THE PSYCHOLOGY OF IDENTITY IN THE MATRIX AND AVATAR
Article by LiveReal Agents Courtney and Kevin
It seems simple enough: there’s “me,” and there’s “not me.”
“Identity” lies at the heart of both.
The idea of identity is so personal, intimate, obvious, that we rarely bother to talk about it.
For some, the philosophy of Popeye settles it: “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam!” And it’s as simple as that. It’s the first rule of logic, the law of identity, a=a, “a thing is what it is.” End of story.
But the whole business of “identity” might be trickier than it seems.
It cracks open only when we examine “the obvious.” The first problem in these areas can be understanding that there is a problem.
There’s something inherently elusive about it. With us, identity works like our eyes, ears, and nose. In the way that we can’t see our eye (because it’s what we see with), we can’t hear our ear (because it’s what we hear with), we can’t smell our nose (because it’s what we smell with), we can’t directly know our identity because we are it.
At best, we can see reflections, imitations, approximations. We can see our eye in a mirror, or possibly hear our ear in a recording, but that’s indirect. We only directly perceive the mirror or the recording, not the thing itself.
In thinking along these lines, we arrive at a baffling idea.
Our own identity can seem unknowable.
It’s like a black hole at the center of our being, hiding in plain sight.
If we can’t know our selves (our identity) directly, it would mean that we live in our own blind spot. If this is accurate, we often seem to only know ourselves indirectly, through induction.
We’re like players in “The Number Game,” where everyone is secretly assigned a number, and while you can see everyone else’s number, you can never see your own. Yet the goal is to pair up with someone with the highest possible number. You can see everyone else’s numbers clearly.
It’s a paradox.
You are unknowable to you.
Suddenly, insults, slights, and the reasons for entire cultures of manners, customs, and social protocols can make more sense. If one person calls another a jerk, it only “hurts” if that person, on some level, suspects that they might be a jerk. If there wasn’t uncertainty in the mix, it would be like calling a kitten an elephant, or an airplane a flower. The person hurling the insult would just look absurd. But instead, we deal with unknowns, and our attempts to find toeholds of certainty.
Even the phrase “our identity” is misleading. It’s not something we possess – it’s something we are. It isn’t the thing being possessed, it’s the possessor. It’s a verb, not a noun. In this sense, identity is closer to being an active process, not a static object.
But beyond the philosophical gymnastics, this can lead to practical, everyday problems – especially today.
After all, we’re now living in the age of AI, deepfakes, weapons-grade persuasion, and generative communication while entire new species of media flood our lives daily.
It can be hard to know what’s real and what isn’t.
And what if this includes our very selves?
What if we don’t know what’s real or unreal, even with what should be the most intimate and obvious of all – namely, ourselves?
Nietzsche described exactly this.
“We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves…Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each is the farthest away from himself’ – as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.”
This business can all seem a bit…unsettling.
The entire show can become baffling and unnerving, even to the point of existential panic. It can seem to make perfect sense that Nietzsche went insane.
We could easily decide to avoid the whole matter altogether.
But that would mean shoring up along the lines of psychological self-defense or philosophical self-defense in order to avoid any threats to our identity. And that would lead us right back into the same problem. After all, if “defenses” along these lines are necessary, what are we defending ourselves against? And what is being defended, exactly? What happens if the defenses don’t hold?
It’s not as if there’s a physical flag that we’d take down or raise, or a stone fortress that some breathing, sweating, physical enemy would storm and occupy. It can seem more like a fistfight with ghosts in a hall of funhouse mirrors.
As Kierkegaard said, “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.”
Luckily, a few films can help clarify some of this.
The Matrix, Avatar, and a few others can illuminate certain areas here.
We often think of identity as something fixed. It’s some thing inside us, like a treasure in a box, locked somewhere between our ears or ribs, that’s very real and stays the same through space and time.
But putting the “what it is” question aside for now, one key aspect is clear: identity can change.
If identity was purely static, The Popeye Model would hold. Things are what they are, and there’s wouldn’t be much more to say.
But luckily, that isn’t the case. The world is more complex, interesting, and full of drama. And so are we.
Identity can go in one of two directions.
We can become what we aren’t, and we can also stop being what we are.
We can “identify” with something, and we can also “dis-identify” with something.
We can “identify” with what is not “me,” and we can “dis-identify” with what is “me.”
Consider the movie Avatar.
In Avatar, a human soldier named Jake Sully learns to control a genetically engineered hybrid body that is initially an object, external to himself (an “avatar”).
(Spoiler alert.) As the story progresses, he eventually decides to leave his original human self behind, cut the cord, and become his avatar.
He “becomes” something he previously wasn’t.
The Matrix illustrates the opposite.
In The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (spoiler alert) believes he’s just a mild-mannered regular guy computer programmer who does a little hacking on the side.
But as the story unfolds, he discovers that he isn’t who he thought he was. “Thomas” is exposed to be a colossal illusion.
He’s Neo. (“Whoa.”)
Thomas undergoes a process of dis-illusion – an weapons-grade existential peeling of the onion layers of self. Thomas “dies,” revealing that “he” is actually Neo.
