perfidy

Lileks has today published the nearest thing to a screed he's had in a while. He assaults Ain't It Cool News, head red, Harry Knowles and his recent analysis of the third Matrix movie. I have not yet seen the aforementioned moving picture, but Lileks' pen strikes several telling blows:

Alas, he cannot write. He is a horrid stylist; he writes like someone mashing the keyboard with bratwursts; his politics have the sophistication of a preschool crayon drawing, and his self-confidence in his insights is matched only by his inability to see how fatuous his work often sounds.

The social pleasantries now disposed of, Lileks moves in a little closer: 

and the Machines - they're drilling to put a stop to it all. Now, the problem is - the only person that can put a stop to The War" on Terrorism are the terrorist.

He are, are he?

NOW - What is Agent Smith? Essentially, Agent Smith was Communism. If we are all the same, then there is no reason for violence. Resistance is Futile. Communism was fantastic as it represents an ideology that the Capitalist and the Extremists both hated. And it was spreading and taking over and trying to assimilate cultures and suppress belief systems. Or you could say AGENT SMITH is that Born Again Christian type that is trying to eradicate another's belief system - and ultimately - the elimination of both either politically, humanly or functionally is a move towards peace.

You can't make this up. You can only stand in awe. If I can untangle the wet knotted shoelaces of Knowles' prose, he seems to be saying that we can only live in peace when everyone agrees to believe in nothing but peace.

Ultimately what they believe or we believe is inconsequential.

Spoken like a man with no beliefs. Or, more accurately, spoken like someone who thinks that line above demonstrates some sort of intellectual sophistication lost on people who do the whole work-kids-church thing. Trust me, Harry - what someone believes is of great consequence. And if your society believes nothing it ends up making its last stand in the Temple of No Particular Belief System with the squiddies hammering on the door, possessed of a terrible certainty: they believe you should die.

Read the whole thing, as they say. His summation of the Matrix trilogy is especially interesting:

I took away something else from the Matrix trilogy: it is a product of deeply confused people. They want it all. They want individualism and community; they want secularism and transcendence; they want the purity of committed love and the licentious fun of an S&M club; they want peace and the thrill of violence; they want God, but they want to design him on their own screens with their own programs by their own terms for their own needs, and having defined the divine on their own terms, they bristle when anyone suggests they have simply built a room with a mirror and flattering lighting. All three Matrix movies, seen in total, ache for a God. But they can't quite go all the way. They're like three movies about circular flat meat patties that can never quite bring themselves to say the word "hamburger."

Philosophically, the Matrix movies are banal, but they're no worse than the empty animism of George Lucas' Force-centric cosmology. As dramas, they lag - but Wagner wasn't thrill-a-minute, either. The moments of emotional connection are few, but they're there, almost like Burma-Shave signs spaced out every hundred miles.

I have enjoyed the first two Matrices, althought the first was certainly the superior film. One thing that I enjoyed was the cafeteria style eclecticism with which they injected the philosophical bits - it allowed you to construct a better dialogue in your head. You could fill in the blanks in a way pleasing to your aesthetic, without worrying over being contradicted by a awful, banal, overly determinate summation at the end of the movie. Ambiguity is the artist's best friend - it is the cinematic equivalent of the old chestnut about silence being mistaken for wisdom.