“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”[1]

 The release of the first Matrix film was the ultimate event of our cinematic time, illustrating the cyclical nature of reality through well-meaning, yet thoroughly misguided, attempts to exit the simulation. The whole point is, of course, that The Matrix is exactly the kind of film that would be circulated in the matrix itself. We can no longer rely upon any such simple distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ even if it still retains any real motivational power.[2] But twenty years later, the original film’s significance persists as a pop-culture phenomenon informing everything from science-fiction writing and action sequences to popular philosophy and psychology, to say nothing of the eager redditors merely the latest in a long series of conspiracy theorists who tout the heroic rhetoric of overcoming embodied in the red pill. By contrast, the release of the third sequel in winter 2021, The Matrix Resurrections, did not happen. Rumors of a new film had circulated since 2003 and the lukewarm success of The Matrix Revolutions saw studios privately discuss options for a sequel only to be publicly rebuffed by the Wachowskis. A new sequel, Lille Wachowski opined in 2015, seems a “particularly repelling idea in these times.”[3] But beyond desire or doubt Resurrections was announced in fall 2019. I, like many others, first became aware of it accidentally, when I saw a bus-stop poster advertising it a month before the premier. It didn’t seem like there was anything to it and I, certainly, was tempted to write it off as the ill-fated reboot of a famed action series by greedy Hollywood machinations, cliché as this claim is becoming in its ubiquitous truthfulness. There’s also the irony of my making this observation, and then reliably winding up in theaters myself. And that’s the real indication that in our world of commodities, much like in the world of the matrix itself, the division between consumers and producers has entirely collapsed.

 The Matrix Resurrections was no cause for alarm, in contrast to its original, and maybe that’s the problem. It enjoyed a reasonable box-office response during the COVID-19 Pandemic, particularly because it opened alongside the new Spiderman, which is presently the 6^th highest-grossing film of all time. Viewers seem divided between Peter Bradshaw’s opinion in the Guardian that the film is a soulless reboot drained of life (the pun is his) and the aggregate Metacritic opinion that Resurrections occupies this dreary situation, yet ameliorates it with wit, heart, and perspective. But the best response is Slavoj Žižek’s—he rumbles on in a head-on assault against the film’s repetitive postmodern pandering only to gallingly admit at the end that he hasn’t actually seen it.[4] This is another strange simulative dimension to life (meaning experience, woe that I call it reality!): Žižek says Resurrections isn’t worth your time to see, but it was important enough for him to have reviewed sight-unseen! The ubiquitous fact of this strange distance from franchised culture is something that the producers, the viewers, even the system of the matrix itself would not deny. Nor would Resurrections itself, which occupies a spot amongst a growing genre of self-critical films (particularly amongst popular franchises) that happily accept their rebooted reality with constant in-jokes about their place in an endlessly produced series of sequels whose consistency has long since been sold out to fan interests and the box office (sorry, to streaming revenues). The Terminator franchise was the first example of this, when playing with time inadvertently becomes a means to rupture the direct continuum of a storyline and endlessly expand it into total plasticity.[5] With an ever-present chance to change the past, and the future there’s no death, no loss, no stakes. We all know that, and there’s really no other way around this.

