The year 1999 was a standout year for Hollywood movies. Perhaps the imminent threat of Y2K really released people’s creative juices. In that year, we got the Star Wars prequel classic The Phantom Menace, the misunderstood manifesto of machismo Fight Club, the creepy precursor to Kevin Spacey’s behaviour in American Beauty, the kid who could see dead people in The Sixth Sense, the goofy coming-of-age movie American Pie, and romantic escapades in Notting Hill.But if there is one movie which became part of the cultural lexicon, foreshadowing how all humans would become plugged into the machines and conned by algorithms for a deus ex machina, then it was The Matrix.
The Matrix and its sequels (barring the unwatchable The Matrix Resurrections), as a sci-fi franchise, has had a cultural impact hitherto unseen. Many of the terms in The Matrix have become part of our lexicon. Red pill and blue pill became the choice between a hard truth and a comfortable illusion. Waking up meant realising we are surrounded by an illusion. It was the movie that made philosophy cool, that mainstreamed nerd culture, where we suddenly learned how Plato’s man in a cave could make a pretty great plot point because the action was that good.The Matrix also had a host of memorable characters like Neo, a messianic Jesus-like figure who would ultimately sacrifice himself like Jesus, but not before showing off some cool kung fu moves. Then there’s Trinity, named after the Holy Trinity, whose faith in Neo makes him the One. Morpheus, named after the Greek god of dreams, is the one who wakes people up from their slumber and tells them walk the path. Even the side characters are super cool.
Take the Merovingian, a character so suave and French that his tie knot immediately became a fashion statement and he could Emmaneul Macron fashion tips. Suave, smug, impeccably dressed, and aggressively French, the Merovingian was an old program who survived by running a black-market empire inside the Matrix. His tie knot alone became a fashion statement. Named after the Frankish dynasty that once ruled large parts of Europe and later spawned myths about being descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, the Merovingian’s symbolism was as in your face as a Truth Social post by the Orange one. He existed in the shadows of power, ancient, connected, and convinced of his own immorality.For those who don’t remember, the Merovingian (also called the Frenchman) is an old program (or operating system) that resides in the Matrix and operates a smuggling ring providing a haven for exiled programs. He is a trafficker of information, loves living the high life, has a partner who helps him run his criminal syndicate, talks with utmost smug superiority, keeps old programs like trophies, sells access to the powers-that-be, operates from private spaces as theatres of control, hides behind moral relativism as his philosophy (“It’s all a game, it’s always been a game”), and pretends he has all the answers.When Morpheus asks him in the restaurant scene, “Do you know why we are here?”, he replies without batting an eyelid: “I am a trafficker of information, I know everything I can. The question is, do you know why you are here?”And of course, he loves controlling programs around him, putting a tiny bit of code in a woman’s dessert as a means to control her.Not to mention that he believes he’s infallible, telling Neo during a fight: “Boy, I have survived your predecessors, and mark my words, I will survive you.” Remind you of anyone?Strip away the French, the programs, and the green tint, and the Merovingian is exactly like Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced paedophile who appears to have been friends with every single individual of note in the WENA elite circle.The Merovingian’s lines could very well be Epstein’s guiding philosophies. The Merovingian’s worldview was transactional and cynical: “You see, there is only one constant… causality. Action. Reaction. Cause and effect.”Similarly, Epstein’s entire modus operandi was based on being a connector and facilitator who “knows things” and can “open doors”. The Frenchman also loved mocking the illusion of choice, which he claimed was between those with power and those without. Morality was a theatre for the poor. Both used different forms of hedonism — food, sex, language, aesthetics and more — as means of demonstrating control without force.Both archetypes posed resistance as futile, believing that the system would favour them forever. The Merovingian’s philosophy of causality mirrors this worldview perfectly. He rejects choice, mocks morality, and insists that all behaviour is simply a response to desire. Control the appetite, and you control the outcome.Epstein’s system operated on the same premise. He targeted vulnerability, ambition, fear and greed, reducing human agency to transaction. He controlled the most powerful people in the world, coerced them not through force but a degree of perverseness far beyond the realms of polite culture. Epstein did not need force because the system had already mastered what Manufacturing Consent described decades ago, a logic made only more unsettling by the fact that Noam Chomsky himself was someone Epstein was pally with.
What makes the parallel even more chilling is how both figures overestimate their own permanence. The Merovingian boasts that he has survived every previous One and will survive Neo as well. Epstein behaved as if his insulation was eternal, as if his proximity to power made him untouchable. But intermediaries are only valuable until they are not. Once their utility fades (or their deeds become known) the system discards them without sentiment.When we meet the Merovingian again decades later (in The Matrix Resurrections), he is reduced to a ranting relic, stripped of relevance, furious not because he has lost morality, but because he has lost access. Epstein’s collapse follows the same structural logic. The moment the cost of protecting him outweighed the benefit, the network withdrew its shield.
When The Matrix first came out, it was heralded as era-defining science fiction. Little did we know it was a foreshadowing of our lives, where we would all become so jacked into our devices that we would forget our real lives, where our every action would be judged by an algorithm tweak, where we would use small machines to peer into the lives of others instead of living our own. And that we would willingly submit ourselves, like Aldous Huxley predicted, not because of oppression but because of convenience.The real deus ex machina was never the machines with tentacles. It was the invisible architecture that learned how to manage human longing itself. And little did we know that the entire operating system was being run by a few men who could control each other’s guilt. Go to Source
