2024-12-01

Reading "The Matrix"

Yes, that's right, reading. Now, I don't know if there was a novelisation, but there was a screenplay. In the late 2023, I started reading screenplays. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, like comparing what they intended versus what they shot but also how much actors influenced the characters. In September, I decided to give "The Matrix" a shot.

One of the criteria of a good screenplay for me is if I'm imagining a different movie during reading. This means that the writing itself is good. As it should because to sell a movie, you need to do that through the text itself. This means that there are many well-written texts intended for a small group of producers, directors, and actors. More often than not, screenplays give us only the necessary details. It's a bit like William Gibson's or Cormac McCarthy's prose (and some, like "Blade Runner 2049," read like a damn good novel).

"The Matrix" was written and directed by the same people, the Wachowskis siblings, so there is no reason to believe there were drastic changes because they were in a creative control over the movie (I know of one executive meddling, but that's not important now). And yet, there are some changes. The first being

general vibe

that could have gone in a different direction had different actors been hired for the job. There aren't many visuals described in the source material. For instance, Morpheus "wears a long black coat and his eyes are invisible behind circular mirrored glasses." That's it. And Neo's look is not described at all. This leaves room for imagination.

The very first thing that popped up for me was that I imagined Neo as someone younger. The movie gives two ages for Neo: 28 (passport) and 37 (Agent Smith's file), but that's inside the Matrix, outside it's anyone's guess. Keanu Reeves himself was 35-year old at the time of shooting, Laurence Fishbourne was 38, and Carrie Ann-Moss 32, so they were around the same age. And that made Neo and Morpheus relationship more like partners, whereas in the script, it felt closer to a mentor-protégé one.

And that makes difference. With a twenty-something Neo and, let's say, forty-something Morpheus, the movie could have fallen into Young Adult territory or something more for kids. And that could have been less impactful? Who knows, and it's not the purpose of this essay to analyse that. The directors made certain choices and I am noting that.

To further corroborate this notion, though, at some point, both in the script and in the movie, Morpheus tells Neo that they took him out of the Matrix too early, when they never do that, but they had no time. Why would he tell him that when Trinity was younger? It could be that she was more mature mentally than Neo (he's a man), and that's probably how it plays out in the final vision, but this made me think there was an angle for even a late-teens Neo.

This brings me to

the two removed pieces of dialogue

which further enforce the impression.

When Neo gets together with Cypher and Cypher offers booze to Neo, they talk briefly. In the movie, the scene ends after Cypher tells Neo that he's there to save the world. But in the script, he lets him in on a little secret: Neo is the fifth One there was. All the predecessors were killed by agents.
That returns later when Neo and Morpheus are going to meet the Oracle. The conversation in the corridor is longer and Neo confronts Morpheus about the four earlier Ones, which puts Morpheus in a difficult spot. He has to swallow his pride and admit that he was wrong in the past (but not this time! :D).

Why was this removed? Maybe it revealed too much or the creators had different world-building ideas when they started shooting. I don't even know if this became the actual lore (which is irrelevant, actually, because I'm comparing a script to a single movie, and the movie leaves that out). But it would be interesting to see this exchange. This would give more substance to Neo's doubts and make Morpheus less of a fanatic (make no mistake, he's amicable but fanatic; a thing that led to Cypher's disillusion and betrayal). This would be also a great piece to play for Laurence Fishbourne.

Anyway, there were also

small things

I observed.

For instance, the first time Neo returns to the Matrix, he doesn't wear sunglasses. He has them the next time, though. A small hint of a change within him. Nice touch.

Another thing is bullet-time. It's actually called like that in the script, but it late to arrive: only during the fight on the rooftop when they're rescuing Morpheus. In the movie, there is an early bird when Trinity fights the policemen at the beginning, which foreshadows the future. Perhaps, they didn't want to keep a fancy new technology for later. I can imagine this being used only when Neo masters this skill (especially that Trinity did not use bullet-time, it was merely presented to us as such). But this really was a game changer to the whole action movies, so who can blame them?

There are more visual decisions not present in the script, like using different filters in the Matrix (green one) and the real life (natural/blue).

The three agents (Smith, Brown, and Jones) popped up to me as more connected, as if being a part of a hive mind. However, upon rewatching fragments of the movie to compare it with the script, I noticed they do behave like that, so that's just my memory. Like with Neo's sunglasses.

Fun fact. A number of swear words like "shit" were removed (or replaced with "whoa"). No loss to anyone.

And finally, unexpected for me yet always there,

trans themes.

It's been known for years that the red pill was inspired by a real-life oestrogen pill from the 1990s. It's sort of ironic what "being red-pilled" evolved into in real life. And Switch was supposed to be male in the real world and female in the Matrix (that's the potential executive meddling that I mentioned before, albeit, I didn't find any confirmation now).

But more subtle elements popped up for me. During the first meeting in person, Morpheus tells Neo:

Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

It didn't sound like an anything specific to me when Laurence Fishburne said it in the cinema, but when I saw this in writing, I realised this was very similar to descriptions of gender dysphoria, which I now know from many testimonies. Back in the 1990s, I was largely unaware of trans people. They were out there, mentioned every now and then, but it was years before I got to know more in depth. And so now, 25 years later, I can see that it was there from the beginning. According to Lilly Wachowski, "The Matrix" was not meant to be an allegory of transition. Perhaps, looking for one's identity is a generally shared experience and that's why it worked out so well. Artists put themselves into their stories and use their own experience to build narratives.

And finally, a word I wouldn't pay much attention to for a long time. Gatekeepers. Those doctors who were an obstacle to the gender-affirming care. I learned to know this as a unanimously pejorative name. So, how does Morpheus call the agents?

We've survived by hiding from them, running from them, but they are the gatekeepers, they're guarding all the doors, holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later someone is going to have to fight them.

As a bonus, something I realised only while writing this text, is that Agent Smith keeps consistently *deadnaming* Neo as Mr. Anderson.

To summarise,

what I found, the differences, the impressions from reading "The Matrix," etc., are not hurting the final movie in any way. "The Matrix" is and will be a solid piece of cinema that changed the landscape and left a mark in culture in general. The script will always have more potential implementations (as various remakes showed us in the past), but it's even more valuable to get to know also the source material. One can imagine the futures that could have been or find more details.