Cogito, ergo sum. That’s the philosophical aphorism Descartes left us with. But no one said that just because you think, you’re actually delving into what’s really going on. In Carrie Bradshaw’s case (hopefully we’ll only have to wield her as an example so many times, but it’s hard not to when she remains such an emblematic symbol of New York, particularly the version of it people remain nostalgic about), her writing is indicative of that. Barely scratching the surface of relationships, let alone any subject matter at all, the show’s “frothy” (to use a polite word) personality is what gained it popularity in addition to exposing the fact that living in New York is, well, a hollow experience—and actually much easier than people like to make it out to be with that bullshit platitude, “If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.” Bitch, try making it in Beirut. Try making it somewhere, anywhere at all that doesn’t place such a premium on the superficial while pretending to be endlessly profound. A place that isn’t so obviously rife for being the primary tableau for a simulation wherein you wake up each morning somehow thinking it’s going to be different. Things are going to change. There’s a reason you’re still putting up with the fuckery. You just don’t know that said reason is because you’re trapped in the Matrix.
With this in mind, there is a poignant logic behind why Sarah Jessica Parker was tapped to host the MTV Movie Awards in 2000, when The Matrix was still causing a stir for not only its bullet time visual effects but the very concept itself that, in retrospect, was loosely preparing humans for the future. One in which, whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not, machines would become their overlords. Except when it finally happened, it wasn’t even a grand secret, so much as an accepted fate wherein we tell ourselves that we’re in control. As with everything, New York likes to embrace that which is new with an “on steroids” enthusiasm, thus it was quick to absorb the likes of iPod, iPhone and iMac at the dawning of the new century—all in direct contrast to the supposed iDontGiveAFuck attitude the denizens like to associate themselves with. They very much give a fuck, most especially when it comes to packing the latest in technology. For, like everything in that town (couture included, as Carrie will attest), status and the symbols thereof are of the utmost importance.
When The Matrix came along, “geekdom” went mainstream in an official capacity for the first time since computers and the internet became available to the masses. This is why putting Carrie in the role of Neo (with Jimmy Fallon taking over Keanu’s as a side character form of Neo) made complete sense for the opening parody to the awards show. A comedically stylized narrative that found Carrie waking up in the middle of the night as she lamely asserts, “New York: in a city that never sleeps, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a dream and what’s reality.” Raising her head from her desk slowly the same way as Neo did at the beginning, she sees her computer typing out, “Wake up, Carrie. The Matrix has you… Follow the white rabbit…” In Neo’s case, it was the image of a girl’s tattoo when a guy shows up with four of his friends to collect an illegal software program from him. In Carrie’s, it’s a delivery guy (Vince Vaughn, seeing as how he already cameo’d in the show that year) dressed in a white rabbit suit. She, too, surrenders to going to a club (back when New York’s Matrix still promoted club-going as a final bastion of the twentieth century), because, why not? Can’t get laid when you’re cooped up “writing” (if writing constitutes putting a question down on paper and calling it enlightened). It is there that she spots Neo, with Fallon doing his most annoying possible imitation of Keanu’s brain-dead surfer voice.
Retelling the story to her trio of friends, she narrates that they then went back to Neo’s place with the promise that his roommate would be away on business. Lo and behold, of course, Morpheus is there to give the same spiel to Carrie as he did to Neo in the movie, telling her she can take the blue pill and go back to the way things were, waking up in her bed and believing what she wants to believe, or she can take the red pill and “stay in Wonderland.” Of course, to someone like Carrie, with her high-fashion “needs” and frivolous obsessions, the true Wonderland is the Matrix, with all of its ersatz comforts posing as “gritty realness.”
As Morpheus tells her she’s sensed all her life that something has been off, she gives the voiceover, “The guy in the Prada ripoff was right. There was something wrong with my world. I was thirty-something and still single.” “Is being single really that bad?” Miranda interjects at the brunch table, interrupting the flashback. Samantha shushes her, insisting, “Get back to the part about the big black man.” Because Sex and the City must remain on-brand for its super stellar “handling” of race.
Carrie does get back to rehashing the scene in question, inquiring of Morpheus, “So how come I haven’t heard about this Matrix place, did it just open?” She adds in her vacuous dumb bitch way with a tone that is supposed to exude “cute charm,” “Can I get on the guest list?”
“Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.”
Carrie bites, taking the red pill, chalking up her sudden awakening in a pod where she’s nothing more than an energy source for the overlords as part of a bad hangover. But when she finds herself aboard Nebuchadnezzar, the hovercraft Morpheus is the captain of, she realizes this is no drug side effect. There, Neo tries to better explain what her freed mind implicates for her new, real reality. In that zoned out Keanu way, Fallon delivers the line, “The Matrix is a system created by robots [think the corporate Wall Street types Mr. Smith is molded in the image of]. It’s like the real world, but it isn’t real. The Matrix is real, but it’s like the real world that isn’t real.” As faux convoluted as it sounds, the real world that isn’t real is arguably the most succinct description of New York there is.
Carrie, like any materialistic ho who has more coffee table books than actual books decides, “Screw the real world, give me the Matrix. Manhattan, martinis, cute men.”
Her concluding segment offers her newfound “perspective” in voiceover for her column as she remarks, “We said our goodbyes, I returned to the Matrix and I had a feeling I would never see Neo again… in the real world, that is.” A.k.a. when he shows up to the Matrix that is New York, she’ll be happy to bang, but she ain’t gonna do it on that depressing hovership.
Like Carrie, “New Yorkers” would genuinely rather be trapped in their illusions than have their minds freed. The imprisonment is so much more comfortable. Especially when it helps with the denial about the city not living up to its grand expectations, most markedly in the present climate—all fortified by centuries of media grandstanding. Of course, the overlords will soon remake New York to satisfy the necessary delusions of its residents in a post-corona climate, continuing to ensnare them by making them believe it’s the “greatest city in the world.” Tellingly, the Matrix was modeled after an amalgam of cities that one can’t really discern. Is it Chicago? Is it Tokyo? Is it London? Is it Downtown Los Angeles? No. At its core, the intent by the former Wachowski brothers was to model it most blatantly after New York. For reasons only glaring to those with freed minds, this makes total poetic sense.
