Minute 13: “You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson.”

Transcript

Transcribed automatically from the audio, and imperfect for it — names and punchlines suffer worst. Useful for finding a moment, not for quoting one.

0:00Welcome to the Matrix Minute, a podcast where we discuss the first film, one minute at a time, because we love this film. Hi, I'm Phil, who digitally graded many of my city photos when I was 13 to green because of this movie. Hello, I'm Jake. Who's next? It's me, Tim. Ah, welcome back. And I just remembered I named my cat Matrix at one point. Really? No way. What about Pixie? You had another cat called Pixie. Pixie was first, but Xenia was for him, and that was Pixie. Xenia, that was the first cat. They all have X's in their names. This is something that Americans don't understand. You need to name your cats with X and S.

0:43If you call your cat Sexy, that will be the best name because cats respond to these words. If you name your cat John, you can't go, John, come here. The cats don't do that. They're not dogs. What if I name him Cat One? They just come to like... No, you need those consonants. You need the X's. Why? Because they react to that. They react to that. Their ears are attuned to that higher register. So we just call it like... Like Bagel. Yeah. If you call him Bagel, it won't be like Bagel until, like, you know... Until you go Bagel. We won't know it's his name. Bakesle. Okay. Okay. So anyway, this is good because, again, we have it connecting to the Matrix because of, you know, Black Cat just walked by and another just like it. So everything is connected.

1:23So welcome back. This is minute... Welcome. ...uh, 13, I believe. You're correct. I will tell you what's happening in this minute today. Neo's boss is upset at him. He gives him a right scolding. Then a distraught Thomas Anderson sits at his office cubicle and tells an off-screen voice who calls his name. Yeah, that's me. He replies. And thus ends minute... All right. ...13 of the Matrix. Okay, so... No. Same thing. So, okay. Scene change. We're finally out of that grim night and darkness. We're in the daytime, finally.

2:05And we're in a completely new location. We're in the quote-unquote real world. Yeah, we're in... Not the capital R, capital W real world. But we are in a real world that Neo might perceive. In a tangible world. Indeed. Indeed. At least to the senses of the brain. So, let me get this out of the way. Neo's distracted by window washers. And these window washers, you know, who, as I explained in the last minute, was famously mistaken in, you know, IMDB trivia, specifically, because that's, you know, user-generated content. So, to be the Wachowski then-brothers. But they actually aren't, and you can easily tell that. And the window washers are actually stunt coordinators. Because they're Glenn Boswell and Lou Horvath.

2:46Just Boswelling it up with their wonderful window washing expertise. I assume this isn't an actual office and those stunt coordinators didn't actually go by the ropes down the building. Let's hope not. This is like a set, right? But then again, they are stunt coordinators. They are stunt coordinators. They can handle that sort of stuff. Part of the job. My first question for the scene is, Tim, would you say that this is reflective of true office speak? You're going to get in trouble for being late. This is the most strangest, like, IT developing programming company I've ever seen in my entire life. The machines are completely messed up. Maybe things were different in the 90s. I don't know. Office space is pretty cubically.

3:26But maybe, you know, since the startup and, you know, Silicon Valley kind of the new movement. Yeah, and this is totally old school. It's completely different. This is hilarious. I can't imagine someone developing software. Do you know what I always imagine? In this cubicle. This is like death. When he says this is one of the top software companies in the world, I just imagine that they make, like, Winzip or something like that. Like, that's what they're making. Yeah, right, right. Well, there's a whole theory. But this is, like, horrible. Like, there's, like, what? He's in a cubicle. You wouldn't like a cubicle? No. I mean, no. The cubicles suck. It's like a little house of, like, containment. And then it's terrible. I don't know. Well, we're going to talk about the cubicle later because there's a lot more mileage in

