Trans trailblazer Lilly Wachowski says she had to ‘let go’ of The Matrix over right-wing interpretations

“Like, why are members of the Trump administration talking about The Matrix like it was made for them and their ideology when it came from you, and that’s not you at all?” Hearon asked.

One of the key scenes from the first film to be appropriated by the right-wing involves Keanu Reeves as Neo, in which he decides to take the red pill over the blue pill, in order to escape The Matrix’s simulation and wake up to reality.

The term “redpilling” has become popularised within right-wing circles – particularly MAGA supporters – to indicate when someone realises the so-called truth about modern society.

This can include men who become aware of men being, as they deem it, controlled by feminism, or cisgender, heterosexual people who believe that there is an LGBTQ+ ideology being pushed upon them.

Responding to Hearon, Wachowski suggested that she was unsurprised by how right-wingers had co-opted the film’s message, and that she had to learn to accept that she couldn’t control how people interpreted it.

“I don’t make stuff anymore with the idea that I want it to reach as many people as possible. I make to make, right?” she said.

“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,” she added. “They do it with absolutely everything.”

“You have to let go of your work,” she continued. “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.”

Wachowski added that she had come to terms with the fact that she would not be able to “make absolutely every person believe what [she] initially intended”.

Far from the narrative being pushed by right-wingers, Wachowski has previously confirmed fan theories that The Matrix is actually a metaphor for the trans experience.

In 2020, during an interview with Netflix Film Club, Wachowski said that the “world wasn’t quite ready” to hear the true meaning behind the film series when it first came out.

For years, LGBTQ+ fans of the films have assumed that the red pills are representative of red estrogen pills, while the double life led by Neo – also known as Thomas Anderson – could represent the closeted trans experience.

Neither Lilly Wachowski nor her sister Lana were publicly out as trans women when the first film came out. Lana revealed that she is trans in 2008, while Lilly did so in 2016.

“I love how meaningful those films are to trans people and the way that they come up to me say, ‘Those movies saved my life,’” Lilly Wachowski told Netflix Film Club.

“Because when you talk about transformation, specifically in the world of science fiction, which is just about imagination and world-building and the idea of the seemingly impossible becoming possible, that’s why it speaks it to them so much.

“And I’m grateful I can be a part of throwing them a rope along their journey.”

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