Bonus buffoonery

I saw Kelly LeBrock at Quiznos the other day and it got me to thinking about Weird Science.  I wondered if they ever explained what was going on there.  I went back and read the plot synopsis and no, they do not explain anything. 

Two super gross disgusting nerds write a computer program and all of a sudden it “comes alive” and is a sexy lady?  There’s no way to make sense of that right?  At the time the movie came out that was probably true, but with our modern advantages the explanation is easy.  Weird Science is a prequel to the Matrix. 

After the first installment, what the hell is going on in the Matrix becomes violently unclear but a couple things seem to be established.  One – there have been many versions of the Matrix before.  Two – the entire savior concept is part of the program.  As I remember it, which is poorly probably because I never saw the third movie and I was barely paying attention to the second because it sucked, they implied (or maybe stated outright) that NEO was just the latest of many “The Ones” who came around whenever the Matrix was getting old and outdated and his job was to create a big hub-bub and wipe everything out so they could start fresh with a new version.  NEO was an automated job designed to tear down a server that was getting old and crusty so a new one could be spun up based on the gold image. 

When Lisa shows up in the “real world” and has unexplained magic powers, specifically powers that allow her to manipulate other people – freezing the geezers (good band name, sidenote) turning Chett into a monster, Jedi mind-fudging the bouncer at the dive bar, etc.  Powers that can be explained if the movie takes place inside the Matrix and she’s a proto-NEO, who as you may remember, was able to manipulate the Matrix (aka “reality”) from the inside. 

Lisa’s powers are more mature than NEO’s in the beginning and there’s a reason for that.  NEO was a real dude in a tube who had “lived” as a Matrix avatar for a good while.  It’s never explained how the different versions of the Matrix work but it’s possible that he had lived many lives before that one in the Matrix as well.  Point being he had a lot of baggage to get over before he could break free of constraints that he thought existed. 

Lisa on the other hand is purely a program, ergo she never had any limitations of scope in her “brain”.  She started doing “magic” stuff right off the bat because she was never trained to believe that she couldn’t.  One day she was just there. 

In order for the Matrix to exist, it has to have some point where it intersects with the real world.  The program has to be running on something.  I submit to you that in Weird Science when the two gross disgusting nerds hack into the “government computers” to give their sexy lady program more power what they really did was touch the OS behind the Matrix.  The robots saw their program and thought “now this is interesting” so they made it into an avatar to see what would happen. 

Now, you may be saying “But Jeremy, a program in the Matrix that can manipulate other programs?  That sounds more like Agent Smith than NEO.”

Good eye, because what I believe is that Lisa is the earliest version of both NEO as a concept and the Agents literally. 

At the end of Weird Science, Lisa embarks on a journey to use her magic powers to help other gross filthy disgusting smelly ugly nerds bang cheerleaders.  She was built to help people out.  In an awful 80’s kind of way, but still she was basically altruistic.  So she goes around on various adventures helping various revolting stinking trash-eating insect-like nerds get laid for several iterations.  Eventually with her magic powers she’s going to catch on to the fact that she’s in a simulation. 

But from inside the Matrix, what can she do about it?  As we’ve established there has to be some connection point between the two – the machines are presumably better at security than we are so they probably don’t have unprotected S3 buckets out there but if the program is running, it has some way to reach back the other way.  You can’t touch something without it touching you back. 

So Lisa starts futzing around trying to wake people up in their pods in the real world.  Now, I believe that it was implied (if not outright stated) that NEO and all his Zion buddies were actually still in the Matrix the whole time.  No one ever escaped, it was just another part of the Matrix where you got to think you escaped and “fight back” against the machines and go on fun adventures and have sex with Carrie Anne Moss after super long cave-raves.  When Lisa starting messing about, that’s probably when the machines came up with this idea.  Let’s create a new “level” to the Matrix as a pressure valve of sorts.  We’re going to keep doing this forever, eventually there’s going to be a glitch and some of the avatars are going to figure out the deal so let’s make that part of the story. 

Whenever “The One” comes around and starts breaking the rules, we’ll send in a couple Agent Smiths based on the Lisa program to murder them up.  If they get The One, fine,  that means the system is still good and we stay the course, but if The One “wins” then that means it’s time to upgrade the drivers so we run the “you escape the Matrix” program and then tear down and build a new version.   

In other 80s news, to get back into the swing of things with Ela, I watched the Road Warrior the other day and I realized that the people in white football pads are real assholes for blowing up the refinery when they left. 

Mad Max is a world of scarcity and the whities destroyed a working refinery just to kill the homoerotic marauders?  That goes way beyond cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Granted we never find out what’s going on in the “Promised Land” so maybe the refinery isn’t the last one in the world (they do mention Gastown in Fury Road) but it’s certainly massively valuable to all of humanity.  Blowing it up just so someone else can’t have it is a dick move. 

It’s like in the Walking Dead when Negan burns all the mattresses.  That to me is the worst thing anyone did in that whole show.  All the people killed, that’s bad, but you can make more people.  There are no more mattresses ever.  The mattress factories are gone and they’re never coming back. 

And that’s my pitch for a new Purple Mattress ad campaign.