Neo Never Learned Kung Fu
Some time in the coming months, tickets will go on sale for the fall production of Waiting for Godot on Broadway — a new production starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves — and I swear to you right now, I am already ready to hit the “buy” button. I first read Samuel Beckett’s play in high school and back then, when I pictured Vladimir and Estragon, I imagined the two acquaintances as William “Bill” S. Preston, Esq and Ted “Theodore” Logan. (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure had been released the previous year.)
I didn’t love the play, I won’t lie – I mean, come on, I was 17. Whatever. My tastes were much more in line with Bill and Ted – the film, the dudes, the air guitar – and that movie remains, I’ll say, one of my favorites and surely one the very best movies about education technology ever made. (The phone booth, in case you want to fight me on this, is the technology that enables the time travel. Of course it’s an ed-tech movie.)
It’s not the best. That would be Real Genius, in which students discover they’ve being used, against their knowledge and consent, by their professor to fulfill a contract he has to build a weapon for the military – a weapon that can be used to assassinate people from outer space. So the students scheme to alter the demo and unleash the project on the professor’s home.
Funny that Sal Khan doesn’t list Real Genius as an inspiration, although I guess it is the antithesis of Enders Game, a SF novel in which students are recruited against their knowledge to develop military technology and which Khan has frequently cited as a model for Khan Academy. But I digress...
Keanu Reeves, the world’s greatest living actor, stars in two of the best movies on ed-tech – the other is obviously The Matrix. The greatest living Brechtian actor, I should clarify, as one is always aware that he is, like, totally acting. With his awkward gestures, monosyllabic utterances, and flat delivery, Reeves is Brechtian insofar as he subverts Hollywood’s attempts to sweep the audience up in the spectacle of “movie magic.” Indeed, it’s one of the things that makes his performance as Neo so successful, I’d argue: Reeves’s presence always serves to remind you that this is not real. I’m not accusing him of bad acting, to be clear, but rather a sort of un- or anti-acting.
Or then again, perhaps he is the greatest living anti-Brechtian actor, because as CGI and editing technologies have proliferated in decades, and Reeves’s fame has grown. He has thrived as this blank slate, his star text is filled in with machine meaning. His actions and acting have not, as Brecht might’ve hoped, led to some sort of rupture of hegemonic naturalism, let alone to marxist consciousness-raising.
Reeves famously did many of his stunts in John Wick (a franchise that I’d argue takes place in the same universe as The Matrix, one where Morpheus runs the pigeon network – the bird, both the symbol of feral domestication and, of course, of behavioral engineering. But that too is another digression). In the final scenes of Chapter 4, as Wick charges up the hundreds of stairs outside the Sacré-Cœur church again and again and again, only to be knocked back down over and over and over as time runs out, you can see, you can feel Reeves’ utter exhaustion. “This isn’t acting,” you might think. “This is the real thing.” But it is. And it’s not.
Perhaps we’re more ready to identify with the emptiness now, decades after The Matrix, as the machinery of modern life has further obscured and undermined our own humanity – the tokens minted and issued by the powerful bosses of the High Table of Silicon Valley, if you will, with their predictive modeling and venture betting on our life and death. We root for Wick and his vengeance against them rather than trying to dismantle the system ourselves.
Keanu Reeves does not appear in one of the best scenes in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: the montage where the historical figures brought back in time wreak utter havoc on the San Dimas mall: Beethoven in the music store; Joan of Arc in the aerobics class; Abe Lincoln in Glamour Shots; Genghis Khan in the sporting goods store – all to the tune of Extreme's “Play with Me,” a song that opens with Mozart’s “Rondo all Turka” before unleashing the wickedly fast and complex guitar-playing of Nuno Bettencourt.
It’s probably Extreme’s most enduring song – it appears on several versions of the video game Guitar Hero too – although not its best-selling. That would be “More Than Words,” an acoustic ballad from the band’s second album and a number one hit song in 1991.
I can’t believe I know all this shit. I can't believe I'm writing it all out here. I'm trying to make a point.
More Than Words is also the title of John Warner’s new book on education, writing, and generative AI. He doesn’t mention the band a single time in the book, for which he can be forgiven, although he did embed the video in the release-day email he sent out to his newsletter subscribers.
I read Warner’s book months ago; hell, I blurbed it. When I saw the title at the time, I didn’t read it as a nod to the most criminally underrated guitar player of my generation but rather as a refutation of the title of Salman Khan’s latest bestseller, Brave New Words – an embarrassing book-length advertisement for ChatGPT and a vapid insistence that generated text production heralds some revolutionary future for schools.
