real and the outcome was not necessarily going to turn out like a Hollywood ending.

Science fiction films like Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999) had certainly reflected various strains of fear, anxiety, and paranoia in American culture and society. So had the bug-eyed monster (BEM) movies of the 1950s and 1960s, when nuclear war seemed a very real possibility. Above all else, science fiction has excelled in expressing contemporary fears about out-of-control science and technology — whether nuclear weapons during the Cold War or computers, robots, androids, and artificial intelligence in Blade Runner and The Matrix. In the former, humans were paranoid about intelligent machines becoming too much like their creators and therefore no longer content to be slaves; in the latter, the machines had already taken over and enslaved humanity.

Apart from a group of rebels, not only had humanity ceased to be human at all, but it was no longer even aware of physical reality. Instead, the program created by the supercomputer had become reality. Both films also feature individual heroes who defeat the agents of the system: Neo in The Matrix and the killer cop Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, who regains his humanity by learning to love and empathize with the replicants.

Technophobia and Dystopia in Science Fiction

In science fiction, the threat to the planet and the human species can take many forms — natural or artificial, created by humans or by aliens. Paranoia about technology that runs out of human control or threatens the very existence of humanity has been a staple of the genre ever since the original Frankenstein novel. Both Blade Runner and The Matrix are highly dystopian and "technophobic" films, despite all the high technology on display.¹ Cold War science fiction, with its well-known anxiety about nuclear weapons and radiation, was often "saturated" with paranoia about science and technology.²

In many movies over the last twenty years, however, the threat has come from natural disasters, climate change, comets, earthquakes, and volcanoes — all of which reflect real-world anxieties about damage to the environment. Especially in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, "the agent of destruction…now most often precludes active human agency or responsibility."³ Hollywood cannot resist using these scenarios because "some of our planetary violence is so cinematic that it automatically makes for gripping movie scenes."⁴ Often the events depicted are impossible or at least highly improbable, but audiences find them plausible because "we don't fully grasp the complex natural processes of our planet." Human responsibility is far more clear-cut in The Matrix and Blade Runner, however, since people originally created the technology that later became a threat to them.

The Matrix, Hyperreality, and the Politics of Rebellion

The Matrix contains dialogue referring to the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, who described the social and economic system of the contemporary world as hyper-real. In the film, hyper-reality has become totalitarian and absolute, replacing the physical world with a virtual or simulated one. Apart from the rebels, "no one knows that their minds are operating inside a dream that is programmed for them," which carries the "latent paranoia" of Baudrillard to its extreme.⁵ This is Marxist false consciousness with a vengeance, since most human beings are not aware that they are simply slaves to the system, existing in a condition of complete unawareness.

Some real-life scientists, like Bill Joy and Kevin Warwick, actually welcomed the kind of future described in The Matrix — one in which illness, old age, and the human body have essentially been abolished. Joy, who was employed at Sun Microsystems, wrote that "the future doesn't need us" and predicted the next stage of directed evolution, in which machines replaced bodies and the mind would exist forever. Warwick, meanwhile, fantasized about becoming "one with his computer."⁶ According to the film, humans had developed the artificial intelligence (AI) that eventually enslaved them, but then tried to cut off its solar power by scorching the atmosphere. Those who survived were driven underground while the computer turned the rest of humanity into "living batteries in immense power plants."⁷

Only a few radicals and revolutionaries have the courage and insight to even recognize the evil system and struggle against it. In this case, a band of multicultural rebels is at war with simulations that look like parodies of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI agents — all white men with identical suits, white shirts, and short haircuts. They literally are "the suits" at war with the countercultural underground. As the rebel leader Morpheus informs Neo (Keanu Reeves) when he begins to understand that he is a slave to a machine: "it is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."⁸

Agent Smith, the leader of the system's security force, informs Neo of his loathing for humanity and explains that the original Matrix was truly a perfect world without pain, death, or suffering — but "it was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops [of human batteries] were lost." This led him to conclude that human beings were "a virus" and "a cancer of the planet. You are a plague."⁹ Smith hates humans so much, including the way they smell, that he cannot bear even to be simulated as one. Paradoxically, though, the film carries a conservative message in that the rebels cannot win without the superhuman, which fits the Hollywood convention that "social change is only through the heroic action of a hyperkinetic individual," such as Neo or Rick Deckard.¹⁰

Conclusion: Comparing Anxiety in Blade Runner and The Matrix

Deckard in the end is probably a more interesting and complex hero than Neo, at least within the conventions of Hollywood drama that require individual heroes and positive resolutions. He learns how to be human again from machines that he was ordered to destroy, and also comes to recognize their fundamental humanity. Although he cannot overthrow the system, he can at least escape from it and save Rachael from the other hunters. In this film, humans had ended up designing androids who turned out not only to be their equals but their superiors, and a film that started out full of technophobia and paranoia ends with man learning to love the machine.

This could never be the case in The Matrix, however, since the machine has already become the master — no matter that it regards itself as a benevolent slave owner. Its chief opponent, Neo, has superhuman powers worthy of a comic book hero, unlike Deckard, who would have been killed had his replicant opponent chosen to do so. For the real humans in the movie, there is no choice except to defeat the system or be exterminated. At the same time, their mission is also to free as many humans as possible, since those humans are not even aware of the real world at all. As a concept of a future environment gone terribly wrong for humanity, The Matrix inspires far more anxiety and paranoia in the audience than Blade Runner, and the machines in that alternative world turn out to be far less worthy of empathy than Agent Smith and his cohorts would suggest.

Bibliography

Doll, Susan, and Greg Faller. "Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction." Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1986, pp. 89–100.

Kakoudaki, Despina. "Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film." Camera Obscura, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2002, pp. 109–53.

Lavery, David. "From Cinespace to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ." Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 150–57.

Miller, Edward D. "The Matrix and the Medium's Message." Social Policy, Summer 2000, pp. 56–59.

Perkowitz, Sidney. "Our Violent Planet." In Sidney Perkowitz (ed.), Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World. Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 67–90.