philosophical deep end of the pool as the Job-like
“True-man” braves the god-like “Christ-off’s” worst
tempest in his bid to escape the confines of a limited
world view. As the filmmaker obviously intends, the
audience learns that piercing the scrim of one’s reality
can entail a dramatic shift in one’s priorities.
Movie Preview:The Matrix (1999)
This film poses the same questions about reality but
from a slightly different angle. In the flashy, fast-paced
blockbuster, the hero, Thomas Anderson, is a computer
programmer by day and a hacker by night who goes by
the handle, Neo. Having plumbed the deepest recesses
of the global computer network (and along the way
breaking almost every known computer-crime law on
the books) he has come to be haunted by an irrational
but unavoidable hunger to learn about something called
the Matrix.
As the film opens, Neo is sought out by a mysterious
woman who introduces him to Morpheous. Morpheous
shows Neo that the world he thinks is reality is in fact
an elaborate computer simulation called the Matrix.
The Matrix is an illusion maintained by machines that
run the world in order to keep their human slaves
unaware of their true condition. The humans are farmed
as energy cells and live out their entire lives unable to
move, trapped inside Plexiglas cases filled with pink
liquid and feeding the electrical grid.
Morpheous and his crew have escaped from their
cells and are on a mission to free as many others as they
can. But in order to do so they must reenter the Matrix
so they can locate and communicate with individuals
judged ready to withstand the shock of the transition to
reality.
Using Movies to Release Negative Beliefs 63