The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland

The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland

            In the book Alice in Wonderland, the main character Alice follows the white rabbit and falls down the rabbit hole. Through the rabbit hole, she arrives in Wonderland and she finds a lot of unbelievable things happening in there. In the famous 1999 movie called The Matrix, we learn that the character Neo’s experience is almost the same as Alice’s. He falls into a world that makes him so confused because while everything there looks real for him, he can not be sure if it is real or not. So he has to discover reality by himself. Both Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix make the viewer and audience question what is reality and what is imagination.

            In both The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland the characters are bored with the monotony of “reality”.  In Alice in Wonderland, Alice feels so bored sitting on the river bank with her sister at the beginning. She wonders about the book which her sister was reading. She thinks it is ridiculous that her sister is reading a book with no illustrations, and she feels tired and falls asleep beside her sister. In The Matrix, Neo is a computer programmer in his reality. His boss is not satisfied with his working ability, so he doesn’t do well in his job. After he is off work, he sits in front of the computer and chats online. One day, he meets Morpheus online and begins to become curious about the secret of the Matrix. According to Simandan, “The viewer of the film might thus imagine how Neo feels at the moment of his unplugging from the Matrix. ‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank…’ wrote Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland while Neo has ‘the feeling where you don’t know if you’re awake or still dreaming’”(Simanda). So I can conclude that in The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland, Alice and Neo both get tired of their “reality” and their unconscious minds want to hide from their living worlds.  Also as soon as their minds want to escape from their living world, something comes up and leads them to another world.

Both stories truly begin with a white rabbit. Alice in Wonderland’s, Alice follows the white rabbit and goes down the rabbit hole. The white rabbit plays an important role in this story because following the white rabbit leads Alice to Wonderland. In The Matrix, they do have a “white rabbit” as well. After Morpheus sends information to Neo, he tells Neo to follow the “white rabbit”, who turns out to be a lady who has a white rabbit tattoo on her shoulder.  According to Simanda, “In The Matrix, the White Rabbit, in the form of a tattoo on the shoulder of a minor character, is used to facilitate Neo’s introduction to the real world, and the truth about the dream world. In the same manner, the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland introduces Alice to the Wonderland. This reference to the Alice books is used with the same meaning in The Matrix”. From these sentences, we know both Alice and Neo both have a white rabbit to show the way to a new world. The white rabbit signals the viewer or audience that the story is going to begin right now.

 Although both Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix question the relationship between reality and imagination, “reality” for Alice is not the same as how Neo’s new life outside the Matrix is “reality”. In Alice in Wonderland, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a room with many doors and a bottle that makes her grow and a cake that makes her shrink so that she fits through the tiny door. After she eats this food, her story in the book begins to change and she finds out a lot of strange things.  For example, blue caterpillars who smoke hookahs, babies who turn into pigs, cats whose grins remain after their heads have faded away, and a Mad Hatter who speaks to Time. All these things look real for Alice when she stays in Wonderland. “ What normal experience actually means is not that we experience things as they are, but that we experience things as we normally experience things”(Parker 140). But after her sister wakes her up, she realizes that Wonderland is a dream for her. “ ‘ Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister; ‘ Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’ ‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’ said Alice and she told sister, as well as she could remember them” (Carroll 189).  To Alice, Wonderland is a dream for her which is not real. Her real world is outside Wonderland. But in The Matrix, that is opposite. When Neo sees Morpheus for the first time in person, Morpheus makes Neo choose a blue pill, which would keep him in his “reality” inside the Matrix or a red pill to escape the Matrix and start a new life in a new “reality”. Neo picks the red pill and falls into another world. Morpheus tells Neo: “the world you live is the unreal world called Matrix, and we all controlled by an intelligence machine which is created by the early 21 century.”   Neo thinks it is 1999, but Morpheus tells him it is now is 2199. Morpheus shows him the image of the world in which he lives; it looks like a ghost town, and everything is destroyed. Neo discovers that his brain can connect to the Matrix computer system. Finally, Neo finds out the world he lived before is fake and the real world is the one that he lives in with Morpheus and other partners. “We want to immerse ourselves in the new world, just as Neo begins to immerse himself in the real world outside the Matrix”(Worth 184). Reality for Neo is the world outside of the Matrix while the world he lived in before is his imagination and does not exist. We can conclude that both Alice’s experiences in Wonderland Neo’s experiences in the Matrix bring up the relationship between reality and imagination. But two of them have different consequence. To Alice, Wonderland is her imagination, the real world outside Wonderland, but to Neo, the real world is outside the Matrix and he is taking to the real world by Morpheus.

