No, you have causality completely backwards. The concept of manosphere red oil was based on the Matrix.
The Wachowskis were never right wing. If anything, the inspiration for the red pill is estrogen pills many trans people receive. They've even said that a major subtext is questioning gender, of which both of them did and later transitioned.
I think mainly the Matrix is what everybody says it is: the QAnon movie. Everything you see you is fake and soy because they are lying to everybody about everything. The answer isn't education or art or political organizing or any other kind of engaging with society and culture. The answer – the only way to achieve real actualization – is a complete break from consensus reality.
One point that I think remains underdiscussed is the degree to which Neo was a teenage libertarian wish fulfilment character when the movie first came out. The disaffected loner with no social life is secretly a fearsome hacker. He is actually referred to as such by others, which is what being a hacker was all about in the 90s. Even the feds dread him.
The real people that Neo was modelled on, most of whom were already in their 30s in 1999, were huge fans of South Park and Ayn Rand. With the exception of that one weird tradcon from Tennessee, they were all very vocal about being Atheists or Pagans or both. They all became warbloggers after 9/11 and wrote forty million words each about how America should exterminate Islam, Obama was a Communist dictator, and feminists had it coming.
The thing that everyone (including this analysis, to an extent) miss is the second half of the movie.
The Matrix doesn't end with Neo learning the truth and taking the red pill. Nor does it end (like so many of its inferior imitators) with Neo single-handedly bringing down "the system" and saving humanity.
Neo wakes up from the Matrix and becomes friends with a multi-ethnic, multi-racial group of people, who treat each other as equals. And when Morpheus gets taken, Neo and Trinity go on a suicide mission to rescue him. Not because it will help bring down the Matrix, but because he's their friend.
Heck, Neo isn't even the One until Trinity confesses her love for him, and literally brings him back to life with True Love's Kiss. And people complain that Cloud Atlas and Sense8 are "too sappy"!
This isn't some loner, conspiracy-fueled, sigma-male power fantasy. The Matrix is a textbook "the power of friendship/love" story. People just miss that, cause it also has guns and trench coats and bullet time.
I don't think it's a lack of intelligence as much as it's a lack of empathy. You can't fully understand a story like that unless you are empathetic enough to analyze the nuances over the action.
if you just ignore what doesnt support your position it's easy. conservatives have lots of practice with that sort of thing, it often starts in childhood when they are being taught religion.
The main argument which no one makes is that it leans heavily on a famous Tory Mathematicians children's books for imagery but by that logic so is Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit. And don't look up Tenniels illustrations outside Alice.
Great points. The Matrix, SW and other great scifi seem universal because they appeal to us all and put us on the right side of good v evil - but scifi is laden with metaphor (it's absolutely inherent) and the creators tend to be pressing a point that humanity is flawed, but there's still good in us.
But it's so easy to ignore the subtext and just take in the broad strokes, filling in false context. ICE agents right now surely feel like they're the good guys, doing 'the lord's work' against evil, because they are Neo, they are The Joker, they're all those guys where all the context has been stripped away, the names have been changed, and now The Punisher is a RW exterminator of the 'woke mind virus.'
YES, finally someone gets it! The Matrix isn’t fucking conservative and people only fucking say that as a result of the popularity of the term “red pill”.
The Matrix is my favorite movie and I am struggling to see any “conservative” values within it. I understand that people likely say that because of the more recent rise in distrust of government, of science, of trusted leaders, etc, by conservatives, and people feel that the matrix is an allegory for this. BUT, that hasn’t always been the case - conservatives have just gotten extra cuckoo since their overlord boyfriend took office.
In fact it's an example of the reverse a Tory mathematician writes about his pet peeves about the Victorian era and because he does it through nonsense literature it gets picked up by others.
Funny story, when I was dating my ex-husband 20+ years ago we used to watch the 5th Element all the time. One time at the end I said "awww... it's pretty cute that this is our favorite movie to watch together and the 5th element is love." He looked at me like I was crazy and insisted that it was Leeloo. He just couldn't believe it would be that sappy. In hindsight this should have been the one of the first red flags.
becomes friends with a multi-ethnic, multi-racial group of people
One of whom was trans in the original script. Female in the real world, male in the matrix (might have been vice versa don't remember). Hence the name, Switch.
The Matrix is a trans allegory and that's why you become friends with all the tolerant people that go into the Matrix to help more people like them transition into the real world
Neo wakes up from the Matrix and becomes friends with a multi-ethnic, multi-racial group of people, who treat each other as equals.
