From Here to Zion - the Matrix & Reality

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I went to the movies with two friends the night the Matrix was released. We had heard it was a must-see from someone that said they were going back to the theater to see it for a second time that same day. As we approached the ticket booth, the man working behind the counter told us we had just bought the last three tickets. About two and a half hours later, I walked out of that theater feeling like it was fate that had placed me in that theater seat, with that ticket, on that night. A quick bit about myself before I get to my point- I have been an artist and writer since I was very young, and up to that point, anything I had ever written, I had envisioned as work of sequential art (comic book/graphic novel) or animation. I had always been very influenced by animation/anime, and film, but my ideas had always been so unrealistic and surreal, there was no way a movie could ever compare with animation, at best. I walked out of that theater that night with my entire perception of visual storytelling turned on it's ear. I could now envision how my ideas could possibly translate to live-action film. It is still my #1 favorite movie of all time, as a die-hard sci-fi, dystopia, martial arts, and philosophy fanatic. But there has always been a darker shadow of the story which I seemed to notice life seemed to increasingly mirror over the following years, and it's the age old 'does art imitate life, of does life imitate art' conundrum. As I have always said, when asked about my thoughts on said conundrum - life imitates art imitates life imitates art...et cetera. It's cyclical, and in the case of the Matrix, it's an unfortunate reality in the form of a double-edged blade - technology has continued along an irrevocably advantageous and resourceful path in the years since 1999, but at the same time- it has chewed away at the humanity of every day life experience , to a point where we can no longer imagine an existence without cell phones, and the omnipresence of the internet. In public, people everywhere are always nose-down into their screens. At home, it's not much different. The overall dependence has extrapolated to a point of a near-superfluous existential bond. In many cases, technology has always strove to make life better. To improve upon the grand design and save time as a means to improve productivity...but in even more cases, it has just made life and even the most simple of tasks needlessly easier. Some advancements of which are indeed beneficial, but others that are completely arbitrary. So as I observe things such as the internet making the world a little smaller, and bringing mankind closer to one another in terms of connectivity, I also notice how it can force distance between people sitting next to one another. How we're more concerned with what's happening outside our own territorial bubble, and can be distracted from experiencing the immediate world around us. When I correlate this to the fictional world of the Matrix, I think back to how life was in 1999. And how much has changed since. The unsettling symbolism of that distance between our territorial bubble and the digital world at our fingertips. Were I were to be insincere, I would say I can't begin to imagine how technology and our dependence on it could evolve in another eighteen years. If I were to be honest, I'd say I have an unpleasant sense of where it's headed, and it's not rainbows and butterflies. Because I can almost imagine, on a long enough timeline...from here to Zion.

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#TheMatrix #Essay