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Beyond Threshold Phenomena: "The Matrix" and The Invisibles

In an earlier "Recycling Bin" column, I examined claims that the character the Tick borrowed, wholesale, from Don Simpson's Megaton Man and came to the conclusion that too many other possible and recognizable sources could have inspired the creation of this hero - and, indeed, that convergent design might have brought about both the superficial and substantial similarities between the two (here).

While the existence of exculpatory evidence can suggest an innocent relationship between works where someone may suspect an uncredited derivation - what we bluntly call "plagiarism" in some contexts - occasionally the absence of evidence can suggest the innocence of the connection. In other cases, however, a trail, like footprints, connects source and product. In the case of the action film "The Matrix," a series of similarities implicate the piece as derivative of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

Sometimes one can doubt that a particular source inspired another work. The resemblance, after all, might not ring true for everyone. Generally the prominence of an artist and/or his works in the imagination of the observer will incline him more to find tributes or plagiarism in other works more often than an indifferent onlooker. However, when the similarity goes beyond a certain point, a kind of Event Horizon of Derivation, deniability begins to vanish; the burden of proof shifts; and it becomes very difficult to argue, with any credibility that such a child did not come from such a mother.

We have such a case in the relationship between The Invisibles and "The Matrix," a pair which demonstrate enough similarities that we might expect DNA testing, if such existed for works of art, to implicate a sibling relationship. However, in this connection we deviate from the conventional flow of concepts; for the comics work stood as precedent and the movie as a derivative work.

A number of shared traits implicate the origins of "The Matrix" in Grant Morrison's celebrated and conceptual comics piece.

Virtual Reality Elements versus Plural Reality

In the massive conceptual appropriations from Morrison's work, "The Matrix" had somewhat to dumb down mystical notions that drive the printed work. For the most part, this involved shifting the scenario from a mystical to a technological basis. The simplification of the concept did not, however, condescend to an audience presumed stupid; instead, the complexity of Morrison's concept presented something of a stumbling block to movie scripters. Plus producers of "The Matrix" could somewhat conceal the derivative nature of the movie by conceptual changes.

In both cases, though, the theme of an illusory world that overlays at least one world of substance serves as backdrop to the events and conceptual revelations.

"The Matrix" dealt with a world overtaken by a kind of mechanical life that managed to subdue humanity by feeding it sensations of a virtual life in a shared artificial cosmos. This artificial world served to maintain a humanity that tended to die when it realized its circumstances - as a race of chemical electric cells for a conquering electronic life form that mankind, in its folly, itself created.

The Invisibles took a more complex tack, making out the menace as a kind of magical / conceptual disease of sentient beings that manifests itself as cities. The city, in this model, parasitizes human beings, whom it uses to replicate itself, even to the extinction of host planets. By the point of the death of biospheres, however, the city has driven its hosts to launch themselves into space and carry the city virus to other worlds.

'Agents' versus the Myrmidons

A scenario of hunters and hunted runs through both works. The heroes of The Invisibles took their name from their ability to remain invisible to ordinary persons. Sometimes this took the form of a kind of cognitive dissonance-correction, which forced Invisibles to take forms appropriate to their setting, regardless of how out-of-context they might appear. The heroes of "The Matrix," on the other hand, enjoyed certain enhanced abilities, partially through benefit of add-on software that provided them with skills without the necessity of learning by ordinary mechanisms; they, too, could vanish, but only through the method of returning to empirical reality from virtual reality.

For each group, we have a counterbalancing group to consider. In The Invisibles, gangs of hunters, sometimes clad in the traditional fox-hunting habit of Britain, assail and destroy targets deemed too uppity to allow to survive, at their pleasure; these hunters bore the name of "Myrmidons," a figure of speech probably intended, in context, to suggest swarms of red ants defending their hill from the incursion of a black ant.