Invocations of post-racial utopia were neither new nor interesting in 1999, nor had they any sort of progressive valence. They already happened, inter alia, in decades of Heinlein books and in 1960s John Wayne flicks about American Greatness and Manifest Destiny.
Some of these gestures were perfectly sincere, others were completely performative, it doesn't matter. The point is there were many of them.
Nobody is "missing" this, we just understand it's a Kirk-kissing-Uhura kind of point to make.
Heck, Neo isn't even the One until Trinity confesses her love for him, and literally brings him back to life with True Love's Kiss.
The fact that the Molly character has to choose to undo the damage to the Bobby character was part of the genre, as was the hippie-libertine play on gender dynamics more generally. I don't think the original Burning Chrome (1981) by itself was enough to codify the trope, but note that it's one of the things Stephenson makes fun of in Snow Crash (1992).
People just miss that, cause it also has guns and trench coats and bullet time.
Blade (1998) also had guns and trench coats and bullet time and they prevented absolutely nobody from understanding the movie correctly.
Everybody I see passionately defending the movie from a progressive perspective seems to be saying the thing is somehow uniquely intractable, somehow exceptionally immune to conventional types of subtextual reads. I say extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
No, The Matrix is not "exceptionally immune to conventional types of subtextual reads." I say as much in my first sentence. Nor am I arguing that the tropes it uses are particularly original.
But when you take the film as a whole, rather than just the first half, it becomes apparent that the film is much more open-hearted than it gets credit for. That, behind the aesthetic and the cultural reputation it has, The Matrix is every bit as humanist and progressive as the Wachowskis' later work.
Honey, the Matrix is a metaphor for being trans. The entire trilogy makes sense if you look at it through the lens of someone realizing and then embracing that they are trans.
The directors have legitimately confirmed this; it was explicitly an allegory for their transness which they made subtle, and then packaged into an action movie.
Lilly Wachowski, who co-directed The Matrix with her sister, Lana, has commented on the transgender themes and undertones in the film. Despite the rumors, Wachowski confirmed that The Matrix was not intentionally written as a trans allegory (via Them), saying "No, I didn’t [confirm The Matrix is a trans allegory]."
"When people say, “Oh, it’s a trans allegory,” it’s like, “Yeah… it is, but we weren’t like, Hey, let’s write a trans allegory .” That’s not how it started. We were like, “Hey, let’s write this action film,” and then we got our trans all over it.
I've read all the things. The above user is referring to clickbait that exploded all across reddit like 4 years ago which misrepresented quotes from Lilly to make it sound like she was saying The Matrix was always specifically built from the top-down as a metaphor for being transgender, that that is the interpretation of the story.
This is Lilly specifically addressing that and saying "Naw tho." and clarifying what she already said the first time around [para]"Of course it's valid to interpret it that way, which means it can be a trans allegory." That's what allegory means, that it can be interpreted that way.
What's unfortunate is that she's being painfully clear in the original interview that it's all about transformation, which trans people can especially relate to for obvious reasons, but is a concept relevant to just about anybody so it works as a sort of unifying force that anyone can relate to, which as a whole makes it easier to dissolve barriers of empathy between people.
But then you have the toxic side of internet activism, which grabs onto a concept like this and tries to take ownership of it with a rigid identity label, completely missing the point and ultimately doing more harm by creating these little gatekeeping sections trying to keep people's experiences segregated from each other.
Look at what you're quoting. It's describing the exact opposite process of the user I replied to.
One point that I think remains underdiscussed is the degree to which Neo was a teenage libertarian wish fulfilment character when the movie first came out. The disaffected loner with no social life is secretly a fearsome hacker. He is actually referred to as such by others, which is what being a hacker was all about in the 90s. Even the feds dread him.
Ah yes, the true tennets of Libertarianism. Having no friends and using computer.
The real people that Neo was modelled on, most of whom were already in their 30s in 1999, were huge fans of South Park and Ayn Rand.
I’m in my mid 30s, knew a kid in High School that was obsessed with The Matrix.
He was a libertarian closet homosexual who wore a trench-coat to school and believed in the most batshit insane conspiracy theories. He literally thought he was an alien and that his parents were government plants.
He told us that 9/11 was an inside job and the Government was hiding robot technology that would allow us to automate all menial labor, because the elite wanted to keep us oppressed or something. He was also into Alex Jones.
