Nomad Codes

horror but cannot move—encased, as it were, in the amber of dream time. What we want in these moments is the secret wish whose fulfillment animates these films: the desire to awaken inside the phantom world and wrest control from the dream machine.
    On this level of psychic control, both Matrix films can be read as Castaneda-esque instruction manuals for lucid dreamers. As the first film suggests, the simple knowledge that one is dreaming is not usually enough to exert control on the illusory world; instead, one achieves full creative action only after a lot of training in the dreaming dojo. The first thing that a lot of dreamers do when they first go lucid is also one of the first visual pleasures The Matrix Reloaded gives us: flight. Neo’s batwinged cruise through the moonstruck heavens is not just a Superman reference, but also a specific invocation of our own dream experience. This is what people don’t understand about the Wachowskis’ special effects, many of which revolve around virtual camera moves impossible to generate in the real world. Remember the subconscious equation of film: I am the camera. When the Wachowskis propel their camera faster than a speeding bullet, when it swoops and dives with angelic grace or whips through a frozen moment of space-time—these novel perceptions strike us at first as virtual experiences, familiar only through dream time or trance.
    The novelty of these effects wears off fast, of course, and we soon assimilate the technique as mere technological rhetoric. “Bullet Time” sells beer now; we are not impressed. Our rapidly jaded eyes drive the arms race of special effects, a race that suggests that we will not be satisfied until we somehow break through and manipulate space itself—a pleasure now increasingly available through computer games, like the Wachowskis’ own Enter the Matrix . As in lucid dreams, the question is all about control, a control that necessarily implies a certain technical disenchantment. We can control our dreams when we recognize they are merely dreams, just as we can create the “magic” of FX only with the total mathematization of space-time and the images of human bodies. The Matrix films are not neo-Luddite propaganda; the Wachowski brothers recognize that technology accompanies all our dreams. Early in the second film, an insomniac Neo wanders through the depths of Zion as Councilor Hamann draws his attention to an irony only implicit in the first film: The good guys also depend utterly on machines. In their stilted chat, Neo differentiates between the Matrix and Zion’s technological infrastructure, a steam-punk space of Tesla-coil arc lights and corroded Modern Times gears that looks back to the organic textures of the last century. Neo implies that Zion is free because humans have control. But this nineteenth-century romance only raises the question Hamann asks him: “What is control?”
    This question is not just the nut of the movie. It is the central koan of cybernetic civilization and our ever more intricate symbiosis with algorithms, control systems and the kind of self-replicating bots suggested by Agent Smith. All the representatives of the Matrix, even the Oracle, continually suggest that conscious human agency is not what it’s cracked up to be. During his first balletic bash with Neo, Smith, though now apparently a “free agent” like Neo, insists that everything is determined by its purpose. He does not use the term as Morpheus later does, to suggest destiny or a higher calling. Instead, he means a techno-Darwinian logic, a programmed calculus of success. His is the voice of the evolutionary psychologist, who delights in deconstructing our most spirited social actions in terms of the base advantage they confer. This is also the perspective of the Merovingian, who comes off as a curious hybrid between Herod and Pilate from Jesus Christ Superstar . With the aphrodisiac piece of pie he feeds a future fuckbunny, the Merovingian raises the distinct glandular possibility that “decision” is simply the story the brain tells itself about the neural cascades of electrochemical reactions that underlie behavior. Code rules: Despite appearances, we are out of control.
    As mythographers, the Wachowski brothers realize that the cybernetic problem of control reboots the hoary old struggle between freedom and fate. Morpheus, for example, is convinced that everything is proceeding according to cosmic plan, but his increasingly