“The Matrix Resurrections” Tries to Un-Redpill America

“The Matrix” is one of the most iconic, influential sci-fi franchises of the modern era, but one of its most lasting legacies is among the most unexpected: It changed politics, almost entirely by mistake.

The mind-blowing conceit of the original 1999 film — and warning, spoilers will be coming thick and fast here — is that the “real world” is a fiction, and a few chosen people get the chance to see behind the curtain. In the movie’s pivotal moment, the protagonist gets a choice: Swallow a blue pill, which will return him to his comfortable reality, or take a red pill that will forever awaken him to “reality,” which happens to be an alien hellscape.

In the past two decades, the idea of a “red pill” has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be “red-pilled” means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises. The neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a Tucker Carlson guest and favorite of Steve Bannon’s, deployed it influentially on his blog; Conservative YouTube star Candace Owens called her own conservative awakening the “Black Red Pill.”

To say this wasn’t the movie’s intention would be an understatement. The Wachowskis, the sibling auteurs who created the franchise, both underwent a gender transition in the years after its release, and one half of the duo recently confirmed a long-standing fan theory that the films were partially intended as a metaphor for gender identity. Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films’ villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people “will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite.” When Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump tweeted about the “red pill” last year, co-director Lilly Wachowski instantly (and profanely) slapped them down.

Beyond that, though, the Wachowskis have been largely silent about the “meaning” of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of “The Matrix Resurrections,” a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it’s everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it’s a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. “The Matrix Resurrections” is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades.

On the most superficial level, the defining characteristic of “The Matrix Resurrections” is its familiarity. Keanu Reeves returns in his leading role, as does Carrie-Anne Moss as his counterpart; other characters, like Morpheus and Agent Smith, are recast with actors made to resemble their counterparts. The film’s screenplay is riddled with self-aware references, characters casting off winking bon mots like “nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.”

That’s par for the course in an era of irony-riddled, self-referential blockbusters. But “The Matrix Resurrections” deploys that familiarity in unexpected ways — to an end that’s far more subversive than selling merch and inking licensing deals.

The “pill” discourse that’s so thoroughly infiltrated American politics is dealt with most directly in a scene near the beginning of the film — where, without elaborating too far on the film’s matryoshka-like plot, a roundtable of audience surrogates debates the “meaning” of the original “Matrix.” Was it about trans politics? Crypto-fascism? Capitalist exploitation? “Philosophy in shiny-tight PVC?”

In an interview with the A.V. Club that published the day before the film’s release, co-writers David Mitchell and Alexander Hemon addressed the political overtones directly: “We talked about … things like the Red Pill/Blue Pill trope or meme and how it was kidnapped by the right-wing,” Hemon said. The verb “to red pill” and so on. So one thing we were mindful of is how to reclaim that trope. To renew the meaning of Red Pill/Blue Pill.”

Mitchell added, “I don’t see myself as a frontline fighter in the culture war, but you also want your work to mean something, to have an ethical edge. … I think the film has integrity, and perhaps that’s the source of the integrity.” (No points for guessing that their quotes were almost immediately aggregated for rage-clicks by Breitbart.)

Hemon also noted that Wachowski, who has never publicly weighed in on the political valence of the “red pill” and its appropriation, nixed a joke originally written about it in order not “to give any credence to that position, even a semblance of dialogue with that.” Luckily, viewers looking for her thoughts will find them directly baked into the film’s narrative: The “red pill” isn’t about ideology or incels or making America great again. It’s about choice, or at least the illusion of it.

Just as in the original films, Reeves’ Neo is presented with two pills. But the false world he’s waking up from is quite different from the one in which we last encountered him. As an antagonist explains in one of the franchise’s signature lengthy scenes of spoken exposition, in the late 1990s the Matrix’s illusion depended on its seamlessness. Those trapped in it had no idea there even was an alternative. Today, he explains, such an effort isn’t quite as necessary: People choose to remain in a newly constructed Matrix which stokes their fears, desires and hopes, providing an infinitely more alluring emotional environment than messy, difficult reality. In case the cultural update isn’t obvious enough, another familiar character pops up later to decry “Face-Zucker-suck” and “Wiki-piss-and-shit.”

The original “Matrix” was deeply of its time. Reeves’ Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like “Fight Club” and “Office Space.” Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society’s willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. “Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years,” one character tells him. “They don’t know you like I do. I know exactly what you need.”

The solution Wachowski ultimately offers to dismantle it seems almost quaint, and therefore refreshingly disarming: Love, in both the individually romantic sense and in a radical willingness to accept those unlike us. In keeping with the rest of the Wachowskis’ offbeat, earnest oeuvre, its protagonists’ supernatural powers are only unlocked when they renounce what blinkers them to their true selves.

Which is all well and good in the context of a Hollywood film, but what does it say about, you know, the real “real world?” “The sheeple aren’t going anywhere,” taunts the film’s villain in his climactic speech. “They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty. And that means you … back in your pods, unconscious and alone, just like them.”

It’s another obvious bit of meta-commentary on the film itself: Opening against the second weekend of Disney’s latest piece of steamroller, monocultural superhero content “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” it’s hard to imagine a film this knotty and idea-oriented capturing the American zeitgeist in 2021 as it did in 1999, even with all the series’ legacy and blockbuster appeal.

But bring the slow, mistaken co-opting of the “red pill” as a piece of reactionary symbology back into focus, and consider the rest of the film’s anti-social-media message, with its overt hostility toward the would-be pundits and storytellers who seek to “program” their listeners’ brains. There’s another meta-critical message being conveyed beyond just the film’s theoretical success: Yes, arts and culture, “The Matrix” included, can inspire, critique and influence their consumers.

But simply receiving and regurgitating their wisdom is a shallow foundation on which to build a political philosophy, or an emotional life. “The Matrix Resurrections” ends with its protagonists flying off into the horizon, mirroring the ending of the original film but in a much different world than our own. The “red pill,” as conceived of by the Wachowskis and their collaborators, isn’t an answer in itself, but the freedom to pursue one’s own answers.

Of course, that’s the very same intoxicating idea that a generation of ideological hucksters seized on in order to peddle their wares in the wake of the original films’ release. The most hot-button issues in American public life — elections, vaccines, disasters natural and otherwise — are inevitably followed by a parade of Yarvins and Bannons, promising access to the “independent thought” that the architects of our own proverbial “Matrix” would obscure. “The Matrix Resurrections” doesn’t rebut them directly, because to do so would miss the point. What Wachowski, et al have shown with their unconventional, risk-taking sequel is that in the real world, the only real “choice” is to reject such pat explanations — and by proxy flush the whole bottle down the toilet.