Meanings of the Matrix Trilogy

For those of you who don't already know, Ken Wilber is a writer and a philosopher.  He's a rather remarkable philosopher, in my opinion.  He now has a web site called Integral Naked (need to pay for access) where he interviews various people.  His most recent interview is with Larry Wachowski. In the text below, Ken shares part of his interpretation of the movies and Larry addresses why he has refused to comment:

Larry and Andy Wachowski, the writers and directors of The Matrix trilogy, have been reluctant to share their interpretation of the films from day one, fearing that whatever they said would turn into dogma. However, this did present a problem for Warner Brothers when producing The Matrix DVD boxed set (to be released this fall). How do you have a director's commentary–a must for any boxed set–when the directors refuse to comment?

What the Wachowskis did was to ask Ken Wilber and Cornel West to do the director's commentary on all 3 films. The following dialogue was recorded right before Ken flew to LA to meet with Larry and Cornel and do the recorded commentary. Ken and Cornel recorded 15 hours of commentary, which has been edited down to 6 hours to fit the 3 films, and the boxed set with all 3 films–and 6 hours of Ken and Cornel's commentary–will be released in October.

In the following dialogue, for the first time ever, we are lucky enough to hear Larry publicly comment on this situation. As he explains, the movies were in many ways designed not to give answers, but to introduce questions. What does it mean to be human? What is reality? Who is in control? Does God exist? and so on. If he was to explain what he thought the movies meant, he would be providing people with another concept of reality to either accept or reject–either way, the open space created by the question would vanish.

The Matrix injected mainstream culture with a straight shot of the surreal, where fact and fiction and truth and appearance are not grounded in a single pre-given "reality," because reality is simply what appears to be real. In a dream, the dream is real–until you wake up. In the Matrix, the Matrix is real–until you wake up. But what if you never woke up? It's questions like that that Larry wished to inspire, and he certainly succeeded.

As Ken points out, the first movie is fairly easy to grok: everything in the Matrix is bad, everything outside of the Matrix is good. Everyone inside the Matrix is trapped, everyone outside the Matrix is free, and so on. But twenty minutes into part 2, Reloaded, and the audience discovers that the Oracle is a machine program, at which point most people go: um, what?

What had begun as a simple good guy/bad guy movie had just become a complex piece of literature, with different levels of interpretation and a very sophisticated model of reality. Ken suggests that it's not until the last twenty minutes of part 3, Revolutions, that the key to the trilogy is revealed: although–and perhaps because–Neo is physically blind, he sees the machines as luminous, golden light–not quite how the "bad guys" are seen in most movies. And yet Neo is unmistakable in what he says to Trinity: "If you could see them as I see them, they are all made of Light...." Indeed, the machines represent Spirit, but Spirit as alienated and therefore attacking....

Thus, as Ken summarizes a more integral interpretation (that takes into account what is revealed in all three films), Zion represents body (filmed in blue tint), the Matrix represents mind (green tint), and the machines–this is the kicker revealed in part 3–represent spirit (golden tint). For those of you keeping track, this is indeed quite similar to the Great Nest of Being as taught by the world's wisdom traditions, a spectrum of being and consciousness reaching from body to mind to spirit.

Borrowing from the wisdom of Christian mysticism, "The flames of Hell are but God's love denied," and so an alienated and dissociated spirit manifests as an army of machines bent on destroying humankind. It is only in the integration of body, mind, and spirit that all three are redeemed and peace returns.