I next sat down to watch The Matrix again, hoping to find a "limonaire moment" that could round out this test of photogénie. Before I hit Play, I searched my memory. What images had stuck with me from my first viewing that seemed to resonate or play over and over again? To my surprise, I felt stymied. For such a striking film of visual inventiveness, nothing came to mind.
Of course, that's not the same as saying I forgot what I saw. The cool costumes, the slow-motion cascading bullet casings, the impossible gymnastic feats during the fights--this whole barrage of special effects had certainly not been forgotten. But none of these images pulled me in or created a sense of reverie the way the bemusement of Dalio's smile or the playfulness of the Sea of Holes did. Could the images of The Matrix be striking but not engaging?
At first I thought of following the direction I found in considering Yellow Submarine: find an atypical moment that falls outside the main flow of the film. I first thought of the scene with the children, the other candidates to be considered as "The One" at the Oracle's apartment. Kids are practically guaranteed scene-stealers, and certainly they'd offer the gentle charm I was expecting in photogénie.
I jumped to that scene of the DVD. One boy, bald and miraculously bending spoons more effortlessly than Uri Geller, offers a Zen paradox on his technique. Behind him, two other children cause toy blocks to float in front of them in a slow motion juggle, while a cheap horror film plays on the television behind them. Strangely, I'm more drawn to the images of rabbits trampling on a model town on that TV than I am the children. The children practically disappear; your eyes watch the special effects around them, not their faces.
There's a certain delight to watching the digital manipulations of objects (floating blocks and bending spoons), but it doesn't really share in the mystery associated with photogénie. We're just supposed to accept them as part of the film's reality, just as Neo's reaction to his final battle with Agent Smith is one of acceptance, to the point of detachment--even boredom--over the amazing things he can now do.
As a result, that final confrontation is probably the least visceral in the film. Because of the amazing special effects, all of the action sequences end up being too flamboyant to fit the nature of photogénie. Instead, I realized the moment that seemed most memorable in the film was actually verbal, not visual: Keanu's "whoa." The impact of that "whoa" is curiously strong: although it only appears once in the film, several reviews I've read recall "whoas" occurring in scenes they describe where it actually is never spoken.
That single "whoa" occurs in one of the simplest shots in the whole film--just Keanu standing against a wall. Morpheus has taken him into the "Jump Program" for training and advised him to "free your mind" before launching himself from the top of one skyscraper to another, provoking that amazed "whoa." Neo then tries to repeat Morpheus' words, and as he taps his temples and points forward in an attempt to focus himself, we know his heart's not in it. Here Keanu is acting at acting, playing Neo as a Method actor trying to get himself into the role of Superman.
It's a moment that's quite funny, but it also starts to draw you in to the swirl of thoughts associated with photogénie. To free his mind, Neo must forget what he knows about reality. Only, it isn't reality, but a mirage called "the Matrix." Thus, he must forget his forgetting of true reality. But as we look at that same scene, we also see Keanu rather than Neo, and we almost see Keanu remembering. Remembering the pop culture associations that orbit around the name "Keanu," and making us remember this is Keanu, not Neo. Keanu, not Neo, says "whoa," as it echoes back to the "Bill and Ted" films as well as Keanu's whole public persona5 . When Keanu says "whoa," we get outside the illusion of The Matrix, a film about getting outside the illusion of the Matrix.
But if this is a limonaire moment for The Matrix, it's of a different kind than the others exactly because Keanu's "whoa" lets our imaginations run outside of the film's flow of images. And in its own way, this is a good thing. Rather than having the film do all the imagining for us, that syllable infects our perception the whole film like a virus, providing an outlet to some of the grim sights we see in it. Instead of falling into the attraction of the images of Rules of the Game and Yellow Submarine, we hold them at a distance.
As I eventually watched the whole film over again, I found that "whoa" quite useful, in a Rocky Horror sort of way. Whenever the philosophy became too dystopian, or the action became too sadistically violent, inevitably a pause would be thoughtfully provided by the directing Wachowski Brothers, often through a cut to a reaction shot of Keanu, that practically invited the viewer to insert his own "whoa." And it always seemed appropriate.
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