assault. noun
a: a violent physical or verbal attack
b: a military attack usually involving direct combat with enemy forces
c: a concerted effort
From the Latin (ad) “saltus” meaning, “to leap”
In a scene from Lana Wachowski’s most recent film, The Matrix Resurrections, she introduces a new character to the mythos of The Matrix Saga named “Bugs” (yes, like the bunny). Bugs (Jessica Henwick) sits with Keanu Reeves’s Neo, who has been recently re-freed from the Matrix, and tries to comfort him as he begins to spiral into despair. During the closing events of The Matrix: Revolutions, Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) sacrifice their lives in order to stop the machines from decimating the last human city of Zion as well as stop the Agent Smith program (Hugo Weaving) from multiplying and copying its way to critical mass. They fought not so much to give humanity a choice, but to make the choice available to them, the choice being to let those in the Matrix who want to unplug to do so without interference. Yet, here Neo sits, resurrected, and from his point-of-view nothing has changed. There’s still a Matrix, there’s still a fight to free minds, and things seem as sovereign and stagnant as they did before the machines, Neo, The Architect (Helmut Bakaitis), and The Oracle (Gloria Foster/Mary Alice) came to their uneasy and costly truce. Neo has been brought back to life and put into a prison where his real lived experiences are reduced to moments in a video game franchise, his life now a never-ending treadmill of false dichotomies and routine. Bugs turns to Neo in his resurrected uncertainty and explains, “That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us,” and then later states, “They took your story, that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial.”
Watching this scene (a scene that can be interpreted a magnitude of different ways, just like The Matrix: Resurrections itself) you can pull from it that there’s a frustration of how personal art, especially personal art on the most visible scale, can become an inconsequential commodity. It’s one of the many themes Lana Wachowski and her frequent creative partner Lilly Wachowski often circle back to in their post-The Matrix work. How could you blame them? The Matrix as a film not only defined their entire creative output to the point that each subsequent work has been a challenging, deconstructing, subverting, and decoupling from the text, subtext, visual acumen, form, and creative process of The Matrix, it is also a movie that has largely defined cinema as we know it in the 21st century.
Admit it or not, The Matrix has copy-and-pasted itself into the very code of a majority of blockbuster filmmaking not unlike Agent Smith — not just in the parodies, homages, and quick copycats (though I have nothing but respect for the film Equilibrium and the sacred art of “Gun Kata”), but from the ground up. Obviously Hollywood kept pumping out white savior narratives informed by Joseph Campbell’s research into cultural monomyths that top the box office year after year (James Cameron’s Avatar is still the highest grossing film of all time), despite Lilly and Lana’s best efforts with the pointed subversion of such things in The Matrix: Reloaded. However, it goes deeper than the narrative, themes, and world building.
All these movies started looking like The Matrix.
It should go without saying, but given the impulse of modern film criticism (myself included!) to focus so much on the text and subtext of a film instead of exploring how it’s shot and edited, how physicality factors into an actor’s performance, how music can alter a film’s entire mood, or how a film’s visual cues and design are really the first and strongest things a viewer latches onto when they lay eyes on a work, we sometimes forget that film is a visual medium. Whether or not an audience member is actively thinking about what kind of lens was used, how dynamic the lighting is, or how a character is dressed or moves in contrast or comparison to other characters, they subconsciously pick up on it. To use a phrase from an internet personality I haven’t thought about in quite some time, “You didn’t notice, but your brain did.” These cues and design all serve the movie by imbuing it with its single most important trait: its aesthetic.
It would be foolish to try and give an all encompassing definition of “aesthetic” given that there are whole schools of philosophy and study based around the concept, but in short aesthetic is the examination and appreciation of beauty, i.e. its look and artistic choices and its intended impact on the viewer. Aesthetics are a vital part of everyday life, not just in art. It’s how we visually communicate to the world around us. The clothes you wear, the way you style your hair, home décor, how you present your gender, etc. — these are all aesthetics and as YouTuber and cultural essayist Natalie Wynn aka “Contrapoints” states in her video “The Aesthetic,” “Aesthetics is the expression of an inner truth.”
