4/30/2024 0 Comments The red and blue pill matrix![]() At the time the first film dropped, in 1999, the most widely prescribed oestrogen for trans women in the US was Premarin – a red pill. This was a thing even before the films’ directors, the Wachowskis, transitioned. It’s ironic that the other subculture to have embraced The Matrix franchise is trans people, particularly trans women, for whom it’s a story about coming out. It’s both ironic and not that the main subculture to have adopted this language is extremely online men, who want to believe that everything they’ve been taught about how the world works – and, in particular, how gender works – is all a scam to which they have woken up. There’s a whole subculture that already imagines itself as ‘red-pilled’. If you accept that the films are real, then you accept that The Matrix exists, so you’re in it and, paradoxically, compelled to choose your pills. Which, of course, is a double-bind: even to acknowledge these films exist makes it impossible to not take a pill. They’re written with an ‘I don’t buy it’ tone. Courtesy: Warner BrosĪ lot of reviews of the most recent film in the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections (2021), profess to take neither. In narrative terms, it’s red pill versus blue pill but, structurally, the choice is actually to take both pills – or neither. ![]() To enjoy the world of The Matrix, we must accept this conceit of an exit from the simulation, within what is obviously a pure extrusion of it. ‘Welcome to the desert of the real,’ as Morpheus says to Neo (Keanu Reeves) when he takes the red one, stealing a line from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981). ![]() ![]() My favourite meme from The Matrix film series (1999–ongoing) has an incredulous Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) ask: ‘What do you mean you took both pills?’ In the narrative arc, the blue pill takes you to the simulated world the red pill is your exit. ![]()
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