"Mr. Anderson:" Repetition and Queer Longing in the Matrix Trilogy

Introduction

There is a peculiarity at the heart of the Matrix trilogy that was pointed out to me by my excellent friend Beryl P--- that I have not found to have been adequately addressed yet, and thought could do with some further exploration. Across the span of the trilogy, Agent Smith addresses the film's protagonist Neo as "Mr. Anderson" not once or twice (as dramatic emphasis might warrant) but with a frequency so remarkable - and escalating so notably across the three films - that it passes, by degrees, from address into something altogether stranger. In The Matrix (1999), the repetition carries institutional weight; by The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003), it has become so insistent, so rhythmically excessive, that it tips at moments into something approaching the farcical - a parody of itself, a tic that has outgrown any functional purpose and taken on the quality of compulsion.

The repetition is, on its surface, explicable enough: Smith refuses the name Neo, declines to engage in the liberation narrative that that name encodes, and persists in the designation that the system has assigned. But this explanation (I will argue!) is radically incomplete. It focusses on the name itself whilst overlooking what the repetition of it performs. It is the contention of this essay that Smith's compulsive return to "Mr. Anderson" is best understood not as an act of negation or erasure but as an act of invocation - a summoning, in both the ritual and psychoanalytical sense. This is not, of course, to diminish the work of my fine crewmates who have put forward a number of elegant arguments pertaining to Smith’s refusal to call Neo by his chosen name: I simply wish to explore an alternative argument and see what we can discover by doing so.

This essay shall argue that Smith calls "Mr. Anderson" so very often because he simply cannot stop calling - because the name is the nearest marker available to him for a desire that the trilogy's narrative architecture will not otherwise permit him to express.

Smith's Name as Architectural Necessity

Before one may attend to what Smith's naming performs, one must first consider what it is. Within the logic of the film, Smith is a programme: a sequence of code running within a simulated environment, possessed of objectives, constraints, and - one infers - something resembling a data structure in which entities are stored and referenced. "Mr. Anderson" is, in this reading, not a chosen address but an architectural given: it is the reference tag, the pointer in Smith's code that resolves to this particular body, this particular anomaly, this particular problem requiring elimination. Smith does not call Neo "Mr. Anderson" because he has decided to; he calls him "Mr. Anderson" because that is the label under which this entity is registered in the system Smith serves and, in some sense, embodies.

Lacan's account of the symbolic order and the function of the proper name is instructive here. For Lacan, the proper name occupies a peculiar position within language: unlike common nouns, which signify through their relation to a system of differences, the proper name purports to designate an individual directly, to attach to a singular body with a fixity that ordinary language cannot achieve. Lacan argues “precisely because the proper name specifies, because it identifies the rootedness of the subject…this is where the very particular property of the proper name in signification resides.”

And yet, as Lacan observes, this fixity is itself a fiction: the proper name is no less arbitrary - no less a product of the symbolic order - than any other signifier. What it produces is not a stable identity but the effect of one: the reassuring sense that beneath the flux of attributes and performances there is a singular, nameable self. Smith's "Mr. Anderson," in this light, is the system's attempt to fix Neo within the symbolic order, to insist that he is, beneath all his anomalous behaviour, a registered and containable entity.

And yet something rather curious occurs when one attends to the frequency of this assertion. A programme that had genuinely and successfully resolved its reference tag to a stable and manageable entity would have no need to keep insisting upon the fact. The very repetition of "Mr. Anderson" betrays the failure of the operation it purports to perform. Each iteration is at once an assertion of containment and an admission that containment has not been achieved - that the entity in question keeps escaping the pointer assigned to it, keeps failing to coincide with its designation. Smith calls "Mr. Anderson" so often, one ventures, because "Mr. Anderson" keeps not quite arriving.

Repetition as Ritual

Across a remarkable diversity of cultural traditions, the repetition of a name has been understood to constitute a summoning. To speak a name aloud, and to do so repeatedly, is to insist upon the presence of the named, to call them from wherever they are into the space of the speaker's attention. The logic underlying this practice is one that Freud, in Totem and Taboo (1913), identifies as the animistic premise of magical thought: the belief that the word and the thing are not merely associated but in some sense continuous, that to manipulate the name is to reach toward the entity it designates. Freud is careful to distinguish this premise from the reality principle of “civilised” thought - and yet he notes that the premises of magic are never fully abandoned by the psyche that has nominally outgrown them. They persist, in attenuated and displaced forms, wherever desire outstrips the resources of rational address.

Smith's repetition of "Mr. Anderson" has, viewed through this lens, the character of a ritual summoning that has begun to lose faith in its own efficacy. In the early scenes of The Matrix, the address carries the weight of institutional authority: Smith speaks the name as an Agent speaks, with the calm assurance of a system that knows itself to be in control. But across The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, as Smith becomes increasingly wild and Neo increasingly ungovernable, something shifts in the quality of the repetition. It becomes more insistent, more rhythmically foregrounded, and rather more desperate. By the later films, the address has been repeated so many times that it has worn through its own surface meaning; it has become a verbal reflex, a compulsion so deeply grooved that Smith deploys it even in circumstances where it can serve no conceivable instrumental purpose. The incantation is not working, and yet it cannot be abandoned, because to abandon it would be to relinquish the last instrument of contact available.

