3 - Time Lags and Differential Pace: Bullet Time, William Faulkner and Jessica Hagedorn

Summary

BULLET TIME FROZEN FAST

In Lana and Lilly Wachowski's film The Matrix, the protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves) kicks off the movie's climactic sequence by setting out to rescue Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), the man who helped Neo unplug from a simulated 1990s world that sentient machines use to pacify human brains while their bodies are farmed for bio-electric power. The year of this dystopian setting is unclear: the Resistance believes the year to be 2199, but we learn in later films that there have been multiple iterations of the Matrix, recent versions of which actually include a rebellious Zion (the refuge of unplugged humans) as a kind of pressure-release, a way of protecting the machines’ power grid. Moments after Neo's famous bullet-dodging scene against fasterthan- real agents, we begin to encounter deviations from actions represented at a uniform speed, whether fast, slow, or 1x: the ‘Rescue of Morpheus’ sequence involves speed-ramping and a variety of slow-motion speeds between and within shots. Stranger than the simple speed-up or slow-down of action, as Lisa Purse points out, characters and objects begin to move in different frames of reference within the same shot. As the helicopter that Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is piloting begins to crash in slow motion over him, Neo looks up in what appears to be real time and utters her name, while Tank (Marcus Chong) presumably hears ‘Trinity’ in a squeaky, high-frequency pitch, as he listens to the rescue operation from the ship Nebuchadnezzar. When the helicopter crashes, it sends ripples through the glass-and-steel grid of the office building, figuring curved, uneven and malleable timespaces. Neo looks down on the explosion in a time rendered identical to that of the audience, while the flames, debris and smoke billow out at a slower speed.

This temporal assemblage was not what the film became known for, if it was noticed at all. Rather, the buzz about the film centred on its seeming opposite: what Bob Rehak calls the ‘frozen-time aesthetic’ of ‘bullet time’, exemplified by the scene in which Neo, having grown more confident in his powers as ‘the One’, is able to perceive and move so quickly that he can evade the agents’ bullets, while the audience is granted a similar ability to freeze the projectiles visually in mid-air and rotate around them.