How the Matrix reclaimed the Red Pill
Shownotes
Time.
Is money.
And in the cold unfeeling eyes of Hollywood a “movie” is just a business strategy to convert two hours of your time into shareholder value.
Jupiter Ascending failed at that task. Spectacularly. It made $184 million dollars globally, but cost roughly the GDP of a small island nation to produce, generating such a severe loss for Warner Bros. that as punishment eight senior executives were mashed into time milk.
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SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/mPkRdJ3EwWEWhy? Because it’s garbage. It is beautiful, glistening, high-fructose hilarious garbage. It’s the kind of movie that isn’t trying to make you laugh, yet leaves you wheezing at the screen asking, “Why? Who allowed this? Was everyone on set huffing industrial-grade furniture polish?”
Why make Mila Kunis a toilet cleaner? She’s about as believable in the role as Elijah Wood as He-Man.
Sure it’s the low origin for her galactic scale heroine. But depicting that would require that Mila do something called acting.
Imagine the thing called ACTING. Then imagine it’s anti-matter opposite. Anti-acting.
That is Mila Kunis screen presence.
Why is Eddie Redmayne attempting to keep a very dark secret from his own vocal cords? He spends half the film whispering like a haunted Victorian doll and the other half screaming like he just stepped on a Lego.
Why is Sean Bean…oh wait it’s a paycheque. Even Sean, a famously low effort actor, has never turned in a lazier performance.
Why is 78% of Jupiter Ascending’s screentime just an indecipherable sludge of brown CGI?
In the future people will just assume this is all AI slop, because it’s that “generic scifi” look, but back when Midjourney cost $2 million dollars a minute.
Yet, buried in this sea of CGI vomit is this kind of thing:
Jupiter Ascending fails as a mechanism to convert your time into Warner Bros shareholder capital. But.
It’s Redpilled.
“Bro, Americans will believe anything but the objective reality that capitalism as an economic organisation of society is responsible for exactly the things they are complaining about.”
Hasan Piker
There’s a reason the Redpill is red.
If you know, you know.
It is one of the great ironies of our age that people who claim to be a “thing” are almost always the exact opposite of that thing.
People with a Masters in Creative Writing struggle to write a compelling grocery list.
People who claim to be Woke are the least awake to their own internal dumpster-fire personalities.
And anyone—ABSOLUTELY ANYONE—who claims to be “Redpilled” is guaranteed to be the most Bluepilled motherfucker you have ever met in your life.
Taking the Redpill today is like selecting from an artisanal chocolate box of delusions.
The Manosphere offers to awaken you from the lie of feminism and unleash your inner Apex Predator Alpha-Wolf when
really
it’s not that girl on OnlyFans who’s keeping you down, you’re both victims of the system that turns your desire into a revenue stream.
The Alt-Right made you believe you’re fighting the Cathedral of the liberal establishment because you read a 4000 word blog post by a man who thinks this mid-life crisis biker jacket is a look. When
really
Being a Neoreactionary is just being an old reactionary. You want monarchy back because you think the king will be your mate. When really he’ll have you cleaning the cess pitt.
The Cryptobros told you fiat currency was why you can’t pay the rent. But they forgot to mention their imaginary monopoly money is directly owned by oligarchs.
The Transhumanists. You too can live forever if you buy their $99 a month supplement regime.
The Heterodox intellectuals and Contrarian thinkers. The Qanon conspiracists. The Flat Earthers. The Alien abductees. You people who think Joe Rogan is a deep state media outlet.
You aren’t fucking “Red Pilled”
Yet
For anyone who actually, genuinely doesn’t know, the Red Pill originates from the Matrix.
Neo after a lifetime seeking the Matrix is offered a choice.
What follows is arguably the greatest moment of pure science fiction in cinema. Neo’s awakening in the goo pod is the essence of what critic Darkko Suvin calls…
COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT
…a moment ago you believed reality was a green tinted city, now you see reality is pink tinted goo. Crucially, reality has not changed. Your cognition of reality has been estranged.
