Comparing Film: The Matrix & Ich Klage An:
Red-Pilled or Wised-Up?  

2,030 words

What are my Saturdays like? Quite dull. After my weekly pizza, I settle down to read, perhaps write and revise, pig out on a podcast, and go out sometimes if there is a play, concert, opera, or movie to get my interest. I don’t mind a nice sunset walk (more so now that I have skin cancer).  I never watch TV.

I would go to a bar for a Saturday beer. It’s to observe, not to pick up. At 72, I’m hardly a catch, and I note that one bar I frequented in the 1970s, still alive and kicking, is quieter than I remembered. In St. Louis, night life has still not recovered from Covid, when the County Executive took millions from Covid relief funds to bribe bars and restaurants to close. The local media’s battle cry was repetitive and shrill.  “The streets are empty, we’re winning!”

I also note the women at the bar, who in the 1970s seemed sexy and chic, are now mostly fat, tattooed, with either equally framed gal pals or anemic, hirsute guys. I’m also prone to catch a film on Youtube, sit down with my bottle of Sam Adams (much better than the beer I get at the bar, any bar), and catch up on past film epics.

One epic was The Matrix. I never saw it, despite all the buzzing about it on the Internet. “It’s like The Matrix,” I hear about everything these days. Being red-pilled is part of the language.

I watched it, and was neither amused nor impressed. The Matrix does provide the obligatory popcorn movie entertainment with a lot of kick-ass, tough broads in black leather whacking cops, and the usual crazy chase scene where CGI makes mincemeat of Newton’s theory of gravity. It’s a very persuasive hook for the popcorn munchers.

The Rosebud in this film is Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), an unseen rebel being hunted, and the story centers on Neo (Keanu Reeves), who is drawn in with not even a whisper of backstory.

What continues is a build-up to the entrance of Morpheus, who offers Neo the choice of red pill or blue pill. The red pill will give him the truth, and he can never go back. The red pill leads to Neo joining the resistance. It’s not a happy world. The film concentrates on dark, grungy sets recalling condemned buildings and trashed-out alleys. It’s not surprising that one of the gang goes turncoat…not for comfort, but just to forget there ever was a red pill.

The Matrix jabs at a profundity that escapes me. A friend of mine, a devout Catholic librarian who has pet rabbits, admires G. K. Chesterton, and is a faithful attendee of Marvel Comic movies, believes The Matrix is one of the most important movies in history. He told me of its allusions to Christ, the disciples,  the betrayal  of Judas, death and resurrection, etc., and I can see his point, but again, I don’t find a lot depth to the film.

I note the almost obligatory cinematic habit of making blacks the good guys and dispensers of wisdom ((Morpheus, Oracle, and Tank), and white guys are monotone types in suits who kill. It’s a step from what the sixties called the “Righteous Nigger”–Sidney Poitier who could do no wrong, and that blacks hold timeless philosophical insights whites seem incapable of, and, like the Oracle, must be inculcated with ebonic truth.

I’m just not into it.

The film’s delving into the above Christ-like issues drops it in the last thirty minutes for an excess of bang-bang and boom-boom. I felt like I was watching twenty other films. A scene opens with a gatling-gun device, wastes hundreds of rounds trying to free Morpheus, and in a contained office no one gets hit. It goes on and on. We see clouds of empty shell casings and explosions everywhere. The blank office towers are oblivious to this.

I confess I’m not into bang-bang. I understand there have been other Matrix films that my friend assures me are more philosophical, but I’m not interested.

There are better films that deal with the individual becoming aware of a double society. I think of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both versions), and 1988’s They Live. I didn’t see Christ-like allusions in either one, just normal people who are forced to accept a horrible alternative world and try to do something. There is a lack of violence in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It relies on dialogue and character development. They Live tends to capitalize on the star’s (Roddy Piper) previous wrestling experience for a silly scene where he tries to get his buddy to put on the glasses that show reality, both using wrestling holds and tosses that get redundant and tiring. Also, his buddy is, of course, black. Gotta have that black buddy.

At least Invasion of the Body Snatchers was all white. As a bonus, the second version had Leonard Nimoy. But They Live offers a very shrewd and disturbing message about reality. It was interesting that when it opened, both right and left claimed it vouched for their respective views of what was yet to be called the Deep State. A director of mine, communist and from the Dominican Republic, was delighted that it showed the true nature of capitalist society. Others claim it shows the Jewish role in controlling our minds. High Noon had the same kind of response from left and right. Is Gary Cooper’s sheriff fighting McCarthyism or

Leftist, communal apathy?

So, now I know where being “red pilled” came from. I also see how much of The Matrix style and clichés influenced countless TV shows. A white man in a suit was never the same after that. Even Mad Men offers a reptilian side to wearing a suit.

A better film I watched on Youtube was Ich Klage An, (I Accuse), the 1940 German film dealing with euthanasia. It has a very black rep as a precursor to Nazi extermination programs, and I was lucky to avoid versions where you have profound interviews, lectures, and solemn warnings of the eeevilll you are about to see. We are warned this film is still banned in Germany, only available for viewing under controlled situations. (Controlled: what a creepy term and sentiment that is. A sci-fi film waiting to be made).

