It’s been over 25 years since the release of The Matrix, the science-fiction film that took hold of popular culture, and that has led to right-wing groups misinterpeting elements of the film. Co-creator Lilly Wachowski isn’t surprised by that, and explained why in a recent podcast appearance.
“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it,” Wachowski said on the So True With Caleb Herron podcast. “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.”
The main scene in question is the “red pill/blue pill” sequence, where Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus offers the red pill to Keanu Reeves’ Neo in order to wake him up from the Matrix. The right-wing interpretation defines being “red-pilled” as someone who has awakened to the truth about society, more often than not aligning with far-right ideals. Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump have used the “red pill” reference, to which Lilly Wachowski replied, “F— both of you.”
Wachowski had mentioned earlier in the interview that the movie she and her sister Lena created was a metaphor for the transgender experience, leading her to state: “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.”
“That is what fascism does,” Wachowski added. “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.”