Both The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland have a couple of points that are similar. We love The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland because they are so charming to the audiences and the viewers, and make them ask themselves what is reality and imagination. But we all know that reality means different things to us. From Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix, we know the relationship between reality and imagination is so magical.

How does imagination lend meaning to our lives and experiences?

Last week, we watch two short movies in the class. One is “The Lovely”, another is “Walking Distance”. These two short movies talk about two different stories. In The lonely, a man lived in a lonely place by himself. One day, some people come to see him and give him a gift . The gift is a woman robot. The man feels sick about the robot in the beginning. Because he think she is a machine even she look like a person, but she doesn’t have any emotion. After a three months, the man lives with the robot, the man changes his idea. He falls in love with the robot and he think she has emotion. One day, some guys come again and tell the man he can go with them. The man want the robot come with him, but the people stop him and tell him she is a robot. But the man doesn’t believe and the people kill the robot. Finally, the man realized she just a robot without any emotions. He knows that what he think is his imagination. The another one Walking Distance, a man come back to his hometown where he grown up. He finds out come back to his past when he still a child. He sees his childhood there. And he loses himself in the begging and he want to finds a place for himself. But finally, he realizes there are no place for him in there, because he is a person who comes from future and everyone only has one time for their childhood. So he leaves  and understand he need to treasure everything he has in this moment. I think these two stories talk the same thing. When our imagination becomes one part of our thinking that makes us to believe what we imagine is true for us. That means the things we imagine in our life can become our experience and has a effect on our behavior or thinking. In my opinion, imagination belongs to thinking system, when we imagine something that means we think about something. So we use imagination everytime and everyday. That means our imagination exist everywhere no matter in our lives or experience.

research refletion

One semester is going to past, we will have a final exam very soon. And my ENG103 class was done because I have finished my final research paper already. To be honestly, it is the first experience for me to write the researchr paper. When the first time, Prof. asked me to write a research paper, I didn't realize that is a research paper. I didn't know what is difference between quotation and citation. But Prof. is so patient to explain everything for me. Also I went to the writting centre to ask for help. After I finished my first research paper, I knew generally how to write research paper for my English class and I got a good grade. I think my final paper is more challenge me because this is the final paper and  make me under a high pressure. The most terrible thing is that the thesis I set up in my paper is too broad. I have to narrow it down. When I found out my thesis is too broad, I almost finish my whole research paper. That means I need to rewrite it again. Everytime when I set up my thesis in my paper, the thesis too broad always be a problem in my paper. Finally, I decided to set up my paper’s thesis about The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland. As we known, the sources in a research paper is very important, we have to find some strong evidence to support your idea in your paper. I did a lot of search and went to couple library to borrow the books. In one word, I learn a lot in this semester’s class. I will be careful about the thesis problem in my paper.

The first draft-- The Matrix and Reality

The Matrix and Reality

            The Matrix is good movie, it helps us to discover the reality in the world and develop our mind. The story in The Matrix talks about Neo who is a computer programmer drawn into a rebellion against the intelligence machine with other people who have been freed from the "dream world" and into reality. The entire movie tries to tell us the reality in the world. I think the most important thing the movie wants to tell us is that everything is impossible in the world even you didn’t imagine before. So we have to discover the meaning of reality to ourselves and the definition of reality.

