Neo and Agent Smith

Neo and Agent Smith are opposing doubles whose final confrontation makes Smith’s destruction possible but does not resolve the system that produced their conflict. The book reads their relationship as both a political struggle against an uncontrolled instrument of power and a failed Christological allegory: Neo’s death ends Smith, yet neither the Matrix nor humanity’s subjection to it ends with him.

Opposing Doubles

The trilogy’s central development, in the book’s account, is the elevation of Agent Smith into the principal negative hero: a threat to the universe and a kind of negative image of Neo. Smith begins as a program serving the Matrix’s control over human beings, but becomes autonomous and turns against the order he was made to enforce. His rebellion makes him more than Neo’s personal adversary. He threatens the system itself, so the conflict between the two figures becomes a struggle over whether the Matrix can contain the force it has generated.

This structure also supplies the book’s political analogy. Smith represents coercive forces developed by Capital to control workers, just as the Matrix uses its programs to control humans; once those forces escape their assigned limits, the system must seek help from its own enemies to defeat them. The book compares this to liberal capital’s enlistment of Communism against Fascism. Neo’s opposition to Smith thus belongs to a larger, uneasy alliance: defeating the immediate threat does not mean overcoming the order that made it possible.

The Final Confrontation and the Christological Analogy

At the end of their duel, Neo becomes another Smith. When Neo dies, Smith—and, in the book’s description, all the Smiths—is destroyed as well. The result makes Neo’s death the means by which his double is eliminated, rather than a straightforward victory in which one opponent simply overpowers the other. Their identities converge at the moment the conflict is resolved.

The book tests this ending against a Christian account of sacrifice and finds the analogy incomplete. In its reading, Smith is cast as an intrusive figure whose multiplication disrupts the balance between humans and machines; his destruction permits a temporary class truce. Christ’s death, by contrast, entails God becoming human and therefore God beyond humanity dying with the human figure. A more fully Christological version of the trilogy, the book argues, would make Neo a Matrix program made human, an embodiment of the Matrix itself, so that his death would bring about the Matrix’s destruction. In the film’s actual conclusion, Neo’s death destroys Smith, not the system.

Political Coding and Its Tensions

The book’s interpretation gives Smith’s role a disturbing symbolic dimension: it describes him through the figure of a proto-Jewish intruder whose unchecked multiplication unsettles an imagined harmony. This coding makes Smith’s destruction signify the removal of conflict and the restoration of balance. The analysis therefore identifies an anti-Fascist logic in the struggle against a brutal force that has escaped Capital’s control, while also warning that the film’s resolution can take on potentially Fascist elements. The supposed peace is achieved by eliminating the disruptive figure, not by transforming the order in which the conflict arose.

That tension complicates Neo’s relation to Smith. Neo is not simply the good counterpart who defeats an evil enemy; his final identification with Smith makes their mutual destruction the condition of a settlement. The book’s criticism is that this settlement risks treating the suppression of antagonism as harmony, even as the machinery of domination remains in place.

The Truce and What Remains

The agreement that follows the duel promises that the machines will no longer fight humans outside the Matrix and that people who want to leave it will be allowed to do so. The book questions how that choice can actually be offered, and stresses that the terms leave the Matrix standing. It continues to exploit human beings, most will remain enslaved, and there is no guarantee that another Smith will not emerge.

Neo’s sacrifice therefore brings an end to Smith without bringing an end to the conditions that made Smith possible. The book treats this unresolved outcome as more than a weakness in the pair’s dramatic closure: it can also be read as a sobering refusal of a fantasy of final victory. Capital persists, and the best available result is a temporary truce. Neo and Smith’s relation closes through reciprocal destruction, while the larger antagonism survives beyond them.