As an artist, how do you react when a political party appropriates a concept you invented? It’s a question that Lilly Wachowski, codirector of the Matrix trilogy, has had to contend with since the concept of becoming “red-pilled”—a.k.a. becoming politically aligned with radical far-right ideology—went mainstream. In a recent interview with comedian Caleb Hearon on his podcast, So True, Wachowski said she’s learned that “you have to let go of your work,” as well as people’s perceptions of it: “People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it.”
“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!” Wachowski continued. “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 concept of becoming “red-pilled” dates back to arguably the most famous scene from The Matrix (1999), the seminal science fiction film starring Keanu Reeves as computer hacker Neo, which Wachowski directed with her older sister, Lana Wachowski. In the film, Neo is presented with the choice of “blue pill or red pill”—not knowing that if he takes the red pill, he’ll be freed from the Matrix. Since 2004, the phrase “red pill” has been defined on Urban Dictionary as signifying “a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance.” But in more recent years, right-wing conservatives have co-opted the term to describe someone who has purportedly “woken up” from the liberal political agenda and is now aligned with right-wing ideology.
In August 2020, Lilly Wachowski, who publicly came out as trans in 2016, four years after her elder sister, Lana, came out as trans, said that the “original intention” of the Matrix trilogy was for it to be an allegory for the trans experience. But “the corporate world wasn’t quite ready” for that narrative, she maintained. In her interview with Hearon, Wachowski said that she was unsurprised that conservatives have latched on to the film because “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,” she continued. “This is what fascism does. And so, of course, that’s going to happen.”
Original story appeared in VF France.
