#Red and blue pill in the matrix series

I see a lot of my pre-transition self in Neo’s deep sadness, his failed coping devices and how he learns to become the person he needs to be from younger people. Like the Wachowskis, I came out as trans later in life, at which point my fascination with all their work made a new kind of sense. Maybe it’s just a me thing, but there’s also much pathos in it as a film about late transition. It’s a lovely film about love, longing and regret in middle age. The meeting between Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in a coffee shop called Simulatte is delightful. Lana Wachowski’s direction has become less tightly controlled. Still, I think its pleasures have been under-appreciated. The Matrix Resurrections has call-backs to many moments from the first three films, but not the rave. Now that’s closer to the simulation many of us want. It’s multiracial, intergenerational, if somewhat heterosexual, and hot as fuck. In Zion, home base of the revolution, the night before it goes into defensive mode against seemingly inevitable destruction, there’s a rave. The best image of this in the whole franchise – and my favourite moment – is in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). The revolutionaries in and against it want the surplus information they generate to produce a simulation over which they have agency, built for their stimulation and pleasure. The Matrix lives by extracting surplus information from us. What makes more sense is that it feeds on our creative, emotional and intellectual energy. The famously implausible reason The Matrix keeps ‘real’ humans alive is to use us as an energy source. For there to be a real world, there has to be a simulation, and vice-versa. The heroic, red-pilled revolutionaries end up spending most of their screen time back in The Matrix. While in narrative terms, there’s a choice of pills, in structural terms, there’s no choice: viewers have to take both. At the time the first film dropped, in 1999, the most widely prescribed oestrogen for trans women in the US was Premarin – a red pill. This was a thing even before the films’ directors, the Wachowskis, transitioned. It’s ironic that the other subculture to have embraced The Matrix franchise is trans people, particularly trans women, for whom it’s a story about coming out. It’s both ironic and not that the main subculture to have adopted this language is extremely online men, who want to believe that everything they’ve been taught about how the world works – and, in particular, how gender works – is all a scam to which they have woken up. There’s a whole subculture that already imagines itself as ‘red-pilled’. If you accept that the films are real, then you accept that The Matrix exists, so you’re in it and, paradoxically, compelled to choose your pills. Which, of course, is a double-bind: even to acknowledge these films exist makes it impossible to not take a pill. They’re written with an ‘I don’t buy it’ tone. Courtesy: Warner BrosĪ lot of reviews of the most recent film in the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), profess to take neither. In narrative terms, it’s red pill versus blue pill but, structurally, the choice is actually to take both pills – or neither.

To enjoy the world of The Matrix, we must accept this conceit of an exit from the simulation, within what is obviously a pure extrusion of it.

‘Welcome to the desert of the real,’ as Morpheus says to Neo (Keanu Reeves) when he takes the red one, stealing a line from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981).

#Red and blue pill in the matrix series

My favourite meme from The Matrix film series (1999–ongoing) has an incredulous Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) ask: ‘What do you mean you took both pills?’ In the narrative arc, the blue pill takes you to the simulated world the red pill is your exit.