 So in order to make such films since the late 90’s (again, right as the first Matrix film was released), it’s become somewhat necessary to fall in step with this premise and manifest it in the film’s structure itself. The most notable examples emerge among major cinematic overhauls of far larger franchises with the resources to do so—see the Abrams/Johnson Star Wars trilogy that took on this challenge by essentially reprising the original trilogy’s plot and resurrecting its entire cast, forty years older, in 2017. Nothing less than a stroke of brilliance, this move resurrected the captivating beauty of the original storyline as it explicitly offered the first fans direct satisfaction in the presence of the wizened icons of their youth, simultaneously passing the baton of resistance to new faces in a young generation of new viewers. This is expansive franchising, which builds upon the continuity of its own essence to generate progressive newness and innovation. What we forget is the compelling reality of essence’s immobility here, considering what is being resurrected. As Jameson pointed out in the 70’s, Star Wars was a sell-out from the start: a revival of “the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers type.”[6] This initial pastiche folded in on itself through full embrace of an endlessly expansive universe—Star Wars is THE franchise—so when we express nostalgia for an original product devised fifty years ago, we’re expressing nostalgia for more unreflexive pastiche that didn’t have to reckon with the scale of its own success. Perhaps it is timely here to introduce a new term for Jameson’s observation, three major franchises later? This is Saudade, a Portuguese word indicating love for something or someone that is nostalgic and melancholic. But it is more than simple longing: saudade is more than nostalgia by virtue of its own impossibility. It brings with it a repressed understanding that, not only that the object of longing may never be had again, but may have never been experienced in the first place.[7]

 And that’s why the new Matrix film is unsettling: it so thoroughly integrates the aspirational escape velocity of the original trilogy that such potential is both everywhere and nowhere. This is what I will again call Saudade, defined here as a longing for the vigor and recklessly innovative power that made The Matrix relevant but was too late for its own time. And it’s certainly beyond our grasp today. This nostalgia for what never was is the basic currency of the Resurrections: the storyline of the first three films is neatly captured and highly curated in an endlessly-replayable videogame designed by Neo’s simulation ego Thomas Anderson. The chance to escape and resistance is everywhere, it seems; the characters of the film experience it as normalized, institutionalized, accessible, for sale! What sells best in a capitalist system? one of the videogame designers who works alongside Anderson asks coyly. From this abstraction of Neo’s original liberation story to the neon signs proudly displayed through the dark streets of San Francisco that brightly proclaim Simulation, Resurrections clarifies on an instinctual level that any talk about the matrix is necessarily an abstraction, any purporting to a successful evasion of it merely metaphor. But does the system’s ability to be self-critical (it’s hard to see this as anything else) make up for a necessary compromising of 1999’s message? Most people would agree that it does not: we know we’re just seeing the terminator in human form, trying to charm us with botched jokes. And this was the central complaint about Reloaded and Revolutions, and their expansions of the original storyline. Long-ago worn out by a red-pill deluge of pretensions to simulatability, franchising’s excess of cinematic bombardment makes us long for the original film, for the steak and sedation of its simple exit strategy. I, for one, would like to go back to the theater and back to the real fight for our lives! But instead parked in front of the latest franchise expansion, we long for the experience of The Matrix as it never was: nothing more than a vanished ability to discern the Real with merely a glance.

 This is truly the scariest part of the film. The Matrix had a uniquely powerful message in 1999, harnessed from rampant technological insecurity at the dawn of the new millennium: the technology embedded in every part of your life manages more than you realize and is capable of controlling you. This is no external antagonism à la Skynet: this insidious monster has sedated and has infiltrated every part of your being. And it is certainly oppressive: it’s the image of blatantly political domination and the tyrannous servitude it demands that energized the original Matrix, the same way it carries through Zack de la Roche’s vocals at the end of the film. The matrix isn’t reprehensible because we are sedated, disconnected from emotion, sensation, or experience, nor even that the world and its reality do not exist as we know it.[8] It’s because we’re under their control and will do what they tell us! The choice to enter, or to leave the matrix, was never ours. Freedom is the central problem of the original film, and it’s of an expressly political nature: the ability to govern ourselves and determine our own destinies is at stake, as our energy is ruthlessly harvested from us by malicious machines. Such is the beauty of the red pill and its ability to instantly discern ‘reality’ from ‘fiction,’ and see the true nature of our situation which, in the classic sense of the dialectic, works through its negative to seek out the future. But as Baudrillard argues in response, any semblance of a dichotomy between reality and fiction has long-since collapsed into expansive notions of symbolic ambiguity and hyperreality: the reversibility of reality. Nothing sells better under capitalism than critiques of capital, the endlessly expansive negativity within a culture industry that incorporates in this way (and thus neutralizes) any sense of alternative.

