“I saw this pattern and it was everywhere. We can’t see it, but we’re all trapped inside these strange, repeating loops. Somehow I saw it in the mirror. Just a flicker, but it was like you said. And suddenly I understood. This is not the real world.”

Therapist (Barney): What were you feeling at that point? Neo: What was I feeling? I felt either I’m having a mental breakdown again or I’m living inside a computer-generated reality that has imprisoned me… again. Therapist writes in notebook: La femme n’existe pas.

Analyst: I told you, there is no sexual relationship. Neo & Trinity: Fuck you! We’ll give it a try anyway.

(Warning: Spoilers)

Matrix Resurrections (2021) ends with an explicit psychoanalytic message. It is explicit not in the usual sense of being graphic, which would remain imaginary, but in the sense of successfully symbolizing the essence of the psychoanalytic “cure”.

The supervillain is a psychoanalyst. The Analyst –as he’s called– taunts the hero that:
1) He can never reach the girl, because “La femme n’existe pas” (the woman does not exist).
2) He can never convince her, because “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (there is no sexual relationship).
3) He can never belong to a proper society because the “sheeple” just want to remain hooked to The Matrix.

The name of the hero “Neo” obviously refers to his ultimate task to reclaim the hope for the “new”. And here is how Neo “comes to save the day” [1]:
1) Neo recovers “the woman” by extracting her from the position of motherhood.
2) The woman embodies Neo’s belief in the sexual relationship by reassuming the name “Trinity”.
3) She then redeems his hope in society by reappropriating The Analyst’s mocking remark about “painting the sky with rainbows” (this probably refers to a pro-queer existence).
In order to save the sexual couple, Trinity fights and defeats The Analyst to the point of chopping up his digital body which fortunately regenerates itself. The Analyst is the worst possible supervillain because (as Neo & Trinity put it) “he makes it easy to forget what a free mind can do”. The Analyst thereby embodies a paradox made up of two contradictory components:
1) He is the cause of all forgetting: He stands for the unconscious.
2) He must be forgotten: He is reduced to the excremental element.
Neo & Trinity resolve this paradox by turning “thinking” into “thanking”: After brutally beating up The Analyst, they express gratitude to him for giving them “another chance”. Since The Analyst concretely embodies the failure of their sexual relationship, they can now save themselves by trashing him and “trying again” in the computer game of Matrix [2].

But the greatest irony is the fact that The Analyst is played by the same actor who played Barney Stinson in HIMYM (How I Met Your Mother). As the title makes it obvious, HIMYM was about finding the woman of one’s life. But Barney was the great womanizer, he was (so to say) the “oppositional determination” of HIMYM. He was such an enthusiastic zealot of having as many sexual relationships as possible that he practically embodied the impossibility of sexual relationship. This is why Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) is the perfect man to play The Analyst in Matrix Resurrections. This link is certainly deliberate: The Analyst’s cynical attitude was obviously designed to echo Barney and level it up: The Analyst is the sublation (Aufhebung) of Barney.

This link to HIMYM also lets us decipher how Trinity (“the woman”) was imprisoned in the Matrix: She is a mother called Tiffany who is married to a handsome husband called Chad. Here Chad is obviously the “alpha male” who supposedly “has it all”. Chad becomes Neo’s Oedipal rival by embodying the primal father. But the crucial question is: Who is Tiffany? It is quite significant that The Analyst (Barney) says Trinity that the name Tiffany “was a private joke, an amusement, that’s all.” This amusing private joke is an obvious echo of HIMYM which is incidentally quite easy to find!

Tiffany is a girl from the HIMYM episode “Hooked” (S05E16) which is about how people “hook” others by promising a future possibility of sexual relationship. Being “hooked” to a possibility (“another chance”) is the perfect expression of what the Matrix is all about. In addition to mentioning how Neo’s brain was hooked to the Matrix, both Matrix Resurrections and the HIMYM episode stage how people are hooked to pills: In the Matrix it is the “blue pill” that hooks “sheeple”, in the HIMYM episode it is the “purple pill” that hooks Barney in the end. Moreover, the original Tiffany in HIMYM is a pharmaceutical sales representative. According to Barney, almost all people in this profession are “hot girls” hooking people to pills by hooking doctors to prescribe them.

Whatever its color, the pill hooks by giving masturbatory/idiotic enjoyment, which serves as a memento that “real sex” is not so different, as demonstrated by Barney’s behavior. Perhaps the “red pill” doesn’t exist, it’s just the same “blue pill” in a different color. They all “hook” people in the same way. It’s either “masturbate” or “master-bait” which amount to the same effect:

not only is masturbation sex with an imagined partner (one does it to oneself, arousing oneself with imagined activity with partners); in a strictly symmetrical way, “real sex” has the structure of masturbation with a real partner — in effect, I use the flesh-and-blood partner as a masturbatory prop for enacting my fantasies. (Slavoj Žižek, Parallax View)

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Jim Carrey As Andy Kaufman As Mighty Mouse”

[2] See “Badiou on game design, part 1B: action, manor of the subject”

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