Abstract

Using Joseph Campbell's model of the hero's journey as a base, the Wachowski Brothers' science fictive Matrix trilogy is positioned as a viable twenty-first century myth. Attendant to this positioning, fantasy and science fiction are shown to be modern emanations of true myth. The Matrix myth is in turn unpacked as both an example of and a metaphor for the performance of myth via technological extension of humanity's creative powers. Rather than existing in an epoch that has abandoned belief in mythology in lieu of science and technology, this work argues the collusion between the two to affect a mythological renaissance.

Myth criticism and comparative literary analysis view the Matrix myth initially within its original cultural vantage point. Though the myth is thoroughly American in its construction given its use of American literary tropes such as the slave narrative, the American gothic, and Christianized rhetoric; it resonates across national and cultural borders because of its use of panhuman archetypes, recognizable action, and technology. Even at the story-level, American literature (including film) provides the perfect model for global narrative due to its own polycultural construction and its inherent mythological sensibilities.

Humanity relies on myth and narrative performance to construct reality. This is exemplified by the fact that the films' virtual environment, the Matrix, must be built upon a mythic platform in order to ensure that the human mind will ''accept the program.'' The latter part of this work modifies performance models posited by anthropologist Victor Turner and performance scholar Richard Schechner. Myth performance may now be aided by exponentially increasing representative technologies—film techniques, computer imaging, construction of virtual environments. Thus, human interaction with myth in the real world is experiencing a movement from ritual viewing/reading/listening to myth narrative, such as watching the Matrix films, to ritualized enactment, such as occurs when one ''jacks in'' to the continuance of the story in the massively multiplayer virtual space of the Matrix Online video game. Given their monomythic properties, such interactive performative platforms hold the potential to support global narrative-based communities.