What does The Matrix have to do with Aesthetic Experience?

I’ve been meaning to address why the quote “What is happening to me?” Neo, The Matrix, 1999 is attached to the "What Calls for Art?" essay.  The essay is about the aesthetic experience of the artist or the creative process.  It is specifically about how this relates to the ‘meaning of art’ or rather a rephrasing of the usual question, “What is Art?”  What does The Matrix have to do with what I’m talking about, specifically this quote?  Besides the experience of watching the movie; It’s the moment…a small moment.  I believe there are elements of the experience that I talk about in the essay that are closely related to this moment in the movie.  The Matrix is packed with information.  Anyone who doesn’t freak out because in the first few seconds some chick in patent leather pulls an awesome pose then kicks some butt, so decides that this MUST mean the movie only has one level – slick, action-packed, comic book framed, teenage boy audience intended – gets this.  This one little scene packs in for me most of what my long winded essay is about – The discovery of some truth that completely changes your perspective on things.  If you try to remember the movie...What am I saying?  If you’re reading this it’s more likely to be because you’re a fan of The Matrix than for any other reason, say interest in the quirks of my psyche…so…you remember the movie.  It’s an important scene.

Neo has taken the red pill.  He is led to a room and directed to sit in the chair.  He looks like he took one too many Xanax.  They begin the trace.  Neo looks over.  Dahmet, why don’t I have a clip of this?  He looks over and sees himself in a broken mirror.  A reflection of himself…the self that he knows.  He is compelled to reach over and touch the mirror.  The mirror is now not broken but is also not solid.  His touch causes ripples in the surface and his finger sinks slightly into the center of the expanding ripples.  When he pulls his finger away, he has mirror residue.  Mirror residue?  Whoa.  It spreads, covering his hand…”What is happening to me?”…still traveling this mirror residue, becoming a part of him, changing him.  Creeping over his arm, his shoulder, up his neck.  You see his panic.  You feel his panic.  Don’t ever let them tell you Keanu can’t act.  In the background the rest of the crew is panicking.  The trace isn’t fast enough, they might lose him.  The fluidly metallic mirror has spread past his neck and up his chin and…He wakes up in his pod.  A scary, scary place to wake up…

So again, what does this have to do with my essay?  I realize that most people go to see a movie and then forget about it.  Even if a few scenes linger, it’s not for long.  I admit to a certain tendency toward over-analysis.  That scene stuck.  It stuck with me because I was right there with him.  I recognized the moment.  Discovering a truth about your existence is not always a comfortable thing.  Intriguing at first.  Oh look…isn’t that interesting.  That’s me there.  The me that I know.  The reflection of my perception of me. The physical me, that is surely the real me.  The sum total of all that is I: including the awareness of the thought that this is a reflection or representation of me and all of the memories that allow me to recognize this person reflected in the mirror at this moment as me.  All of this happens when looking in the mirror.  Of course, it almost never happens so that this all is at the forefront of consciousness.  So this scene, the moments before awakening to the “real” are the moments I find analogous to the aesthetic experience.

That is it in a nutshell.  If you care to read another diatribe, I am in the process of writing “The Matrix of Dreams, The Aesthetic Experience and Emerging Self-Perception”.  Here I will, amongst other things, break the scene down and try to make sense of how it relates to my aesthetic experience: the preparation, the action of ‘tracing’, the 'anxiety' or discomfort, the connection with perception of self, the growing awareness of the fluidity of this perception, and the awakening to a revised (sometimes unpleasant) perception.  I will also address the ability to reenter the [m]atrix and how this affects perception of self and existing (without) the [m]atrix.