“Whether the soul is ruah, pneuma, anima, or breath, it is a continuous and unstoppable movement that can only acquire form through a slowing down.”—Arnaud Villani
Eileen Myles says poetry isn’t made of language but energy. I say the movies aren’t made of pictures but of dreams. And dreams are made of séances, collect calls to the dead. “Another night, another dream, but always you,” sings Real McCoy. And who is the “you” the movies try over and over again to reach? Houdini, Einstein, Kafka? Well, one of those hunger-artists for whom the crowd gathers, and will later inexorably disperse.
Field of long-abandoned light aircraft. Zombie cyberpunk girl from the vantage of falling Tokyo rain. Milla Jovovich (but imagine Ivana Fukalot) wields a gun in each hand in a stutter of slo-mo giving way to bursts of inhuman speed. She’s an Alice, dodging air-distorting bullets in tight leather in stark white rooms—we’re you-know-where, fighting the wire-fight of the virtually just. It’s worth saying, Neo and co. ostensibly want to destroy the Matrix, but of course they never would, since it’s within its permissions that they float, and flaunt. You never get dressed the same way again, once you’ve walked last at the runway show. Et in Arcadia ego.
The crazy-hard videogame on which it’s based is evoked when she mows her way through a limitless, gray zombie horde with a shotgun customized to shoot quarters, those shining stars arrayed forever in the firmament of the arcade Real. Post-apocalypse, a prison is a fort, a container ship is a haven, L.A. is exactly the same. If you need to pretend you’ve seen this film, discuss the overhead shots of the infection leaking, or the way the evil corporation trace her flight across a map. We sense already what we slowly grow to inhabit: the eyes of satellites.
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