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The director formerly known as Andy, now Lilly, Wachowski was one half of the creative driving force behind the Matrix movies. Together with her sister/brother, Lana (previously Larry), they wrote and directed the cinematic touchstone franchise before Lilly stepped away for The Matrix Resurrections.
One thing that is now tediously inevitable about the Matrix movies is that many people seem to read an awful lot into the movies. Over the years, people have watched them and decided they are talking to them, personally, on some level about everything from fear of AI, to the nature of control, to their own gender dysphoria.
“Hello!”
Appearing on the So True with Caleb Hearon podcast, Lilly Wachowski addressed this and zeroed in on one particular “appropriation” – that movements seemingly aligned to the American right have adopted the “Red Pill” as a symbol of being aware of reality.
In the movies, Neo (Keanu Reeves) was offered a choice between a blue pill, which returns him to blissful ignorance inside the Matrix, and the red pill, which will awaken him and let him see the truth of reality.
Wachowski says this used to bother her, but now she has moved past it through separation:
“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it. 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.
Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything. 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…They take these ideas that are generally acknowledged as questions or investigations or truisms about humanity and life and they turn them to something else so that they remove the weight of what those things represent.”
The 1999 original film went beyond cyberpunk, effectively birthing its own genre. Viewed through today’s eyes, the philosophy seems somewhat laughable while also terrifyingly prescient. Shit, maybe I have been red-pilled?
The post Wachowski Talks MATRIX “Appropriation” appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