These illustrate two directions of identity.
Avatar demonstrates the idea that “I can identify with something I previously wasn’t.” The Matrix demonstrates the idea that “I can dis-identify from who I previously thought I was.”
Both cases involve certain death/rebirth, phoenix-from-ashes transformations of identity.
Of course, these might seem like purely fictional, far-fetched thought experiments.
But anyone who has ever “gotten lost” in a movie, novel, or sports team will be familiar with the dynamic.
There’s a mysterious process at work. We identify with characters onscreen, on the page, or on the field/court with our favorite players. When they win, we win. When they suffer, we feel their pain. The protagonist in a story is typically a character we “identify with” temporarily, who helps us “get into” the story as a “way in” to the narrative. In video games, we “identify” with an onscreen icon or symbol, such as Pac-Man (“It ate ‘me’!”), Space Invaders (“It killed ‘me’!”), Fortnite (“Where are ‘you’?”). It can lead to real humans crying real tears over a fish – a computer-generated fish, no less – in Finding Nemo or Finding Dory, or a deer in Bambi, or an illustration of a troll in Shrek. Advertisers spend billions trying to reach, target, and persuade certain demographics – or, more clearly, identities.
All to say, this seemingly hyper-abstract philosophizing isn’t far-fetched at all.
Trillions of dollars are at stake in this dynamic.
Identity is the engine that drives the entertainment, advertising, spectator sports industries, as well as the political industrial complex, among others.
Closer to home, we can “identify with” parents, teachers, siblings, friends, and characters in stories in ways that shape our lives and serve as part of the natural course of psychological growth.
There’s something perfectly natural in this. We choose role models, aim to become like them, and are shaped in the process. The process can work well.
But are there ways this can all go wrong?
It seems so.
If the process of identity formation can go in two directions (becoming what we aren’t (Avatar) and ceasing to be what we (think we) are (The Matrix)), then it makes sense that it can also go wrong in two directions.
The Avatar approach means we can identify with something we previously weren’t. But it’s possible to identify with things we aren’t, and will never be. Think of the person who believes they’re Napolean, Julius Caesar, or Jesus Christ, and winds up institutionalized.
On a smaller scale, we could imagine the guy who thinks he’s God’s Gift to Women, the diva who thinks the universe must orbit around her whims, or an overconfident crooner who has overdosed on the self-esteem movement and winds up being ridiculed on American Idol.
Or, on a less dramatic scale, there’s the beauty who identifies only with her flaws, the criminal who identifies only with his virtues, or the doctor with the God complex because he identifies only with his power of life and death.
It can be easy to accidentally identify with what we are not. We all seem vulnerable to falling into various forms of mistaken identity.
But we can also dis-identify with what we are.
We can “forget who we are.”
In The Lion King, Simba forgets his true identity as the prince who is “destined to become king of the Pride lands.” He goes into exile, and stays there until he’s prompted to “remember who you are.”
There’s the classic story of the Prodigal Son who leaves the life of a prince and eventually winds up wishing he could eat pigs’ food, or the Sufi take of a Prince who leaves his father’s kingdom, winds up a beggar, and entirely forgets that he ever was a prince.
Jason Bourne also forgets who he is – he loses his identity through amnesia – and must rediscover it.
Oedipus is a classic Greek tragedy of someone who sets off in search of a villain who committed a crime – only to discover that the culprit is himself.
In Fight Club (spoiler alert), the nameless narrator meets Tyler Durden, only to eventually discover that he is Tyler Durden, or that Tyler Durden is part of him. The Hulk stories dramatize a similar outer/inner conflict, with the dueling identities of Bruce Banner and Hulk – identities that are constantly at odds yet within the same person, as a kind of Jekyll/Hyde dynamic.
Some method actors have reportedly “identified” with their characters so much that – at least temporarily – they forget that they were actors playing a role. They thought they were the person in the story, and were no longer the actor.
These are examples of losing touch with who we are, and the struggle to find our way back.
So, the “Toxic Avatar” route could mean identifying with something we aren’t, while the “Toxic Matrix” route could mean abandoning who or what we are.
When we identify with or as something, we believe it’s us. Once that is set, we often feel a need to stay consistent. From that point, we can easily find ourselves defending all sorts of things we otherwise wouldn’t. (Many advertisers know this, and milk it for all it’s worth.)
After all, by definition, we perceive a threat to our identity as a threat to us.
A perceived threat to “the self” can serve as the origin of anxiety.
And this can be true even when an identity is objectively mistaken.
How we treat the topic of identity matters to a profound degree.
A few more examples can help clarify the impact of this.
If I identify my “self” exclusively with my wealth, then losing my money would mean losing my “self.” (During the Great Depression, individuals who lost their wealth reportedly committed suicide.)
If I identify with fame or status, then losing that fame or status would seem like losing my self. (See Babylon, Avatar, and the Search for Significance.)
If I identify myself according to a particular relationship, then if I lose that relationship, I could seem to lose my self.
It relates directly to whatever game of life we’re playing.
