To this day, that opening scene in THE MATRIX is an all-timer. The bullet-time camera freezing Trinity in the air (one year before the airborne CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON). Her unnatural launching up a wall before killing a room of policemen. Leaping across the street on rooftops. All leaving us with one thought: That must have been one important phone call.
Which makes the appearance of what comes after so intriguing. Neo, who we meet, is sleeping at his computer. We’ve just witnessed at least three things we’ve never seen in a movie before, if this is 1999, and our protagonist sleepwalks onto the screen. Who could sleep through what we just saw? Knowing that kind of shit is going on outside? And just then, you notice the song Neo’s listening to on his headphones.
The Matrix’s soundtrack — which went platinum in the U.S. — sounds like the movie looks. A smashing together of genres, disparate ideas, and compound words. Steampunk. Rap Metal. Marilyn Manson. So it’s appropriate that we learn all we need to know about Neo by jamming three kinetic songs back-to-back-to-back. And they’re three of the steam-iest punk songs you ever did know.
The first tells us who Neo was in the past, the second foreshadows the shock to his system that he’s about to experience, and the third warns that he better want what’s coming because the way is dangerous.
As Neo sleeps, Massive Attack’s “Dissolved Girl” leaks out of his headset, an electronic drone about someone who should leave her partner but doesn’t.
“Day, yesterday / Really should be leaving but I stay”
This is Mr. Anderson’s state of mind just before he is involved in the events of the story. He’s disassociated from his job, secluded in his apartment, apparently searching for Morpheus on the internet. Neo, as Morpheus says later, has “the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he expects to wake up.”
“Feels like something that I’ve done before / I could fake it but I still want more”
He’s ready to leave The Matrix but doesn’t yet know how.
“You are not my saviour / but I still don’t go”
His mind being held hostage in The Matrix is the toxic relationship he can’t quit. It’s this Neo who’s then stirred by his computer screen turning black and producing the words “Wake up, Neo…” (The film, of course, concludes with Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake up”.) He takes off his headphones.
(A note about Neo’s apartment number. When we meet him as a cozy battery living his meaningless life eating noodles, he’s in apartment 101. When he, in the climax of the film, becomes The One and sees the Matrix coding everywhere, he’s just been shot out of apartment 303, as if the tripled number symbolizes a higher state of being. That’s a dumb coincidence, right? Except the room Trinity appears in at the start of the film is also numbered 303.)
There’s a knock at his door and he exchanges a disc of information for some cash with what looks like the latter-day Smashing Pumpkins. They actually look like Team Morpheus doppelgangers, at least they would if they ran into the main cast a la SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Seriously, I wonder if that leather-clad posse is already on Team Morpheus and they’re there both to trade with the hack-iest hacker and to nudge him toward a meeting with Trinity. The club they take him to could be like the underground hangout in BLADE where everyone there is in on a joke that he isn’t.
“You ever have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming?” Neo asks. He’s not, in fact, awake. He’s still in The Matrix, of course. Still dreaming.
Neo agrees to join them at the club instead of getting to bed early and — DIG THROUGH THE DITCHES AND BURN THROUGH THE WITCHES / I SLAM IN THE BACK OF MY DRAGULAAAAAA — Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” begins.
Nineties music got more saturated and bloated and loud as the decade came to a close, and “Dragula” was a ludicrous distillation of energy to which music could only answer by pendulum-swinging in the opposite direction. The song’s chorus, not its beginning, starts the scene and shocks you after the whisper-quiet dialogue of the moment before. It tells us that Neo, as Morpheus again says later, is “feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole.”
Neo is then visited by Trinity and the song abruptly transitions to The Prodigy’s “Mindfield”. The shock of the new reality being over, Neo listens to Trinity’s warning as the electronic drums pick up their pace. He’s starting to grasp what’s at stake. This is what his character presumably wants: to find Morpheus and to answer the question “what is The Matrix?” But as he says, “What is The Matrix?” the song intensifies again.
“This is dangerous / I walk through mindfields so watch your head rock”
Trinity says in response, “The answer is out there. It’s looking for you. And it will find you if you want it to.” Suddenly, Neo isn’t just an anti-establishment slacker looking for an alternative, that alternative is looking for him. Is this what he actually wants? Neo’s typically quizzical face is more “Whoa” in this moment than most as the techno crush gets louder and louder until the pulsating sound is revealed in the next cut to be his alarm clock waking him up well after he has to leave for work.
And that’s it. Five straight minutes of mostly music and some dialogue that gives you everything you need to understand your lead character.
THE MATRIX soundtrack is well-remembered for many reasons, not the least of which being the exquisite use of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake up” to close the film. But what would the “waking up” theme in the movie be without those five minutes that helped tell the story through music?
by @JoePack
Tune Spotting 
I remember that scene! Neo was the best.
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