4:07the next episode. Can I say something? Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Ever since this movie came out, I know my older siblings and people I talk to, they love to reference this scene because of the visuals of the guys wiping the windows. And there's that sound that keeps interrupting. And they always say, oh, so poetic and beautiful. I don't know why till this day. Well, that's an interesting... Like, is there any sort of metaphor? Or is there anything? Or is it just like, oh, it's a cool idea? I mean, everyone else always seemed, like, to make it so, oh, it's such a great, like, compare or something. I just don't know what it is. I mean, it's funny. For me, it was always essentially showing how we're now plunged into the daily grind,

4:52real life, real world boring monotony. And Neo is getting distracted. Like, he's not focusing, right? Because he's thinking about following the white rabbit, you know, going down the rabbit hole. So I think that's why they have the window washers. That's why this guy's being stern and Neo doesn't even care about this. It's just a dead end job. And that's pretty much what I took away from the setup. This lonely man. Okay, so it wasn't like... I never looked at it like poetic or metaphorical. The only metaphor that could actually be displayed there is the visual metaphor of the fact that the soap kind of looks like the Matrix code. I guess so. That's probably the best. And Neo's looking at the code.

5:33Metaphysically. His pre-skills. And then we get to... By the way, in movie logic, you could not hear that. But... I mean, in real life. You couldn't hear explosions in space. I mean, I work in a big office. In Star Wars. Yeah, that's true. I work in a big office. These guys pop down once in a while. Yeah? I mean, those glasses aren't really thick because otherwise you'd hear the booming streets. And the wind. So a little wiper wouldn't be able to penetrate sonically. Yeah, that's one of the charms of the elevated reality that is film. And it's always being put into artistic representations of how you feel emotionally what real life would be.

6:14It's an exaggerated part that all the different crew members take part in to create something dynamic and interesting and stimulating when you watch a film, which is excellent. And it's often also that the sound is presented that you would expect rather than what would be actually the sound. And it's also good when... The sound in your head. Exactly. And it adds a nice little flavor to the scene. You know, otherwise you just have the deadpan delivery of his boss, Mr. Reinhardt. Do you know what I noticed? That Mr. Reinhardt does not have an ergonomic Microsoft keyboard. He does not. No, he's not smooth and in control. He's not funky. He's not... He's playing it safe. He's playing it safe.

6:54I'm looking at his hair. It's so perfect. Gritty stash. Like, I wanted to talk to you about Mr. Reinhardt. Okay, let's talk about one... Tell us about Mr. Reinhardt. There's one wonderful thing about this. Good old Mr. Reinhardt. Yes. I thought he was an agent when I watched this film. Me too! Me too! This is what I was going to say. He looks a lot like Agent Smith. Just by the cut that he's wearing and his hair. He's really similar. And the actor, David Astin is his name. He does bear some facial similarities to Agent Smith. So I don't know if that was... I think that was a purposeful thing to make people look very similar. I was definitely tricked the first time watching it. Maybe it was a mistake. I don't know. Because honestly, when I first watched it, I was like, Oh! Yep. The people who were after the lady, this is Neo's boss?

7:35Yeah. And I was thinking like, what? Or maybe he's a new boss. Like, I am the new boss in town. Yeah. I am the new boss. So let me tell you about something very funny. I was going through, you know, I'm doing research. You shit did management around. Yeah, I'm going through the different sources to get my information. Okay. You know, the most common one to do is to get the accumulated sources of the fan-powered wiki page, which is the Matrix wiki. Okay. And it was really... I thought this was very funny when I got to Mr. Reinhardt's article on the Matrix wiki. And just as a comparison, now bear with me here. Here's an article about a random background character from Star Wars Episode 1. A character called... A character called... Listen, listen. A character called Mahonic.

