The Matrix Resurrections: Absolute Commodity
January 23, 2022
When questioned on how he felt about the influence his writings had on the conceptual development of The Matrix (1999), Baudrillard replied that the film confuses the problem of simulation with the problem of illusion. In the sense he meant it, illusion refers to a distortion of the content of consciousness. Illusion is the veil pulled over our eyes to hide the truth, an image implying the possibility of the veil being lifted or pierced, of an escape from illusion into reality. And it is this figure that presides over the film’s narrative: as soon as Neo swallows the red pill, the difference between the illusory world of the matrix and the real world outside it becomes fixed. But this is not simulation, which consists precisely in the disappearance of this difference between the real and the illusory. In this respect, a more accurate depiction of simulation is to be found in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) or even more vividly in Videodrome (1983). According to Baudrillard, the ideological structure of consumer society is based not on illusion but on simulation, in the way that it erases the difference between what things are and the way they present themselves. The loss of contrast between the real and its representation is the key condition which allows marketing and PR to wield functional power. Insofar as The Matrix attempts a critique of consumerism, then, it not only misses its mark but in fact reproduces the ideology it aims to subvert: by presenting the consumer utopia as an illusion to be escaped it upholds the contrast between illusion and reality, effectively masking the true ideological structure. Or as Baudrillard put it, The Matrix is the film the Matrix would make about itself.
I saw Resurrections last night, and it was the first time I have ever heard an entire cinema full of people collectively groan when the credits went up. I won’t dwell on the film’s details, but suffice to say that the groan-factor was located not so much in the fact that nothing really happened, or that there were loads of pointless extra characters, or all the weird out-of-joint throwbacks to highly forgettable moments from Matrices II and III, or that it contained no new ideas or lore, all of which is true, but in the far more morose fact that it is a film about nothing other than itself, conducted in a mood of self-consciously lame reflexivity with all the subtlety of a Saturday Night Live sketch. To give just one example: the films contains a Morpheus 2.0 character, a piece of software written by Neo to help him break out of the new version of the Matrix. This character is pure pantomime, constantly dancing around and drinking cocktails dressed like he’s on tour with Funkadelic. In a moment which relives the scene from the original film in which Morpheus offers Neo the blue or the red pill, 2.0 struts out of a toilet cubicle in a bright yellow leisure suit before making an oblique reference to Marx’s comment that history repeats itself ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ The joke somehow manages to be both bungling and gate-keepy at the same time, and as a result makes you hate yourself for getting it. The entire film is woven from this kind of nonsense.
The real mystery that confronts you when watching Resurrections is how it ever ended up getting made in the first place—it is a film which appears to despise not only the studio who commissioned it, but also the audience who watch it and indeed itself. Then you remember that you’re the asshole that bought the ticket. And of course this is the heart of the paradox. It’s sometimes remarked that the reason jokes in Christmas crackers are always so terrible is that bad jokes are more inclusive than good ones. Good jokes tend to be clever or subtle, and can create implicit hierarchies when some people don’t get them, or don’t have access to the right context. A collective cringe is often more socially desirable than a private smirk. A similar logic seems to underly the homogenising pressures that Hollywood studios exert over directors, dictated ultimately by box office revenue. Films are social goods, meaning the value people derive from watching them often has more to do with the hanging out with friends part than the film itself, and it may well be more fun to slate a crappy film together than to see some arthouse slow-burner which might split opinion or leave people feeling excluded. And it is exactly these kind of forces, exerting a downward pressure on cultural production, funnelling it always towards the lowest common denominator and which we can’t help but be complicit in, that Resurrections’ self-reflexivity sort of tries to grapple with but also not really.
