People all around the world contribute with non-governmental organizations, participate in solidarity campaigns, donate clothing and food for charitable causes, not because they are truly worried about dying children in Africa, or victims of earthquakes and tsunamis in South America or Asia, but because is so doing they lessen their alienation from all the suffering in the world; in contributing, in donating people can go on with their lives and continue buying for the act of consuming, for they do not need the great part of what they buy.
In this perspective, a message to humanity may be conveyed through the meaning behind The Matrix, an allegory representing the alienation and ignorance of people in a world subdued by mass media consumption. The message apprehended is beyond the representation of the alienation itself; it is a calling for humanity to awaken from immobility, to get out of the cave and see the world the way it actually is. According to Irvin,
The only thing worse than a prison for your mind would be a prison for your mind you didn't know you were in, a prison from which, therefore, you would have no urge to escape. How would a person in such a prison even recognize if he were set free? (IRVIN, 2002, p.11)
The alienation, its concept, has two different implications that somewhat can be seen intertwined and can reflect what was exposed so far in this paper. Hess, Feuerbach, and Marx popularized the assumption that “alienation is a process whereby products of human work and life gain a quasi-autonomous existence and dominate (or oppress) people like foreign powers; people lose control of their own creations. The word ‘alienation’ is often used in a vague sense of being injuriously separated from society or one’s own milieu.”. In a certain degree, both assumptions apply to what is observed in The Matrix: the technology produced by humanity generated potent artificially intelligent computer programs which were able, afterwards, of recreating themselves out of human influence and to dominate the human race. The other conception applies to the human imputed ignorance of the ugly part of the world.
From the beginning of this paper to this point, all the assumptions presented were based in the belief that The Matrix carries a message behind all the special effects and the Kung Fu fighting. Nevertheless, this belief is supported by theoretic concepts on intertextuality and on allegory.
Different authors describe intertextuality differently: some of them do not talk about ‘intertextuality’, but about ‘influence’; others, argue that new texts are just possible, because they retake, repeat, challenge, and transform previous texts (CULLER, 1999, p. 40); others, yet, claim that “intertextuality is the very condition of literature, that all texts are woven from the tissues of other texts, whether their authors know it or not” (LODGE, 1992, p.98-99). The assumption here shares some of this information, but takes it further: the pieces of art may dialogue between each other intentionally or not, explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously regarding the author, the painter, or the director, but for intertextuality to happen the audience in the reception must realize this dialogue; otherwise, all the meanings intended or not through intertextuality will not arise.
The movie presents intertextuality in different ways: there are echo, allusion, and direct quotation, and structural parallelism. There are references to philosophy through the Myth of the Cave by Plato, to literature through Alice in Wonderland (in the very beginning of the movie, Neo is told by a message in his computer to follow the White Rabbit – a girl’s tattoo; later on, Morpheus says to Neo "I imagine right now you are feeling a bit like Alice—tumbling down the rabbit hole."), to Greek mythology (Morpheus is named after the God of Sleep responsible for bring changes in shape during the dreams), and to contemporary philosophers (Neo holds a book titled Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard; later, Morpheus, while explaining to Neo what he knows about the war between humans and machines, says “This is the world as it exists today. Welcome to the desert of the real." – the expression ‘the desert of the real’ is a direct quotation from an article by Jean Baudrillard called Simulacra and Simulations).
In this sense, the awareness of the possibility that The Matrix can be understood as an allegory or as an action movie has to do with the disposition of the moviegoer, or the audience at home, to see more than sees the eye, actually. The relations that come to audience’s conscience have to do with their readings, their experiences, their professions, their beliefs, etc. It is a myriad of possibilities provided by the synapses receiving, transmitting and relating information continuously.
Similarly to what happen in intertextuality, to recognize an allegory, despite the author’s intention, is a process of identification that must occur in the reader. According to CEIA (2010), the decoding of an allegory depends always of a intertextual reading that enables the reader to identify in an abstract meaning a deeper significance of moral character. Lodge (1992. p. 143), on the other hand, states that “allegory is a specialized form of symbolic narrative, which does not merely suggest something beyond its literal meaning, but insists on being decoded in terms of another meaning”.
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