Lilly Wachowski Slammed Right-Wingers for Co-Opting the “Red Pill” and Missing the Point of “The Matrix” Entirely

Lilly Wachowski recently pushed back on MAGA supporters who tried to claim an iconic scene from The Matrix. The 1999 masterpiece introduced the now-famous moment when Morpheus offered Neo the blue pill or the red pill.

via: Variety

“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it,” Wachowski said. “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.”

“The Matrix,” specifically the iconic “blue pill or red pill” scene, is the most famous example of the film being appropriated by the right. In the scene, Keanu Reeves’ Neo must take the red pill in order to be freed from the Matrix. In the political context, “red pilled” is a term for someone who has “woken up” to the truth about society and often aligns with radical far-right ideology.

In an interview in 2020, Wachowski explained that the “original intention” of “The Matrix” was to be a transgender allegory, but “the corporate world wasn’t ready.” Even so, she said she’s unsurprised the right has latched on to the film since “right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything.”

She added, “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.”

Fans online echoed her frustrations. One Reddit user argued that these interpretations” were often intentional attempts to attach right-wing thinking to stories that encouraged questioning oppressive systems.

Another commenter, u/myersjw, said MAGA groups, “desperately want to be pop culture taste makers and yet keep getting stuck with the absolute worst celebrities and artists out there.”