McEntee, J.2009-05-112009-05-112005Imagining the Future: Utopia, dystopia and science fiction conference, December, 2005, pp.1-17http://hdl.handle.net/2440/49570The Matrix invites us to speculate that we are becoming post-human, but it suffers from a conspicuous failure of imagination with regard to showing us that becoming. In the Construct, free of the restraints of corporeality, Neo could be anything, but he so resembles his ‘real’ self that this has to be explained: ‘Residual self-image.’ This certainly represents Hollywood’s commitment to ‘identification:’ Neo must resemble Keanu. More than this, it represents an intrinsic difficulty cinema has in figuring forth the idea of the post-human, in rendering visually the conceptual possibilities mooted in speculative literature and theory. But perhaps calling for ‘formlessness’ is too much while cinema remains caught in the interval between the (possible) obsolescence of photography and the full development of CGI, between the relentlessly realistic and indexical photograph and the freer, more fluid, more plastic possibilities of code. It is still the case that, if something has no form, for the purposes of cinema, it isn’t. But if cinema can’t show us ‘concept without form’ (Drew), the cinematic grotesque can catch something in the act of becoming: in the act of dissolution and reformation, in an interrupted inter-corporeal state. And The Matrix offers many such grotesques. What the “residual self-image” tactic represents is not only an awkward hesitancy on the threshold between photograph and code, but also an opportunity for rethinking theorisations of the grotesque, and a chance to develop greater precision in the application of established theories of the grotesque to cinema.enConference paper002006436150349McEntee, J. [0000-0002-5510-4080]