The Matrix: A Dialogical Perspective
Md. Mahbubul Hasan Nayeem
Abstract: Film as a visual art form can be understandably perused as a form of “visual literature” where, under proper scrutiny, literary theories and critical concepts may be found intervening significantly. Stretching the range of “cine-literacy,” an approach to interpret films from a literary/theoretical perspective, suggests simultaneously the pervasive reach and the inter-disciplinary scope of literature. This article aims at addressing the aspects of the 1999 movie The Matrix that enable it as a congenial site for Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to operate. There is hardly any linguistic phenomenon, verbal or non-verbal, that can negate its affiliations with the Bakhtinian theory of dialogism which affords a disentanglement of the dialogic properties operative in the phenomenon and thus attempts to excavate its philosophical roots as well as the diversity of implications. The Matrix, as a form of communicative event captured in celluloid that attempts to convey some messages to the audience, corroborates the idea further and the film indeed illustrates the ways dialogism and other Bakhtinian precepts are imbricated in the cinematized fiction. What an enumeration of Bakhtinian concepts in the movie allows is an articulation of the movie’s rich diversity of meaning and implications. The film has been approached from Bakhtin’s theoretical perspective with a view to addressing the adaptability of the filmed fiction with the central tenets of his theory of dialogism. Furthermore, a dialogical perspective of the film unearths its underlying mosaic of philosophical imbrications that ultimately endorses its intrinsic quality of multiplicity of meaning.
Keywords: The Matrix, dialogics, polyphony, heteroglossia, carnivalesque
Published in September 2021