> BUT i guess i've always thought of it less
> as a repression of the past than an embrace of "history" (that is, the
> discipline or process) as a kind of myth-making.
Yes, that's it exactly. It's what Adorno and Horkheimer called "mythos" in their "Dialectic of Englightenment", the mass-cultural projection of the bad totality, onto the narrative field.
It just occurred to me that one of the really stupendous achievements of the Wachowskis has been to turn neoconservativism's mythos against itself. The aesthetic highwater mark of the 1980s neocon ideologies, James Cameron's "The Terminator", projected a terrifying future, in which most of humanity had been slaughtered (there's this one unforgettable image of a Skynet tank tread pulverizing a pile of human skulls). This was probably the foreshadowing of the end of the US Empire, actually -- easier to imagine the apocalypse (or to create one, as with Rummy's 50-year Terror War) than to acknowledge the arrival of the post-American world. But the Wachowskis turn the whole theme of catastrophe on its head: the Matrix has a buried history worth rediscovering by its Neo-historians, namely the fall of Zion after Zion. The labor of the One uncovers the catastrophe of the Many.
-- DRR