Analyzing John Berger's Essay 'Ways Of Seeing'

Mark Ching

Professor H.O. Alvarez

ENG 1A

18 May 2018

Are we in the Matrix?

John Berger’s essay “Ways of Seeing” (1972) speaks on the topic that the visual can be manipulated in order to make the observer see from the manipulator’s perspective. Berger states the meaning of art is being changed, and that art is occasionally being mystified due to the lack of understanding. Berger explains his topic on how the art historians alter the visual arts for their own whim in his writing and while not directly correlated, Wachowski in his film The Matrix (1999) represent the possibility that one’s perspective of reality can be distorted by what one sees. The minds of humans can be seen in the matrix to be just completely oblivious to the fact that

The relationship between the original work of art and the reproduction has changed as it is easily capable to bring multiple copies of the original piece to the masses, thanks to ever so advancing technology and multiple ways of reproducing a picture. As the copy of the piece is not the original there can be any numbers of meanings attached to it, Berger argues in his text “In the age of pictorial reproduction of paintings the meaning is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable […] It is not a question of reproduction failing to Lennon 2 reproduce certain aspects of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image, unlike an original work, can lend itself to them (Berger 24-25). This can all be seen throughout the film The Matrix as the two main characters who are trying to cover up the “real” world and the other trying to keep the fraud up. This is clearly represented in the scene which Agent Smith is interrogating Morpheus and says “The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your

The freedom is seen in both pieces as in the film the freedom is to escape the suffering and tragedy of life in the real world and live in a world where one can be a self-supporting Lennon 4 individual in a capitalist society. As Laura Bartlett and Thomas Byers in their essay “Back to the Future” assert about The Matrix, “In the film, the hallucination is thematized; it is not only an electronic illusion, but also an ideological one. […] The Matrix metaphorized our willingness to fantasize that the ‘freedom’ rhetoric of e-capitalism accurately reflects our reality and our propensity to marvel at our technological innovations even in the face of mass alienation and social malaise (Bartlett and Byers 31). The freedom of one individual in the matrix becomes something of capitalism, as in the matrix the world represents the peak of human life. One would be engulfed by the freedom they were expiring at the time when they were in the matrix nothing more nothing less, as all the advances of technology makes up for the lack of human interaction. Bartlett and Byers assert further when they describe and quoting the character of Cypher, “the villains are those who side with the pleasant virtual against the gritty real, such as the traitor Cypher […] While meeting with Agent Smith in the