What ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Midsommar’ Have in Common

The end of August saw the coincidental (re)releases of the The Matrix (1999) and Midsommar (2019); the former in celebration of its 20 year anniversary as a landmark cultural milestone and the latter as a kind of victory lap from an indie film studio on an impeccable genre streak.You can find my review of Midsommar here; to be brief, I found Ari Aster’s sophomore effort to be a less-urgent, albeit quieter and deadlier affectation of modernity’s spell. Dani’s trip down the pagan rabbit hole of the macabre Hårga tradition in the director’s cut of the film occasioning the re-release, nicely parallels that of Neo in his awakening from the literal dreamwork of the Matrix, a computer simulation of neoliberal society maintained in the real world by an intelligent machine race. Two lost souls desperate for connection, Dani and Neo take the curious leap into the perilous unknown.

Nearly all of the discourse I’ve come across around Midsommar – and The Matrix in other significant ways – seem to not know what to do with the films’ political implications nor the ramifications of their thematic ends. **spoilers ahead** Dani’s relationship woes don’t as much stem from her emotionally stunted boyfriend Christian, but a broken social system necessarily dependent on the alienation of its subjects. Likewise to The Matrix, Neo’s existential choice between ‘red pill’ and ‘blue pill,’ when taken in its correct, neoliberal context, is a brutally honest denouncement of the entrancing, hegemonic complacency that is capitalist realism. The Matrix itself is a means of completely severing the human mind from its reality by supplanting a new one. Even when plugged out of the Matrix, Neo struggles to escape the restrictive consciousness learned in his virtual imprisonment. “There is no spoon.” We are only as limited as our consciousness. Our accepted breadth of possibilities must be fluid to our distinctive needs as autonomous individuals. Dani is clearly more suited among the Hårga than her own American countryfolk despite her repulsion for the casual ritualistic violence, but violence is more than blood and gore. By the end, Dani and Neo are born anew through death set forth a bright, limitless future.