In "The Matrix," on the other hand, the White House security agent served as prototype for the hunters, known only as "agents," and given to a uniform look - a dark suit, glasses, and pasty Anglo looks. These agents enjoyed generally superhuman abilities that overmatched them to any empirical-reality human mind that attempted to confront them according to the rules of the reality-simulating software. Cynical self-interest replaces the nihilistic hedonism/sadism of the Myrmidons from the source material.

The Messianic Revolutionary

Morpheus, in the movie, played a role more or less equivalent to that of Tom O'Bedlam (combined somewhat with fellow Invisible King Mob) in his instruction of the young recruit in the theoretical background behind the forces that separate various perceived worlds. While Morpheus moved in a different setting - a beclouded and captive earth in which surviving humanity literally played the role of energy cells in massive alien generators that supported a mechanical / electronic form of life, he served just as Tom O'Bedlam as the principal source of exposition (and, therefore, the young man's instruction).

The messianic mission of the revolutionary permeates both works. In The Invisibles this invests more in a movement or faction than in an individual, but for audience appeal and clarity of story, "The Matrix" chose to depict Neo Anderson as a singular messiah, the one human with the combination of neural hardwiring and imagination to overcome the limitations of the simulated reality in which he and his kind fought with binary hit-men for the future of humankind.

To some extent, the movie's messianic ideas borrow from the cinematic formula of mentor-apprentice tales (such as "The Karate Kid"), and possibly even such material as the New Testament, where an older, earlier moral leader such as John the Baptist would pave the way for the coming of another who would assume the messianic mantle. Those themes remain somewhat beyond the scope of an analysis of the movie's relationship to a comics prototype, however.

The Jump Scene

I suspected only convergent idea development between the two works - which provided a smoking gun, but not proof, of derivation over that stretch of time where I heard the rumors of the relationship of the movie to the comic. However, upon my first encounter with an Invisibles trade paperback, I opened the book to a random page, and came to a scene lifted in its important particulars from print to film, and the forensic trail mostly gelled at that point.

In the movie, Morpheus put Keanu Reeves' character through the paces of a more or less organized training program, including simulated martial arts, observational techniques, and, of course, the famous jump scene where he jumped from the top of one skyscraper to another one. In this scene lay the central clue to recognizing the identity of the movie's source.

Tom O'Bedlam, with his apprentice Dane McGowan in tow, provided the template for this scene. After O'Bedlam stripped away a key limiting chunk of character armor from Dane, he then proceeded to take the young man to the top of a skyscraper, promising that they would jump off it. Tom had intended to show more than Morpheus, later, would: He intended to show Dane death and to partake of death himself. Although, in this case, he seems to have reappeared shortly after his purported death, something more possible in the context of the fluid and multiple reality backdrop of The Invisibles than in the more limited setting of "The Matrix."

Consider, though, the two images in this section. We have Jack Frost (the name the character would later acquire after meeting other Invisibles) and Tom O'Bedlam jumping off a building, essentially as a kind of educational exercise. Then move to the movie, where we have Morpheus showing his new hope, the young man played by Keanu Reeves, how to jump from one building to another - again, jumping off a building - as a kind of educational exercise. The details differ somewhat, in that no ill befell Jack Frost while Neo did a face-first cartoon splat into rubbery virtual pavement; nonetheless, we might consider this the focus and origin of the wholesale appropriation of Morrison's work into the movie form.

The images speak very strongly to me as indicators of where the ideas came from. The various parallels merely support what the video screen capture and scanned panel, together, tell us.

The shame should lie, for the producers of the movie, not in the use of material from comics. Someone somewhere will try to make a movie about anything, and moviemakers survived blows to the dignity implied by events such as bringing "Dennis the Menace" into a screen form, with none other than the late (and lamented) Walter Matthau as Mister Wilson. We should, instead, look for shame in the point at which someone felt he could borrow and doctor Morrison's ideas just enough that he could let Morrison do the work while his movie made the money.

