Free will?pt.1

What is man's preoccupation with free will? Titles such as The Adjustment Bureau and The Matrix deal with questions regarding an individual's free will and the actual impact of the choices he makes. What does all this say about the condition of the individual, of his psyche? In the investigation of this issue  I will utilize popular culture as my tool and my evidence; I believe that popular culture, the trends produced by broadly separated individuals simultaneously (relatively), acts as a mirror held up to the subconscious of an era-- for example, the number of works based on persecution produced in the States during McCarthy's rampage.
I'd like to restrict the scope of my answers to the modern age; it would be fun to try to investigate the effects of the modern age on man, that maybe it's this time period that's making him fret. But I can't. Plato's The Cave, Homer's Odyssey, and countless other works from antiquity onward also pit themselves against this question.
What makes free will such a desirable goal? Or rather, what makes the lack of free will such a dystopian concept? In The Adjustment Bureau, for example-- as it was the most recent movie I saw-- Matt Damon's character is leading his life just fine, regarding the circumstances surrounding his rise to political success as lucky breaks and personal triumph, never suspecting that he's a part of a grand scheme carried out behind an invisible curtain. IT seems that one of the most common nightmares plaguing us is this backstage concept, in which the puppeteers pull the strings of our lives. What is it about this idea that's so disturbing? Maybe it's that we all want to be men and when we are cogs in a wheel we are reduced to dogs following the orders of some giant plan we can't conceive of, much less control. This makes me ask, is it the issue of control that drives someone to freedom? To control his environment was man's basest goal-- to  manipulate the unforgiving elements for survival-- but in the modern era we shouldn't have to worry about manipulation for survival. Perhaps we, as a species, still cling to these vestigial impulses-- it's easy to see that we still do in many other ways. However, free will does not immediately call to mind the drive to control one's surroundings, or other people--- free will seems to be the ability to control one's own actions. Perhaps free will is self-control (this line train of thought rides on Jung's tracks pretty well). But we must continue on the main branch as long as possible. The main characters of The Matrix, The Adjustment Bureau, and the Republic could all have spent the rest of their lives unaware of the truth behind their existence (here we see another oddly basic human drive: truth. count it next to freedom. truth, I think, is less animal) so this existence is not less real, is it? If it's the only truth the we have known, can it be untrue? if we have lived it, it can't be a lie-- just a story being told. It's order in the chaos. so what makes these stories like a prison we must break out of? It calls to mind the image of a wolf in a trap, only this trap is for the mind. Perhaps the mind dies if trapped for too long. Maybe this is why prison is such a nightmare as well, or why the unimaginable distance of the stars is so daunting. but prisons is a subject for another train of thought.