Invisible Influences in The Matrix
Debunking Grant Morrison‘s claim that The Matrix wouldn’t exist without his fiction
Iain Spence
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Published in
Books Are Our Superpower
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12 min read
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May 19, 2023
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Photo by
Curtis Nguyen on
Unsplash
Grant Morrison has stated in the past that
The Matrix was part of a late 1990s emergence of Hostile Strength celebration within pop culture. He said this in relation to
The Sekhmet Hypothesis.¹ As the author of the book, I disagree.
The Matrix was a movie, not a raw celebration involving atavistic behaviour within pop culture.
I also disagree with the following remarks concerning the clothes worn by the characters in
The Matrix. In one interview, Morrison describes the characters as wearing a ‘…tight, fascistic, fetishistic style’ again, in relation to
The Sekhmet Hypothesis.²
I’d say this shows a lack of understanding of the early
Sekhmet Hypothesis, the nature of fascism and
The Matrix itself. He’s completely wrong on every point. Anyone who believes that the clothes worn by Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, or Switch in
The Matrix are ‘fascistic’ would be better off putting their comics aside and educating themselves on modern history and politics.
In the same interview Morrison also makes the following remarkable claim:
I think The Matrix is a brilliant movie, which wouldn’t have existed without THE INVISIBLES.
Yup, I’m not making that up. Notice how
The Matrix isn’t given the good grace or dignity of basic italics but
The Invisibles is written in LOUD BLOCK CAPITALS. That aggressive hard sell is in itself, a red flag. So let’s examine Morrison’s remarkable claim in more detail. We’ll then move onto other, more likely influences, on the movie.
Invisibles in
We can start by considering the date of the first draft of
The Matrix: 1994. That was the same year when the first copies of
The Invisibles appeared in comic form. There is a final script available of
The Matrix online, dated April 8th 1996.³
The Invisibles spans from 1994 to 2000. If the dates attributed to
The Matrix scripts are accurate, then this allows little influence to feed into the actual plot of
The Matrix.
By the time the film was being shot (March of 1998), the Wachowskis didn’t have the entire Invisibles to share with design staff and actors. It only amounts to the first half of the myth. According to Grant Morrison, his
Invisibles ‘books’ were given to the design staff as a reference for the film’s content.⁴ If this is true, then we’re looking at even less influence than his comics.
The Matrix film production ended in August 1998 — only two books had been published before that date.
Here are some of Morrison’s main accusations:
After the initial rage, when I really went through it plot point by plot point and image by image…The jumps from buildings, the magic mirror, the boy who’s being inducted called the One, the black drones, the shades, the fetish. The Kung Fu as well. The dojo scene. The whole thing — the insect machines that in fact are from a higher dimension…The entire Gnostic theme.⁵
Okay, let’s go through each of these claims and deconstruct his rant. If we take it in good faith that
The Matrix was written between 1994 and 1996, we have to ask ourselves how much of Morrison’s list was already inside the Wachowskis’ script.
Visually, both myths are in fact, very different. There’s little cyberpunk in
The Invisibles. If you want to see
The Matrix style in
The Invisibles, you have to read the trades which appeared in the very late 1990s, by which point the film was pretty much in its late stage of development.
The shades
A visual similarity exists between King Mob (
The Invisibles) and Morpheus (
The Matrix). Both wear shades in the same manner. Grant Morrison says he asked his artists to turn him into King Mob, to put him directly into his
Invisibles stories. To see such a visually similar character then turn up in another myth years later may have been unnerving. But it’s not proof that the Wachowski’s copied
The Invisibles.
There are also similarities between the Agent Smiths of
The Matrix to Morrison’s dark-suited villains. Both wear dark shades. Then again, why not bring in Jake and Elwood from 1980, from
The Blues Brothers? Okay, so that’s a comical example, but the point is, there’s little way to tell where any influence comes from unless the writer uses a previous myth as a template and happens to share the fact. Sinister MIB were a constant joke among heads discussing UFOs and psi phenomena in the 1980s. They’re not an invention of Grant Morrison. Likewise, the movie,
Men in Black (1997) didn’t depend on Morrison as an influence.
