Divine Dreams, Divine Lies

What happens when God lies to you?

In The Matrix (1999), Neo (Keanu Reeves) is roused from his false-life inside the computer-simulation we all think is reality, awaking to the true reality of a blasted world and a war between humanity and machines. The psychopomp, or reverse-psychopomp, who has woken him, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), believes Neo to be ‘the one’, a messiah-figure whose unique gifts and powers will win the war for humanity. To that end Neo is taken to see ‘The Oracle’, a woman who lives inside the matrix and who has, it seems, the gift of prophecy. She tells Neo that he is not ‘the one’; that his destiny is otherwise—he will have to sacrifice his own life to save Morpheus’s, because ‘without Morpheus we are lost’. But at the end of the film it turns out that Neo is ‘the one’ after all. ‘Morpheus,’ Neo starts to say, at one point, ‘the oracle told me …’, but Morpheus cuts him off with: ‘… exactly what you needed to hear.’ So: the oracle, one of the gods of this imaginary cosmos, lied to Neo. The implication is: only by telling him a lie could she motivate him to do what he needed to do to realise his potential as ‘the one’. This is a little hard to comprehend. How would events in this movie have gone differently if the Oracle had told Neo he was the one? He finds out soon enough anyway, and rattles through the two subsequent movies in that knowledge. What part does the oracular lie play here?

We could say: its only role is a dramatic one—that the real deceit is the trick played upon the audience, who spend the second half of the movie doubting Neo’s messianic credentials, until the Wachowskis can stage their eucatastrophic conclusion, narrative surprise and effectiveness. But the implication in the storytelling is that the Oracle’s deceit is purposive. Had she told Neo the truth, he would not have been able to achieve his One-ness, this messianic powers. She lies to him for his own good. It’s hard to see how things would have panned out had she told him the truth, which is say, in what ways the narrative of the movie would have differed. Is it that learning the truth would demotivate Neo? Lead him to prioritize his own life over rescuing Morpheus? Hard to see that it would. How was the lie ‘exactly what he needed to hear’?

Here's another story of war, heroes and divinities. Early in the Iliad, Zeus sends a false dream to Agamemnon, the Greek leader.