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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

It's not mentioned expressly in the article (there's just a link to the movie), but the book is briefly to be seen in The Matrix. Neo uses it to stash cash and warez.

I remember reading about this, and being just astonished how many significant details the Wachovskis hid in those movies, even if they were only visible for a second or two.

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I really enjoy all Matrix movies. I recently rewatched them and in parallel read and watched all the essays by v/bloggers I could find. Here's a few take-aways:

1) According to mainstream (I disagree), the sequels dropped the ball. It's somewhat popular to make fun of the Matrix movies that are not the first.

2) There's a lot of symbolism in the movies, and it's not less important than the superficial layer. You could say it makes up a second-layer in the movies, and if you don't get it you're missing part of the content.

3) The first movie referenced Baudrillard a lot, but it didn't (fully) follow Baudrillard's philosophy, as Baudrillard himself has said. To be more specific (but simplistic), Baudrillard's work that was referenced represented a supplantation of Plato's allegory of the cave, but The Matrix in many ways is an illustration of Plato's allegory, reaching Plato's conclusions, not Baudrillard's. Baudrillard was approached to work on the sequels, but rejected it.

4) The badly-received Matrix sequels examined non-western philosophies (which are hardly familiar to mainstream audiences). The well-received first The Matrix movie examined the ever-so-familiar Plato's allegory and Christian themes. The sequels broached a lot of new ground and required intellectual effort; the first movie by comparison was easy watching.

5) Some people think that The Matrix has badly aged CGI (not me).

Regarding 4, the dialog and plotting of the sequels seemed to build only on the flaws of the original. That some of that dialog was monolog about different philosophical themes was a problem, but the problem was the monolog not the philosophy.

I took it that the monologues were a problem because they were confusing to people. They serve as a major bridge between what I called the superficial and symbolic layers. For example the dialogue/monologue with the architect was great. I found it very stimulating, but most bloggers made fun of it.

Warez on minidiscs [1], even! And long before Hi-MD, which suggests some kind of acoustic steganography resilient to ATRAC compression.

For all the interest that went into Simulacra among the writing and production crew, I feel like it's not without significance, accidental or otherwise, that that was the book selected to be hollowed out for Neo's shelf safe, to have its substance removed in order to make a place for the stuff of the movie moment in which it appeared...

[1] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_a...

It was preceded by Strange Days (1995) - which no doubt contributed to that moment in the film.

For a point of view of Baudrillard about matrix:

https://baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca/the-matrix-decoded-le...

I remember from some behind-the-scenes footage that the Wachowskis (the two directors) had asked studio execs and the actors to read it fully before they even started reading the script for The Matrix

baudrillard was not particularly amused by that placement: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/24/opinion/editorial-observe...

I'm not surprised. You don't need to look very far into The Matrix, and especially into the trilogy as a whole, to find what amounts to a direct refutation of Baudrillard's thesis in Simulacra.

More than that, the book was required reading for principal cast and crew.

But then, they cut the heart of the book out to stash warez.

Cheers! I remember pausing here and there to read little details like this and really appreciating the richness in that movie.

It's a shame the visuals don't hold up well.

Which visuals don't hold up well? The Matrix's? In my opinion they hold up marvelously. It's the actual content of the movie that has become an overused cliche by now... (it' still enjoyable anyway, in my opinion).

Yeah, the trope Seinfeld is Unfunny even lists The Matrix halfway down the page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SeinfeldIsUnfunny/Liv...

The scene that sticks in my mind the most is the neo vs. smiths staff fight scene. Appears to referred to as the burly brawl on youtube.

But, when I saw it I thought it looked bad, and I haven't watched the movie since release. So it's not that it hasn't aged well, at release I remember being thinking it was bad. Going back and watching the clip again I'm ambivalent. Maybe it's supposed to look like that? But it looks like a cartoon. It's a good "looking" scene but about every 5 seconds the character's motion is jarringly strange. Sometimes it's rubbery and haha funny, and I respect that to a degree. Like it's supposed to lighten the mood maybe? But sometimes it is just distracting.

Ah! I just watched it. The CGI from the staff part looks bad, agreed. The whole scene though looks pretty good, a homage to fight scenes from some Hong Kong flicks. I hope you're not implying there's anything bad with Hong Kong action flicks ;)

Besides some bad CGI like the staff fight, Matrix still has many awesome scenes with SFX that have aged pretty well, though.

One movie whose bad CGI is painful to see is The Lord of the Rings. Once you notice how bad the tiny "dolls" running around Moria look, you just cannot unsee it. And that cave troll and Legolas fight... :( A shame because when LotR did actual makeup and practical effects, they were awesome.

heh, no. And I think some of the humorous to me "bowling ball" like effects that I don't like in that scene are very much in the spirit of some hk movies. But I think the homage tries to add interest by being over the top, when a crowd of 10 actors with different bodies and approaches to doing the scene is going to be more interesting. But that isn't what the plot calls for.

Fun fact: The Matrix producers tried to get Baudrillard to consult them for the sequels but he refused

Well, The Matrix Reloaded taught me about nmap...

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