We can even “identify with” our own desires. An alcoholic might “identify with” his desire to drink – or more with his desire to quit drinking. An addict can “identify with” a desire to use, or to quit. An athlete might identify with a desire to work harder, or to slack off.
Amid all this, we might ask: “Which way is ‘right’?”
Is one side “correct” and the other “mistaken”? Does one lead to health and strength, the other to deterioration?
Should we aim for the way of Avatar, The Matrix, or both? Is it wrong to identify? Or should we dis-identify entirely? Or vice versa?
This is all part of navigating daily life, even if much of it takes place below conscious awareness. The human condition seems to be that we exist between opposing forces, and we’re tasked with working through, choosing between, and reconciling those forces the best we can.
The world’s great religions have long understood this.
They also go further: they call us to a new identity.
For example, Zen Buddhism calls us to awaken our “Buddha Nature” or “Original Nature,” to go beyond the ego or false sense of self in order to realize the true nature of the “Self” (or identity). Christianity calls us to put aside the “old man” or fallen nature of Adam/Eve and, through a process of repentance, salvation, “second birth,” atonement, kenosis, etc., taking on a new identity, or the “new man.” (This was often depicted through individuals being given new names – Saul to Paul, Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter, etc.) Hinduism describes the Atman – the divinity at the center of the self – undergoing a process of realizing the Self, or Self-Realization, or undergoing unity with Brahman. And so on.
Both routes (Avatar and Matrix) can be either beneficial or disastrous, depending on how they’re pursued.
For example, we can identify with positive role models and take on or form a new identity along those lines. We can also dis-identify from false identities – to find out who we are by backing away from who we aren’t.
Or, we could can “forget who we are” (by turning our back on our true friends, for example, as in King Lear and nearly every teen coming-of-age movie), or we can “get lost in The Matrix,” as when we give ourselves over to addiction.
Perhaps the highest form involves both.
There’s a paradox of being “in the world but not of it” as espoused by Christianity, or what Buddhism might describe as “detachment.” It avoids rejecting the world, but also avoids getting lost in it.
It seems to avoid being “in the world and of it” (an error of being “lost in The Matrix”) and the opposite error of being “not of the world yet not in it” (an error of being in a state of alienation).
The resolution seems to lie somewhere amid the middle, in the transcendence of both. Neither immersed in, nor alienated from – “in, but not of.” It avoids shunning the world to live as hermits, yet also not being swallowed up.
It seems to involve activating something in us that’s in the world, yet also beyond it. A “beyond within.”
This points us toward a dictum most recently popularized by Nietzsche.
“Become what you are!”
It sounds like a riddle.
After all, if I have to become something, that typically means “I’m not it already.” (If I’m already a teenager, I don’t need to be told to “Become a teenager!” But if I’m almost a teenager, then the instruction to “Become a teenager!” could almost make sense.)
On the other side, being told to become what I already am seems redundant, like useless advice. “What I am” is something I already am, and so I don’t need to become anything. We don’t implore a dog to become a dog. He already is a dog.
If I already am what I’m supposed to become, why would I need to become? Or, if I’m supposed to become someone or something, doesn’t that imply that I’m not that already?
The need to “become” something implies that I’m not it yet. But the statement that I “am” something implies that I already am it.
The advice, taken piecemeal, can seem incoherent.
But we shouldn’t dismiss it, as it still seems like good advice. For example, it echoes a phrase from the Chandogya Upanishad: “...man must find his own Soul.”
Again, is my “Soul” something external to myself that I must “find”? Or, isn’t my Soul – my self – the one doing the seeking?
It further echoes the classic advice to “Know Thyself.”
In the scenario of “Know Thyself,” I am both the “knower” and “what is known.” So, which am I? Am I the knower, or the known, or, somehow, both?
This seems to turn our usual understanding of ourselves upside down.
But perhaps it all makes sense with our unique psychology.
If we can assume for now that this isn’t silly advice – that it’s been valuable enough to last thousands of years for some good reasons, then it could point us in this direction: that we aren’t yet ourselves.
It means fully becoming ourselves hasn’t happened yet – but can.
This would mean that our real nature, or our real selves, still exists only as a potential.
It would mean that our true self is dormant in us, perhaps the way an oak tree is dormant in an acorn or the way a new human is “dormant” in a soon-to-be mother.
Soren Kierkegaard once made a startling claim:
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
This seems like commonsense advice to the point of being mundane. But what if this was reversed? Then, the most common form of genuine happiness would lie in being who you are.
And it begs the question: what is the “who you are”?
What, in other words, is the “real” me?
“Who we are,” it seems, could be someone we haven’t yet become.
This can be cause for hope. If all of this is good advice – and many authoritative sources say it is – it can highlight the possibility that we have seeds in us, the potential for a kind of genuine happiness that we haven’t yet experienced fully, or that we might have just briefly glimpsed.
So, maybe we’re like Sully, ready to take on a new identity at a higher level than we are now.
Or, maybe we’re like Thomas Anderson, ready to drop away from an illusory self that isn’t really real.
Or, better yet: maybe right now, we’re all some version of Neo, operating under the illusion that we’re some still version of Thomas Anderson. And it’s time to wake up.