Cinema is an artform all about revealing layers of inner truth through sound and image. You can see this in a recent example of popular cinema with the debacle of Zack Snyder’s cut of The Justice League. To spare you the details that are easily available online, Zack Snyder had to leave the production of The Justice League after a sudden family tragedy. The film was given over to the now-disgraced Joss Whedon and what came out in theaters in 2017 was a confused and neutered use of aesthetics. There were still elements of Snyder’s maximalist-Randian-yet-hope-tinged vision of gods among us present in the Whedon cut of the film, but they were muddled with his signature jokey undercutting of tone and a visual palette that had been color-corrected to the point of garishness that washed over Snyder’s more dour aesthetics. When the fabled “Snyder Cut” was finally released in 2021 (with the help of a boatload of post-production since the film was never technically finished and therefore was never technically a “Snyder Cut”), it became clear how important aesthetics are to a film working and engaging its audience with its inner truth. Your mileage may vary on your enjoyment of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, but it’d be hard to debate that the film we got is filled with all his visual and artistic idiosyncrasies. Ezra Miller’s swooning and romantic slow-motion introduction as The Flash, set to Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett’s “Song to the Siren” as he rescues Kiersey Clemons’s Iris West from a car crash, is a showcase in how powerful a set of bold aesthetic choices can be in affecting the viewer.
What makes the Wachowskis such interesting filmmakers is that their entire mode of creation is based around aesthetics, meaning their work is that of creators always digging for an inner truth but in the most grandiose ways. The Matrix was famously a movie that was meticulously planned out with the use of storyboards and comic book sensibilities (of course, with the help of famed comic book artists Steve Skroce and Geoff Darrow), giving the film its signature rigidity and preciseness. It reveals an inner truth to the text and subtext of the film of being boxed in and on a predestined path, which the film also pushes back against as the narrative unfolds. Lana and Lilly spent 270 production days shooting The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions back-to-back and in that time they came to a few realizations. One important one is that they wanted to avoid, as Lana put it during a conversation at DePaul University in 2014, “a kind of commodifying ossification of an original idea,” meaning they wanted to avoid stagnation and repetition in service of capital. The Matrix Saga was constructed to have each film and piece of media take on a different aesthetic to serve its ultimate truth. Even though all the films, video games, and comics in The Matrix Saga are of a piece, you could never say that The Animatrix, The Matrix Online, and The Matrix: Resurrections don’t all have different aesthetics and aims. The sisters specifically went out of their way to make sure they had a fresh take and expansion of their initial ideas laid out in The Matrix to avoid that ossification.
Another realization they happened upon while trapped inside the world and aesthetics of The Matrix Saga (by their own doing — Lilly points out, “We were also shooting for 270 days so we were in our own straight jacket”) was that Hollywood had already started commodifying and ossifying the aesthetics of The Matrix. Lana talks about this odd but expected phenomenon:
“While we were going through it [production of The Matrix: Revolutions], I just kept saying, like, ‘God, I’m just so sick of how all these movies look the same!’ And at this point all the other people are, like, imitating us, and we were trapped in this house of mirrors where you go to the movies and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s our shot!’”
And she’s right! Despite The Matrix being, in my estimation, the quintessential “End of History” movie (a political and philosophical concept born out of late 20th-century hubris that the western world’s commitment to capitalism had essentially led us into the final form of human government and there were metaphorically no more worlds to conquer and the weeping that comes with such a revelation — we were… wrong), Hollywood, as it is wont to do, took all the wrong lessons from the film and brought them into the 21st century without much examination or care for the film’s inner truth. They loved the sleekness and depth of Bill Pope’s cinematography, the look of Yuen Woo Ping’s choreography, and the minimalist bombast of Don Davis’ score, but they missed how the meaning behind such aesthetic choices coalesced together in a post-modern potpourri. It’s not really a criticism, but you can pretty much draw a direct line from The Matrix to the works of Christopher Nolan’s ‘OOs and early 2010s filmography. The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception owe a great deal to the aesthetics of The Matrix — its color palette, its lighting, its sound, it’s all there. People would then go on to copy Christopher Nolan’s films and the cycle of ossification continued.
So what do you do when you’re a creative more interested in forward momentum and you’re watching in real time as the dominant aesthetic becomes a stale and trivialized imitation of something you created?
