Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2011 | Page 14

10 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