The jumps from buildings
As Morrison says, there’s an uncanny parallel between the Wachowskis’ rooftop scene and the rooftop scene in
The Invisibles. In both scenarios, individuals are pursued by the police on rooftops. Those who are chased, carry out massive, impossible jumps.
The Wachowskis’ version is dated April 1996.
Grant Morrison’s version is dated 1997/98.
He might pause to consider what this looks like from the Wachowskis’ perspective.
The entire Gnostic theme
Both myths draw on the idea of a hidden war being conducted by occult forces while humanity remains oblivious to the fact. But we’ve seen this before in the early 1970s with
Illuminatus!, by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Perhaps the Wachowskis took this sci-fi series as a direct influence and not
The Invisibles.
Another example of the Gnostic theme turns up in the underground ‘biography’,
The Black Alchemist, by Andrew Collins. It came out in 1988 and involved two groups of hidden factions fighting an occult war in Britain via a technique of ‘psychic questing’. There are plenty of other examples. Grant Morrison does not have a monopoly on strange tales of secret societies, ‘Gnostic’ or otherwise.
Insects and the dojo training scene
As Morrison says himself, his fictional insects are from another dimension. The Wachowskis’ insects are AI-based. Like the dojo scene, they can be traced back to April 1996. Morrison’s (completely different) dojo scene only dates back to 1997.
Towering cyberpunk imagery: low resolution for critical review
The chosen one
So what about the initiation of the two main characters in
The Invisibles and
The Matrix? Morrison’s first trade collection of
The Invisibles is called
Say You Want a Revolution. It revolves around a wayward character, Dane McGowan. He’s a schoolboy on a downward spiral of petty crime until he’s initiated into the Invisibles.
But Mr. Anderson (from
The Matrix) is an intelligent computer hacker, not a thuggish schoolboy. Dane is taught by Tom O’Bedlam, a tramp who employs methods of initiation similar to those played out by Castaneda’s Don Juan. Again, there’s no similarity here to the initiation of Thomas Anderson by Morpheus, apart from the fact that they are both initiated. Morpheus is not anything like old Tom.
Initiation, involving a near-death experience, is common as muck in mythology. Like so many heroes, young Harry Potter came through the initiation of a near-death experience (1997). But we don’t see J.K. Rowling claiming the Wachowskis must have ripped off her main background plot. Thousands of other ‘Chosen Ones’ date back in mythology thousands of years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that modern fantasy has hundreds of examples.
The magic mirror
The ‘magic mirror’ that Morrison refers to, sounds like a mirror made by his character Jim Crow. Crow creates his bluish mirror from his ‘molten imagination’. He then reaches into it and tastes the liquid looking-glass running down the back of his throat. This has obvious parallels to Neo’s initiation into the real world via Morpheus’s mirror. Morrison’s version pre-dates the Wachowskis’ acknowledged finished script by mere months. It may however pre-date it in unacknowledged form.
So at last we find a scene which has an intricate parallel to Morrison’s work. But this rare nugget of gold is swimming in a mythological sea of vague similarities, not facts.
We could easily compare the mirror parallel above to Morrison’s paper-folding, time travel plot from
The Invisibles and its remarkable similarity to Alan Moore’s paper-folding, time travel scene from ‘The Disturbed Digestions of Doctor Dibworthy’. Moore’s story dates to the early 1980s, from the comic
2000AD. Morrison’s from the late 1990s. Unconscious influence? Conscious ripping off? Pure coincidence? Synchronicity?
The Wachowskis
So what do the Wachowskis make of Morrison’s claims? Discussing the general ‘feel’ of the movie, they said, ‘The largest influence from the comic book world on the actual design would be the art of Geof Darrow’. When asked if
The Invisibles had influenced the film, they said they enjoyed the series, but it wasn’t an influence.⁶
Geof Darrow worked as one of the design staff on
The Matrix as far back as 1997. He may (or may not) have used the image of King Mob from
The Invisibles, as his main influence for Morpheus’s image. They certainly look similar, but until he states that he did, I guess we have to keep an open mind. Even if he did, it remains a minor visual point.