You assault it.
If you saw the incredibly pretentious block definition at the top of this piece, you can see where this is going. Obviously the word “assault” carries violent and malicious connotations given its everyday usage, but as educator and author Cáel M. Keegan points out during an interview with Lana in his bravura analysis of the Wachowskis’ work in his book Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender, Lana has a penchant for using that word:
Cáel: “I was thinking about your use of the word ‘assault.’ After I heard you use it several times, I became very interested in what it actually meant. I looked up the etymology of the word and was surprised. It means ‘to leap.'”
Lana: “To leap — yes!”
When you understand that the Wachowskis view an “assault on aesthetics” as more of a mode pushing an artform forward — a leap of faith in conjunction with good old-fashioned “know-how” into something new — and as a way to make a “concerted effort” (the most fascinating definition of the word “assault”) against the very ossification of that dominant aesthetic by introducing a new one, then the creation of the film Speed Racer seems as natural as the air we breath.
I saw Speed Racer on opening night back on May 9, 2008, with two close friends who would go on to become accomplished artists themselves (composer Dalen Wuest and visual artist Anna Martinez), and in retrospect seeing that movie felt like the seed of every positive creative impulse I’ve had (and quite possibly my two friends have had) in the 14 years since. Seeing Speed Racer without having any prior studied knowledge of how cinematic language worked but having an intrinsic knowledge of it — most of us born in the late 20th century are raised on film and television — it felt as if I was watching someone create a new language out of preexisting elements and somehow simultaneously teaching me that language in real-time so that by the time we reach Speed Racer’s phantasmagorical finale, you’re fluent and ready to have more conversations.
The film is a miracle in cinematic reinvention. Gone are the stringent use of cuts and edits as means of defined punctuation that the 20th century demanded and are instead integrated and at times replaced with the flowing temporal kineticism of Cubist art. Lana expounds on this in a 2012 interview with Ray Pride called “Lana Wachowski on Speed Racer and Influence”:
“…Editing is a really interesting topic, too, because it’s also aesthetic-based. It is essentially the grammar of cinema, the sentence of cinema. And pretty much every movie since I was 9 was, you know, from a capital letter to a period. Scenes progress through a series of cuts, and maybe you throw in a dissolve, which is more of an ellipse, you know, instead of a period. But we were sick of that, too. And if you read postmodern fiction, something like Rick Moody’s Purple America or James Joyce’s Ulysses, you see these authors trying to transcend the boundaries of conventional grammar, trying to get your brain to think about language differently. And so we started trying to do that same thing with Speed Racer.”
The effect is dazzling. The movie moves between the past and the ever forward-moving present as easily as pistons in a well-oiled engine. Characters in different locations and temporalities slide across the screen to illustrate multiple points-of-view synchronously, all to serve the internal and external struggles of the titular Speed Racer. And it comes back around to the aesthetics’ relationship to how we create things. Lana has been very open about how aesthetic assault and her transition informs how she creates, all the way from the methodical creation of The Matrix to the improvisational shift she went through making season two of Sense8 and The Matrix: Resurrections (coming up with action setpieces on the day of shooting), and how her newfound freedom to trust her impulses and “embrace messiness” has had a direct effect on her work. The same can be applied to Lilly and Lana’s mode of creation on Speed Racer. The sisters were inspired by James Joyce’s attempt to convey that we don’t think in definite phrases and sentences:
“Joyce said, ‘I want to try to demonstrate the way my mind works as I’m getting all of this input and it doesn’t cut things and it doesn’t order things and it doesn’t always make sentences.’ There were moments in Speed Racer, like the races, where we just wanted them to feel like this experiential flowing thing that was transcending normal, simple, linear narrative.”
These bold choices don’t stop squarely at the editing and form; it extends all the way to the unreality of the film which is so lovingly embraced. I’ve long waxed poetic about why I love musicals so much, with special mention of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s 1961 West Side Story adaptation and how the saturated nature of its color palette and the occasional dips into esoteric oddness (see the number “Cool”) make the film feel avant-garde without removing things that make it feel traditionally sprawling and romantic. Speed Racer is no different. It’s a top-to-bottom green-screen movie, which I know makes practical-effects purists’ eyes twitch at the mention of something so artificial, but it serves the aesthetic! Not just the aesthetic of the late-’60s manga and Saturday morning anime (a lot of western Gen X-ers’ first foray into Japanese animation, the Wachowskis included) but the aesthetic of a world where anything has the potential to happen. So what we get is a plasticine universe bursting with colors and marvelously mad machines that feel as if they have malleability to them.