8:16And he was a three-eyed alien called a Gran. And you know the three-eyed ones from Jedi Knight? The ones that you keep hitting in Nar Shaddaa? Yes. Yes. Right? Right? So he just has like two shots in Episode 1 and his pod racer. But here's an example of his biography that I picked from Wikipedia. So it's like, A grand male from the Planet Hawk, Mahonic was a professional pod racer pilot during the waning decades of the Galactic Republic. Mahonic piloted a green pod racer, which was maintained by several grand mechanics during the 32... So completely in-depth... Yeah, before the Battle of Yavin. The Planet Tatooine was celebrating the Boonta Eve holiday, which traditionally hosted the Boonta Eve Classic Prod Race. Mahonic entered the competition and started the race on the nearside pole position, which

8:58offered him a good start into the race. Before the race began, Mahonic prepared his pod racer with help of his mechanics. Et cetera, et cetera. And then he went to Jedi Temple to train as a Jedi Knight. And he's an ill-tempered individual and angrily yelled and shook his fist at Sebulba when the dog began to play rough. By the way, Star Wars Minute, shout out. Right there. Oh yeah, shout out. They're doing Episode 3. Amazing. What? So they're really close to Episode 7. They already finished everything almost. Yeah. They did all the Star Wars? Yeah, they did just so far. It's pretty nuts. It's pretty nuts. Anyway. Are they going for the new ones as well? Anyway, ready for Reinhardt's article for The Matrix in The Matrix Wiki? Yeah, ready for his article. Yes. When Mr. Anderson got up late for work one day, Reinhardt threatened him to either get to work on time or he would have to find another job.

9:38That should be in Mr. Reinhardt's bio. That's his entire life. That's his entire life. So do you want to talk about what the company itself, Metacortex, do you think it is an actual, has a useful function in The Matrix to have humans work for the machines? No. I think it's just a regular company. Yeah? You don't think it's like a... Like Meta? Like they're actually programming something for the machines? Yeah. I don't think the machines need that. I don't think I was going to say. I don't think the machines need it either. Like helping maintain the Matrix code or something. I think the machines are pretty good at this. I mean, just because whatever Neo's coding is probably a lot less advanced than whatever the machines have.

10:18I remember they were like... I would agree. Because machines are pure AI and they can obviously... They write code in essence instantaneously. They don't have to use a language to write code. They just basically create binary, which then outputs the code into the Matrix. So I don't think they need a helping hands at Metacortex. No. I guess not. But there's another funny resemblance we have here. Are there any theories of that or what? Maybe. Maybe. Here or there. Somewhere on the internet. You know, just like those chat rooms in the Matrix. Exactly. All hail Sega. There's another interesting similarity there is where the boss scene is pretty similar

11:02to the later interrogation with Agent Smith. You know, they both call him Mr. Anderson. Only wants to do that. That's true. And both of them tell him to make a choice. The time has come to make a choice. To make a tree and leave. We're going to talk about that later with... What if he's just a retired agent? He's like... Oh, so you're saying that the machines are in fact the... Have the top jobs in these big conglomerate companies in the Matrix. Like he's been an agent for like 30 years and he's like, I'm tired of... That's right. The agents are pro- The exile programs, which we learn in Matrix Reloaded. If you want to get into that lore. So he's like, I'll just, you know, yell at people when they're late. I mean, I yell. I'll just calmly tell them.

11:42But that wouldn't check out though because I think that if we see Mr. Reinhardt here, Mr. Reinhardt is clearly not too satisfied, I think, in general. He's not satisfied with his life. And I feel like an agent, a former agent would be like, I've seen everything. I've seen things. To be honest, maybe they're just seen too much. They're just... They just want... They're a machine. They want to go back to monotony. Monot... True. Monotony? Monot... What? Yeah, monotony. That's true. That is a true point. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. But anyway, what else can we say about this scene? Attack ships on Ryan. Okay. I saw them dodge bullets. Well, we can talk about Reinhardt's actor. Okay. His name is David Aston.

