I know this is one of those “who cares? Why worry about it?” questions, and it IS science fiction, so I’m sure a plausible goofy answer can be created, however…
Why is Neo hairless when he is taken out of the pod and flushed? I would also ask why he is wearing a big diaper, but I assumed that was for our sake as viewers and the ratings people, so Neo’s junk wouldn’t be visible when he slid down the flush tube.
But Neo IS hairless. And when he comes out, his hair begins to grow everywhere, just like you would expect.
Why? Why and how did the machines make him hairless? Was he in a swimming pool full of liquid nair?
I assume the Machines drugged all of their batteries, er, human beings to keep them from growing hair, so there’d be no bother about shampooing or shaving them. Once Neo was freed and the drug’s effect wore off, he started growing hair naturally.
Or, the goop he was floating in would consume hair & dead skin, as his body would be constantly shedding a certain amount of both, and converted it into more nutrient goop (the ultimate recycling).
You’re under the assumption that Neo was born like a normal human being. You have to remember that this is not the case :
All humans (including Neo, and excluding those born in Zion) in the “real world” are grown by the machines. They are hatched in those pods. They are bred hairless, with connecting ports (like an IV) for fluids and nutrition.
When he comes out, yes his hair begins to grow because he is no longer connected to the machines’ form of nutrition. Natural human behavior takes over and without the pod/IV tubes, all his body functions begin to take on their natural characteristics.
When he’s in his pod, he doesn’t need hair for warmth or to attract potential mates, so growing hair represents wasted resources and the machines took whatever steps to suppress it. Once removed from the pod, this active suppression stopped and hair growth resumed.
Compared to some of the movies’ other required disbelief-suspensions, this one is pretty minor.
true enough. It wasn’t a real problem for me either in terms of enjoying the movie. I am not a science fiction fan at all, and I liked the Matrix. It was just one of a number of things that didn’t exactly get explained in the movie, but it’s not something that stops the plot in its tracks.
Thanks for the answers. Good explanations. I especially like the one that said that the growing of hair cost each “battery” energy that was not useful for the machines. So it was suppressed. However, if this was the case, then a human battery growing at all makes no sense, as that would expend enourmous energy, right? I would think that if they had the ability to stop hair growth, they could also stop body/muscle/ skin/bone growth as well. So they should all have been little babies.
A full-grown man or woman with all synapses humming would create more energy for them than a little baby with much-less-developed brain function, wouldn’t it? But the point has been made elsewhere that humans couldn’t actually serve as batteries for the Machines - they’d have to put in more energy to maintain us than they’d get out of us.
Allegedly the original concept was that human brains served as distributed processors for the machines, because they have so many neural connections (a literal neural network). But someone decided that was too complex for the average moviegoer to digest, so the plot point was changed to “they derive energy from us.”
One could also imagine that we provide a type of energy they need and can only get from us, and the necessary energy loss is worth it. Morpheus’s explanation of a battery could be an oversimplification, a misunderstanding on his part, or an outright lie. Or a combination of those.
I’m comfortable with the “outright lie” part: the bots have people locked up in case they need us to write some new code for them some day, but as far as energy is goes, they have a form of cold fusion (and have oodles of highly energetic robots flying around), so the amount of energy they can harvest from us is not part of the equation. They only need humans around to reboot the system every once in a while when things get out of hand.
They only need the odd human, “The One”, to reboot the Matrix. The machine society runs under terms we can barely comprehend – and only the audience saw the Machine World in action. Eventually, I figured, the power cell explanation was (allegedly) tacked on by the studio, the creators originally wanted a human spare processor network, but those were MacGuffins. There was a war, humans lost, the machines kept the remaining humans in a prison camp. Maybe not as bad as Auschwitz, but its a prison camp, how nice were the Machines obligated to make it? Perpetual 1999 is pretty nice, compared to extermination.
The real question, then, is why would you want to be outside the Matrix?
If the Matrix was designed to keep everybody happy and healthy, successful and stress-free (which, as a computer program, it should be doing to keep people from even entertaining the idea that a Morpheus is floating around in “reality” to bring us out of our deep sleep and into the real world.), why would you ever want to leave? Cypher had it right, in my opinion, when he was eating that steak. Ignorance is bliss.
The hero in all of us says “I’ll take the red pill”, but in reality, knowing both sides of the equation, why wouldn’t you want to live your life in the Matrix? I would have wanted a do-over too, and taken the blue pill. Or in Cypher’s way of thinking, get inserted back into the matrix, provide the machines whatever power they can get from him, and he can live the life he wants to inside the Matrix. So what if it’s a dream? You never wake up from it and you beliee it to be real.
And also, isn’t it an odd coincidence that The Matrix just happened to be simulating a perpetual 1999, same time in history that the movie itself came out? Very hard to swallow.
I’ll spoiler this since I don’t think it was from the first movie:
This ends up being addressed later on. The original Matrix was a paradise, but the human consciousness rebelled against it and the robots were forced to simulate a more realistic word, complete with stress and turmoil.
There’s always somebody who has to be that “Rebel without a Cause”. The grass is always greener somewhere else.
There’s always someone who wants to march to the beat of a different drum. Most of these misfits die unfulfilled, but occasionally some become great thinkers or artists (or whatever).
The Matrix apparently doesn’t understand Humans very well, even though they build a convincing simulation of late 20th century civilization. For example, I think there’s always going to be people who chaff under those conditions.
Consider the types of men in “Jeremiah Johnson”. They have this drive to go off into the utter wilderness and tame their small piece of it, or to see what’s on the other side of the hill. The machines can’t understand that motivation. Why leave perfectly good indoor plumbing and dentistry? I suppose they could build a simulation with challenges for such souls, but their first response is to try to hammer these square pegs into the round holes the Matrix provides.