I first watched The Matrix on VHS in 2000. My dad had just bought a PC made by a short-lived computer manufacturer called Tiny which loomed over one half of our living room. While I sat on the other side of the room, in front of the TV watching The Matrix’s opening sequence—a loud gunfight and chase scene—I had to listen over the sound of computer cooling fans whirring menacingly in the background.

The disparity between the machines depicted in the film—capable of battery-farming the whole human species—and our own, barely capable of spider solitaire, should have been glaring. But in the light of The Matrix, our massive Tiny seemed to radiate a sense of possibility.

Keanu, too, radiated possibility. More than one and less than two, as Donna Haraway had it; or, as his friend Tirzah said, he was the kind of hero who could be “anything you wanted him to be.” When I went on our PC for the first time, basking in the white light of its screen, I had that same feeling as I did watching The Matrix, imagining myself as Neo. It was like entering a new, borderless world.

One of the few surviving fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus says: “the one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.”⁷⁵ A version of this sentiment appears on U.S. coins in Latin—e pluribus unum—and was the United States’ unofficial motto for years, summing up the shared hopes of a single nation patched together from numerous states. This ideal is also inscribed into the meaning of the word individual, which originally referred to the Trinity: the three divine persons that make up the indivisible One.

Though Keanu is perfect as Neo, there’s something ironic about him being the “One.” He’s complicated, a man of many turns; his kind of celebrity is characterized by its diffuseness. Instantly recognizable—he can’t eat a sandwich in public without becoming a meme—and yet somehow inscrutable. Maybe it makes more sense to see him as the point at which the One and the Many (or Self and Other) meet. His aim, as he said in an interview with Detour Magazine in 1993, is “to fall into all categories—and no categories!”⁷⁶