Good question, and I sort of wished they’d explained it. What it is is a message from the Oracle. Since it’s just information, I speculate that they can transfer (through the phone line) a certain kind of data disk someone is holding with them, and download the information while they’re pulling the person themself out. So, they’re not really taking anything with them out of the Matrix. I believe, though I intend to check this next time I see it, that the data storage medium that he has in the real world looks different from the one they show inside the Matrix.
I believe this was briefly explained in the movie. It is where Smith is talking to Neo about how he killed Neo and then Neo destroyed him. Smith says he is not sure how it happened but possibly “something was copied or overwritten” so that Neo is a part of Smith and vice versa. This would explain how Smith can sense Neo and how Neo knows when Smith is coming.
This would also explain why both Neo and Smith (in Bane’s body) are in a coma at the end of Reloaded.
Two thoughts, and they contradict 
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What if the Oracle secretly wants the humans to win. If she is the intuitive program that the architect is talking about, designed to understand humans, maybe now she has empathy for us.
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What if the Architect is totally lying. What if he WANTS Neo to choose the door that he does. Think about it. If he really wanted Neo to choose the other door, wouldn’t it have been smarter to NOT tell Neo that his woman is dying?
Just some thoughs.
I haven’t played it, but I think that this message is the focus of the related video game, “Enter the Matrix” - can somebody who has played it tell us what’s going on with that?
Excuse me if this lacks continutity from the above posts but i haven’t been able to read through and if i dont post now i never will!
If Neo is the 6th ‘One’ and the previous 5 took the other door, then why is Neo different? well he takes the door to save Trinity - this would suggest Trinity is in fact equally as important and ‘oneish’ as Neo - If you remember throughout the film Neo says things like ‘i cant do this without you’ - ‘i need you’ and this would a) make sense and b) provide a better plot twist than the matrix within a matrix
i think the zion matrix is a too ‘obvious’ device laid down by the directors to make their plot twist for revolutions more unseen. I see no reason why agent smith who is now ‘free’ and able to replicate couldn’t ‘inhabitat’ a body - remember he doesn’t kill them (as far as we know) so to me this evidence of second level matrix is a little too planted.
Neo stopping the sentinanls - this is much harder to explain, when neo says ‘somethings different i can feel them’ he almost looks worried and slighlty disturbed as if he has realised they are still in the matrix. But if Neo is the one, and he rejected the choice of rebuilding zion then possibly he becomes more atuned with his real world as A) the sentinals have never had to fight further than this and b) Neos powers have developed because he rejected the architect.(maybe the architect himself gave him these powers to help him have a chance - .i.e make them meet again and convince him to rebuild)
That’s right on the money, and inspired by one of the doctrines that got the Gnostics branded as heretics in the first place-- part of what is collectively termed the Manichean heresy.
In the gnostic system, the messiah and satan are spiritual brothers, in that they both have an interest in subverting the laws of the demiurge (architect), which imprison intelligent beings in a deterministic universe. There are hints about this even in the first movie.
As has been mentioned before, in this system, “the right hand” represents bondage to determinism, or fate, while “the left hand,” represents liberation from that bondage through the development of will. Notice that the agents all take their orders through a receiver in their right ear. Smith indicates his rebellion by removing the wire while he candidly tells Morpheus that his motivation is also liberation from the system, and resentment of being made to exist in the Matrix. His motivations are selfish, but he, like Neo, is a renegade working against the architect… Clandestinely, in the first movie-- he’s quick to put the earplug back in when the other agents re-enter the room and ask him what the hell he’s doing. The right/left dichotomy is consistent through both movies, beyond the obvious “choice” the architect gives him. Eg; when Tank is guiding Neo’s escape through an apartment building in the the first movie, he tells him to go left, but Neo blindly goes right, until Tank points out his error… “No, the other left!”
I mentioned it before, but in case you haven’t read the whole thread, even Smith’s name has symbolic meaning, Vulcan was the Smith of the gods, associated with fire, and weapons of war. He pissed off Jupiter (Zeus) by thinking for himself and was exiled to live out eternity on Earth. Over the millennia many associations have been made between Vulcan & Satan-- particularly by gnostic greeks.
Why is it that the “Morning Star” is associated with Christ and the “Evening Star” is associated with Lucifer? (They both refer to the planet Venus, depending on when it appears.)
Bang on! This is at the very heart of the gnostic mythos:
(Sorry, this is remedial material for folks who have read the whole thread, but at least it’s reformulated with some additional details.)
The Oracle represents Sophia. The Architect (see the definition of demiurge) is dismissive of her, but she tricks him into allowing the possibility of humans “waking up” and freeing themselves from his deterministic universe. She guided his hand (without his knowledge) to make humans capable of receiving Gnosis. Then she arranges for a Messiah to make the delivery, and the Demiurge gets his ass kicked. It seems like a weird idea, if you’re used to the christian canon. (The bit of the quote that I’ve underlined offers a hint about the nature of Zion. The bit about uniting with a “spiritual twin” is important, too. Don’t forget that Neo’s ‘real’ name is Thomas Anderson. Thomas is the Greek form of the Aramaic name Te’oma which means “twin”.)
