But to others, The Matrix was itself a wake-up call, one that tried to make sense of the confusion and unease that were beginning to take hold in the late '90s, a period when things were going a bit too smoothly. "That decade was so comfortable," says Mattis, the Wachowskis' longtime manager. "The stock market was up, and people were making money. But there was a splinter in the mind's eye: Something felt wrong. In all of that comfort, people started thinking, 'There's something missing here.'"The Matrix nudged viewers to develop their own slowed-down, omniscient, bullet-time view of the world around them: Who controls my life? Am I happy or just happily distracted? Do I even exist at all? Such existential turbulence wasn't exclusive to the '90s. But it had grown deeper during a decade in which technology had become so soothing—and so controlling. When the Wachowskis began writing The Matrix, the mainstream web was still in its modem-wheezing early days. By the time the film was...
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