Fredo Corleone and Agent Smith

[Contains some plot spoilers for The Godfather Part II and The Matrix]

There may not be two so fundamentally different, but in a paradoxical way, similar, characters in big screen history as The Godfather's Fredo Corleone (masterfully played by the late John Cazale) and The Matrix's "program" Agent Smith (equally well-played by Hugo Weaving, also of Elrond-in-Lord of the Rings fame). Fredo was the hedonistic, irresponsible, childish man in the Godfather who was deemed by Don Vito Corleone to be too irresponsible to pass the leadership of his family to. Fredo was a true believer in what I have come to term "the high life": in order to truly "live", one has to plunge willy-nilly into high stakes gambling, urban night life, promiscuous sex, conspicuous consumption, and serious drug use (in Fredo's case, alcohol). With the assumption that this is the sort of thing that any normal person would engage in given the opportunity. Also, Fredo would mistrust the very people (like his brother Michael) who really looked after him while allowing smooth-talking, slimy strangers (like Johnny Ola and Hyman Roth) to walk all over him. And he would always direct his anger at those who held his best interests at heart. Ultimately, this would lead to his own downfall.

Agent Smith was a security program installed within the Matrix to fight humans who had left this deceptive "virtual life" to establish their own place in the real world in opposition to the machine-run world. Near the movie's climax, Agent Smith had captured Morpheus, one of the good guys, and was explaining to him the origins of the Matrix. He said that, in the beginning, the Matrix was designed to be a happy place, where the inhabitants could enjoy their lives and have whatever they wanted. But nobody, it turned out, would accept the reality of such a framework, and that first attempt failed. Instead, a version of the Matrix, which did work, was installed, based upon the notion that humans defined their worldview around their own misery (There is an implied allegory here to the Garden of Eden and man's subsequent struggles on Earth). Agent Smith, if he (it) had actually been alive, would have understood the paradox of Fredo's overt never-ending quest for pleasure and covert resentment and misery.

Over my life, I have known people who are similar in ways to Fredo Corleone. Although they may live out their lives in a very conventional manner, events may suddenly break down to the point where they have the opportunity to grasp their long-held-but-inhibited dream of living the"high life". Often, if not fought successfully against by those who care for them, they will succumb to this and eventually, like Fredo, stumble and fall (while regarding the ones who really love them as the ENEMY, even to the point of betraying them). And like Fredo, while turning their backs on friends and family, they will often let con artists and predators take them for everything they have without any scrutiny whatsoever!

While opposites on the surface, Fredo Corleone and Agent Smith share the same limiting dichotomy of belief: either one lives a life based on compulsively pursuing pleasure and material gain, or one must live a life based on misery and suffering. This, to me, is a false choice. Each of us has, within ourselves, the ability to choose for ourselves the things that will bring us pleasure, and they don't need to correspond to what others in society think (like the so-called "high life"). A normal, sane, and responsible adult human being will have learned that life is a mixture of both pleasure and suffering, both of which have value, but neither of which should be pursued or avoided relentlessly. For survival depends on both!