I still remember the first time I watched it as a kid, I didn't understand much to be honest.
The black coats, the slow-motion, the pills… it all felt strange and intense.
But I always liked strange and intense things, lol.
As I grew older, I watched it again, and again. Dozens of times.
And with each viewing, it became clearer: the "Matrix" behind the fiction was a system of thought.
To this day, The Matrix remains one of the rare narrative universes that managed to give a visual language to something we all sensed but couldn't articulate.
Now we casually speak of "the Matrix" as if it were real.
We talk about "glitches".
And that's the power of an archetype. It gives a language to something hard to express with verbal language.
When the Wachowskis created the Matrix, they were kinda encoding a perception.
What is an archetype?
I love this topic. I've been studying archetypes for the last decade.
An archetype is not a concept or a character.
It is a foundational structure of meaning - an imprint on human cognition.
Carl Jung described archetypes as "forms without content" - unconscious patterns that shape how we interpret reality, long before we name it.
According to Carl Jung, archetypes are universal, primordial images and patterns stored in the collective unconscious. They shape how humans perceive and respond to the world, regardless of culture or era.
"Archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves."
in The Structure of the Psyche, 1927
Jung expands on this concept in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959), where he describes archetypes as:
"Forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as individual products of unconscious origin."
We recognize them through recurring figures: the Hero, the Trickster, the Mother, the Wanderer... These are universal patterns, unconscious and cross-cultural.
Why The Matrix functions as an archetype
The Matrix provided a shared symbolic framework to express something that many people were sensing:
That modern life is layered with simulation.
That our choices are pre-coded.
That waking up comes with a cost.
It became a lens.
Ever since, we've been living inside that archetype. It has penetrated our language.