Ah, found it. I found The Matrix: Revolution trailer, here. After viewing it (it's kind of big - 13 megs), I've got this jittery, spastic, hyper-active energy going through me. I don't see how Cornel West can say that the movies are criticizing the salvation narrative. There's a scene in the trailer of Morpheus saying, softly, "he fights for us," speaking of Neo. This is just so obviously a salvation narrative to me. Neo fights for his people.
It totally reminds me of a sermon my brother-in-law once gave. He gave this illustration from a William Faulkner novel - I forget which one - where there was this young middle school boy who had a girlfriend who was, by most accounts, a slut. And she had been with all the boys. But this one particular boy loved her. And so when he heard one of her much larger ex-boyfriends start to say things about her, he tried to fight him. And he was getting beat pretty badly, but there's this line that always moved me - the girl says, "I've had boys fight for me. I've never had a boy fight for me." There is a difference, and the thing which is so breathtaking to me about the Christian story is that Jesus fights for his people. So weak and frail on the cross, dying for us.
That's one of the many things that makes the matrix movies so sublime to me. I see the warrior of Christ in Neo, and I see Jesus's tender love for his bride in Neo as well. I think the reason why so many different groups see the matrix movies as representing their story (I mentioned previously that in New Orleans, I was in a post-post-structuralist, post-freudian, post-marxist reading group, and many of the people in it said that the Matrix was a critique of capitalism), is because all of the great tales of history speak, at some level, about this creation-fall-redemption pattern. That is, this movie is capable of being all things for all people because all people are telling each other the story of someone or something that will save them. Magnolia and Boogie Nights do this, too - Magnolia more explicitly than Boogie Nights, but I think the same narrative arc is in Boogie Nights as well. We all feel the oppression and the enslavement and we dream dreams of being free. The thought of a king who comes back to free his people - full of anger at the gall of the one who would do this to his people - is a love story, and it's the greatest love story of history. It's the one of which there are shadows and traces in all forms of thought, in all cultures, in all people. Even, gasp, I suppose, in Marxism (my own personal boogyman), if Cornel West's appearance is to mean anything (although Garver tells me he's not technically a Marxist in the economic sense).
Man, in the movie, there is a part where Morpheus says, "but what if the prophecies are true. What do you do if the prophecies are true?" or something like that. Basically, the question I need to ask myself is - what if Jesus really was the messiah of Israel, and the prophecies about him were true? What if he really did come back to life and is alive now? What does this mean? What's different as a result of that? Who do I want to be in light of that fact? Where do I want to go? Truth be known, when I think about the story being true, I want my life to be a living sacrifice for that story's sake. Not to retreat in some fundamentlist ghetto, but to die, in the same form that my king died, for this mission. That's why, I pray, that God will send Paige and my family back to New Orleans after I complete this program. I want Miles to grow up and know that there is something far more important and more worthy than the next best thing, or even the security and happiness of this life. I want him to grow up into a humble warrior, in the likeness of Christ, for this faith of ours - to see that his life can have no better use than to lay it on the altar and to give himself for others, that they might know that the stories which they tell themselves are true, and that the messiah is real.
It's strange how a movie can bring out so many personal things like that - like dreams of heaven and feelings that we live in an exciting time, and that there is no better way for me to live than to live a dying life for christ and for the world.
Posted by Admin at May 31, 2003 09:46 AM