The Matrix, The new Alice and Wonderland, and The Tempest

******Forewarning~ if you have not yet seen the new Alice and Wonderland this may or may not ruin some of the plot line***********

So last night my roommates and I decided to go see the new Alice and Wonderland in 3D (I highly recommend it by the way). Little did I know that this movie would ultimately be linked to the current theme we are studying. In the beginning of the movie Alice has these dreams (or nightmares as she calls them) about talking animals and other strange happenings. Later in the movie she once again falls into the "rabbit hole" where she is reintroduced to all the animals and beings from the first Alice in Wonderland. They are unsure if she is "the one" and are constantly questioning it. The whole movie Alice believes that she is just in a dream and she has a conversation with the Mad hatter that went something like "this is all just a dream, I am just making it up in my head" and the hatter is very upset over this and replies "so I am not real then? I am just something you came up with?" This scene made me think back to the movie Stranger Than Fiction when he realized that he was being made up by someone elses ideas. There was also a part in the movie where they showed this calendar they had that showed what was to happen in the future, stating that everything had already been written for them.

In the movie the characters keep referring to Alice as the one, much like Neo is the one in the Matrix, the Savior of sorts. Ultimately it is Alice who saves everyone in the end, much like I assume Neo does since I have yet to see the whole movie. Throughout the Matrix movie, they make references back to Alice in Wonderland when they talk about the rabbit hole and "follow the white rabbit". I also feel that Miranda is "the one" in The Tempest, but she also does not know it. She, much like Neo and Alice, lives in two different places reality and dreamland. Her father controls her dreams in a way by controlling when she is awake and when she is asleep, but also because she is so naive from having only experienced life on the island he can manipulate what she holds to be real. All these dream states also relate back to Finnegans Wake in that the whole book was about being in a dream. And they also relate back to Samuel Beckett's novels in that someone else has already written what is and they are just living it out. It was crazy to me as I was sitting in the movie theatre and all these similarities began popping out at me, making me think back to the highbrow readings we have done and how those influence the lowbrow movie that I was currently watching, something I would never have done before taking this class.