In the 1999 film, The Matrix costuming plays a principle role in how the audience perceives the characters. With the constant of a green tinge throughout the movie, a danger exists that the public’s attention may become detached and bored with the presentation. To combat that possibility, the characters are costumed in a myriad of fashions to emphasize the differences between the characters and also to demonstrate the development of the plot.
When the film opens, the audience sees a sleek and shiny Trinity. Her appearance gives the impression of one that cannot be caught. She is smooth, shiny, and has a glossy shine. It is not hard for the audience to identify her as one who will escape, no matter the forces sent to corral her.
Morpheus, the Captain of the Nebuchadnezzar, is the seeker. His costuming denotes his power. Almost pyramidal in nature, Morpheus uses his wedge-like appearance to search for “the One.” He holds power within himself and is costumed as an exclamation point. The audience, observing his demeanor through his costuming, wants to listen to him, to hear his hope, to understand his emphasis. It is the costume that energizes the audience’s anticipation of his search.
The audience meets Neo, the protagonist of the film, as a lowly cubicle worker who hacks and builds illicit programs on the side to supplement his meager pay. He first appears as a frumpy dressed in ill-fitting suits. Pursued by the agents, he meets Morpheus, who initiates him into the world of reality. From one scene in his frumpy suit to the next where he is completely nude, a battery for the system that has created and maintained the matrix system, he is born into the world of the real. The audience recognizes his world as dynamic as he moves from nudity to tattered clothing and on to ninja suits for his training period and then into a trench coat and combat gear as he prepares to battle the matrix, entering the fray uncertain of his purpose. It is the dynamic flow of his costuming that anchors the imagery for the audience as he moves from the matrix to reality and back into the matrix, again and again, creating a costuming flow that enhances the primary drive of the film.
All this movement, all this fulfillment of purpose would have no effect without the consistency of the green background tinge and the Agents that explode from it. The agents are consistent in costuming. Dressed in green suits that seem to emerge from the green tint in the background, they are easily recognized as part of the matrix by the audience. Their costuming is intimidating. Starched collars and cuffs give an appearance of intransigence. The skinny ties invite a certain level of audacity. The creased trousers that never wrinkle and the polished shoes that never scuff, no matter where those feet may travel.
The consistency of the agent costuming brings a feeling of inhumanity to the characters. The audience recognizes that the infallibility of the agent costuming cannot and will not ever be a reality of life. Standing in contrast to the greasy, perspiration filled, aromatic feel of the Nebuchadnezzar, the matrix becomes the unreal, and the Agents are the key hypothetical item within the matrix, the element of consistency of the imagined.
Once seeing the Agents in action, the audience is ready to accept the cadenced and almost monotone speech of Agent Smith. It comes across as the chilling “sound of inevitability,” that can come only from one who marches to the drum of automation.
Without the consistency of the green tinged background and the costuming of the agents, the film would falter. There would be no comparison and contrast and the real world, and the world of the matrix would be too similar for the audience to recognize easily, enhancing the flow through sustained audience attention. It is the costuming, with reality perceived by the fluidity of costume application and the matrix world demonstrable through consistent unrumpled dress, which creates the flow of the film. Without the imaginative costume design and flow, the film would become an inferior concept.
Work Cited
Matrix. Dir. Lilly Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving. Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD.
