Matrix: Resurrections Analysis
This review contains spoilers for both the original Matrix Trilogy and Matrix: Resurrections.
The Matrix, the original film that put the Wachowski sisters on the map, has been endlessly dissected and analyzed and prodded by every facet of society to the point its major metaphor - the “blue pill/red pill” binary choice between comfortable sleep, and painful enlightenment - has its own Wikipedia page. It has been appropriated and mis-appropriated endlessly, and nothing that the sisters have created in the 22 years since - including the sequels to their original creation - has ever received the critical acclaim or widespread cultural acceptance of their ‘99 sci-fi thriller, which was only the second movie they had ever directed in their careers.
There are many interpretations of the red pill/blue pill dichotomy presented in the original movie, but the one that has always resonated with me has been the trans reading (and it’s safe to say that the right-wing appropriation of red-pilling is not the one the filmmakers themselves encourage).
The trans reading of the movie, one that Lilly and Lana both endorse, is that the blue pill path - the safe, false, empty world that Thomas Anderson inhabits - is one where he stays closeted. The red pill path - the dangerous, exhilarating, strange new world that is the domain of Neo - where he reaches his fullest potential is the world as he sees it after transition. The original movie has been deconstructed by far more experienced authors more fully, but this is the basic premise that makes me so invested as an out trans woman. There just aren’t many blockbusters where the villain gets his ass kicked at the emotional height of the story for deadnaming the main character, and it’s incredibly satisfying.
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Of course, with a story that means so much to so many people (including me), it’s an uphill battle to add yet another sequel/soft reboot to a story that was supposedly concluded. Resurrections realizes this from the first seconds of its narrative. The opening of the newest movie admits it will never be The Matrix we remember; the very first scene features an older Trinity fighting her way out through the Heart O’ The City motel, the same location that opened the original movie. There are a few key differences: the agents are new characters, the police now don riot apparel and automatic rifles in lieu of service revolvers and traditional uniforms, and most crucially, Trinity loses her fight against them. Resurrections acknowledges our nostalgia for its past emotional heights and simultaneously yanks the carpet out from under us; the ravages of time have weakened the characters we love, and the world has become more hostile. None of our main characters can re-litigate the battles of their pasts without adapting to their own limits and to the world’s anger.
And from here, Lana Wachowski makes the bold-and-understandable move to murder subtlety. Subtext is now text. There will no longer be right-wingers claiming the red pill as their own analogy.
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Bugs, the blue-haired hacker witnessing Trinity’s failed fight against the Agents, meets a reincarnation of Morpheus as an Agent; this meeting takes place in Thomas Anderson’s original apartment. In this room, as we are clubbed with the transformative importance of this exchange, Bugs offers nouveau-Morpheus the decision to take the red pill and see the real world. Morpheus questions how this could even be a choice - after all, he knows something is wrong with the world he inhabits, and to go back to unknowing bliss is impossible, even if he takes the blue pill.
Bugs replies
The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do.
And this is the belief that underpins the cynical entire first arc of the movie. I knew before transition - as Neo did in the original film - that something was deeply wrong with the reality I inhabited and I had to escape it. I knew long before I became Victoria that the answer to my pains was estrogen and spironolactone, to become something that would make me an outcast, as Neo did. But unlike Neo’s initial transformation from cube dweller to hero, most trans people do not become transgender the moment they discover it’s an option. I dated a trans woman, and yet I tried endlessly to make life work without transitioning myself. Becoming trans is terrifying and if I had a choice in the matter - if I could have lived my life as a cis man - I would have convinced myself to do it.
I only transitioned when I could no longer go on. I am not brave. Every person who congratulates my courage misunderstands that I tried cowardice first, and only abandoned it when the paths remaining for me were transition or death. The original movie glosses over this reality. When the pills are presented to Neo in The Matrix, he is already ready to choose the red pill; in 1999, he had spent his entire life as Thomas Anderson searching for Morpheus, in search of this binary choice he’d reduced to a single possibility. It felt like a question to him - and to us - only because he had already searched for the answer.
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Resurrections asks the audience directly: if there was a splinter in your mind and the world would never feel right to you, and the only way out was to lose an entire life’s work - and the comforts that comes with - would you still abandon it all? What if the choice was never presented? How would we subsume that grief?
None of this is hypothetical for Lana. After the success of the original movie in 1999 (which was entirely made under her deadname, while still presenting as male), rumors swirled about her gender identity for an entire decade until she publicly announced her transition in 2010. She had finally created a movie - The Matrix - that accurately conveyed the pain and experiences of her life, and when she finally acted on those feelings, she stood to lose everything she’d gained by making it. Society wanted the art, not the artist.
Like Lana, Neo has reached heights as Thomas Anderson that have delivered the most comfortable life he could imagine, as his stories fueled creativity that delivered him a life far from the gray cube of Metacortex. No longer is he an office drone; he is a world-renowned game designer, with all the trappings of wealth that could provide. He takes the blue pill daily to sublimate his “psychotic” memories of his life unlived as Neo, his true self, into a palatable delusion he turns into stories. His grief for a future unrealized has become mass-marketed palatability as The Matrix, the video game. His struggles have been turned into success and stability; he is a closet-dysphoria-case as a San Francisco C-suite techie.
