CJC.org

The Christian Science Monitor has a nice article on religion and The Matrix. The article is more for people unfamiliar with the movie and its upcoming sequels, and unfamiliar with their late-night, drunken, rambling grad student philosophical texture (and I mean “late-night drunken ramblings” in the most affectionate of ways), it presents a magazine-length reading the Matrix in terms of Christian Gnosticism:

Gnosticism never developed a well-defined theology, but it depicts Jesus as a hero figure who saves mankind through “gnosis,” or esoteric knowledge. In the Gnostic philosophy, the physical world is not part of God’s creation, but a manifestation of a lower god – a nightmarish reality that imprisons mankind, say religious experts. Gnostics believed they could achieve salvation, not by overcoming evil and sin with God’s grace, but by learning the “higher knowledge” about reality.

There’s also an interesting little glossary on major elements of the first movie, complete with little details like the numerology of apartments and the etymology of the name “Thomas Anderson”.

Update: There’s a much longer, much nicer article up at The New Yorker on the same theme, but without the sample of detail-obsessed numerology and with a heavy dose of movie review that pans the sequel as something leaden that feels like “Matrix XIV”, the movie made after a long-running franchise has run out of ideas.

Posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2003 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.