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The Matrix is half a good idea (inspired one way or another by PKD?). The irony is that its rendering is too flat. It feeds off the conceit of its audience: playing off the idea of their 'knowledge' that reality is an illusion. What the audience fails to see is that actually their 'real' condition as proposed by the film is intensified rather than alleviated or solved by watching it. (Pods in a gigantic illusion machine.) 

It inducts them into its illusory world, for the purposes of making gigantic amounts of money out of nothing - just as the people in the pods exist purely for the purposes of generating energy for the machine. 

It is a machine in which humanity is denatured; but not replaced by anything. 

An action film in which there is characterisation and a meaningful story is Crouching Tiger. I felt that there was a genuine sober sadness in it.

I agree about Crouching Tiger, MJP. 

Re Matrix and Greg Benford. I think he's spot on, Cheryl, about it being a gung-ho reprise of the New Testament, but equating Neo with Jesus is pitiful and disgusting and bankrupt, though the responsibility is the W. brothers' and not Benford's. A few pietas and nods to some theological names doesn't make Neo a human saviour. The entire film is a hard-bloke fantasy and the hard-bloke is the enemy of compassion. 

OK, you have warrior folk in theology like Arjuna hanging back until Krishna points out that the battlefield is that of the self and the kinsmen he's killing are his own inner demons but this isn't the story of the Matrix. Here it's a bunch of machines vs humans, there's no hint of inner conflict or awareness of the real problem, as MJP points to it, of the inner/outer world. 

Also, the enlightenment never happens, whatever they say. If it did Neo would realise that it doesn't matter whether you live inside or outside of the Matrix.

Alienation is the most
common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar
rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to
be surprised out of it—not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind
of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without
self-disgust.

. The romance of movies is not just in those
stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting
others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course,
and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than
about what you love in bad movies.

Carr calls me an optimist, which is true. Here’s why: Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.

Nietzsche’s writing style changed with the typewriter, but was this change for the better or the worse? There is a melodramatic reference to Nietzsche being “under the sway of the machine,” but surely he was just as much under the sway of pen and ink before?

the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present,
paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the
user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion
that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen
landscape.

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself
until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself.

The payoff of interactivity, the thing that gives the story a hook that it couldn’t get otherwise, is less about ‘choice’ or a pleasure of diverging from linear narrative, than a sense of active contribution to the progression of that narrative.

Graham characterised Latour as a ‘secular occasionalist’. Occasionalism was a philosophy originally associated with ancient Islamic thinkers, who thought it an abomination that one thing could directly affect another. Even for fire to burn cotton, they maintained, it was necessary for God to act as a mediator. Graham’s theory of objects, arising from his deliciously aberrant reading of Heidegger, emphasises the opacity of objects, the way that a subterranean region of themselves is always retained that does not enter into any external relations. In this way Graham restores the mystery of causation

This struck me as one way of getting to the Lacanian opposition between the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic is about relations; at this level, an object is a signifier, whose function is determined – and exhausted – by its relations with other signifiers. But the signifier is also a particular form: in the case of language, the letter; in the case of a chess set, the pieces. This level of form, which lies beyond human meaning but upon which human meaning depends, is the asignifying, non-sensical Real. The ‘real’ in Graham’s version of Speculative Realism can be seen, then, as a Lacanian Real.

Every commodity has a fetishistic aura (a pro jection of its exchange-value) that far exceeds its material and utilitarian properties as a mere ob ject (its use-value).

In other words, the entire drama of the aura and its decay, or what Benjamin also calls the movement from “cult value” to “exhibition value,” is internal to the commodity form itself. Technological reproducibility itself is a consequence of commodity production and circulation, rather than the reverse (a point on which Benjamin remains ambiguous).

t. But the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content. If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the “mass media” that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.

Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation.

he all but obliterates the 500-year-old western tradition of perspective by flattening his flesh silhouettes in a space that goes nowhere. It's this visual violence that liberates his eroticism, because it erases any meaning or narrative.

When John Malkovich, in Being John Malkovich, enters the portal which provides access to the thoughts and experiences of Malkovich, a series of strictly Cartesian questions arise, such as: Why does he do this, given that he already has access to his thoughts and experiences? Can the events of that moment of terrifying self-transparency be psychoanalysed? Ontologically, what is the status of that experience? Is it a dream? Is it “reality”? What is its materiality? The brilliance of Being John Malkovich resides in what many perceive as its failure: its reliance on a Cartesian view of the subject as puppeteer. Imagine that Malkovich entered the portal thinking that he might uncover the greatest secrets of the human subject, only to discover one banal certainty: “I think, I exist.” This, then, is the Cartesian Real which Lynch can’t stomach: if one enters the subject, there is no transcendental crisis, only the terrifying certainty of the cogito - a moment of pure appearance, resisting all (psycho)analysis.

How should one approach Stevens' poetry? As with any poet, the first step is to enjoy him, to take pleasure in Stevens' exquisite language, subtle rhythms, arresting images, surprise effects, and distinctive sounds. We have become a little too insistent about meaning in poetry, as if a poem were no more than a vehicle for ideas. We should be mindful of Stevens' observation that “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have”

The second step in approaching Stevens' poetry is to concede that he, like Proteus, is slippery. He will not be fixed. If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our response to it are in constant flux.

Throughout the
entire proceedings, he had sat a bit pushed back from the table, looking
sallow and brooding, else intent and reticent. When his turn came to
speak, he cleared his throat and slowly, in carefully enunciated
syllables, began with this proposition: if Wallace Stevens is
influential in 50 years, then the break between American poetry and the
world will be complete. Much of the crowd, a bit confused by this
comment, leaned in attentively. Was Stevens a great poet? Yes of course.
But, was he a companionable poet? No, not at all. In fact - Wiman
continued in measured tones - he was almost inhuman, uprooted,
impenetrable, unpenetrating, a self-indulgent effete, a hyper-cerebral
poet with raw talent blazing but little sense of how to convey something
a reader might enter into, something born of blood and emotion and the
shared commonalities of lived life. He was a destructive influence on
modern poetry. By now there was palpable and shocked hush in the air.
Stevens' poetry has abjured the world, Wiman continued, he lived in a
bubble of the mind so that he might not be infected by life. His poetry
corrosively and obsessively studied itself and was utterly unconcerned
with the specificity of things and with relationships to people. There
was coldness or distance that Wiman sensed in Stevens' poetry and it
turned him off, way off, didn't arrive at the root of him as a reader.
The early poems thought in sounds, not in ideas, and throughout Stevens'
career, all he could see were busy associative surfaces with very little
depth.