One might say that the Gnostics were a bunch of mama’s boys-- they consistently represent the Father as a tyrant, and look to the Mother for help-- To them, the important divine principle was feminine, and by comparison, conventional christianity is almost uniformly patriarchal. Trinity alludes to this a bit in the first movie, when she first meets Neo. “Trinity? The Trinity? The one that hacked the IRS database? I thought you were a guy.” “Most guys do.” Most people consider the christian Trinity to be fundamentally male: “Father, Son, & Holy Ghost.” The gnostics have a different take:
(In the gnostic gospels, Sophia divides part of herself and fashions it into Achamoth, the saviour’s spouse.)
From the beginning, the Oracle has been hinting that the appearance of free will is mostly a sham, and that’s why the future can be predicted. “Would you have broken the vase if I hadn’t said anything?” “You’ve already made the choice. You’re here to understand why you made it.” Because it was the only “choice” that could be made at that time. She’s like a croupier dropping subtle hints that the table is rigged. "The house always wins. Smarten up, buddy. The exit’s that way.
Lunch time-- Um, here endeth the lesson. Or something.
Blatantly stealing this from Slashdot:
Agent Smith has become spam. Neo’s fight with him in the courtyard represents what I do every day with my Hotmail account.
Ouch…my eyes hurt…this thread is getting too long…wish it weren’t so damned interesting though :P. Can’t seem …to stop myself…from …reading…more…
hehe…keep it up guys
Larry Mudd, I am finding your posts to be fascinating. I have a question for you as I have only a passing familiarity with Gnosticism and you seem to have quite a command of it.
Have the brothers W created a gnostic allegory? More specifically, have they left anything out? Other important texts (e.g. the Bible) have had bits and pieces taken out of context, or just specific parts illuminated to support a specific position without telling the whole story. Sometimes (I know this surprises everyone) we take the parts we like and ignore the parts we don’t like or are uncomfortable with or have difficulty with. So, what I want to know is are they telling their own tale here using this mythology, or part of it, as background, to give it weight, or is it a true allegory?
Thanks, KinSaba, that’s flattering. (To be honest, I feel a bit self-conscious posting so much on the subject. I’m sure I must sound like a complete loon to plenty of folks.)
As for your question, I don’t think it would be possible to produce a complete, coherant story which contains the whole Gnostic schema-- mostly because gnosticism isn’t a monolithic entity, there were a variety of different early christian sects that are considered “gnostic,” and they didn’t always agree.
Everything we’ve seen so far is pretty consistent with the beliefs of the Valentinians, and some of the more well-known Coptic & Manichean material recovered from Nag Hammadi. Have they left anything out? Well, yeah, they pretty much have to. I’m sure they pick over the material and focus on the stuff that translates well into dystopian sci-fi. They haven’t made use of anything from the Apocalypse of Adam, for example, which is a pretty central gnostic text-- and I’m not surprised, because, while it may be interesting to scholars, it sure as hell doesn’t scream “Movie property!” A lot of the material is downright mundane. One of things that set the Qumran community apart from their neighbors, for example, was a social code that mandated that, after you have a poop, you don’t do anything else until after you’ve had a fully-immersive bath. Strict adherence to that sort of thing, while probably for the best on a personal level, wouldn’t really bring a lot to the Matrix franchise.
I have two questions for everyone. First off, I just saw the movie for the second time and picked up a lot more than the first viewing. Also, I haven’t read through this entire thread so forgive me if it’s already been mentioned, but all the same, please answer my questions if you can, they’re killing me!
1.) Why are the agents trying to kill/delete the keymaker? If the machines need Neo to reach the source, then they should allow the keymaker to go with him right?
Here is my theory, but I'm interested as to what you all think as well. I think that, possibly, Neo and crew grabbed the wrong keymaker, and by wrong I mean the keymaker intended by the machines for Neo to find. The keymaker in the movie is supposed to be deleted, which should mean there is an upgraded version of the keymaker somewhere in the matrix. That would explain why the agents were trying to kill him so that Neo finds the *right* key maker. Now, if I remember correctly, Neo was supposed to enter the source at the same time as the machines reached Zion. So if they found an outdated keymaker, one that can still get him to the source, maybe Neo reached the architect too early. And that would also give Neo time to stop the machines from attacking Zion.
What he is supposed to do now I don’t know, and why Neo could stop the sentinels in Zion is not what I’d like answered here since there has already been so much discussion about that. I’m interested in the keymaker. What do you all think?
My second question is along the same lines.