            Remember the beginning of the movie, Morpheus arrests Neo and give two pills for Neo to choose. The red pill is to know what is Matrix; the blue bill is to come back to his old life. Neo chooses the red pill and he find himself in a liquid-filled pod whose body connected by the tubes and cables. Morpheus rescued him and begins to tell him what the Matrix is. He tells Neo: “the world you live is the unreal world called Matrix, and we all controlled by a intelligence machine which is created by the early 21 century.”  The time Neo thinks is 1999, but Morpheus tells him is not, now is 2199. Morpheus shows the image of the world he lives, it looks like a ghost town, and everything is destroyed. Everything, Morpheus tells and shows to Neo is seems to be truth and drives Neo hard to believe that is real in a short time.  I think everything you can touch and you see that is real to your. But after listen Morpheus’s conversation, it looks like the thing you see and touch is fake, all these thing are the illusion created by a machine. In the end I will wonder what is real in the world. Baudrillard is a famous philosopher, his idea about “Simulacra and Simulation is that there is no such thing as reality, but it becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. His point is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice” (Wikipedia  05,2011). Base on Baudrillard’s idea, everything said by Morpheus is true. We can understand his words as the thing Neo touches and sees in the “dream world” like a presentation of reality but not the reality itself. But as a person, we don’t have ability to distinguish the real  and artificial. So we can consider the matrix world is rely on the model and the map, it actually is a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

            Remember one scene in The Matrix, is about after Neo become cyborg in the real world. Morpheus begins training Neo. He download the Chinese gongfu in Neo’s brain and brings Neo in a virtual world. In there, he fights with Neo and teaches him how defeat your enemy. Morpheus tells Neo: “Don not try to hit somebody and hit somebody, you have to pay attention to your mind.” After the training, Neo comes back to the real worlds and wake up. He finds some blood is in his teeth and he talks to Morpheus: “I think this is real.” And Morpheus says: “your mind makes it real.” How can we know our memory real or not? Our mind has an important role to helps us distinguish the thing we see and touch is real or not. According to the psychology textbook, we know “our memory processing in three stages. The first stage is get information into our brain; the second stage is retain that information, and the three stage is later get it back out”(Myers 235). After these three stages, our past experience becomes our one part of the memory in our brain. Neo think that is real because he thinks the training becomes one part of his memory. Also sensation and perception play an important role in our mind and let us decide what is real in our life. Base on our psychology textbook: “Sensation and perception are stages of processing of the senses in our brain. Sensations are the first stages in the functioning of senses to represent stimuli from the environment, and perception is a higher brain function about interpreting events and objects in the world”(Myers 635). As I mentioned before, Neo finds out there are some blood in his mouth after he wake up. This is one of his sensations, and this information will transfer to his brain. His brain begins to make a judgment and tells Neo that is real experience.

the summary of "The Erotic Life Of Machines"

The article “ The Erotic Life of Machines”  written by Steven Shaviro talks about Chris Cunningham’s video for Bjork’s song “All Is full Of Love”. She said that “ we live in a time of massive technological, as well as social and political, change.” So we can see a lot of movie or novel  is relate to imaginative cyberfiction science fiction. All this movies or novels have often expresses an extreme ambivalence regarding the body.  She picks up an example - the Matrix, all of physical reality turns out to be mere virtual simulation, run by evil machines in order to confuse and exploit us. Through the Matrix, she wants to tells us this kind of film denounces virtual as a prison, but offers salvation in the form of an even greater immersion in virtuality. And then she begins to analyze the video “All Is full Of Love”. This song is about robots and is the best understanding in terms of  the reflex action which link to manipulation of sound and picture. The relationship between sound and image which they continually relay one another, respond to one another, and metamorphose into each other. The film sound is anchored by images. The video is mostly a study in different shades of white. Cunningham works with not only  gentle modulations of light, degrees of whiteness  and luminosity, but also the color version. The video can best be called a pluralistic monism, in sharp contrast to the radical dualism of the expressionist tradition. Bjork’s face is blank and impassive, a perfect mask in the video.  Shaviro said that faciality is not in itself subjectivity, it is the abstract dominate standard and brands the audience, and transforms the audience into a certain kind of willing, obedient subjects. Finally, she talks about the race and the voice in the video as well. She sum-up her article: the current computer – based needs to be answered and complexified by something that responds to the new digital medals. In this video, Bjork and Cunningham are inventing and develop new forms of sensibility, ones that are potentially appropriate to our cyborg future.

Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra

Baudrillard is a famous French philosopher.  Simulacra and Simulation is a famous article in his life. In his articles, simulacra as a means of representation. The concept of Simulacra has a negation of the concept of reality. He argues that today there is no such thing as reality, but it becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. His point is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice.  And to clarify his point, he assumes that there are three "orders of simulacra": 1) in the first order of simulacra, which he associates with the pre-modern period,  the image is recognized as just an illusion,  like a place marker for the real; 2) in the second order of simulacra, which he associates with the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies; 3) in the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum. To sum-up: he believes our world had became rely on the model and the map and human couldn't to figure out what is real.

The picture of Drorian Gray and Imagination

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Imagination

            Imagination is a common thing we used every day. And without the imagination, we cannot do anything. Because we face a branch of new problems every day, we have to use our imagination to solve the problems. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a good example to explain how imaginations influence our life. But in some aspect, if you use your imagination excessively, it will destroy your whole life. And Dorian Gray’s whole life is damaged by the portrait. No matter what happens in the portrait, I think is Dorian’s imagination and not reality.

The Dorian’s portrait draw by Basil is the most important thing to effect Dorian’s behavior and thought in his life. When that day, Dorian sees the picture and he realizes he really has a beautiful face. And Dorian begins to think beauty is the only worthwhile aspect of life, the only thing left to pursue and he wants to keep his beauty face forever. He thinks the face on the portrait bear the burden of his passions and his sins. So he wishes that the portrait Basil is painting would grow old in his place. After the day he breaks up with Sibyl the girl he wants to get marry. He finds out his portrait has changed. He realizes his wish has came true that the portrait now bears the burden of his passions and his sins , whilst his own appearance remains unchanged.

I am a realist. I believe no matter what kind of strange things happen, it can be explained by the scientific method. So in my opinion, the portrait was changed by Dorian’s wish that will be impossible for me to believe. All I think why the picture will be changed? Because of Dorian’s imagination. He pays more attention on his beauty and he imagines day after day his beauty appearance will never be changed forever. So he becomes sensitive about his beauty. Also that day, he has a hard conversation with Sibyl and his logical thinking becomes messy. It is easy for him to create an illusion through his imagination. So when he saw the picture again, he thought his wish came true. But he didn’t notice all the things are his imagination. Like what I said before, if you use your imagination imagine something excessively or you imagine something in a wrong way, you will become mad. Like the movie- A Beautiful Mind, we saw last week. John is a genius in mathematics, but he becomes mad after he gets his reputation. He imagines a guy hires him to take a task because of his talent in mathematics. His terrible imagination begins to mess up his life.

 This type of person, like Dorian and John, they imagine one thing excessively and an illusion come into being makes them become mad. We may consider this type of person have Paranoia. While Dorian realized the picture was changed becomes a turning point in the book. He tries to hide the picture and don’t let anybody to see it. After one day of a few years, he leads Basil to see the portrait again. Unfortunately, Basil finds out his secret and he kills Basil unexpectedly. The most ridiculous thing for me is he killed Basil because he saw  the picture imply him to kill Basil. The book mentions it as well: “Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him. The mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him and the loathed anything who was seated at the table, more than he had ever loathed anything in his whole life” (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 84). I don’t believe one picture will has such powerful energy to drive Dorian to kill Basil. What I think is he imagines that picture has an connection to him. And he thinks the picture is important to keep his beauty forever so he just follows the implication and do it. In the end of the story, Dorian wants to make a new life and he doesn’t want to be controlled by the picture any more. So he decides to destroy the picture. But when he picks up a knife and plunges it into the picture. He actually plunges into his heart not the picture. He was killed by himself. I think his imagination kills him. Also he didn’t know he killed himself not the picture when he died in the last minute.

The life of Dorian Gray, I think it is a tragedy. His whole life has a strong connection with the portrait. And his imagination puzzles him all the times. It makes him lose his reputation and becomes corruption in his life. Even though he loses everything in his life, he still doesn’t feel shamed. Even he didn’t find out everything is fake. His imagination creates everything and makes him deeply associate with the picture. Imagination can be good or bad. Dorian is an example of bad imagination how influence one’s life.