At first, I was a bit confused about why The Matrix was our movie to watch with Pattern Recognition, but having thought about it I think there are two major themes that run through both works, though Pattern Recognition clearly tries to stay grounded roughly in the present, while The Matrix extrapolates them to far more extreme situations. Both works, though, demonstrate the key challenges of defining history, through a character's ability to "see beyond" reality to some hidden truths.

There is no question that Pattern Recognition is in large part a response to 9/11, and Gibson clearly considers that event a major demarcation of history into "before" and "after". To this end, the many cultural references Gibson makes to technology and fashion serve to ground the world's chronology in a very exact and careful way; while some critics claimed that Gibson's style in this book would "date" it, this is in fact exactly what he must do to make his point. He is emphasizing that as of now, we cannot tie our culture back to the one of a few years prior, and thus our only way of defining the world is to use whatever cultural markers we have today. The rupture in cultural development has set us adrift, and we have only the most trivial methods of defining ourselves. This "rupture" is immediately obvious in the Matrix as well, where all of human experience hit an abrupt "reset" button, when the world simply became an endless computer simulation.

The response to this rupture and lack of total comprehension is a character who understands reality, albeit intuitively rather than consciously, on a deeper level, to see the hidden machinery that most people accept blindly. Cayse and Neo are both heroes in these worlds because they can somehow tap into the forces of the world that would otherwise hinder them: Cayse the cultural flow of trends and fashions, Neo the computer code of the Matrix. While they cannot return to the pre-rupture world, they are nonetheless able to ground themselves in some deeper reality while most people are simply floating through a world newly separated from its own history.