media that shaped me: the matrix
If I picked one movie to represent me, it would be The Matrix. Somehow, this movie has accompanied me through my life, with new themes becoming clearer as I become older.
I thought it could be fun to share how my relationship with this movie interacted with my life.
Just like the movies, it's a story in 4 parts.
Act 1: discovery
When I was in elementary school, I remember seeing the trailer for the matrix and being completely enthralled. Everyone in the movie was so cool! I didn't know anything about what actually happened in the movie, but I desperately wanted to be as cool as Neo. So I ran around in an oversized gray coat, pretending to be Neo and stopping bullets and what not.
To this day, I feel particularly cool in coats that go below my knees.
As I became older, more and more I wanted to see this movie. Alas, this was in a time before Netflix and ubiquitous video streaming. At this time, to watch movies, we would rent DVDs from the local Blockbuster. My mom would check every movie that we rented this way. The Matrix was deemed too mature of a movie, and in this way became my forbidden fruit.
I would ask my friends to tell me about what happens within it. How did they watch it? Why did they like it? Once, when staying over at a friend's place, I got to watch him play the game version of the matrix, in this section recapping the scene where Neo and Trinity storm a building to rescue Morpheus. It was so cool! Surely the underlying movie is 10 times cooler!
Finally, after I asked enough times, my mom caved in and let me rent out the Matrix DVD from blockbuster, under the condition that we stop watching if she deems it too violent.
The next morning, I woke up before everyone else and watched the movie on my own.
It was amazing. I loved the idea of another world existing above our own, with a group of people resisting the conformity of society. Everything about the movie felt perfect: the central conflict in machines and people, the omnipresent technology, the hacker culture, the mesmerizing fight scenes. This was the world I wanted to inhabit.
My mom gave me a lecture and grounded me after she realized I watched it, but I couldn't feel anything but satisfied.
Act 2: Neural interfaces
In the matrix, the crew jumps in and out of a simulated world and play with its rules. A central theme is that the barriers to self actualization are primarily within our minds. The rules of society are arbitrary, something that becomes clear once you travel enough.
This absolutely fascinated me. Of course, I rebelled against arbitrary rules. At the same time, I became more and more interested in the power of the mind. It can hold a world within itself and holds an unfathomable ability to learn.
In college, I started diving deeper into our modern understanding of the nervous system. I hung around with other neurotech hackers, those who wanted to be cyborgs and those who wanted to understand their own minds.
We'd stay up late and talk about implanting magnets in our fingers to sense magnetic fields or whether you could stimulate the tongue to taste color. Over the years, we grew in technical ability and started to build our own devices. I spent so many nights in college just looking at my own brainwaves, trying to see if maybe, maybe I could change the patterns on the screen with different thoughts.
Finally, I learned about electrical muscle stimulation. With the right electrical pulse applied across two electrodes on your skin, you can bypass your brain and directly activate your muscles. It feels quite strange when you first do it. Your arm might flex without you asking it to. It becomes clear you are part of your body.
The most fascinating thing about muscle stimulation is that there have been reports of using it to correct movements in real time to learn motor movements faster. Maybe someday.. you could even learn Kung Fu??
Magically, my friends also were interested in these ideas and we started playing around with them. One night, we watched the Matrix and the sequel. It was amazing to watch these movies in the company of friends, I felt I had come so far.
We actually did manage to increase stepping frequency in runners by stimulating their hamstring muscles during leg swing. We ended up building a medical device startup focused around something else, but I still hold onto this dream.
Act 3: Self actualization
Years later, the startup became established and I was in my last stretch of my neuroscience PhD. 1
Yet I still held on to this gnawing sense that the way I presented myself didn't match who I felt. I had explored all of these perspectives on the body and the mind, and I really believed they were one and the same, yet in practice I could not unite them. Who was I really?
In the end, I accepted I was trans (see my other posts about this). It was around this time that I discovered the matrix could also be read as a trans allegory.
I must admit that discovering the trans world at first really felt like stepping out of the matrix. I could suddenly really see the gendered expectations in the clothes and maneurisms of people on the street, and the downsides (but also promise!) of not conforming.
I finally rewatched the first two movies and actually watched the third movie. With the trans allegory reading, the movies hit me in a new way.
In this reading, the first movie is a story of discovery of being trans, the second an ongoing fight versus society's transphobia, and the third about internalized transphobia. The fourth movie is about detransition and rediscovering yourself: our journeys are often nonlinear. It really clicked for me when reading Begin Transmission by Tilly Bridges, which I highly recommend if you'd like more details.
The analogy matches very well, likely because the directors are trans themselves. To me, the most visible and relatable part of the allegory is the recurring theme of realizing you're living in a simulation, in a facsimile of a persona dictated by society, until you realize there is a greater world of people out there just like you.
Act 4: Doubts and confusion
Each time I watched a matrix movie, I have some hesitation on watching the next one. I keep hearing opinions that the next movie is worse and they should have just ended it at 1 or 2 or 3 movies. Each time, I was worried watching the sequel would ruin my enthusiasm for the first movies. In the end, I think I needed to become more mature myself in order to really understand and connect the movies, so I don't regret taking such long breaks.
Thus, it took me a year to watch the fourth movie.
Honestly, it was confusing to watch and piece together the first time around. I understood the main story and the allusions to the first three movies, but I kept feeling it was going at something deeper and I was missing it.
On the second rewatch with more analysis it made more sense. To me, it's a story about a sort of mid-life crisis, about being distant from your community and in coming back seeing changed. In some ways it's better than before (and sometimes worse), but it'll never be the same as before.
It's funny because this movie really reflects where I am now. I've grown older and I'm not part of the neurotech scene right now. It's different from what it was too, the club I started at my college has grown to gather many more people, but it's lost some of its hacker spirit. My friends are different too, just as I've changed over time.
I don't really know where I want to head myself. I feel like I need to have a career and a life and stuff now, but I'm not sure I truly want all of it. Still, I can now do things I've never even dreamed of 10 years ago, so I have some hope for the future.
In the fourth movie, Neo manages to make a new beginning for himself and does find a place within this new world.
I hope to find my place as well.
Perhaps someday I will write about what it was like to balance a startup and PhD for 6 years. Please email me to let me know if you'd be interested in such a post, it would motivate me!↩