“Cognitive estrangement is a literary technique, primarily in science fiction, that makes the familiar world seem strange and new, forcing readers to re-examine their own reality through a “lens” of unfamiliar settings or concepts.”
It’s this cognitive estrangement, the transformation of how we perceive our reality, that in pop culture has come to be symbolised by the Red Pill.
Did you believe in democracy until the internet showed you both parties were masks for the same oligarchy?
Were you under the illusion that a BigMac was actually food but now realise it’s just agricultural waste products in a bun?
Did a tropical island for billionaire sex perverts sound like a conspiracy theory until recently?
The Red pill became one of the most potent symbols in 21st century pop culture because the condition of being Red pilled is now a constant.
Having your cognition estranged is table stakes for life in this century.
But how do we know our new perception, or new political perspective, or nutrition plan is truer than our old…delusion?
What if a year ago you went down an internet rabbit hole and discovered a rebel cell of religious fanatics who have convinced you it’s ok to kill the non-believers?
The first Matrix movie is a big dose of Blue pill, painted Red.
What The Matrix really captures, as we share the exhilaration and self-belief of Neo taking flight to Rage Against the Machine’s Wake-up, is the Dunning-Kruger of the freshly Red pilled.
I know you’re out there. I can hear the hum of the 5G towers now. I know you’re afraid. You’re afraid of a man who’s finally figured out that the “birds” on the power lines are just surveillance drones charging their batteries.
I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end—mostly because my Wi-Fi is being throttled by the Deep State. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin.
I’m going to hang up this phone—because I’m pretty sure the signal is scrambling my DNA—and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them why the “moon” looks a little too much like a projection screen on Tuesdays.
I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without Mandatory fluoride, Chemtrails ruining a perfectly good sunset, and Globalist lizard-people in high-waisted suits.
A world where anything is possible, as long as you have enough crypto and a Faraday cage in your basement. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you… whether or not you’ve done your own research.
Because The Matrix is the movie the Matrix makes to keep you in the Matrix.
The Matrix is Plato’s Cave. The most famous philosophical allegory. We are chained in a cave looking at shadows cast on the wall. But we can awaken from the matrix to the light of true
reality.
But what if there is no reality to awaken to? What if there are only more shadows? What if our cave is just inside another cave within a cave within…more caves?
What if beyond reality is hyperreality?
The Matrix puts on the table Simulacra and Simulation, the iconic 1981 work of postmodern philosophy by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
To introduce the philosophy of the hyperreal.
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland”
Jean Baudrillard
But the Matrix isn’t really about the hyperreal. Instead The Matrix tells us we can wake up from the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave to a real reality.
But Baudrillard’s hyperreal destroys that possibility.
The digital age that Baudrillard saw coming, of computer imagery, mass marketing, the internet, algorithmic advertising, video game addiction, politics-as-reality-tv and much more.
Overwrites reality with simulation, and replaces once real objects and experiences with simulacra.
Consider Häagen-Dazs, an invented word to persuade American consumers you are eating Danish ice-cream.
Or Donald Trump. A reality-tv star playing a billionaire who hoodwinked MAGA voters into making him a billionaire
Or AI, Large Language Models, a statistical mashup of the internet that spits out a pure simulacrum of truth.
Tradwives. Star Trek. Bitcoin. Jordan Peterson.
Our world is choking on third order simulacra of people and things that were once real.
Welcome to the desert of the postmodern.
Where the experience of awakening from the simulation…
…is just another simulation.
A product. A commodity. Giving you the subjective Red pill experience is a strategy used by gurus, grifters, life coaches, religions, self-help writers, political campaigns, governments and youtube video essayists.
To convert your time into money, into clicks, into power.
Jean Baudrillard hated The Matrix because it is a simulacum of the movie that might actually awaken you to the Matrix, offering a simplistic Platonic allegory instead of the complexity of hyperreality.
