Higher Meanings: More Like the Other

Did you happen to notice that the personalities of Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, and Niobe in M1-M3 had noticeably suppressed, cold, logical, machine-like personalities, while the personalities of various programs such as the Oracle, Merovingian, Rama-Kandra, Persephone, Sati, etc. were hyper-human and larger than life? I sure did.

I believe this was by design. From a 2006 Rolling Stone article titled "The Mystery of Larry Wachowski":

"Larry and Andy were always into the concept of suppression, of suppressing oneself," says Marcus Chong, who played Tank, the driver of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, in the first Matrix film. "One of their big directorial notes was 'Be stoic. Never show your true self.' "

It seems clear to me that many of the human characters strive to be like machines (see Neo: The Machine to see how Tank, Mouse and Trinity all seem to idolize Neo simply because he's more like a machine than they are), while many of the machine/program characters strive to be like humans. In M4, in fact, Neo codes a Morpheus character in a Modal for the sole purpose of AI development. As a result, the M4 Morpheus character is perhaps even more flamboyant than the Merovingian is. Interestingly, the human Morpheus in M1-M3 acted like a machine, while the synthient Morpheus from M4 acted like a human.

What Marcus Chong says above seems to confirm the first half of my theory (namely that humans in M1-M3 strive to be more like machines), and as for the second half of my theory, I would bet money that the Oracle, Merovingian, etc. were not given similar instructions. In fact, I suspect they were told in one way or another to act very expressively (if the actors/actresses didn't already do so naturally).

Also, the Nebuchadnezzar (not a sentient machine, but a machine nonetheless) was deliberately designed to show blue and red wires exposed (representing arteries and veins), as opposed to being covered up by smooth plating like what is seen in most sci-fi spaceships.

With this in mind, M1-M3 shows the critical steps of evolution of two races of beings: humans evolve to be more like machines (Neo), and machines evolve to be more like humans (Oracle's faith). I thought for sure that if there would ever be a fourth movie, it would involve the final huge step of evolution here: reproduction between species. M4 almost shows this if we stretch our imagination, as we could possibly consider Neo's Modal Morpheus program to be Neo's "machine child." We do see synthients and humans working together in Io, but we don't yet seem to have synthients that take full biological human form, able to reproduce with humans.

Higher Meanings

Higher Meanings: Trans Metaphor