12:22Aston, that is. He's not Australian, which is... No, and it's Aston with an O. He's not Australian, but he's in fact a Kiwi from New Zealand. Wow. He's been in a bunch of different films like Underworld, Rise of the Lycans, if any of you have seen that. I haven't. I've just seen the first one. Didn't like it very much, so I didn't really watch any of the other ones. He played in Xena, Warrior Princess, obviously, because that's a very New Zealand established production. Hercules as well. TV show called Led Zeal. Yeah, he's a New Zealand guy, David Aston. But no, the Xena and Hercules. Oh yeah, Xena was mostly filmed in New Zealand. Huh. I mean... Is Xena homegrown New Zealand? Yeah. Lucy Lawless.

13:02I don't know that. She's a Kiwi. She's a pretty good American accent then. Yeah. A guy with eight hands. Sounds hot. Oh, Spider Minute is going on with great Scott Corelli and friends. Yes. Homecoming was good. Oh yeah, cool. This is going to date our podcast episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly. Also, here's the other thing. Because he's from New Zealand, he's been in another production. Lord of the Rings. Indeed. He was in Return of the King. What? Who was he? Gondorian Soldier 3. Ah. I remember him well. Do you remember when he just trapped that spear? Into that orc.

13:43Return of the King right now. Well, wait, there's only a few Gondor scenes. Well, we're going to have to find out. How are we going to identify Gondorian Soldier 3? Yeah. As Mr. Reinhardt, the boss. Well, there's the first Gondorian Soldier, and there's the second one, and then the third one in a row. We'll just go frame by frame in every single war scene and look for him. We just have to find him. David Aston. Hey, if anybody wants to comb through Return of the King and find it for us. Let's call David himself, and he can tell us in what scene he is. What's his name? I'll plead at him. David Aston. And he also seems to be a pretty good singer and presenter for different shows. No way. That's pretty cool. That's about all I got for David Aston. What a nice man.

14:24I checked the script. So the early script that we have, the 1996 one and the 1998 one, very, very similar to this. So there's really nothing worth mentioning. Except that in the earlier script, Mr. Reinhardt had glasses. He's not on Twitter. So do you guys know, would you like to ask the question for the audience, sort of in place of the audience, why is Neo sitting at his desk? I can tell you my theory. What is your guys' theories? What? Why Neo is sitting at his desk. Why is he sitting at the desk? There's no computer turned on. Okay, well, go ahead and do that then. We were just going to cut that out. Segway. Yeah. No, we're going to cut that out because that's for the next episode. What do you mean? The end of this shot is the sitting of the computer.

15:05There's way more of the whole next episode. Okay, we'll leave it. Okay. Also, Reinhardt says stuff like, you believe the rules do not apply to you. You believe you're special. Is that foreshadowing? Yes. You know? That is clear foreshadowing. And then there's like this mundane and fantastic. He's talking in just mundane terms. But that's also like any principle when you're in trouble. True, true, true. You go like, you think you're special. Correct. No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hillback. You're just a slacker. Oh, if only he said that. You're a slacker, Mr. Anderson. Mr. Anderson, you've been slacking at your programming. I see that you haven't committed in three days.

15:47What have you been doing? He's talking, looking at Morpheus again. I looked at your internet protocol log. There's a lot of this. Morpheus this. There's a lot of nasty things. I will show you Morpheus. Morph him out of my office. It's like, Neo, I noticed that you turned on your private browser 15 times during work. What does this mean, Neo? Why do you have this asphyxiation to black, bald men with circular glasses? Is it a... So anyway, Neo's outfit, if you look at him standing there, you can notice that his outfit, his suit is not very well worn by him. Tailored? Yeah, it's not.

16:28It looks like he has a little beer belly. Yeah, so it was purposefully designed for it to look constricted and unfitting and kind of goofy. That makes sense, yeah. Like that. Kim Barrett, the costume designer, and Keanu actually went to the flea market to pick all those clothes. That's sweet. The local Australian Sydney flea market. They talked about that in the making of, didn't they? And in the 1996 draft, there's another little tidbit. The city is literally Chicago. Like, they mentioned that it's Chicago. Well, did you know it's confusing here? The machines of all the cities, they just went Chicago. It's confusing that... City of Chicago. Well, I mean, look, it's grid-like. It's very... Remember, we were looking at the map of Chicago. Like we talked about before, that we were saying how our theory is that it's the Matrix city.