The Obvious Changes

The Invisibles deal in a plural, multiple reality that crosses lines of time and perception. Nor, in this model, does a reader really receive a clear view of which reality to identify as the objective, or "real" one, and, in this, the piece may, overall, suggest a kinship to the prose works of Philip K. Dick. "The Matrix," on the other hand, definitely deals with a dualist, through still plural, reality, one which divides everything into reality (the ruined, though real world where humans serve as batteries) and virtual reality (the scenario of the Matrix).

As well, the neopagan aspects of The Invisibles more or less did not make the translation from print to cinema. In general, the comics' work mysticism, including the incorporation of religious-esoteric conspiracy theories centered around Rennes-le-Chateau, do not make the crossing; malign technology, instead, plays the role of the magical by the time these ideas became "The Matrix."

Furthermore, "The Matrix" essentially abandoned much of the absurdist tone of The Invisibles. Therefore we see nothing like the rambunctious transvestite Lord Fanny, who dares to attack demons with his spike heels. Nor do we see the likes of an avatar of Marat de Sade keeping company with the heroes, nor characters in clownface, nor the variety of ridiculous handles and outfits that added a dreamlike quality to the printed work.

The movie, consistent with the imperatives that drive large-budget productions, opted instead for a kind of cliched stylishness, meaning lots of tight black leather outfits, wrap-around sunglasses, martial-arts posturing, long leather overcoats, and big boots. No revolutionary could really anticipate the ability to afford a like wardrobe preliminary to winning the revolution and becoming the new boss himself, but movies frequently sell based on visual, rather than logical, appeal.

Lost Fidelity in Copies

If you ever spent much time making photocopies of the printed page, and, subsequently, made second-, third-, and subsequent-generation copies, you might notice something that happens with each new copy. Details fade, blur, or become blocky. The more generations of copying that connect the original to the product, the less detail that comes through with precision and fidelity.

This can suggest a relationship between template and copy where other factors implicate the existence of such parent-to-child relationships. Already the concepts and the calendar dates mark "The Matrix" as a likely descendant of The Invisibles; and, should the theory of lost detail hold, we could expect that the source work would hold more detail than the derived piece.

This definitely applies to these two pieces. Normally, if we heed stereotypes (or even reliable past experience), we don't see a comic book as a piece of density or complexity; however, material from DC's Vertigo imprint often violates such a simplistic characterization. The Invisibles dabbled in some fairly complex ideas. "The Matrix," on the other hand, toyed with much more easily understood notions: fewer realities, technology (of a kind that seemed to originate from modern types but projected forwards a century or so) instead of magic, a single messianic figure rather than a number of benign and demonic avatars. The pluralistic religious notions from The Invisibles almost completely failed to make the transition from paper to film.

As well, the supporting cast in the movie by no means can compete in color with the likes of King Mob, Boy, Lord Fanny, and the rest of that crowd. Indeed, repeated viewings still fail to attach names to some of the faces of members of Morpheus' team aboard the Nebuchadnezzar.

Most of all, someone who witnessed both works might note that the spiderweb of interconnecting conspiracy lore that shaped and flavored The Invisibles has to make way for a single, comprehensible, overarching conspiracy theory. In "The Matrix," the controlling elite of artificial intelligence have created a false world to better enable themselves (itself?) to control an enslaved humanity already converted into a kind of power cell and food supply.

Reaching a Verdict

Some might see, in the preceding paragraphs, considerable begging of the question of the relationship between a movie and a comics series. Yet multiple criteria work together here to support a basic hypothesis. "The Matrix" demonstrates similarities in both general and specific elements; in theme and tone; and in particular scenes. The printed work demonstrated priority by appearing first; and the movie suggested duplication through a loss of detail typical of incomplete or imprecise copies.

As a juror in a hypothetical lawsuit by Grant Morrison as plaintiff and directed against the producers of "The Matrix" as defendants, I would vote to favor the complainant. The evidence points too strongly to the relationship.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 238. Completed 11-MAR-2001.