In his lectures on Postcapitalist Desire, Mark Fisher made a related point about Starbucks. The stereotypical McCarthyite take on communism is that it homogenises—everyone has to have the same car, the same clothes, you know the drill—whereas capitalism opens up a much wider space for variety and personal choice. What Fisher points out is that this assumed desire for personal variation is not reflected in actual consumer markets, which are typically dominated by incredibly generic brands like Starbucks, sitting in generic spaces like shopping malls with cinemas showing reliably generic spectacles like Marvel films. If these are understood as social goods, then it seems that what is actually driving mass markets is not the desire for personal expression or satisfaction at all, but the desire for collective spaces free from implied hierarchy, in which the individual can dissolve into anonymity—in short, something that looks suspiciously like a desire for communism. Despite the rhetoric of personal freedom and expression centred by both neoliberal ideologues and their critics, the way Actually Existing Capitalism often seems to operate is by capturing the desire for collectivity itself. The problem is then that the official ideology, which remains individualistic, positions anyone who tries to represent or shape collective desire as some kind of elitist. Officially, people’s purchases are interpreted as expressing their preferences as individuals (if Resurrections grosses well, this is an indicator that lots of people actually valued it). In reality, people’s purchases reflect attempts to coordinate around social goods (if Resurrections grosses well, this is an indicator only that lots of people thought it could make for an amusing evening with their friends, perhaps only because it would be fun to cringe at together).
Ultimately the studio doesn’t care why it grosses well, so long as it does. But their official stance has to be that if it grosses well then this is because people thought it was good. They can’t just say “we make films that are bad on purpose to make you click,” because this would undermine both real enjoyment and cringe enjoyment. And with this point in mind, we can perhaps give a more charitable interpretation of the social act Lana Wachowski was trying to smuggle into this turkey. Because it is completely impossible to come away from it thinking that anyone could have enjoyed it in anything other than a bad-on-purpose way—there are just way too many overlapping and self-quoting badnesses to make ‘taking it seriously’ any kind of meaningful attitude towards it, even as deliberate comedy. In this sense the film directly and publicly mocks the studio’s alibi: that it tries to make films people think are good. Of course everyone already knows that much of this stuff is bad-on-purpose. But alibis aren’t about belief, they’re about plausible deniability. By representing what is already privately obvious publicly on the big screen, it attempts to undermine the plausible deniability that underwrites the alibi. By raising its bad-on-purposeness to a new level of self-awareness it tries to dissolve the very meaningfulness of trying to measure its aesthetic value against some external standard, like ticket sales.
Interestingly, if this is even halfway right then what it means is that Resurrections is the first of the four Matrix films to touch the problem of simulation, as Baudrillard intended the term. Here we could make a comparison with financial markets. Everyone knows that financial markets are radically speculative—that what drives them is buying and selling based on judgements about what others are buying and selling, regardless of any perceived ‘real’ value. But nevertheless the official fiction has to be maintained that all these charts and figures are reflections (accurate or inaccurate) of real value, of something that exists outside of and prior to the financial markets themselves. This official fiction is what stabilises the speculative feedback loop, and if it were to disappear the fear is that the whole system would be destabilised. But if we turn this around, the act of exposing the official fiction can be understood as a method for deliberately destablising speculative systems.
Baudrillard actually made this strategy explicit in a concept he termed the ‘absolute commodity.’ (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 116) He argues, essentially, that commodities are always social goods—the value we place in them is always irreducibly bound up with our perception of others’ valuations of them. In this respect commodity markets are inherently speculative. But the official fiction says that the market value of commodities is ultimately rooted in our individual assessments of their utility. According to the official fiction, people buy things based on their individual judgements of what they’re worth to them, and any speculative activity is secondary to or parasitic on this primary activity. The absolute commodity is imagined as an object of pure speculation, something so self-reflexively useless that it becomes impossible to interpret its value as rooted in a utility, and which thereby exposes the official fiction as a sham. There’s many conceptual artworks which could conceivably fall under this strategy—Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007), for instance. If we were searching for a gesture of resistance within Resurrections, we could certainly view it in the spirit of the absolute commodity.
All of which raises a problem, because it is eminently clear at this point that none of this stuff works. No-one is actually scandalised when the film literally tells you that Warner Bros forced its production on pain of contract termination. Damien Hirst did not break the art market; he was absorbed by it. The absolute commodity is, in my opinion, one of the things Baudrillard got wrong (I’ve laid out why I think that is here). But nevertheless, what the new Matrix film shows so vividly is how a particular logical knot of irony, self-reflexivity and aborted subversion, one which belonged in the domain of French theorists in the 1990’s and of conceptual artists in the 2000’s, now finds expression at the heart of popular mass culture.
References
- Baudrillard, J. (1990). Fatal Strategies (P. Beitchman & W. G. J. Niesluchowski, Trans.). Semiotext(e) / Pluto.