The Question Concerning Energy: Ecological Crisis and Machinic Ontology in “The Matrix” Trilogy

Abstract

There is a longstanding tradition in science fiction cinema of human bodies being consumed in order to generate some form of energy; films like Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) and Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976) depict the consumption of humans as food (i.e., energy in the form of calorie intake). Other examples with similar tropes include David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Kevin Reynold’s Waterworld (1995), John Bruno’s Virus (1999), David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), Frank Vestiel’s Eden Log (2007), The Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers (2009), and George Miller’s Max Max: Fury Road (2015). In all these films, the consumption of bodies relates to the idea of humans as a source of “power:” be it as nutrients or as a more technical energy resource. Their most obvious example of the latter to date is the Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) in which humans are bred and harvested in huge fields to serve as living batteries (and where the dead are liquified and turned into nutrition for the new baby-batteries to grow), a “Human Resources” trope, which also echoes in some of their more recent works like Cloud Atlas (2012) and Jupiter Ascending (2015).