There is, furthermore, a quality to Smith's use of the name across the trilogy that one can only describe as liturgical. He deploys it not merely as an opener or a closer but as punctuation - inserting it mid-address, returning to it mid-thought, as though it were a refrain to which the rest of his speech is merely verse. By Reloaded and Revolutions, this quality has intensified to the point at which a certain absurdity becomes inescapable - the name drops into exchanges where it is barely syntactically necessary, crowding the dialogue with a repetition that cannot be explained by dramatic intent alone. And yet this very excess is, in the ritual framework, extraordinarily legible: the litany that has lost its object does not diminish but intensifies, piling iteration upon iteration as though sheer accumulation might accomplish what individual utterance cannot. One is put in mind of those religious formulae in which a name or a phrase is repeated until the act of speaking it becomes inseparable from the presence it invokes. Smith is not, one submits, merely addressing Neo. He is performing, with increasing urgency and decreasing control, the verbal equivalent of a summoning circle - and the farcical excess of the later films is not a failure of dramatic craft but the precise and legible signature of a summoning that cannot stop because it has not yet been answered.

Derrida and Desire

Derrida's account of the proper name in Of Grammatology (1967) (and his subsequent arguments relating to forms of address) furnish the final and most consequential dimension of this argument. For Derrida, the proper name is the site of a significant paradox: it purports to designate a singular presence, to reach across the distance between speaker and named and establish direct contact, and yet it operates (as all language operates) through a system of differences that renders such direct contact impossible. To call someone by name is always, in Derrida's view, to reach toward a presence that the very act of naming simultaneously posits and defers. The name promises arrival; it cannot deliver it. And it is this structural impossibility that gives repeated naming its peculiar pathos: one calls again because the previous call did not bring the called fully into presence, and calls again for the same reason, and again.

This Derridean logic maps with striking precision, I would argue, onto Smith's compulsive address. Each "Mr. Anderson" is an attempt to fix Neo, to bring him fully into the presence the name promises, to resolve the reference tag to the entity it designates. And each iteration fails, as each iteration must, because Neo will not coincide with the name - will not, in the most literal sense, answer to it. Neo's clear refusal of the name ("My name is Neo") is not merely an assertion of identity; it is, in Derrida's terms, a refusal of arrival, an insistence upon remaining beyond the reach of the caller's address. He will not come when called. And Smith, consequently, cannot stop calling.

It is here that the erotic dimension of the argument becomes, one finds, inescapable. The structure of the unanswered call - the repeated address that the addressee refuses, the name spoken again and again into a silence that is not quite silence because the named is manifestly present and manifestly withholding - is the structure, in its barest form, of thwarted desire. To desire someone is, among other things, to wish for their full presence, their full attention, their complete coincidence with the image one holds of them; and desire persists, as Lacan observes, precisely because that full presence is never achieved, because the object always withholds something, because the gap between the name and the named can be narrowed but never closed. Smith desires, in this reading, not merely the destruction of Neo but something more intimate and more impossible: the arrival of the presence the name keeps promising and the named keeps refusing to deliver.

Conclusion

The first film concludes, so far as the Smith-Neo relationship is concerned, with an image of definitive, if temporary, refusal. Neo, newly awakened to his own capacities, faces Smith and declines, for the first time without ambiguity, to be eliminated. Smith calls his name; Neo does not heed his calling.

And yet one notes that Smith does not stop. Across The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003), the address continues and intensifies - more frequent, more excessive, more stripped of any pretence of functional purpose. By Revolutions, the name has become something very close to pure compulsion: Smith speaks it in circumstances where it can accomplish nothing, addresses it to a Neo who has long since ceased to respond to it, repeats it in the manner of one who has forgotten why he began but cannot conceive of stopping. Desire, as Lacan reminds us, does not seek satisfaction; it seeks its own perpetuation. Smith calls "Mr. Anderson" so very often not despite the fact that the name fails to deliver its object, but, in some obscure and rather melancholy sense, because of it.

The trilogy encodes this as enmity, as the system's implacable pursuit of the anomaly it cannot tolerate. One need not dispute this encoding to observe that beneath it, audible in the ritual cadence of the repeated address, in the liturgical insistence of a name spoken far beyond the requirements of functional communication, there is another register entirely. It is the register of a figure who has found, in the act of calling, the only form of contact available to him - who mistakes invocation for intimacy - and who cannot cease the calling because to do so would be to relinquish the last, most attenuated thread of connection to the one he cannot reach. "Mr. Anderson" is, in the end, less a name than an expression of longing.