Brief movie review - The Matrix (1999)

Having now seen this film twice, I am still impressed by it as the most sophisticated piece of science fiction I've seen on a screen in a very long time -- perhaps since 2001, A Space Odyssey.  While I'm a recent convert to science fiction, it still has to have character development and/or a truly interesting plot to gain my favour.  The Matrix accomplishes both.

It's true.  The "shoot-em-up" scene caused me to convulse in giggles.  Still, in general, the special effects and martial arts support a smart and engrossing story line about reality and humanity and machinery, and who is which and what is where.

It's a loud movie; it's a "guy movie" in almost every sense of the expression. But it's the first sci-fi flick I've seen in a long time that I think deserve several Academy Award nominations on its own merits. And not just for special effects.

I hate hating what I am doing.  Maybe I'm just not used to it.   Maybe I lack discipline.  Maybe I just never learned to do what needed to be done, without whining.  Whatever the cause, I am unaccustomed to hating what I'm doing, and I hate it.

It's the studying I hate.  I'm trying to determine which of many reasons could cause so strong an emotional reaction.  It could be that I resent having had to learn this stuff the first time, and I resent it even more on the second go-round.  Maybe it's the knowledge that I'll never use most of it in what remains of my life-time.  Maybe it's just that I was never clear enough on why I am doing this damnable PhD anyway. 

It's entirely possible that it's an old reaction.  I've never been good at memorizing.  In fact, I've never been all that good a student.   Teachers all remember me as being very smart; my peers from elementary and high school remember me as being so smart as to be intimidating.  But my report cards and transcripts tell the tale: I'm a solid B student.  My A's have been few and far between; even in a world where a minimum grade is B- and an average required to pass is B+, I only got one A out of six courses.  Even grade inflation didn't help all that much.

Studying, as I have known and hated it, consists of memorizing facts, and then memorizing what the professor/teacher thought was most important about those facts.  The paradigm was his (and it was almost always "his", rather than "hers"); the fill-in-the-blank part, even in essay form, was to be provided by the student.  Me, that is.  So I needed to know the content.  Unless it interested me, or made some kind of sense to me in my life and/or my work, that meant memorizing.  And it still does.

If I had unlimited time and endless disclipline, and no competing interests, I suppose I could have read the thousands of pages often enough that I'd have remembered the substance of the words.  But, even with time, I fall asleep almost every time I try to read.  The adrenaline rush is starting, so I can stay awake now.   But that just seems to mean that I hate what I'm doing with more alertness.

Even now, as the threads start to weave together to make new and interesting patterns (Schumpeter was a political economist, an Austrian school economist, and a theoretician who could be seen as pre-saging public choice theory, for example), I value the wisdom and the insight, but not the process whereby it is gained.  Or earned.  Or sweated into existence.

I marvel at how persistently cranky this has made me. when I first started, I resented having to learn theory at all.  Then I started to value theory, but resented having to learn and mimic the paradigm of the professor in each course.  Now I value the paradigms (though I don't agree with them all), but I resent the process. 

I believe that life is too short to do things one hates doing; I believe that life is too short to hate doing the things one must do.  Mostly, I believe life is too short to waste it learning things that are not interesting, instead of things that are.  And, at the base of it all, I do find what I'm learning interesting.  I'm not finding the learning itself to be an interesting process, but the product has value to me personally as well as academically. 

So why do I persist in my whining?  Well.. I still hate hating what I do. 

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