The Matrix (1999): A Collection of Enlightening Scenes
The first time I watched it, I was a youngin’ and watched it as an action movie. The neighborhood kids and I would reenact the lobby shootout scene in my friend’s basement. We started the scene on his dad’s laptop (probably illegally downloaded on BitTorrent) and switched off the lights. The only light that remained was from the mid-summer sun coming through the glass block windows. “Backup, send backup,” I said. Then my friend walked into the room draped in a trench coat and blew me away with a squirt gun.
The second time I watched it, I was in college. I had transferred to the main campus and felt completely overwhelmed. I was living in a crummy dorm with popcorn ceilings and failing my math and engineering classes. The illusory pressures of life were suffocating. Does this really have to be my life? The Matrix told me no. I switched my major to creative writing and life got better. I still didn’t like the bustle of university, but I took what I could. I suppose the drugs provided by the university psychiatrist helped, too. Surely my unrest was not due to the environment I was in. It was a chemical imbalance in me.
Since then, I would watch the movie annually, with the next most important time being in 2019, the year I came off the drugs (Celexa). What started as withdrawal transformed into something powerful. An awakening they call it, and it was almost too much to handle. Jarring. Disorienting. Concepts like “rebirth” became a lived experience. “Why do my eyes hurt?” Neo asks after being ejected from the matrix. “Because you’ve never used them before,” Morpheus tells him. No longer was The Matrix a dystopian action movie with some inspirational messages about fighting the system. It was a movie about the stages of awakening, and it became a close friend.