But the makers of The Matrix were themselves shaken awake by Baudrillard’s refusal to participate in the sequels, and his insult that they had made the movie the Matrix would make about the Matrix.
And the best way to understand the broken, crazed, indulgent filmography of the Wachowskis…
…and understand why Jupiter Ascending is both a flaming garbage pile and a dose of true Redpilled magnificence…
…is as a quest to make the Matrix movie the Matrix did NOT want them to make.
The first thing you notice watching Bound, the Wachowski’s first movie, back to back with The Matrix…
…is that the Wachowski’s had a type.
Gina Gerson is the prototype that became the Trinity archetype played by Carrie-Anne Moss The androgynous dark haired beauty, with the inverted triangle shoulder to hip ratio.
It’s going to become a significant part of the Wachowski’s story that Lana in 2012 and Lilly in 2016 both announced their transgender identities, and Bound is their movie most overtly centred on gender.
The term “gender performativity” was introduced by the philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble.
And the Wachowski’s 1996 debut movie is an examination of the forces; social, economic, political that keep us “bound” within performative gender identities.
And it’s also cinematic erotica from the straight-to-DVD era, before the internet made pornography ubiquitous, that very much exploits and reinforces the very gender performativity it also critiques.
And this becomes the key characteristic of all the Wachowski’s movies.
The critique of ideas simultaneously being exploited for entertainment. Capitalist blockbusters that critique capitalism. Movies that show you the Matrix to keep you in the Matrix.
All, except one.
It’s self-evident that the Matrix sequels, Revolutions and Reloaded, are an attempt to answer Baudrillard’s critique.
While still being effects driven kungfu action blockbuster extravaganzas.
The only bearable way to watch these movies is the Dezionzed edit, which you can simulate by skipping the painfully bad scenes in Zion.
Zion is basically like being told the trust fund kids who showed up for Fyre festival will save the world.
Even if it was true, everyone else would rather die.
And even if you can ignore or skip Zion, Matrix Reloaded is structurally crippled by the decision to make it a video game tie-in with Enter the Matrix…
…a kamikaze attempt to bootstrap the career of Jada Pinkett-Smith as Niobe, an acting talent only slightly less compelling than Mila Kunis.
But if you can mentally reconstruct a decently edited movie, and somehow purge the cringe “orgasm cake” from your memory, the Matrix sequels are…half a great movie.
That movie climaxes as Neo confronts the Architect of The Matrix.
The most pertinent but least relevant question to ask about the Architect is why he’s Sigmund Freud. And you’ll find an entire video about that elsewhere on yhe Science Fiction channel.
The Architect is the answer to the unresolved equation of the original Matrix. Neo’s Red pilled rebellion is not a true awakening to reality, but is in fact just another control mechanism within the Matrix, an awakening only to the complexity of hyperreality.
Great.
But instead of reckoning with the hyperreal contradiction, instead of tracking what we are to do as humans when we realise there is no way out of the hyperreal trap we find ourselves in.
The Matrix sequels double down in completely the opposite direction. Neo is actually Digital Jesus and the next couple of hours are a mess of junk CGI…
…as Neo, who is garbed as a Catholic seminarian the whole time, beats up Satan Smith.
Under the tension of being movies the Matrix would make about the Matrix, while trying desperately not to be, the Matrix sequels simply
implode.
Science fiction is an art form born in short stories.
And The Matrix as science fiction has some of its best ideas when liberated from the blockbuster movie format.
The Animatrix main contribution to the mythos is that machines might be making a perfectly ethical and good choice to subdue or destroy humanity.
Man’s inhumanity to man is the defining quality of human history. War. Murder. Slavery.
And humanity, of course, subjects sentient machines to exactly the same exploitation as sentient humans.
In a shocking moment of cognitive estrangement, the machine’s sociopathic hatred of the human becomes logical, perhaps even a good thing.
