The Architect Scene

The Matrix was a great movie. Its two sequels (2003's The Matrix Forever and 2003's The Matrix & Robin) were not. They were about on the level of the bottom two Highlander sequels in terms of originality and quality of conception. There are so many failings that could be pointed up, but this article will limit itself to one - the moment when I knew that the whole enterprise had gone irredeemably wrong, irretrievably dumb: The Architect Scene, from the first sequel.

The Wachowski brothers have to be two of the most profoundly middlebrow intellectuals on the planet. They came up with a dynamite treatment of a solid sci-fi concept, which they then executed brilliantly! So naturally on the strength of their giddy triumph (and that first Matrix movie did indeed present some deeply "thinky" ideas), based on all the kudos that hailed down upon their burgeoning heads, they decided that they were now needed to play a certain role, to be for us the voice of the intelligentsia futuristico.

Now, don't mistake me: I'm no intellectual. But I have respect for intellectuals. I admire intellectuals, when I can get them. And when it comes to intellectuals, it doesn't necessarily take one to know one. Anyone with a pretty decent vocabulary can smell out an ill-faluting imposter, just by the tone-deaf mash they make of their misused words.

I do have a pretty decent vocabulary.

I feel I can offer some advice, some constructive or perhaps, deconstructive criticism to whichever Wachowski brother or Wachowski underling (or -lings) wrote the Architect Scene. The advice is this: if you're writing a dialogue scene, use only words that you know how to use. Stick to words that you've used before, at least a few times. Don't try to "smart up" the dialogue by substituting words that are unfamiliar to you. Don't try to Lego together words in combinations that to you seem dizzyingly, thrillingly unfamiliar or unnatural. Don't assume that because you're not sure how to use a word correctly, the audience won't know either. I don't care what the thesaurus says: If you try to use twenty unfamiliar words in one speech, you are not going to end up sounding smart.

For a while I toyed with the idea that we aren't supposed to respect the Architect. That he is meant to be a tedious buffoon, whose pretentions are as pathetic as they are obvious. That his mind is supposed to be transparently inferior, yet infected with a grandiose vision of its own perfection (which might even be justifiable, within the limited parameters it is capable of recognizing as valid). His whole speech could be taken as a wicked-subtle pillory of nonsense academia jargon, of communication as a deliberate strategy to exclude understanding - except the understanding of those chosen few who believe their ability to communicate to each other using feverishly, arbitrarily, incestuously agreed-upon conventions marks them out as intellectually superior. Superior to those whose lack of interest in such anti-communication strategies renders them unable to make heads or indeed, tails of these teetering towers and barricades of bunkum.

But while it would be an almost perfect success as a lampoon of postmodernist anti-meaning, such an interpretation of the Architect can't be supported from within the film. The self-importance of the two sequels congeals squarely around the figure of the Architect. While it's a pleasurably ticklish notion, I admit I can't impose my wish to see it in this humorous light over the Wachowski's pretty clear intent to be taken seriously, on these ideas. So I can only assume that they looked at this weird obfuscatory spiel as the vocabulary equivalent of CGI.

Sadly unconvincing CGI.