Inessentials

Chapter four in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. Earlier posts: overview, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three.

I have an occasional “joke” I pull out when the conversation turns to teaching philosophy. It’s a dictum about how the laziest form of teaching philosophy to undergraduates is screening The Matrix. Putting The Matrix on your intro to philosophy syllabus is a likely sign that you’ve given up completely, you are trying to connect with your youthful audience but don’t know how, or you don’t watch many movies.

Between inchoate undergraduate essays, professors’ weak attempts to make culture references, and lazy teaching, the film has become so ubiquitous that is probably the leading cause of eye-rolling among academic philosophers. Another essay on Cartesian skepticism and The Matrix? More fill-in-the-dots connections between The Matrix and Christianity or Buddhism? So scanning Wartenberg’s book before I read it, it struck me as either extremely daring or extremely naïve for him to include an entire chapter on The Matrix as philosophy, the film that has probably generated more faux-profound navel-gazing that gives philosophy a bad name than any other artifact of popular culture.

It was not encouraging, therefore, to read the first sentence of chapter four. “It is tempting to credit the Wachowski Brothers’ film, The Matrix (199), with ushering in an era of brisk philosophical activity focused on film” (54). Replace “brisk philosophical activity” with “insipid pseudo-intellectualizing” and you’ll have a better sense of my philosophical acquaintances’ attitude toward the film. That’s not to say that good philosophy inspired by the film can’t be done or that it hasn’t been done. Perhaps the most influential and respected philosopher of mind writing today, David Chalmers, wrote a lengthy article about the philosophical underpinnings of the film. But that is seen as the exception rather than the rule. Regardless, let’s clear away our prejudices and predispositions as best we can, set aside judgment for the moment, and see what arguments Wartenberg can offer for why The Matrix helps us better appreciate the way that films can philosophize.

Philosophy. Deep. Whoa.

This chapter focuses on how films can philosophize by providing thought experiments. There are two conditions on a thought experiment, says Wartenberg, following the work of Tamar Szabo Gendler: there is an imaginary scenario, and this imaginary scenario “needs to play a role in a broader argument about a philosophical claim, principle, or theory, adding or withdrawing support to the item in question” (57). Fiction films easily meet the first condition. But how can they do the second?

To begin, note the wide variety of roles that thought experiments have played in philosophy: counterexamples, establishing a possibility, demonstrating impossibility, establishing necessary connections, confirming a theory, and theory building. (He gives extended examples from the history of philosophy for each of these kinds.) Then, examine a particular fiction film to see if it has done any of these. According to Wartenberg, The Matrix does this by updating the Cartesian skeptical thought experiment replacing Descartes’ evil demon with malevolent computers (67).

He focuses on a particular reading of The Matrix: that it updates the Cartesian thought experiment by drawing attention to itself as a film and the way that the deception occurring within the matrix is similar to the deception occurring when one watches a film like The Matrix (72). In both cases, one becomes deceived about reality by a projection that simulates reality. This is ultimately the purpose of the skeptical hypothesis presented by The Matrix, to get the viewers “to think about the role that computers and other devices with screens — films, video and DVD players, etc. — have come to play in our lives” (75). I’m not going to object to this (rather simplistic, I think) take on the film, since I have a more direct objection to this reading’s role in Wartenberg’s larger argument.

The second, more difficult, constraint on a philosophical thought experiment is that it play a role in a broader philosophical argument. Does The Matrix do that? Wartenberg does not attempt to show that there is some on-going filmic or cultural conversation about skepticism or screens that The Matrix participates in. That would have been one way to show that a film can be part of a philosophical argument. Instead, he attempts to focus on the film’s narrative structure to show that The Matrix is embedding the thought experiment in a philosophical argument or making a philosophical point. His interpretation thus hinges on the importance of the film’s early sequences in which the viewer does not yet know that he or she is watching a matrix-scenario within the film’s world rather than the film’s world itself. He asks us to compare The Matrix to a different, imagined film called The Matron that is similar to The Matrix but in which we are always aware that Neo’s experiences are within the matrix. The Matrix uses the skeptical scenario to make a philosophical point, says Wartenberg, because it allows the viewer to undergo the same realization as Neo, and thus leads the viewer to raise the same questions about what is real that Neo confronts.

I find his argument that The Matron would not be successful because we would always be aware of Neo’s position vis-a-vis the matrix completely unpersuasive. In fact, watching the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar watch the matrix would more successfully underline an emphasis on the relationship between screens and skepticism than does The Matrix. Not only do I not find Wartenberg’s emphasis on narrative structure helpful in showing how a film can (removed from any context whatsoever) engender a specifically philosophical awakening in its viewers comparable to what Neo allegedly experiences within the film, his argument actually convinces me that The Matrix could have been more successful had it adopted the approach of The Matron if that was what it was trying to do. Clearly The Matrix is supposed to play off the long history of skeptical scenarios and give us little “a-ha!” revelations. But that’s a far cry from a clear, sustained thesis about skepticism (or skepticism and screens).

I’d like to think there is a fiction film that attempts to contribute to a philosophical debate and does so successfully. The Matrix is not that film.

Other observations:

• “What’s unique about The Matrix [compared to the novel Atonement], however, is that it deceives viewers about their perceptual beliefs, for, while watching the initial segment of the film, they believe themselves to be perceiving a real, albeit fictional, world when all they are perceiving is the illusory world of the Matrix” (72). I hope Wartenberg is not suggesting that The Matrix is unique among films in this way, since there are so, so many films that use this same device. That’s why Serenity had to up the ante by making no less than three reveals to start the film.
• Classic skeptical scenarios that are supposed to be imagined, like that in the first two of Descartes’ Meditations, are built on there being no differences whatsoever between the skeptical scenario and our naïve percpetion of the world. (Descartes later denies this is true, but the argument gets going from this starting point.) But as I remember The Matrix (it’s been a few years), there are distinctive elements in the matrix that underline its difference from the real world (glitches that produce déjà vu for instance, ability to control events in ways that defy physical laws.) In other words, without some serious interpretation to show why this is an important new direction for skeptical hypotheses, it seems like the film really doesn’t care to emphasize that utter indistinguishability of the matrix-world and the real-world. This distinction further breaks down in the sequels, of course, but I’m willing to set that aside. It still doesn’t make sense to me as a truly skeptical hypothesis.
• Yet again, I’m tempted to say that the choice we’re presented is between “films can’t philosophize” and “films can only (or so far only) philisophize poorly.” It’s like the old debate between whether bad art is art at all. (“Thomas Kinkade isn’t art!” “Yes, his paintings are art, only they’re really, really bad art!”)