To circle back around to the Wachowskis teaching you a language as they’re creating it, it sets you up for a final race that leans fully into the abstraction of a character “painting a masterpiece” in real-time (as the Wachowskis themselves are painting THEIR OWN masterpiece in real-time — wild stuff!) with the track dissolving into lava lamp-like textures and the editing hitting a fever pitch that allows certain images to become outright subliminal. I’m a person whose mind is constantly looking for something to challenge and move my perceptions of what a film can even do and to this day, with maybe the exception of the ENTIRETY of Mad Max: Fury Road, I have yet to see anything since that matches those triumphant last five minutes of Speed Racer.
But to quote an overused Back to the Future meme: “Guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet… but your kids are going to love it!” Speed Racer, despite Warner Brothers’ best efforts, could not be saved from the critical and public vitriol it endured upon its release. Critics and audiences still sore from the perceived betrayal of their sensibilities with the unfairly maligned Matrix sequels would have none of this overtly sincere assault against dominant aesthetics “Trojan Horse’d” inside of a kids’ movie. The film was a flop with the old guard of critics and adults, but within the burgeoning online film community and children and adolescents a seed had been planted. Speed Racer has gone through such a radical shift in its esteem, even I — a day-one defender and evangelist for the House of Racer — sometimes find it challenging calling it underrated anymore. Like all Wachowski projects, they were just about a decade or two ahead of the curve. (Their first film, the lesbian neo-noir Bound, wouldn’t undergo critical and academic reevaluation as a landmark piece of queer cinema until Lana came out as trans in 2012, 14 years after the film’s release, largely because Lilly and Lana’s chosen aesthetic to present as cis men didn’t match people’s sensibilities of who makes queer films.) They just needed some fresh, more-21st-century-and-less-20th-century perspectives on the film. I mentioned the artform of Cubism earlier and I think Lana gives an apt comparison to the critical reception of Speed Racer in contrast with what her and Lilly set out to do:
“…we realized that if you try to make a Cubist film for adults, you will end up like Picasso, running from the angry mob when he first showed Guernica. They wanted to kill him. It’s because adults… They reject change, and an aesthetic change is too aggressive a death for them. Every generation experiences aesthetic death, and when you really assault an aesthetic, people freak out. But we said that kids are okay with aesthetic change…”
So I sit here, in 2022, thinking about this piece of anti-capitalist, avant-garde, postmodern art that came months before the subprime mortgage crisis, months before the release of Iron Man would signal the definite beginning of the end of creator-driven blockbusters with the rise of the MCU and the end of the hope of the multiplex as an exhibition space for a large, aesthetically diverse swath of cinema to make itself known and appreciated. And yet, I do not despair. Lana and Lilly Wachowski stood boldly with their hard-earned artistic and financial clout in their hands and showed me a world where anything was possible — scratch that. They showed me a world where you could paint the sky with rainbows. Through Speed Racer and their entire filmography, they showed me beauty is infinite, and if you take the leap, you can fall into a world where those very same skies are no longer the limit.
Or quite simply:
TL;DR — Speed Racer owns harder than a bank on a defaulted loan during the 2008 financial crisis and I think it’s the greatest piece of filmic art in the 21st century and honestly…
…everyone else is racing for 2nd.
Speed Racer, which was programmed by David, will be screened at IU Cinema on March 25 as part of the Staff Selects series.
To hear more of David’s thoughts on Speed Racer, check out their conversation with Margot Stacy on the latest episode of A Place for Film: The IU Cinema Podcast.
David Carter is a film lover and a menace. They play jazz from time to time but asks you not to hold that against them. Their taste in movies bounces from Speed Racer to The Holy Mountain and everything in between. Since both those films have now screened and been written about at the IU Cinema, they will probably change this bio soon.