As some fans of the 1999 sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ cry foul over how conservatives have misconstrued the film’s messages and imagery, co-creator Lilly Wachowski is learning to “let it go.”
Lilly Wachowski, who co-created, wrote and directed The Matrix with sister Lana, said that she’s learned how to separate herself from her films once they’re out in the world.
The comments came during a recent appearance on the So True with Caleb Hearon podcast where she was asked about the film’s mind-opening “red pill” sequence being appropriated by President Trump’s MAGA movement as a call to conservativism, saying she believes it was a very intentional misinterpretation.
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In the film, Keanu Reeves’ Neo was offered a choice between the “red pill” and the “blue pill,” with the blue pill returning him to the non-real world of The Matrix he’d been living in and the red pill promising to open his eyes to the truth of the world and escape the Matrix. MAGA supporters have interpreted it to reflect waking up from the political control of the “woke” left to see the true conservative view.
“Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything,” said Wachowski, who has previously said that the entire Matrix trilogy is a metaphor for the transgender experience — both sisters came out as transgender after the films were released.
“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,” Wachowski told Hearon. “This is what fascism does. And so, of course, that’s going to happen.”
“It takes these things, 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,” Wachowski elaborated.
As for how she handles seeing her film’s message twisted and buried under MAGA ideology, Wachowski said that “you have to let go of your work,” adding, “People are going to interpret it however they interpret it.” She reiterated that there was no political meaning at all behind the scene, or the entire trilogy, for that matter.
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“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!’” she said. “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.”
That’s not to say Wachowski has always live and let live when she’s seen her work twisted like this. Elon Musk used the film to promote conservative ideology, tweeting “Take the red pill” back in May 2020, and Ivanka Trump responded with, “Taken!” Wachowski responded to both, per Deadline at the time, with a very pointed, “F–k both of you.”
In her podcast appearance she urged fans to remember what the “red pill”/”blue pill” was intended to be about, which was that we each have a personal choice to seek truth.
