The Matrix: The Allegory Of The Cave

The Allegory of the Matrix In 1999, an auteuristic filmmaking duo known as the Wachowskis created what has gone down in history as one of the most philosophically charged, action packed, and beloved properties of film history. The Matrix, the science-fiction / action-adventure film, is filled to the brim with the most essential questions regarding reality; the narrative is driven by epistemology and metaphysical theory. It is apparent that, though the story alludes to many different philosophies and processes of thinking, the text that influences the film the most is Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” The two works provide their own narrative arcs that mirror each other while remaining completely set apart from each other. In my analysis,

Countless parallels exist between Plato’s work and the film, with narrative points that mirror each other directly. In Plato’s work, the premise is that of prisoners in a cave who are subjected seeing only shadows of a world that exists beyond their comprehension. The Allegory follows one who eventually escapes from his cave and explores the world above, one who has seen the truth of reality. In the Matrix, the main protagonist Neo is trapped in a world of a computer program, developed by a race of artificially intelligent machines, as is the whole of humanity. This premise is near exact to the Allegory of the Cave, where prisoners are entrapped in the darkness of a cave, where all that they have and ever could know is that of shadows on the wall. Some direct allusions to the Allegory of the Cave include the Agents, who can be viewed as the “prison keepers”, or as those who project the shadows onto the cave wall directly. Neo and humanity, as formerly mentioned, are the prisoners chained to the cave wall, while Neo’s life – his apartment, the club, his job, and the city scape

The Allegory, for all of its wit, is a bit one note in comparison to that of the Matrix, due to its lack of differing and complex variables that are present within the film. I believe that the moral implication in the film is where the meat of the philosophy truly lies, for it is the thing that applies best to our dealings in our own daily walks of life. It is no question that the theme of these works applies to many different things… additions, institutions, indulgences, prejudices, emotional wounds, and so many more can be identified as the respective “caves” in which we individually exist in. Even something as helpful and universal as the internet can be understood as its own “cave”, as explained by editor Jesse Walker, “The worlds of the web, of multiplayer video games, of fan communities, and so on are ones in which people adopt or construct their own fake realities, which then bump up against one another in unpredictable ways”. When confronted with new and strange ideas or concepts that could be true, the temptation is always to reject these ideas and concepts immediately and never call into question our own reality. But even further than that, the temptation could just as easily be to reject ideas that are so evidently the truth, as Cypher did in the Matrix, in favor of a more comfortable or efficient life