1. Obvious reasons for the movie's success
1.1. Beautiful people
1.1.1. Goth Clothing
1.1.2. Sunglasses
1.1.3. Skin tight black outfits
1.2. Great music
1.3. Amazing special effects
1.3.1. technology
1.4. Disgust: gore
1.5. violence, love, great ending
2. Seductive idea in the Matrix: the world around you isn't the real world. Some examples of how this is kind of true.
2.1. Pictures in magazines that have been photoshopped give you an unrealistic idea of what real people are like.
2.2. Conservative and liberal "news" stations try to give their viewers a view of the world that isn't real (but it is shocking and attention getting.
2.3. "Filter Bubble"
2.4. The supposed "knockout game" - the news plays in our fears to gain viewership.
2.5. Book: "Trust Me I'm lying"
2.6. Law of attraction, The Secret: unrealistic ideas about how people can change their thinking and the "magic" that results from it.
3. What does it mean?
3.1. A lot of "heavy sounding" philosophy
3.1.1. Critic Leonard Maltin: The Matrix has a high "MJQ": mumbo jumbo quotient
3.1.2. He's the "one"
3.1.3. Esther (facebook): dejavu a glitch in the matrix. (Trinity says it)
3.1.3.1. Taylor, A. (2013). Encyclopedia of human memory. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishers.
3.1.3.1.1. Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego
3.1.3.2. If you are in a place that has some unfamiliar objects, but they are set up similarly to a situation you have experienced before, you will get a feeling of knowing, but you won't actually retrieve any specific memory for the place. That feeling of familiarity is quite helpful, of course. If you walk into a new restaurant, but it is configured like many other restaurants that you have visited in the past, then it is good for you to feel like you are in a familiar place. Your knowledge about restaurants will help you figure out what to do next. If the configuration is nearly identical to one that you experienced before, though, then you may get a powerful feeling of knowing. That is, you may get a sensation of déjà vu. In the end, though, the experience of déjà vu is just an extreme reaction of the system that your memory uses to tell you that you are in a familiar situation.
3.1.3.3. A paper by Anne Cleary, Anthony Ryals, and Jason Nomi in the December, 2009 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review suggests one factor that leads to the experience of déjà vu. They had people study a number of drawings of scenes. Later, they were shown a number of new scenes and were asked whether they had seen them before. Some of those new scenes had a similar configuration to ones they had studied earlier, but all of the objects were different. For example, during the first phase of the experiment, people might have seen an alley between a fence and a building. Later, they might have seen an alley between a train station and a train. In this case, people often felt that the new scene was familiar, and participants often reported a strong feeling that they had seen the new scene before.
3.1.4. Gene: "There are definite themes that pervade these movies without most of us really realizing it. Whether those are linked to a "Collective Unconscious" or not, we do have a shared symbology that seems to act on a subconscious level.....Maybe thats why Star Wars resonates so much even 40 years later. The movie never seems to get dated. The themes are universal and the symbols speak to our psyche.
3.1.4.1. Something about the movie just seems to have a familiar "ring" to it. It "resonates" with something deep inside. - "Collective Unconscious"?
3.1.4.2. http://www.room237movie.com/
3.2. Joseph Campbell
3.2.1. influenced by
3.2.1.1. Maslow
3.2.1.2. Freud
3.2.1.3. Jung
3.2.2. Wikipedia
3.2.2.1. Campbell's concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story... a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation.
3.2.2.2. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as the hero's journey and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces
3.2.2.2.1. The Hero's Journey was that story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.
3.2.2.2.2. Star Wars
3.2.2.2.3. Lion King
3.2.2.2.4. Stages of the Journey: LIfe is normal, something happens, life is difficult, a challenge must be faced, it is faced and overcome, life returns to normal.
3.3. "Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path." takes courage - confront your fears
3.3.1. Why wasn't Morpheus "the one"?
3.3.2. a lot of "feel good" philosophy
3.4. We all have this deep seated belief that there is something very special about us.
3.4.1. "Superman"
4. Psychologists: can you change your thinking so you can "see" a different world around you?
4.1. "Cognitive Restructuring"
4.1.1. Albert Ellis
4.1.2. Martin Seligman
4.1.3. Aaron Beck
4.2. Skinner: "if you change your situation you'll change your thinking"
4.3. You can learn to see the world differently but it's not easy to change the way you think and it doesn't take place overnight as in the movies. Learning to think differently requires constant monitoring of your thoughts - comparing them to what is realistic and coaching yourself to think differently.
4.3.1. Not unlike trying to lose weight - it's a constant battle.