2.) Why are the agents always after Neo. If the agents are part of the Matrix, and the Matrix is designed for Neo to reach the source to reload it, why would the agents be trying to stop him?
The first question about the Keymaker is what I’m more interested in, but that second question is nagging me too.
Whew! 24 hours later & I just got to the end of this thread. Is anyone still reading?
I can’t believe you are the only other one (maybe I missed some others) in 500 posts to make this observation. It seemed so obvious to me. I guess it wasn’t. Not that it means anything - he could appear as whatever he wanted.
That would make the counsellor dude 111 years old (he mentioned being “freed” at age 11). This is not impossible, considering that the technology of the day.
Spam, LOL!
“My name is Spam. Agent Spam.”
“You all look alike to me!”
One other thought,
The wireless connection to the Matrix.
Was this done in the first Matrix movie? When Cypher was meeting with Smith in the restaurant, was he plugged in? How could he have been without the others knowing? He was startled when Neo came up behind him and he quickly turned off a bunch of monitors. Only the scrolling code was left on, which Neo didn’t understand, at the time. This point has always nagged at me. I mean, you need an operator to get in/out, right? you can’t do it yourself.
Thanks, Larry, that’s pretty much what I was asking.
Ha! No, a movie based on the Book of Leviticus probably wouldn’t be all that entertaining, either!
Several thoughts have occurred to me while reading this thread over the past couple of days:
- Does time pass at the same rate for people inside the Matrix and people in the Real World/Zion Matrix? Has there been any indication of this? Is it possible that when Trinity is moving really really fast in the matrix she is just moving at normal human brain speed, while everyone caught up in the Matrix is operating at a much slower speed - the matrix being an underclocked dream reality rather than the “rebels” operating at super speeds. If this is true it could be that the duration of the Matrix is six hundred years from an external point of view but only a fraction of that internally.
2.) Do people age and die in the matrix or rather do peoples bodies age significantly and die in the support systems for the matrix? How are new people born. There seem to be kids but no mechanism for generating them (unless there is a test-tube baby farm somewhere). Would it be worth it for the matrix to make sure that the matrix parents of an individual and the real genetic parents of an individual be the same?
According to one of the comics available on the website (Goliath, the top one listed of Series 1 - you can get to the comics (from the High Bandwith part, at least) by clicking on the upper left box of the Mainframe section), Matrix time flows very differently from real world time. Fairly early on in the story, the hero is told by someone who is obviously an agent that the last fifteen years of his life have actually taken 37 minutes, since they’re running faster than usual to catchup. The story largely revolves around this ability that the Matrix has to screw with the perceptions of the people inside it. I’m not sure to what degree we’re supposed to accept the comics as cannon, though, although I didn’t notice any major inconsistencies with the first movie (I read them before Reloaded came out).
I don’t think this has been mentioned yet, but I certainly could’ve missed it somewhere in the heap. The Warner Bros. Matrix Trilogy pages contain the following, which touches on some of the philosophical discussions from this thread:
Go watch the first movie again. Morpheus talks about this during Neo’s recuperation and training. He says, “There are… fields. Endless fields, where humans are no longer born. They are grown.”
I think you could be more right than you know. I’ve been to see the film again since I last posted and I’ve changed my mind about a few things, the major one being that I now believe Zion is really the real world. I think Neo is now tuned into the Matrix so fully that he can even control machines on the outside as well as plug himself in wirelessly (which he does when he goes into a caoma).
Meanwhile, everything inside the Matrix has been set up by the machines to lead Neo to the Source. I think the machines have come to realise that humans love a story, and created the whole scenario of the evil king in his castle with werewolf bodyguards, the mysterious old lady who can tell the future and so on to give the One and his companions an adventure so they would think they were on a noble quest whereas in fact they are being constantly manipulated. Handily, this also explains any plot holes and inconsistencies that occur in the Matrix. It happened that way because that’s the way the machines wanted it to happen.
Agent Smith, however, is the exception to this. He is perhaps even more of a rebel than Neo and almost certainly more of a threat to the structure of the Matrix. Near the start of the film, after Neo fights the three agents in the alleyway, Smith appears and says something like ‘Excellent. It’s all happening exactly as before’ and a second Smith replies ‘Well, not exactly’. This, among other things, suggests to me that Smith is the only difference in this cycle of the Matrix. He knows where Neo will be at any given time because he knows the story of the One. How it happened before and how it is supposed to happen again. Maybe he is really trying to stop Neo from reaching the source because he wants the endless cycle to end just as badly as the humans do.
‘…the endless cycle to end…’
That sounds a bit stupid really. Oh well.
Hats off, Wayward! That’s a great post. Will Neo and Smith team up to fight Morpheus in the last one? And on the Neo/Smith twin subject: did you notice in the Revolutions trailer how Neo and Smith mirrored each other as they ran up for the punch? Sweet.