17:09But it's very strange here because remember, we had some references like the IRS, and I think later we'll see Neo's passport. It's like a US passport. So I don't know, like, were they going for like, just a copy of the world? I mean, in the previous minute, we were talking about how if... If the Matrix is just one city, but obviously it would be an American city. Well, no, that's fine, but I'm saying that it's... You know, the Americans are important. No, I'm saying in the Matrix, is the Matrix a replica of the world? Like one-to-one replica? Or is it like they're making new cities and just calling it the city and stuff like that? That's my question. No one knows these things. Okay. Well, there we are. I believe it's only a city.

17:50But it is called Mega City. That's the official term. Okay. Oh, really? Not in this movie, but in Reloaded Revolutions. Mega City, USA. Pretty much. Do you live in a gigacity? No, I live in a mega city. One day, one day, I'm going to go to Giga City. But how much people can they have in a mega city? It's kind of really... What? How many people? Population? Yeah. Well, a lot. Like a mega city. Think of video games. Like a 10 million? No, more. That's not enough for machines. 50 million. Do they have like copies of mega city? Like, oh, you know, machines like mega city 45, mega city 52. I don't know. I think we'll never know. I have to apologize in advance. If you hear anything in the background, that's thunder and lightning and rain. And if only we were doing this episode to be the one where it's like, I've searched my

18:35entire life for you, Neil. Welcome. The honor is all mine. Yeah. That'd be perfect. That'd be amazing. So I apologize. I think it's a storm that was here. I think we came back. Like, uh, I drove and it was like, uh, one o'clock I was arriving to the city and it just like a storm, like, uh, above the city. And then there's this huge rainfall came. I was driving like 60 kilometers per hour on the, on the, on the highway. It was just like, there was so much water. I could not move. It was epic. It was amazing. It was like a dream. It was the matrix. Oh my goodness gracious. Anyway, story time. Okay. Ooh, it was windy. Okay. Go on, Phillip. What else do you have? Um, all I have to say left, um, is city phone, city phone all over the place.

19:19I was going to mention the last thing. City phone books. Tim, do you know about the city phone? Yes, we talked about it many times, many times. And then, maybe I was drunk. And of course, uh, at the end of the minute, FedEx guy comes in and you kind of get a little startled because he's like, Thomas Anderson, agent, agent. Yeah. It's a little bit of a run your ass off. Okay. So I think this is good. We got this one. Next minute. Wait. Tim, follow me on Twitter. Sorry. Okay. And that's it. No. I'm officially ending it. And that's it. No, but you said just two seconds ago, wait, wait. What do you want to add? No, the company is called Cortex in the older draft. And, um, they had to take that out.

20:01Because there was a real name. Because there was a real company called Cortex. Well, and Metacortex is it. It is. All right. You can follow me on Twitter, Jake Dragish. You can follow us on iTunes. Yes, please do. We would love that. That's like the best thing you can do. Yes, we are on other things, Tim. Oh, we're on other things now. Google Play. Yes. We're on Google Play. You can just look for the Matrix podcast. We're on Stitcher nature. Yes. No, it's just Stitcher. It's just Stitcher. It's just a cha. And iTunes. Matrix. And those are the three major ones. And an RSS feed, of course, if you want to copy paste that into. If you're an old school kind of guy. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Let's officially end this. And, uh, yeah. You can rate us. And you can leave a review. And, uh, yeah. Find us in those places.

20:41That's right. And especially that iTunes stuff. That's right. That's making us really proud. Really proud. Um. And thank you for listening. And we'll catch you on the next episode. You're all great. The Matrix. How's your? What's your guys' Twitters? Oh, yeah. Phil Dragish. At Phil Dragish. There you go. Oh, good. Good to know. At Timo Majorsky. Nice. Good. Majorsky. All right. Bye. Bye. Thank you.