Popular Culture and Epistemological Doubt
9
Significantly enough, the second and most commercially viable
cinematographic adaptation of Simulacron 3, Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth
Floor, was released the same year as The Matrix and responded to the same
thematic tendency: the possibility of creating a virtual reality as convincing as
the real one. The ontological question arises during the famous scene where
Cypher is negotiating his treason with agent Smith, and opposes two
conceptions of reality: the Truth and the Matrix, and just as the protagonist of
MoreVs Invention, who chooses the illusion over reality, Cypher opts for the
Matrix against the Truth. The condition Cypher poses to the agent Smith—“I
don’t wanna remember anything”—is epistemologically problematic for it
allows for a logical shift with no clear solution: if the Matrix can replace the
Truth, it implies that the Matrix and the Truth are interchangeable, therefore th e
Truth itself has to be a construction. This is what has become fashionable in
postmodern rhetoric to refer to as an aporia: that is, a logical impasse.
Another episode from The Matrix illustrates the epistemological doubt
regarding the nature of reality and the reliability of human perception and is all
the more significant that it happens aboard Morpheus’ ship, the
Nebuchadnezzar, i.e., in the real world rather than in the virtual environment of
the Matrix. During a meal, Mouse, the programmer, speculates about the
mechanism of taste and concludes that our perception of food is mostly based
upon a conventional relationship between words and aliments. Reality, then,
becomes as much a question of conventions outside the Matrix, as well as
inside, and individual perception is ignored in order to structure a collective
epistemology: a set of conventions that regulate and limit our cultural
understanding of the environment. Even aboard the freedom fighters’ ship,
reality remains a problematic notion that cannot be fully apprehended by human
perception but rather reduced to a set of linguistic propositions, very much along
the lines of Wittgenstein’s conception of the insurmountable limits of human
understanding expressed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and of the
impossibility of metaphysical discourse pointed out in Philosophical
Investigations.12 This short dialog, seemingly inconspicuous when compared to
the weight of Neo’s interactions with Morpheus or with the Oracle, is in
actuality more epistemologically significant for it presents an essential doubt
regarding our perception of reality and the function of language and offers no
possible resolution. Whereas Morpheus’ and the Oracle’s discourse, just as that
of Trinity, are impregnated with metaphysical certainties that provide some type
of direction, which will be proven correct as the story unfolds—Morpheus
“feels” that Neo is “The One” and the Oracle, as the vessel of a higher,
comprehensive Truth, is in charge of verifying the Hero’s ontological integrity.
Mouse’s meditation upon the disturbingly aleatory relationship between
signifier, signified, and referent takes place outside of the Matrix, in the real
world and in a highly identifiable situation, that of a meal; his interrogation is
not directly related to the narrative syntagm and has no real incidence upon its
development, for it is a proposition that cannot lead anywhere, yet another