So, I pressed the button and delved into eeevilll…and found a very thoughtful and entertaining film.

I won’t go into the story, since Trevor Lynch has an excellent essay on it on this site.  I’ll say that the movie had much more humanity than The Matrix. We aren’t shown fanatical Nazis or exterminators, but middle-class people dealing with the problem of incurable illness and the ethical and emotional issues involved in it. Ich Klage An is hardly a strident demand for extermination. It ends unresolved in how this will be dealt with, leaving it to the people, and by implication, the viewer.

As it is, at the trial, all sides are given a hearing where people from all walks of life offer their views, from moral shock to resigned acceptance. The communal view recalled Lope De Vega’s 1599 play Fuenteovejuna, where a village willingly assumes communal responsibility for killing a cruel nobleman. The tone of the people’s arguments and dialogues recalls much of Brechtian theater. The ending, where a final verdict is left to the viewer, recalls Ayn Rand’s play The Night of January Sixteenth, where jurors of a murder case are chosen by the audience, and they deliver the verdict at the end of the play.

Lynch cited the barely visible signs of official National Socialism. A bust of Hitler briefly overlooks the judges. I noted that the judges’ robes bear the Nazi party emblem. At a scene where the judges reconvene, we just see them lower their arms in the salute.

But throughout the film, I don’t see Nazi doctrine. I see a humanism that is tried by a very delicate and wrenching situation in the endless suffering of Hanna (Heidemarie Hathayer), Paul Hartmann’s (Thomas Heyt) brilliant, lively wife.

There is hardly anything cold or inhumane about dealing with Hanna’s dying. Paul and Mathias (Bernhard Lang), a friend who was once a lover of Hanna, disagree strongly on what to do, and they turn against one another, but at the trial, Mathias recants after he sees the earlier effects of his “humanitarian” care of a child.

There are no easy answers here, and I was impressed with a communal concern about dealing with a dying woman. The acting was downbeat and hardly melodramatic. Everyone, from doctors to judges, are rational and concerned.

I simply found it a more human and involved film and performance than I did The Matrix. I was able to put my personal experience into Ich Klage An. I recall my mother dying from emphysema. It was incurable, and our doctor, who took my mother on as a patient two years before her death, predicted her death almost to the month. From July to early September was the deathwatch. If we had been offered a euthanasia solution, would my brother and I have taken it? A two month’s end to her suffering would have saved much of her savings and ended the strain we were under. For the record, Mother had signed a DNR order before her emphysema overpowered her.

My brother also brought some insight. When he was a policeman at a major hospital in St. Louis, there was a patient in a coma, a woman who had lost anyconsciousness for a year, and her family’s efforts to cut off her life support were challenged by right-to-life groups, who considered this to be murder and filed lawsuit after lawsuit. There were even two attempts to kidnap the comatose patient. This led to a round-the-clock security detail. One man brought a suit in court to marry her so, as her husband, he could legally keep her alive.

My brother was on the security details on occasion. He recalled the horrible odor of the woman, her emaciated body and weekly decline into death. He had been neutral on the right-to-life movement before, but dealing with this case made him hostile to them.

Ich Klage An recalled all of the above and the issues of life and society. I simply have no such thoughts on The Matrix. I felt that at a certain level, any story in Hollywood becomes the handmaiden to the budget, where cinematic opera overtakes all.

If I prefer movies with a message, I’ll take low budgets. One such film was Unplanned, a 2019 film about abortion directed by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, starring Ashley Bratcher as Abby Johnson. Unplanned recounts the true story of Abby, who worked in an abortion clinic, then had a change of heart seeing too many behind-the-scene mishaps. The film has been trashed for being propagandistic…by Hollywood and its pro-choice allies. Maybe, but I recall over a dozen movies offering a positive view of abortion (especially The Cider House Rules), and one anti-abortion film gets roasted. In spite of a six million dollar budget, it made a profit of twenty-one million.

Again, I recall how anti-Jewish films put out by Nazi Germany numbered maybe five, while anti-Nazi movies may well go into the hundreds.

All of the films made during the Third Reich were described as horrible and pro-Nazi, henceforth eeevilll, but when I watched them, these movies banned in Germany like the above and others like Stosstrupp Westfront or Jud Suss (which I reviewed for Counter-Currents), I found them well-made and thoughtful. In a sense, this was my true red pilling: when I examined the reality, I found that the official denunciations were bogus. If these were bogus, what else could be? It turns out a lot.

I can do without that word “red pilled.” In my younger days, we would say “wised-up.” As it is, I distrust multimillion-dollar Hollywood films offering us any kind of truth and showing what the reality is, since Hollywood itself is the Valhalla of unreality: an adjoining grotto to Plato’s cave. I’ll settle for the smaller films, smaller budgets, and modest truth-telling.