[Jun8]

What great movies, sadly such mainstream movies are getting rarer and rarer (I thought Inception was one, but, boy, what a disappointment).

The more you watch them the more new stuff you discover, e.g. it recently occurred to me that the Zion control mechanism is very similar in spirit to "the book" in 1984, called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism supposedly written by the anarchist mastermind Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the Brotherhood. It is later revealed that this book was indeed written by O'Brien, the member of the thought police that eventually arrests Smith. I believe other sophisticated autocratic regimes, like China, have similar multilayered control mechanisms in place.

[dreww]

in sophisticated, autocratic regimes, you need a fake anarchist mastermind.

in non-autocratic regimes, all you need is People magazine and TMZ.

[Jun8]

Excellent point! That is the control, based on sex and soma, described in Huxley's Brave New World (hmm, vodka was heavily subsidized by the Russian government and they are one of the most sexually open societies I know of, so maybe the Russian Party wasn't so 1984ian after all).

It has often been commented that out of the two futuristic scenarios, Huxley's is much closer to the reality we are experiencing now.

[iwwr]

That's an interesting thought. The Matrix saga may represent a failure of the command & control economic model. False freedom fails, but the machine(machines?) has(have?) a lot of power to just try again.