ABSTRACT
The Matrix sequence has generated significant discussion since the first film premiered in 1999, in part due to its pastiche of cultural referents, including “literature, old cartoons, comics, Jung, gaming, Rastafarianism, hacker culture, Goth, animé, Hong Kong kung fu movies, myth, Gnosticism, Judaism, visual movie and art quotes-the list seems neverending” (Goonan 100). The Matrix’s seemingly never-ending story, a cycle made explicit in the Architect’s rambling (and at-times nonsensical) infodump with Neo in The Matrix Reloaded or the park bench meeting of the Architect and the Oracle at the end of The Matrix Revolutions, has no coherently stable ground, except perhaps the “overarching cyberpunk vision” that has been squeezed into the trilogy “with admirable condensation and élan” (Goonan 101).1 For better or worse, The Matrix (more than its sequels) has supplanted Ridley Scott’s conceptually superior Blade Runner (1982) as the most successful (if only on the level of movie studio profits) visual articulation of key cyberpunk tropes popularized decades earlier by Movement-era authors and in Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.2
