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.