Misinterpretation on a healthy basis is a part of cinema until it’s not. In a recent episode of the So True with Caleb Hearon podcast, filmmaker Lilly Wachowski spoke about co-directing 1999’s sci-fi classic “The Matrix” and how the picture has been understood and reinvented over time. Some claim it as being spoon-fed into the ‘rightist propaganda’.
Jumping into the tale of controversy, do you remember the moment where Neo (Keanu Reeves) is offered the blue pill, which will return him to his ordinary existence, or the red pill, which is going to awaken him to the “real world”, which is controlled by artificial intelligence? This has recently become the focus of some minor criticism and a small raging controversy.
The scene has come to represent the American MAGA movement in a way. Wachowski objected to this in the past. According to her most recent interview, she has come to terms with the fact that her work is public and that individuals and even entire movements will understand and embrace it in different ways. It is up to the viewer’s interpretation.
She proclaimed, “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 … You’re never gonna be able to make absolutely every person believe what you initially intended.”
Here is the main issue that she addressed: “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…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.”
After the first trilogy, Wachowski left the film enterprise, allowing his sister Lana Wachowski to independently create “The Matrix Resurrections”. Drew Goddard is presently attached to develop the next edition in the franchise, with neither of the Wachowskis participating.
