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Popular Culture Review
aporia, and naturally, it doesn’t benefit from any type of collective
epistemological support: quite to the contrary, since Mouse’s crewmates do not
respond to his inquiry, but rather discard it in a condescending manner. By
questioning the effectiveness of language as the privileged vehicle to relate our
consciousness to the reality that surrounds us, Mouse’s reflexion echoes the
concerns of French philosopher Brice Parain, who suspected language to be “a
loose lever” (Une mcmette qui branle), unable to precisely convey the true intent
of the speaker, and consequently, an unreliable tool to know and express the
truth. The narrative treatment of the character suggests the despair of the
unsolvable, for Mouse is the youngest and most immature member of the crew,
and his demeanor appears clumsy and insecure. He clearly occupies the Omega
position in the power structure, and it is taken for granted in the logic of the
narration that the opinions of a fidgety, barely out of adolescence nerd will have
little bearing upon the resolution of the conflict. His personality is in total
accordance with his name, the connotations of which can be opposed not only to
those of the all-mighty Oracle, but to those of his shipmates as well—Tank,
Switch, Dozer, Cypher, and of course, Morpheus and Trinity—and
onomastically underlines the powerlessness of the character. In spite of being
the programmer, Mouse has a very reduced active role in the narration, for he
represents a problematic point of view that clashes with the metaphysical
conceptions put forward by Morpheus and shared by the rest of the crew.
Naturally, he will be the first to die after Cypher betrays his friends.
The Matrix thus questions the nature of reality and the validity of our
perception on two levels: directly, by establishing the concept of a constructed
reality as one term of the narrative conflict, and indirectly, through apparently
innocuous comments concerning the desire for complete memory loss or the
arbitrary phenomenological reception of “Tasty Weet” in relation to language,
which can be related to the uncertainties regarding language and epistemology
expressed by thinkers such as Wittgenstein or Parain. However, whereas
Mouse’s considerations are most destabilizing, for they suggest the possibility of
a linguistic matrix at work within our consciousness, a notion that is very close
to the trendy postmodern concept of “the prison-house of language,” and hence
points to the probable similarities between the Matrix and what we consider to
be our reality, the dominating narrative syntagm, rather than exploring the
ambiguity created by a dual reality, thrives to resolve the conflict in a
metaphysical manner. In this sense, The Matrix is self-contradictory for it
clearly presents a problematic view of our relationship to reality but shies away
from its epistemological consequences, favoring an archaic resolution to a
fundamental philosophical issue. Rather than confronting the distressing
possibility that any structure of knowledge might be the product of an
exploitative matrix, the narration introduces a savior, Neo, who is miraculously
able to transcend the rules of the Matrix in the name of the Truth just as any
saint transcends those of the natural world in the name of the Divine, and who
re-establishes a traditional, religiously infused order that automatically