Crossing the Desert of the Real*

I just got through teaching my favorite movie-to-teach, The Matrix (the exquisite first, not the absymal sequels). I don't know that my students necessarily ate it up (one astute coed suggested I next rent Videodrome), but we had a great time riffing on the many cultural references jampacked into the story: in the dialogue, in the visuals, in the soundtrack, in the plot structure. Just the names alone--Morpheus, Trinity, Neo/The One, Cypher--provide an excellent platform for getting my young charges to start thinking in terms of the layered midden that is our culture--that is, in fact, our own self-created Matrix.

More than one student stopped us at a particularly exciting point in discussion--cognitus interruptus--to ask if, well, uh, this was all okay. You know, with Them. Seems students were persistently worried that we might be reading too much into the symbols and scattered cultural detritus of, say, the Oracle scene.

Hello? I need a transport: the only way it's possible to read too much in is if you believe--as They want you to--that you are a passive reviewer, set to receive and not to interpret or, Architect forbid, to add.

But that's a radical idea. As is, ultimately, the desert of the real.

I need to teach them all about Virginia Woolf's theory of the active reader, she who once said, "'Few people ask from books what books can give us."

Or from life.

(*with apologies to Jean Baudrillard).

Hey. Wait a minute. The Wachowski brothers never apologized.

Jeez.

categories: architecture art film teaching thought words