Maybe the real Red pill is understanding that human reality was never all that.
MORPHEUS vs GROYPER
INT – NIGHT
Thunder rumbles. Rain pours down outside the windows of a dark, decrepit room.
MORPHEUS sits in a leather armchair. Opposite him sits GROYPER. Groyper is slouching so low he is almost horizontal. He crunches loudly on a chip.
MORPHEUS
(Dramatic pause)
Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life.
GROYPER
(Mouth full)
Is it indigestion? Because I ate like, four burritos before I logged on.
MORPHEUS
(Ignoring him)
It is the feeling that there is something wrong with the world. You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Morpheus opens his palms.
Left Hand: A shiny RED PILL.
Right Hand: A glowing BLUE PILL.
MORPHEUS
All I offer is the truth.
GROYPER
Okay, quick Q. What does the Red pill do?
MORPHEUS
You will join the resistance. You will fight the machines in the scorched desert of the real world. You will eat protein sludge and sleep in cold steel bunkers.
GROYPER (Grimacing)
Cringe. Too much cardio. Blue pill.
MORPHEUS
The Blue Pill returns you to the simulation. A prison for your mind. A world of illusion.
GROYPER
Does the illusion have 5G and those little mini-pizzas?
MORPHEUS
Yes, but they are false. The taste is merely electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
GROYPER
Bro, if the electrical signals taste like pepperoni, I literally do not care.
(He reaches out)
Gimme the Blue.
MORPHEUS
(Retracting hand)
GROYPER
Morpheus, my guy. Look at you. You’re wearing sunglasses indoors at night. You look stressed. I’m trying to go back to my stream. I was about to hit Gold rank. Blue pill. Now.
MORPHEUS
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
GROYPER
Blue Pill!
MORPHEUS
(Opens Left Hand – Red Pill)
You take the Red Pill: You wake up. You see the truth. You will see the global supply chains built on suffering. You will understand that your clothes are made by sorrow, your food is poison, and the government is a lizard-run Ponzi scheme designed to harvest your anxiety. You will feel the crushing weight of systemic injustice every waking second.
GROYPER
(Deadpan)
Yikes. That sounds super toxic.
MORPHEUS: You will learn the entire global economy is a hallucination. The banks are bankrupt. Your savings are imaginary numbers.
GROYPER: So you’re saying my credit card debt isn’t real? Based.
MORPHEUS: The government is recording every private moment of your life through your webcam.
GROYPER: Hope they like watching a grown man cry while eating Bagel Bites.
MORPHEUS: Every news station is owned by one conglomerate script-feeding you lies to keep you docile.
GROYPER: That’s why I get all my news from Asmongold.
MORPHEUS: You are living in a pod full of goo, naked, bald, and hooked up to tubes.
GROYPER: Free rent, free pool. You’re really bad at making this sound bad.
MORPHEUS
(Desperate)
Look. If you take the Red Pill, you become a hero. You save humanity.
GROYPER
Okay, but consider this: If I take the Blue Pill, I can be a level 90 Warlock and I don’t have to wear that itchy wool sweater everyone in Zion wears. Seriously, look at your shirt. It has holes in it. You live in a sewer, Morpheus. You are a sewer rat.
MORPHEUS
It is a ship! The Nebuchadnezzar!
GROYPER
It’s a sewer ship. You eat slime. I eat steak.
MORPHEUS
THE STEAK IS NOT REAL!
GROYPER
(Leans in close)
Does. It. Matter?
Morpheus freezes. He looks at the Red Pill in his hand. He looks at his tattered clothes. He looks at Groyper, who is inexplicably holding a bubble tea that materialized out of nowhere.
GROYPER
Come on, Morph. Join the vibes. We have air conditioning. We have cat videos. We have ignorance. It’s bliss, bro. It’s literally bliss.
Morpheus’s hand shakes. He looks at the Red Pill. He looks at the Blue Pill