The Matrix franchise is a rich sci-fi saga that can be enjoyed for its superficial entertainment, though creators Lana and Lilly Wachowski also packed the mythology with incredibly dense metaphors about technology, religion, and gender identity. While packing a movie with so many layers can be enlightening for some audiences, it also means people can misinterpret a lot of things. One misinterpretation comes from the concept of the red pill, which Neo (Keanu Reeves) is given by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) that breaks him free from the artificial reality of “The Matrix,” though conspiracy theorists and the far right have co-opted the phrase to symbolize someone “waking up” from the reality they’ve been meant to believe in, stemming from political control and coercion by the media. Lilly Wachowski recently addressed her narrative being twisted, expressing frustration while also accepting that she had to let go of her works.
While speaking about her work being interpreted by audiences on the So True with Caleb Hearon podcast, Wachowski detailed:
“You have to let go of your work. 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!’ But I have to let it go, to some extent, or else I’m engaging … You’re never gonna be able to make absolutely every person believe what you initially intended.”
Despite Wachowski understanding that unleashing art into the world means you lose control over how it’s interpreted, she went on to express in more detail her frustrations with specifically seeing the themes from The Matrix being intentionally weaponized to manipulate. The filmmaker explained:
“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, this is what fascism does, and so of course that’s going to happen. They do it with absolutely everything … This idea of putting ‘scientific gender’ in the words … they’re calling it science, but it is not science, and that’s what fascism does. They take 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.”
How ‘The Matrix’ Impacted Lilly Wachowski
The Matrix wasn’t the first sci-fi movie to explore bigger philosophical topics cinematically, though it marked a unique confluence of packaging major existential ideas inside a gripping, action-packed experience that pushed filmmaking techniques to new levels. The original 1999 The Matrix became an unexpected financial success, while its home video release only helped further its cult following. The franchise earned three big-screen follow-ups, animated spin-offs, video games, and more expansions. While any filmmaker would appreciate earning this type of pop-culture presence, Wachowski admitted that she has become less interested in how popular her work is and focuses more on appreciating the act of making that art.
She confessed:
“I don’t make stuff anymore with the idea that I want it to reach as many people as possible. I make to make. [I] just finished Trash Mountain, that experience is the reason you’re there, not what comes after. And so, as an artist, I try to be as present as possible now. This isn’t what I always did, it’s taken me a while to get to this point of view. I want to be present and relish each day of the making that I have, because the beauty of filmmaking is that you get to come together in this community, all these different artists, and bring this thing that’s in your brain to this new form.
She added, “When I think about The Matrix and the ‘success’ that it had, that’s something that I think artists or filmmakers or any artist, really, they place too much emphasis on those kinds of successes and I don’t think that’s necessarily a success.”
Signifying that she has moved on from The Matrix, 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections was developed solely by her sister Lana. Drew Goddard is currently attached to develop a new installment in the franchise, which neither of the Wachowski sisters are involved in.
The Matrix
- Release Date
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March 31, 1999
- Runtime
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136 minutes
- Producers
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Andrew Mason, Barrie M. Osborne, Bruce Berman, Erwin Stoff