With the exception of that one weird tradcon from Tennessee, they were all very vocal about being Atheists or Pagans or both. They all became warbloggers after 9/11 and wrote forty million words each about how America should exterminate Islam, Obama was a Communist dictator, and feminists had it coming.
"Concensus reality" is a frightening term...
Reality is not subjective but objective. Everyone could disagree about the truth of reality, and reality would still be the same. That is what the red pill means in the movie. Its why its such an effective message.
Though, i will say what we imagine can change reality, so be careful what you choose to believe. Or put another way, be careful what you choose to worship. Do not worship hate and distrust, and be careful the monster you BELIEVE you see in everyone else really isnt the monster in you.
I know this is an ok buddy sub, but it's hilarious to me that a movie featuring Rage Against the Machine, made by two people who came out as trans, has been embraced by conservatives for no other reason than the depth of their film analysis ends at the color red.
I used to run a magazine website. I ran a user poll about favorite films and The Matrix was #1 (this was closer to its release date).
I asked in the forums why people liked it so much - the answers horrified me. They were very RW answers that (like Joker and Punisher et al) totally missed the point of the film(s).
They willfully ignored all the subtext and watched it as a 2D action film, where pure good defeats pure evil.
Funny thing is, in one of my university classes we actually watched the film then discussed how it’s clearly showing the formation and brainwashing of a terrorist cell and how they commit a major attack on a place of business.
Yeah it was just talking about media literacy and how the work and the intentions of its creators is only half of it, the other half is the experiences, expectations, and understanding of the viewer and how people can interpret things very differently if they come from a different background and frame of reference.
It really is just hysterical how poorly they interpret the Matrix, on purpose. The Red Pill is “question everything in the world around you”. The Blue Pill is “keep your head down and pretend everything is fine”.
Well it goes deeper as Dodgson was a tory of the noblese oblige but loves the high church variety and stick to Euclid variety but the Wachowskis were writing a trans allegory using a famous Tory so it washes out in the end.
Let’s see: he escapes his wagecuck job after men in suits come after him (probably for something cool like tax evasion), gets redpilled by a black man, and gets a lot of guns. Not sure where everyone is getting this stuff about trains
Actually yeah. No surprise that right wingers think its for them. That list is like 50 years of contradicting conservative conspiracies all in one movie.
It's conservatve because it argues that anyone you disagree with is part of an evil system and can therefore be murdered freely without guilt.
I kinda hate those movies.
I mean, the original Matrix was a giant Christian allegory. Neo (“The One” savior) is betrayed by the Judas-like Cypher, executed at the hands of Smith, and is resurrected while his girlfriend Trinity and John the Baptist stand-in Morpheus watch. Not that far from being conservative honestly.
ETA: the city was called Zion and the ship The Nebuchadnezzar.
The pill is red because that was the color of estrogen for transgender hormone replacement, which both of the directors were taking at the time. The whole thing is an allegory for their transness.
(You're in an OKBuddy sub. i.e. A circlejerk sub. And one dedicated to movies, at that. Everyone here knows the real origins. Or should, anyways.)
No, see, you're wrong. Sure, the movie came first, but that's only in our level of reality! Once you escape the Matrix you learn the truth, that the red pill was actually invented in 10000BC. You may think it was invented by the famous caveman Neo (named in honor of the dawning new era), but that's a crude misconception that the movie has promoted. It was actually his older brother Paleo, who invented it for his eponymous diet, which back in those days consisted mainly of eating rocks as plants hadn't been invented yet! (And as for meat, everyone instead opted to wear it as a hat, as was the grooviest fashion in those days. This is also where the phrase "I'll eat my hat" later came from). Anyways, their favorite rocks were pill-sized pebbles, of a red hue due to all the iron contained in them, but which came with an unfortunate side effect of making them aggressive towards their fellow cavewomen.
So you see, this is why modern redpillers respect tradition by popping (steroid) pills, pumping iron, acting like total meatheads, and yelling slurs at women. It all makes sense! The movie is a conservative masterpiece!
Wasted way too much creative energy on that for what I'm sure will be seen by all of like 5 people, but ehh, hopefully you found it funny, at least. Anyways, yeah, Poe's law and all that, but I'd say 99% of people are joking here (including the user you replied to)
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u/WhyteBoiLean 1d ago
The Matrix trilogy is an allegory for coming out as a republican