To help him stay stable in this miserable existence, Smith is no longer the oppressive suit of masculinity and order; he is Thomas’s boss, on a first-name basis with him, constantly guiding him towards using his pain as fuel for more games while simultaneously defanging them to prevent awakening from the populace. The unflinchingly cold, Ray-Blanchard-esque Architect of the original trilogy, seeking to destroy The One (or gatekeep the hormone-therapy red pills and condemn trans women to their deaths) to balance his equation is gone. He has been replaced with the saccharine manipulation of The Analyst, who prescribes Neo his blue pills out of kindness, and convinces him that his delusions can never become reality. With the boundaries of conflict softened until they are no longer apparent, Thomas is stripped of any chance for meaningful resistance.
The end of the cynical first third happens when Mr. Anderson meets Bugs, and she introduces him to the red pill - a choice he knows he is powerless to decline. Thomas’s decision to dejectedly take the red pill is depicted directly in front of his open-minded excitement to consume it in his first movie; despite the fact his world is open to choice once again, he still acts as though he has none. When Neo finally awakes in the real world, rather than having an epiphany that sheds his dead life’s hold on his psyche, he mourns that his struggles have been appropriated. Bugs tells him as he laments his life spent in service of the machines:
That’s it, isn’t it? If we don’t know what’s real… we can’t resist. They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial. That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us. Where better to bury truth than inside something as ordinary as a video game?
At this point, if the original Matrix is a sci-fi depiction of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Resurrections is a portrayal of Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. The original Matrix asks how we would react to seeing the sun after living our lives in the cave; Resurrections asks how a movie about something as personal as trauma, self-discovery, and the transgender ideology can be created without being devoured and transformed by the society around it into something else entirely. And Lana’s frustrations are grounded in reality. The original Matrix was supposed to be the enemy of patriarchy and conservative views of gender, and the film’s main metaphor became a weapon of theirs regardless. The entire first third of the movie, as Neo is nowhere to be found and Thomas Anderson downs blue pills while a fourth Matrix “game” is under development, is a relentless deconstruction of what it means to make a fourth movie about a franchise that nearly ruined its creators lives and has been warped into the service of those it sought to oppose.
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Admittedly, the middle section of the movie loses the plot a bit. There is a lot happening in this film. Lana seems dead-set on rebutting every single misunderstood point in her original movies, and while it’s admirable, it also makes the main narrative thread weaker. After a bit more (heavy-handed) deconstructions of the audience and the reactions to her previous works, the final arc of the movie takes shape, and the main struggle for Neo becomes clear: Trinity is still in the simulation. He cannot live without her, but he cannot free her without her choosing to leave of her own accord. She has an apparently satisfying existence on the blue pill, with her literal-Chad husband and two point five children.
The first time we meet Trinity (as Tiffany) in Resurrections, she discusses her motherhood and how she’s unsure if she wants it; she wants something more from her life but has never been presented with a choice in any of the “decisions” she has made. More importantly, she tells Thomas - the designer of The Matrix, the game - that she hates herself for seeing elements of Trinity, the game character, in her own psyche. She wants to believe she has the strength and courage to be a transformative figure like Trinity, but her existence shows no evidence she could. She is Lana - she is every trans woman who watched The Matrix - resenting herself for believing she could transcend the mundane life she’s been given and be something more.
But unlike Neo’s acceptance of whatever path he’s presented with, Trinity still embraces empowerment. Despite her personal doubts she has expressed again and again throughout the film, she finds her divine spark through attachment to Neo at the final moment, and flees the simulation to be with the one she loves. She chooses to reject her self-hatred and becomes Trinity once more, even without a world-shattering moment where the simulation is revealed to her. Her belief in human emotion is enough.
Most tellingly, neither Thomas Anderson nor Tiffany ever fell in love; only Trinity and Neo do. If the first third of Resurrections paints the trans experience as one pockmarked with pain and suffering and a lack of choice, the final third reminds us that the first step is only where we begin. Love, meaning, freedom - all of these can only come once we have taken the first pills, no matter what path we take to it. Whether Neo embraces the red pill as in The Matrix or takes it with apprehension in Resurrections, the life he lives afterward is where he finds meaning. No matter how hard he tries to construct a purposeful existence while bluepilled, it will never succeed until his mind is freed and his transition is underway.
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And as for The Spectacle, Lana has not abandoned that plot thread. The closing scenes of the movie show the Analyst dismissively painting any efforts the newly-freed couple will attempt to free the minds of his world. As they confront him for the final time, he states:
Remake it. Knock yourselves out. Paint the sky with rainbows. But here’s the thing. The sheeple aren’t going anywhere. They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality.
He is openly admitting that he will remake the message of this film into something that will defang it. This dialogue may as well be to Lana directly. Trinity, however, is unphased, and insists she will use her freedom to free minds once again. She might actually paint the sky with rainbows. What the Analyst intends as dismissive she remakes as wholesome.
This is the idealistic crux of the movie. Thomas Anderson stood wholly controlled by the Analyst, unable to escape his reshaping of Neo’s own story. He is a stand-in for Lana’s frustration through the 00s, believing that her art was ultimately futile resistance in the face of entrenched power. Trinity, however, is why Lana created Resurrections. She does not care what she is told; she will struggle nonetheless in the name of love and humanity because she wants to. If Neo represents consummation of autonomy by the alienation of The Spectacle, Trinity is the belief that human emotion - devotion, courage, fear, hope - are the only meaningful ways to fight against that system.
And this battle - why struggle against The Spectacle - explains why this movie exists. Why does Lana continue to search for self in a world that will strip the purpose from her art? What if people truly don’t want her sentimentality, as the Analyst said? Because Lana is an artist, and she creates for herself and for the characters she loves. That, to her, is enough.