Posthumanism in film and television

Abstract

One of the films most readily associable with posthumanism, The Matrix, opens with green lines of source code on a black background. The code breaks up, cascades, and reforms, before the viewer’s gaze enters, via a zero that morphs into the white orb of a flashlight held by a police officer navigating a noirish corridor, into the film’s storyworld. Down the rabbit hole, indeed. Here, in this film, which liberally references literature and cultural theory from Lewis Carroll to Jean Baudrillard, is allegorized not only the plunge into the desert of the real, but also the codewriting and machinic direction determining an entirely different beingin- the-world. Neo, the film’s protagonist, messianistically invoked as “the One” in a phone conversation between an unseen woman and man that the audience overhears in this opening sequence, will come to understand just how much around him is born digital. [excerpt]