Some might call it bad timing. The Matrix, a sci-fi film conceived by Andy and Larry Wachowski, was released at the end of March and was still number one at the box office on April 20 when reports of a killing spree began to emerge from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Hardly had the shooting stopped when fingers began to point at media violence—especially in movies and computer games—and the creepy virtual violence of the Internet. Had Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Columbine's teenage killers, seen The Matrix shortly before they acted out their long-savored scenario?

At first glance, The Matrix seems an unlikely candidate for such censure. Although it features dazzling special effects, it is a cerebral film, with more time given to philosophical discussion than to mayhem. The premise of the film is that Earth has been taken over by a massive computer system, the Matrix. When the humans who created this network tried to knock out its power source by obscuring the sun, the Matrix learned to harvest human beings and use them like batteries to power itself—thus humans are "copper tops." The network also created a make-believe world to ensure the docility of its subjects, and so, in their minds, humans are living in the world of 1999, at the pinnacle of human achievement before the triumph of artificial intelligence.

A renegade band of human beings was able to stay free of the evil computer system, and its members live in hiding in Zion—a place that we won't see until the sequel. Further, a group of humans who have freed themselves from the Matrix roam the sewers and tunnels of Earth in a spaceship called The Nebuchadnezzar. Led by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), they are seeking the One, a man who will be able to figure out the Matrix and begin to free humanity from its bondage. With the help of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Morpheus tracks down the man he thinks is the One: Neo (Keanu Reeves). A meeting is arranged, and Neo is given the choice to go back to his known life in the Matrix or step out into the real world. "The Matrix is everywhere," Morpheus explains.

"It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

"What truth?"

"That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bond age, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. … Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."

Neo chooses reality, and, after a dramatic episode in which he is born again, he leaves the world of gleaming skyscrapers and enters a world of darkness and rusty spaceships. After learning the ways of being an "unplugged" person, Neo is confronted with a choice: in order to save Morpheus, his mentor and friend, he must re-enter the Matrix and battle evil federal agents (who are themselves constructs of artificial intelligence, contemptuous of humanity and disgusted by mere flesh).

This is a seemingly impossible task, except for the One. And it was here, in the last 30 minutes of the movie, that movieland and our world collided on April 20, 1999. When he descends into the Matrix to save Morpheus, Neo dons a black trench coat and takes up a vast array of automatic handguns and rifles—frighteningly similar to the garb and tactics that Harris and Klebold employed at Columbine High School. The Matrix quickly became the subject of editorials and talk-show conjecture: James Wall, senior contributing editor of the Christian Century, singled out the film as a symptom of media gone bad. Vice President Al Gore, after stating publicly a few weeks earlier how much he and Tipper liked The Matrix, recanted. And on May 4, at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on marketing violence to children, Denver Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput said that one scene in film "left me completely stunned. … The heroes wear trench coats and in a violent, elegant, slow-motion bloodbath, they cut down about a dozen people with their guns. Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold may have seen that film. If so, it certainly didn't deter them."

In the months since the Columbine killings, we've heard a good deal more from Washington about violent entertainment and the too-easy availability of guns. I don't want to belittle those concerns, but I wonder if The Matrix doesn't suggest another, deeper understanding of that tragedy. In the youth group at our church on the Wednesday night following the shooting, we gave the junior high students a chance to talk about their reactions. One boy said, "I would have thought that when they killed the first one and saw the blood, it would have become real to them, and they would have stopped."

But what was real to Harris and Klebold? Much has been made of the one-liners they shouted as they killed their 13 victims. Even their infamous question of Cassie Bernall—"Do you believe in God?"—smacks of Arnold Schwarzenegger. These boys could have been acting out a part in a movie.

What we have seen in Columbine, perhaps, is a prime example of what will be increasingly common in postmodern culture: the border between reality and fiction is becoming more difficult to discern. Harris and Klebold were immersed in movies, video games, computer games, fantasy board games, and comics. The line between reality and virtual reality had blurred to the point of being erased. These two didn't stop when they drew first blood because their reality had morphed with their fantasy.

I know this feeling myself. At my last job, we received a free virtual reality spaceship game when we purchased some business software. I spent many lunch hours and coffee breaks playing the game, trying to achieve the next level—until the game began showing up in my dreams and my daydreams!

In The Matrix, Neo's guerrilla training is conducted via computer simulation. When Neo asks, "Is this real?" Morpheus responds, "What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." This exchange is what the film is all about. And it points to a major cultural watershed that we as Christians dare not ignore.

Of course, long before the advent of computers, human beings had to wrestle with the problem of how to recognize the really real—and how to choose rightly between reality and beguiling self-deception. (Before the Brothers Wachowski there was Plato and his Myth of the Cave.) A book is a powerful technology for altering one's sense of reality—hence Christian interdictions against fiction. But the mind-twisting technologies we're just beginning to explore pose these perennial problems in new and more acute forms.

Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), the Judas figure in The Matrix, meets with the evil Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) at a virtual restaurant and eats the best-looking virtual steak you've ever seen. "You know," he says, lifting his fork and eyeing what appears to be a tasty morsel, "I know that this steak doesn't exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I've realized?" He takes a big bite. "Ignorance is bliss."

As virtual reality becomes less virtual and more real, more and more people—especially youth—will choose this kind of ignorance: a life lived inside movies and games rather than in families and schools and relationships and jobs. Thankfully, we follow a Lord whose life and words "invade our 'real' world with a reality even more real than it is." Our teens need that reality. So does our world.

Tony Jones is minister to youth and young adults at Colonial Church of Edina (Minn.), www.colonialchurch.org.

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