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Since its release in 1999, The Matrix has seen one of its most iconic scenes hijacked by various groups which have actively missed the point.
You know the one we’re referring to: Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) a choice.
“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” explains Morpheus, describing the return to a state of blissful ignorance.
“You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes,” he counter-offers, referring to Lewis Carroll in order to clarify that whoever picks the second option will wake up to a new reality.
What was originally a way of breaking free from the shackles of simulated reality has become a rebranded metaphor for causes that couldn’t be further removed from the film’s original meaning. Whether it’s the incel movement, misogynistic online groups that are part of the “manosphere“, anti-feminist online communities or the alt-right and QAnon, the blue pill / red pill image has been co-opted to suit various ideologies including breaking free from liberal viewpoints or “feminist culture”’s so-called “indoctrination”.
Thus, being “red pilled” frequently pops up as an expression to refer to someone who has “woken up” to supposedly secret societal truths.
Lilly Wachowski, one half of The Matrix’s directing duo alongside her sister Lana Wachowski, recently sat down with Caleb Hearon on his podcast “So True with Caleb Hearon” and addressed the many misreadings of the film.
Wachowski said she’s unbothered by conservative misinterpretations and explained how important it is to separate oneself from films once they are released.
“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it,” Wachowski said. “I look at all of the crazy, mutant theories around The Matrix films and the crazy ideologies that those films helped create and I just go, ‘What are you doing? No! That’s wrong!’ But I have to let it go to some extent… You’re never gonna be able to make absolutely every person believe what you initially intended.”
Wachowski previously explained that the “original intention” of The Matrix was to be a transgender allegory – which seems ironic considering the nature of the groups that have latched onto the film.
“Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything,” continued Wachowski, adding: “They appropriate left-wing points of view and they mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own to obfuscate what the real message is. This is what fascism does. And so, of course, that’s going to happen.”
For the 21st anniversary of the first film’s release, Lily said in a Netflix Film Club video that she was glad that the original intention of The Matrix had been identified.
She said: “I love how meaningful those films are to trans people and the way that they come up to me say, ‘Those movies saved my life.’ Because when you talk about transformation, specifically in the world of science fiction, which is just about imagination and world-building and the idea of the seemingly impossible becoming possible, that’s why it speaks it to them so much. And I’m grateful I can be a part of throwing them a rope along their journey.”