The Matrix was the first DVD I ever watched. It must have been the summer of 2000,* my dad had just gotten a new laptop with a CD/DVD drive and we drove in our Toyota Previa from Colorado to Memphis and then to somewhere along the Florida panhandle, where we had split a beach house’s weekend rent with my cousin’s family. I would open the laptop and watch while my damp skin dried.
I was captivated by the newness of it all; the Matrix DVD itself, never mind the film it contained, prefigured the sort of “alternate reality games” that would proliferate in the decade to come. There was the customary animated splash page menu, the chapter selection, etc. but there was also, if you scrolled downward past the menu options, “hidden” options rendered as little pixelated pills in the corner of the screen. These opened to further documentary clips of the sort that have, like Le Corbusier’s hated flying buttresses, become taken for granted as vestigial and garish in film presentation. The memory of them for me is now bound up with the Florida sun and the loud whine of the laptop’s fan. The digital picture was so clear that the green camera filters the Wachowskis used seem to bleed into my view of the world on that trip.
Because the senses are bound up together in memory, and the senses in the modern era are bound into products, various other media will in almost surreal fashion press upon my ethereal Floridian nostalgia. We had only a few CDs in the Previa that my parents would listen to on car trips, and that summer it was U2’s The Joshua Tree. When the battery ran out of the laptop and I could no longer play the dojo sparring scene or the lobby gunfight on repeat in the backseat of the van, I read Michael Crichton’s Sphere.**
I remember vividly the way a Sphere character died because another imagines swarms of deadly jellyfish into being. Days before our arrival in Florida, a storm had passed over the coastline of Cuba and ripped up millions of small blue anemones from the ocean shelf, and as a result, the beaches and the water teemed with cobalt blue disks roughly the size of a silver dollar, bristling with arms like threadbare cotton. They stung passively to create little rashes like red ant bites. Somehow we were too young to really mind. My cousin H would eventually get stung by an actual poisonous jellyfish; being somewhat culturally literate, I offered to urinate on the wound, but a kindly old Australian couple intervened to tell us that the real thing for stings was powdered meat tenderizer. She tried it and it worked.
Later that night we would join other random tourist teens to swim in the moonlight, the waves all seeming to swell into rolling hills; we could barely see each other, but I remember that we laughed. Later on I would drag her to watch Princess Mononoke together and she would admit to liking it, would talk about the drama in her cheerleading team at a catholic school in Memphis. She got pregnant a few years later and, some years after that, took her own life.
Somehow it bothers me that I feel I didn’t know her well outside of our vacations together; by the time I realized what other people could mean to me, what family, especially family my own age could mean to me, she was already gone. I remember how sharp she was, and for some reason I remember the way she pronounced the word “rank” with her heavy Memphis accent. We mirrored each other in the ways we resented our parents while appreciating theirs. I was too distant while she was alive because I didn’t know what else to be.
I get older and my body tires and my mind loosens and these little chain reactions of memory are thick on the ground. I wonder if this isn’t why so many people become reactionary as they age. I turned 20 and all of a sudden the taste of bitter greens and olives, which I had always detested for lack of sweetness, became things I loved because of their depth and texture. As the clock runs down on my 30s, physical aches begin to linger and I learn to live alongside them. Is it any wonder that other sorts of ache could become furniture? Cue that perfect old saw that Mad Men popularized about the root of the word nostalgia. Certainly there are varieties of pain that take on a lovely roseate tinge. And I think, as I find myself doing in many bewildering contexts, about Linda Williams’s Hard Core and the fluid dynamics in masochism that she notes. Pain becomes a proxy by which we allow ourselves to be taken by all sorts of other things.***
Obviously all of this rumination is preceded by the slow rollout of a new Matrix movie. I dislike the Matrix films but I clearly have a lot of feelings about the things surrounding them. I could expound on all sorts of opinions, but blockbuster film opinions are the cheapest kind. Will I like the new one? I won’t love it the way I loved the first, unless essential memories of place and a person I love form just in time for it. You get to make more of those, I think, when you’re younger.
* I am presently at the age at which the memories of years condense and pulp together like a wet paperback, and I’m not aided by my dependence on benadryl for restful sleep. Were it that I could have both my rest and a healthy brain.
** I loved that book as I loved all Michael Crichton in those days. Somehow high school seemed to wring out my capacity for wholeheartedly giving myself over to science fantasy of that type; Timeline was the first Crichton I read only to think “this doesn’t make any sense, and it’s also not any good.” Ironically enough he got the theoretical basis of teleportation down pretty well in that one, though. Points for that.
*** Instead of always defaulting to that text when contemplating messy entanglements, couldn’t I simply just study dialectics? I’d like to think that intellectual cement has set, for me. Besides it’s just more fun, and funnier, to relate anything and everything to feminist psycho-sexual analysis.