Back down the rabbit hole Interpreting The Matrix . . . BY SUSANNAH MANDEL
	Jacking in to the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation Edited by Matthew Kapell and William G. Doty. Continuum, 232 pages, $19.95.

Whatever their success as films (and parts two and three were something of a letdown), there’s no denying that the Matrix movies gripped American viewers as few action flicks have. The fascination ran deeper than the oft-quoted tag lines, the endlessly knocked-off visual style, and the sunglass fetish that spawned a small industry. In 1999, The Matrix was the metaphor of the year, and its vision of life as a simulation spawned many a water-cooler debate. Coming at a cultural moment rife with pre-millennial tension, it was a transcendental action movie that made everyone a philosopher.

All this is addressed in the new book from academic/pop-culture publisher Continuum, Jacking in to the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation. Edited by cultural anthropologist Matthew Kapell and retired University of Alabama professor (and myth specialist) William G. Doty, it’s a meaty collection of essays on The Matrix’s cultural meaning. Hailing from a range of scholarly disciplines, the contributors speak to the innumerable interpretations the films have inspired. Christian philosophy? Taoist parable? Racial utopia? It’s one of the series’s defining features, Doty says, that it’s been "stubbornly polysemic," a kind of "pop culture Rorschach test."

The second unusual feature, the editors say, is the series’s transmedia sprawl. The films have narrative gaps that are addressed only in a spinoff series of shorts collectively called The Animatrix and in the Enter the Matrix video game. Granted that the Matrix franchise is a commercial gold mine, Kapell and Doty suspect it will also herald a storytelling mode for the new millennium. Doty invokes the notion of "gesamtkunstwerk" ("total work of art") used by Richard Wagner to describe his opera/theater pieces. It’s a high-flown comparison, but if Doty’s right, Hollywood could be on the brink of some interesting changes.

This collection’s strength is that it doesn’t try to tell you that the Matrix films are good or bad movies. The writers are as interested in the films’ failures as in their innovations, and in the opportunities they offer to take the measure of the American mind. They ask intriguing questions. Why, exactly, would simulated life be less rich than the "real" world? Can freedom of choice really be exemplified by a messiah who flouts the democratic process? Do the films undermine their philosophical ambitions by showing that though enlightenment is nice, what really gets things done is a few swift kicks to the head?

The scholars often sound like frustrated fans wishing for a better Matrix. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren in his piece and Frances Flannery-Dailey and Rachel L. Wagner in theirs both salute the movies for asking complex questions about human nature but then lament the excess of Christianity and violence. In "Is Neo White?", David Leonard and C. Richard King acknowledge the films’ ethnic diversity before asking why a hero played by one of Hollywood’s few bi-racial stars comes across as so utterly Caucasian. Feminist scholar Martina Lipp draws on critic bell hooks when she writes: "One of the striking characteristics . . . of The Matrix is that it is motivated by a continuous shift between revolutionary and stereotypical positions." No wonder the scholars are frustrated.

Do the films hold up as art? Maybe — the writers generally admire the series’s "intensely focused cinematography" while criticizing the blurriness of its ethical claims. But that’s not the most interesting question asked here. I came away from Jacking convinced that the Matrix films are more than action flicks. By provoking such passionate and thoughtful responses, from academics and water-cooler philosophers alike, the series has embodied the cyborg dreams, the fears and desires, of Americans at the turn of the millennium. And that’s something worth reading about.