Agent Smith is Neo’s mirror image. Where Neo is an anomaly, uncertain and rebellious, Smith is power in all its vestiges—white, male, state-sanctioned. More than that, he’s filled with a visceral disgust for humans. So while the other agents are anonymous men in suits, trained to fight the resistance with the bland efficiency of anti-virus software, he takes it personally.

Toward the end of the first film, when Morpheus is being tortured, Smith leans in close. It looks like he’s about to lick the sweat from off his forehead. “This zoo,” says Smith. “This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer…It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.”

On the tip of his tongue is the kind of racial slur that would place this scene in the prison cell of any number of anti-colonial fighters, civil rights activists, or Free South Africa protesters from throughout the twentieth century, or further back. In 1652, when Europeans first settled on the Cape of Good Hope, a white settler recorded his first impressions of the Khoikhoi people: “The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle, barring their human nature…They all smell fiercely.”⁷⁷

Perhaps the Wachowskis were making a point in their casting. Neo is open and unreadable, able to pass in a way that Morpheus, who is black, cannot. In spite of this—and the many styles of kung fu he masters—he can’t win by the rules. Agent Smith is not killable. As soon he dies, he reappears in the place of someone else plugged into the Matrix. Every onlooker is a potential informant, a body into which he can switch.

Morpheus’s task is to make Neo aware of the Matrix, to convince him that what might appear absolute and infallible is nothing of the sort. “You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt and disbelief.” But you can’t just be told this kind of thing.

The lesson Neo finally learns is to stop trying. Instead of trying to be stronger and faster than Smith, he simply leaps headfirst into his chest—a move that recalls his earlier practice at jumping off buildings. As Smith’s body shatters from within into a hundred tiny pieces of badly rendered CGI—apparently rewriting his code—the symbolism is clear: Neo is penetrating him. Smith’s face contorts with horror, or with the complex self-disgust of the white Southerner who, having ranted about the dangers of race pollution, finds himself in bed with a Chinaman.

This is mixedness as an explosive force, a special power: the Mixed-Race Superman become a strong wind bursting open the angry, controlling certainties of white manhood.

Even though The Matrix was released in 1999, part of its enduring appeal is that it feels like a post-9/11 film—a film for now. It responds to the lurking chaos, the grotesque inequality, beneath the flat surface of Western society. David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, also released in 1999, channels a similar fear, depicting a world in which participants can play out their darkest fantasies in immersive video games. In both movies, order is constructed; the threat of rupture looms. Power can only stay hidden for so long.