The fetishistic aesthetic
Such is the archetypal lure of
The Matrix that even high-brow intellectuals such as Professor Lewis Call have been taken in by Morrison’s claim. In ‘Post-anarchism in Grant Morrison’s
The Invisibles’, he states:
‘In 1999, the Wachowskis…released their film
The Matrix. This film borrowed its theory of simulation, its post-anarchist politics and its fetishistic aesthetic directly from
The Invisibles (but without crediting Morrison)’.⁷
The ‘fetishistic aesthetic’ may have come out of any of the weirder nightclubs in the early Nineties. Call could revisit
The X-Files’ second series from 1994. One episode features a nightclub, Club Tepes, which has as much (if not more) towering, cyberpunk aesthetic as
The Matrix. But we don’t see Call claiming that the Wachowskis borrowed the same style from
The X-Files. Likewise, it would be presumptuous to claim that Morrison ripped off the same episode.
I’ll confess here to knowing little about Call’s ‘post-anarchist’ politics. I always preferred the down-to-earth definitions of anarchism offered by the likes of Neil Gunn and Colin Ward. The idea that Grant Morrison (MBE) espouses anarchist politics is laughable. Or do ‘post anarchists’ make a habit of brown-nosing the future ‘king’ of Britain and its empire?
Kung fu
Seeing as we’re discussing
The X-Files, let’s not forget ‘Kill Switch’, made in 1997. The plot involves a rouge AI which is prowling around the internet, bumping off humans, specifically those who don’t like its increasing autonomy and sentience. Take a look at the main cyberpunk hacker character, Invisigoth (Esther Nairn), played by Kristin Lehman. Compare to Trinity. Kung Fu is played out in a cyberpunk style in the same episode.
Two scenes in particular look like archetypal blueprints for two of Trinity’s main scenes. One is Nairn’s discovery and violent confrontation by Mulder and Scully in her lair. The other is her introduction to Mulder’s three hacker friends who are in awe to find that she is the one and only, Invisigoth. The parallels to two similar scenes in
The Matrix are remarkable, but they don’t prove who is influencing who. It could of course be pure coincidence.
We could remind ourselves at this point of the nature of archetypal symbolism, and its relationship to synchronicity. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the script for the episode was written by Tom Maddox and a quiet author who goes by the name of, ‘William Gibson’.
One imagines that Gibson finds better things to do with his time than complaining about the Wachowskis, or selling t-shirts with his name on the front, to idiots on his personal web site.
Virtual reality
With regards to where the Wachowskis took their simulation idea from, again, Call is fanciful. Nor does the simulation influence have to be singular or ‘direct’. Speaking for myself, when I first saw
The Matrix, I thought, I’ve seen this before: The concept of our world being a digital simulation had already appeared in a philosophical article around 1995, in
Wired magazine.
For virtual simulation, we can go back even further to a book by Lionel Snell (AKA Ramsey Dukes), called
Words Made Flesh. Snell’s book dates back to 1986 and is listed on Wikipedia as an uncanny prediction of the plot of
The Matrix. He’s since described the book as being once ahead of its time but now dated.⁸
He originally discussed the Matrix concept back in the early 1970s. So it’s absurd for Call to suggest any ‘direct’ simulation influence in
The Matrix coming from Morrison. William Gibson’s use of virtuality, within his science fiction, hardly needs elaborating on. It pre-dates
The Invisibles series by ten years.
Are Professor Call and Morrison aware of P. K. Dick’s,
A Maze of Death from 1970? Here we find a group of colonists seemingly on a distant ‘world’ attempting to come to terms with living in an increasingly bizarre, virtual environment. Notice how it pre-dates
The Matrix by three decades. Or how about Dick’s
VALIS, from 1981:
That the entire universe — as we experience it — could be a forgery is an idea best expressed by Heraclitus.⁹
Simulacra and Simulation
An Easter egg is presented to the viewer in
The Matrix. It comes in the form of a copy of,
Simulacra and Simulation on Neo’s bookshelf. It is hollowed out and holds the illegal code of a simulation. The original book is by Jean Baudrillard, written in 1981. After the egg was gifted to Baudrillard, he was asked to collaborate on the next two Matrix movies. Baudrillard declined:
The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw.¹⁰
Baudrillard thought
The Matrix was too simplistic and roughly done. It took the age-old question, ‘Is the world an illusion?’ and confused it with the new problem of living in an increasingly phoney world of simulation. That was a problem already touched on by the likes of Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1960s. Elsewhere it’s been hinted that Baudrillard was uncomfortable with the hypocrisy (or at least, the contradiction) of a movie that had become such a large part of the spectacle supposedly challenging the same problem.
