#MATRIX BLUE PILL RED PILL MEME HOW TO#
#MATRIX BLUE PILL RED PILL MEME MOVIE#

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. But the false world he’s waking up from is quite different from the one in which we last encountered him. Just as in the original films, Reeves’ Neo is presented with two pills. It’s about choice, or at least the illusion of it. 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. … I think the film has integrity, and perhaps that’s the source of the integrity.” (No points for guessing that their quotes were almost immediatelyĪggregated for rage-clicks by Breitbart.) 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. To renew the meaning of Red Pill/Blue Pill.”

#MATRIX BLUE PILL RED PILL MEME HOW TO#

So one thing we were mindful of is how to reclaim that trope. 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 “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?”Īn interview with the A.V. 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. That’s par for the course in an era of irony-riddled, self-referential blockbusters. The film’s screenplay is riddled with self-aware references, characters casting off winking bon mots like “nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.” Keanu Reeves returns in his leading role, as does Carrie-Anne Moss as his counterpart Īgent Smith, are recast with actors made to resemble their counterparts. On the most superficial level, the defining characteristic of “The Matrix Resurrections” is its familiarity. 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. “The Matrix Resurrections” is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. 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. But even more, it’s a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism.

As a movie, it’s everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. 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. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

#MATRIX BLUE PILL RED PILL MEME MOVIE#

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.” WhenĮlon Musk and Ivanka Trump tweeted about the “red pill” last year, co-director Lilly Wachowski instantly (and profanely) slapped them down.īeyond 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 theĭigital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films’ villain, Recently confirmed a long-standing fan theory that the films were partially intended as a metaphor for gender identity. 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 To say this wasn’t the movie’s intention would be an understatement.

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