Quote 1
Trinity: “You
know the question, just as I did.”
Neo: “What is the
Matrix?”
Trinity: “The answer
is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you. And it will find you if
you want it to.”
–The Matrix
This exchange takes place in a techno
Goth club near the beginning of The Matrix, before
Neo understands what the Matrix is and before he ever meets Morpheus.
These lines set Neo’s adventure in motion. Not long after this exchange
takes place, Neo will decide to let the Matrix find him, and he
will discover that more than one person has been counting on him
to find and understand an important answer to a cryptic question.
From the very beginning, the film suggests that more than one real
world exists, if we can just open our minds to it. Trinity suggests
that Neo can’t avoid this other world, and that it’s open for him
if he knows how to look for it. Trinity’s final sentence foreshadows
the tension that will arise between fate and choice, a tension that
will reappear throughout the trilogy.
This exchange reveals the true extent of Neo’s double
life. As the everyman Thomas Anderson, he holds a day job as a respectable computer
programmer and works at night as a renegade hacker, nicknamed Neo.
Now he is also a chosen one, someone selected to find the cryptic
answer to which Trinity refers. Though Neo is thrust into this strange
world with no explanation, he doesn’t seem entirely surprised—when
Trinity refers to the question, Neo knows instantly what question
she means. On some level, Neo may have expected to one day be taken
to task for his suspicions and speculations about reality. That
an everyman like Thomas Anderson could be plucked from ordinary
life and chosen to search for an answer suggests that anyone in
the audience might one day be chosen to be a messiah as well.