Whilst they’ve never mentioned this publicly, I’d guess the Wachowskis may have been grappling with chapter 13 of Baudrillard’s
Simulacra and Simulation. It is titled ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’. At one point, Baudrillard describes a theme in Philip K. Dick’s novel,
The Simulacra.
He ponders on the book’s meaning:
…in which fiction will never again be a mirror held toward the future, but a desperate re-hallucination of the past.
Sound familiar? I like to think that if Dick were still alive in 1999 and had received the egg, rather than Baudrillard, he would have welcomed it with open arms and probably incubated it in his
Exegesis.
Photo by,
Curtis Nguyen on Unsplash, C.C.
Morrison’s naivety not only applies to
The Matrix. It’s also part of a broader outlook. Several years back I found myself mentioned on Wikipedia as being a minor influence on
The Invisibles. So I obtained a copy of
Anarchy for the Masses, a book from 2002, which gives background details to the series.
Interviewed in the book, Morrison suggests that British pop culture emerged because of the decline of the British empire:
‘[Britain]…took 50 years to get over the empire and then we had the Beatles and the Stones and psychedelia.’¹¹
He then suggests that America will one day get over its own empire but is somehow lagging behind the UK. He fails to acknowledge that American pop culture has been as influential as the UK’s since the 1940s. Has he never heard about Hip Hop and Rap, or Chicago House. What about American Acid Rock in the mid-1960s, or The Ramones in 1974? What about the origins of Rock ’n’ Roll in the 1940s?
Grant Morrison suggests that Britain took 50 years to ‘get over’ the decline of its empire. Several years later, he visited Buckingham Palace to receive an MBE. This medal now shows that he is a fully fledged ‘Member of the British Empire’ and not just some lowly peasant.
I have little time for his brown-nosing of royalty, his hypocrisy and his unchecked vanity. His references to my work in the 1990s amounts to nothing more than misrepresentation.
References:
1 — Grant Morrison,
Barbelith Interview, 2004.
2 — Grant Morrison,
The Crack — Edition Two, Crackcomics.com.
3 —
The Matrix, by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, IMSDb.
4 — Grant Morrison,
Suicide Girls Interview, 2005.
5 — Grant Morrison interviewed in,
Anarchy for the Masses, p. 236, Disinformation, 2002.
6 —
The Wachowski Sisters’ Interview, Originally appeared on the Warner Brothers’ website.
7 — Lewis Call, ‘Anarchism and the Body’, p. 54,
Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2018.
8 — Ramsey Dukes,
Words Made Flesh, The Mouse that Spins, 1987. For a follow-up to Lionel Snell discussing the same topic, here’s a link to his four-part series,
From AI to The Matrix.
9 — Philip K. Dick,
VALIS and Later Novels, p. 203, The Library of America, 2009.
10–Jean Baudrillard, interviewed in,
Le Nouvel Observateur (Volume 1, №2): ‘The Matrix Decoded’, 2004.
11 —
Anarchy for the Masses, p. 233.
The Matrix
Grant Morrison
Comics
Philip K Dick
Baudrillard
Written by Iain Spence
![[F*U*S*A*|KåMµ§]](/forum/data/avatars/m/0/141.jpg?1720524803){kind=avatar}
de qualquer forma, sobre as diferenças pontuais sobre neuromancer, é obvio que elas deveriam existir, caso contrário o filme se chamaria neuromancer, e não matrix 
de qualquer modo, acho que os wachowski nunca negaram que matrix é uma colcha de retalhos de 'n' obras, filosofias e afins. eu gosto. só acho que deveriam ter parado no primeiro.
![=]](/forum/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/happy.gif "Sorriso =]")
é o que faz valer a experiência de usar o fórum.
