Taste is employed in The Matrix with particularly ascetic values, as we have already seen, for the pleasure of eating embodies the dangerous temptations that subvert the war against the Matrix. Exhausted by the ongoing effort to protect Zion, Cypher abandons the quest of his companions and betrays them, agree-ing to deliver Morpheus to Agent Smith. All he wants is to for-get his past and to live within a program that provides him with the comforts that seem otherwise foreclosed. We first learn of Cypher’s sensuous tendencies—representative of his moral weakness—when he offers Neo a drink of home-made hooch in apparent friendship and jocularly undermines his confidence that he is “the One” who Morpheus believes was sent to save the world. His more profound deception is revealed in the next scene in which he dines in an elegant Matrix restaurant with Agent Smith. Cypher savors a perfectly cooked steak. As he eats and drinks and smokes a cigar, he declares that he wants to be reinserted into the Matrix and to remember nothing from before.
I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
After nine years, do you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Although this point of view is presented as transparently wrong, the movie actually reinforces it with its use of color. As Cypher notices, the world of the real to which his colleagues remain committed seems to be losing vivacity. The Matrix is almost wholly bleak in hue: black, gray, brown, sepia. When saturated color appears on screen it is shockingly vivid. The only objects with brilliant color in the entire movie are things that indicate almost nostalgically the life of the senses: vending carts full of bright fruit, the red dress of the virtual woman created as an emblem of sexuality, and blood. All are symbols of living, organic form—though only the blood, also a symbol of dying—
is not illusory.
Cypher has been seduced by food, but he has additional rea-sons to abandon the fight, for he has come to believe that the world of the Matrix is more real than the one outside. (As he puts it, “real” is just another four-letter word.) His conclusion proceeds not only from his own valuation of pleasurable sense experience but also from a perspective voiced earlier by Morpheus himself: all sense experience is just interpreted stim-ulation of nerve receptors.
MORPHEUS: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
With dedicated strength of character, Morpheus remains com-mitted to the brute, real world that causes such brain signals.
But Cypher diverges in a reasonable direction: if the real is truly just phenomenal sense experiences, what does it matter where they come from? If reality comes down to one’s own sensations, there is nothing immoral in pursuing them, because there is nothing else to demand one’s moral attention. So Cypher pur-sues the pleasures of the bodily senses, long associated with temptation and sin. In so doing he makes not only a moral error but also an epistemic miscalculation, for he settles for illusion rather than reality—which constitutes an implicit if perhaps inadvertent refutation of the analysis of sense experience in wholly subjective terms. That is, if Cypher is wrong then so is Morpheus: sensations are not in all cases just interpretations of brain stimuli but also are indicators of an external reality that demands attention and respect.
To be sure, taste pleasures need not necessarily subvert one’s morals, as a parallel scene with the Oracle demonstrates. When Neo visits her, the Oracle is baking cookies, and their delicious scent fills the air. She herself is drinking something chartreuse and smoking. She can indulge her senses, one presumes, because she has not abandoned the deeper values that Cypher relinquishes. Neo eats a cookie but, significantly, he doesn’t seem to enjoy it very much.
Scenes with Cypher also make use of another traditional meaning of the taste sense: the association of taste and eating with sex. In his final act of treachery as he readies to kill his
for-mer colleagues, he croons menacingly over Trinity’s dreaming body strapped into its chair. He tells her (and she can hear him on the other end of a phone line where she awaits to be trans-ported back to safety) that he once was in love with her, that he is tired of war, and tired of eating the same goop everyday. His language and gestures are both threatening and caressing as he announces that he has decided that the Matrix can be more real than real life, because the experience it furnishes is more com-plete. You see death in the Matrix, he observes as he pulls the plugs from both Apoc and Switch; here you just die. Once again he echoes an only slightly distorted version of a sentiment expressed by Morpheus: What I see is real. Seeing is believing.
Truth
Which brings us to touch. This is an action movie full of phys-ical violence, and a good deal of the plot consists of avoiding death. Though most combat occurs within a Matrix program full of slick and tiresome special effects, it physically affects the bodies strapped into the chairs aboard ship. When Neo emerges from one encounter, he tastes the blood that trickles from his mouth and is taken aback that a virtual experience could cause physical injury. “If you’re killed in the Matrix, you die here?” he inquires. Morpheus replies soberly: “The body cannot live without the mind,” reinforcing his comment about virtual experience: “the mind makes it real.” I confess that at first these scenes tried my patience, along with several more loose comments about mind and body. (“It is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself,” pronounces one of the Oracle’s young “potentials,” adept at bending spoons without touching them.) An exasperated viewer could conclude that blatant hooey uttered with faux-Zen opacity passes for insight. What could it be but a cheap plot trick to say that if you die in the virtual world of the Matrix you also die in reality. But then I remembered the Hmong and their deadly dreams. Changes in heart rate, breathing, and adrenaline output are among the noticeable physical changes that mental images can bring about. It is but a short step further for a dream—or a virtual experience—to draw blood, a bridge between what is merely seen and what has a palpable, felt effect—a bridge, that is, between vision and touch.
Not all touch is violent, and the movie uses gentler touch in standard ways to indicate affection, trust, and friendship. The grip of Neo’s hand saves Morpheus at the end of a helicopter rescue line. Trinity hugs Tank to comfort him for the loss of his brother. As Tank prepares to pull the plug on Morpheus, he strokes his forehead in sad farewell.
Above all it is Trinity whose actions embody the intimate side of trust. It is no accident that this role is given to a woman, for the tender aspect of touch is associated with both eroticism and maternal care, and since Trinity is the only female sexual pres-ence in the script, these roles fall to her. (Evidently in their efforts to inspire doubt about the certainty of sense experience, the film makers forgot to doubt gender stereotypes.) Most dra-matic is the final scene in which she delivers a Sleeping Beauty style kiss and breathes the life back into Neo. Although it is clear that they are drawn to each other from the start, they only kiss outside the Matrix, a fact made explicit in an early version of the script, where she tells Neo that she will not kiss him in the Matrix—because she wants it to be real.10 This declaration has been dropped in the final version, but the action is retained:
Trinity delivers her life-giving kiss in the bleak atmosphere of Nebuchadnezzar when Neo is on the brink of death, having lost what appears to be his final battle with the Agents. She reaches out both physically and emotionally to Neo, caressing his inert body and whispering:
The Oracle told me that I would fall in love and that that man, the man that I loved would be the One. So you see, you can’t be dead.
You can’t be. Because I love you. You hear me? I love you.
She gently holds his shoulders and kisses him; his heart starts to beat and he draws a breath. She withdraws her hands and com-mands sharply: “Now get up!”
Neo gets up and saves the world.
Touching’s the truth.
10Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix, April 8, 1996
<http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Capsule/8448/Matrix.txt>.