Guest post: Just how creative expression works

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Real world v virtual world.

Ian and JA,

You make a very good point that much of the now-quasi-“official” interpretation of The Matrix as a trans analogy may have come later, as a kind of convenient retroactive explanation. I’ll gladly concede that parts of that almost-too-perfect interpretation may be ret-cons.

But that said, retcon or not, the film does indeed align perfectly with trans ideology. (And so does their previous film, Bound. The Wachowski Brothers were, consciously or not, very much exploring transgender themes in their work, years before they both “came out” as “trans women”. )

The thing about art analysis is that the artist doesn’t have to consciously, deliberately intend something for it to be detectable and recognizable in the work. It happens all the time that an artist’s work contains themes that the artist herself wan’t fully conscious of until after the fact. That’s not some airy-fairy argument, either: it really is just how creative expression works. We’re watching people spill their inner feelings into a medium: a typewriter or a guitar or a canvas or a film camera. It can be quite raw when it comes out, and it can take years to interpret the context and conditions around which the art emerged.

For example: I doubt Hitchcock was aware that he was showing the world how much he hated and feared women when he made his fims. Nevertheless: there it is. You can write a very clear, clean story of Hitchcock’s fear of women by simply watching his films, and yet there’s no question that he wasn’t aware that he was telling such a story at the time. And it’s rather indisputably there. The man was a flaming, neurotic misogynist and it doesn’t take any retconning to see that a major underlying “meaning” behind many of Hitchcock’s (admittedly brilliant though morally dubious) films is woman-hatred, woman-terror, and woman-obsession.

The connection between The Matrix and trans ideology is that it takes everyday reality and says certain special people can change reality’s seemingly hard-coded rules if they feel something deeply enough. And that’s exactly parallel with trans ideology: Neo discovers he can “manipulate the code” that The Matrix — the operating system of reality — runs on; trans ideology says that sex may seem hard-coded to the “operating system” of humanity, but if you — oh-so-special you — can embrace your magic genderfeelz hard enough, you’re actually opening a line to a super-truth-y dimension: you’re Neo-ing the “code” of reality. Or something along those lines.

It’s basically “faith” — the same concept at the heart of every bullshit religion story. Believe it hard enough and magic just happens, and the proof is that you both feel the warmth of it deeply in your heart, and you discover that you live among ice-cold, dangerous enemies who are out to take your magic feeling away. You’ve suddenly got a new purpose: both a new goal to strive toward and a new enemy to strive against — your life is far more exciting now, because it’s suddenly shot through with cosmic-scale purpose, and it’s cast in chiaroscuro extremes of light and dark.

(Evolutionary behavioural scientists might object that you’ve actually just activated buried old vestigial survival instincts, and basically reproduced chimpanzee tribal warfare behaviours. But, whatever…)

I’ve clearly seen The Matrix many times, so I’m not quite sure what you’re on about by critiquing my rather mundane interpretation of it. Yes, it comes with a bunch of sci-fi backstory. That backstory is interesting in that it isn’t quite a full-on postmodernist rejection of baseline reality in favour of total ontological relativism. Instead, it simply argues that our perception of baseline reality is one step removed from the true firmament of baseline material reality, which nevertheless is there and exists. (The Matrix is a virtual layer in which humanity is led to believe we’re all living happy mundane lives in 1999, but in reality it’s about 200 years in the future and humans are immobile “batteries”, enslaved by AI, fooled by technology wired up to their brains.) The premise still asserts that there are such things as real and not-real, as true and false, it’s just that we’re all inhabiting a world which is one “layer” removed from it.

And when you think about it: that’s exactly what trans activists want: the trans movement doesn’t want male and female to be completely arbitrary categories, it wants them to be just a little bit tweaked so that a few outliers can sneak into the other camp. It wants the categories of male and female to remain relatively intact, stereotypes and all, with just a small change: let the “special ones” truly and completely cross the aisle.

Anyways, I’m more interested in the way that Ready Player One handled its Black lesbian protagonist, and how it handled the moral questions about reality versus pretend reality. I thought was a lesser film in some ways, but that its moral argument was the stronger of the two.