The solution Wachowski ultimately offers to dismantle it seems almost quaint, and therefore refreshingly disarming: Love, in both the individually romantic sense and in a radical willingness to accept those unlike us. In keeping with the rest of the Wachowskis’ offbeat, earnest oeuvre, its protagonists’ supernatural powers are only unlocked when they renounce what blinkers them to their true selves.
Which is all well and good in the context of a Hollywood film, but what does it say about, you know, the real “real world?” “The sheeple aren’t going anywhere,” taunts the film’s villain in his climactic speech. “They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty. And that means you … back in your pods, unconscious and alone, just like them.”
It’s another obvious bit of meta-commentary on the film itself: Opening against the second weekend of Disney’s latest piece of steamroller, monocultural superhero content “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” it’s hard to imagine a film this knotty and idea-oriented capturing the American zeitgeist in 2021 as it did in 1999, even with all the series’ legacy and blockbuster appeal.
But bring the slow, mistaken co-opting of the “red pill” as a piece of reactionary symbology back into focus, and consider the rest of the film’s anti-social-media message, with its overt hostility toward the would-be pundits and storytellers who seek to “program” their listeners’ brains. There’s another meta-critical message being conveyed beyond just the film’s theoretical success: Yes, arts and culture, “The Matrix” included, can inspire, critique and influence their consumers.
But simply receiving and regurgitating their wisdom is a shallow foundation on which to build a political philosophy, or an emotional life. “The Matrix Resurrections” ends with its protagonists flying off into the horizon, mirroring the ending of the original film but in a much different world than our own. The “red pill,” as conceived of by the Wachowskis and their collaborators, isn’t an answer in itself, but the freedom to pursue one’s own answers.
Of course, that’s the very same intoxicating idea that a generation of ideological hucksters seized on in order to peddle their wares in the wake of the original films’ release. The most hot-button issues in American public life — elections, vaccines, disasters natural and otherwise — are inevitably followed by a parade of Yarvins and Bannons, promising access to the “independent thought” that the architects of our own proverbial “Matrix” would obscure. “The Matrix Resurrections” doesn’t rebut them directly, because to do so would miss the point. What Wachowski, et al have shown with their unconventional, risk-taking sequel is that in the real world, the only real “choice” is to reject such pat explanations — and by proxy flush the whole bottle down the toilet.