 But in a more significant sense, the notion of the human itself—that which exists to be freed—has changed. We have changed. Even if there was a true Zion, a pre-apocalyptic untarnished past to which we could return, the longing of the red-pill is to fight the oppressive capacities of artificial intelligent exists in a world where everything is malevolent. Where everyone plugged into the matrix is a possible enemy. But Resurrections resolves this untenable binary between sentient, altruistic humanity and a programmatic, destructive artificial world with its introductions of sentient machines. Even outside of the matrix, humans have not jettisoned the military and organizational capacities that their technology offers. This was a central complexity between good, bad, and ugly machines that went unstated throughout the original trilogy, and only began to receive attention in The Animatrix, the Wachowskis’ 2003’s animated shorts that began to explore the problem that non-homicidal robots present. Thankfully this investigation continues in Resurrections, albeit in a manner that compromises our hopeless nostalgia. If Neo’s story is as much coopted by the matrix’s ability to bury truth inside of the ordinary, it is just as much problematized by such singular notions of truth. As one of the film’s friendly AI explains to Neo, not seek to control. And not all seek to be free. Such insight and its brazen willingness to eschew simple answers, offers everywhere the promise of a more astute and agile liberationist platform that learns from the past without idealizing it, that embraces technology without relying on it. But the freedom-fighters of Resurrections, like so many hopeless martyrs, remain mired in a sullen sense of hopeless nostalgia, Saudade par excellence, that disperses any hope of resistance.

3 February 2022

  [1] A.F.G. Bell, In Portugal (1912)

[2] This paraphrases a quote from Jean Baudrillard, the intellectual inspiration behind the original film, in 2004; https://baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca/the-matrix-decoded-le-nouvel-observateur-interview-with-jean-baudrillard/

[3] Steve Weintraub, “The Wachowskis Talk JUPITER ASCENDING, Creating the Chicago Sequence, SENSE8, and More,” Collider: 4 February 2015, https://collider.com/wachowskis-jupiter-ascending-interview/

[4] Slavoj Žižek, “Boringly postmodern and an ideological fantasy: Slavoj Žižek reviews Matrix Resurrections,” The Spectator: 12 January 2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-muddle-not-a-movie-slavoj-i-ek-reviews-matrix-resurrections

[5] This is Fisher’s point about endless expansive franchises becoming impossible to care about, in addition to acting as unintentional allegories for late capital’s cultural restructurings and directives to create at all costs.

Mark Fisher, 6 July 2015, Sight and Sound: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/review-terminator-genisys

[6] Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Whitney Museum Lecture Fall 1982. Later revised and published in Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

[7] Although the term claims no direct translation into English, it is most commonly associated with ‘nostalgia.’ A more idiomatic translation is ‘desiderium,’ but this comes from the Latin root desiderare (to desire) while Saudade originates with solitās/solitātem: the state of being solitary. It is most facile to render the notion of Saudade as a desire for nostalgia, or a super-nostalgia, because as an imperial product it is multi-generational. It is a longing for the home of your parents, your grandparents—and beyond. Furthermore, with the return of Portuguese colonists from lands they had often occupied for hundreds of years, the term is sometimes layered with several homelands or objects of longing. It is my contention that longing brought to extreme forms by an excess of pure sensible referents (extreme compressions or expansion of time or space) designates the subject performing melancholic remembrance into the object of his own lamentation. The expansion of space is perhaps a pre-modern, or early modern one insofar as it affects these subjects of the earliest global European maritime power. The modern and late-modern experience, on the other hand, is no doubt evident in compressions of time and space, or the annihilation of space through time.

[8] James Pryor, “What's So Bad About Living in the Matrix?” in Christopher Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2005), p. 40.