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This was already the case in the first movie, in which Trinity saves Neo’s life, thus allowing the plot to progress. In The Matrix, however, the character of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is at least as active as Neo. 6 Traditionally, Hollywood narratives are structured as male quests, in which the male protagonist progresses the plot while the female characters have more passive roles. In difference with Zizek, who in Resurrections sees-without-seeing the “old Hollywood formula of the production of a couple-matrix,” I would argue that the Matrix franchise has always sought to be an explicitly feminist narrative. In order to reclaim the red pill, the franchise could just stick to its story line. Such an argument with the alt right also wasn’t necessary. “Lana decided that she did not want to give any credence to that position, even a semblance of dialogue with that.” 5

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In an interview Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell (who co-authored Resurrections together with Lana Wachowski, who directed solo) stated: “We talked about … things like the Red Pill/Blue Pill trope or meme … One thing we were mindful of is how to … renew the meaning of Red Pill/Blue Pill.” But the authors wanted to avoid entering into an argument with right-wingers. In light of the red pill’s appropriation history, the announcement of Matrix Resurrections sparked the question: Will the film reclaim the red pill? The film’s authors did indeed ask themselves this question. In 2020 Elon Musk tweeted, “Take the red pill,” soon joined by Ivanka Trump: “Taken!” To which Lilly Wachowski responded, also per tweet: “Fuck both of you” ( Figure 2)Įxchange on Twitter between Musk, Trump, and Lilly Wachowski The red pill became such a popular right-wing meme during the Trump years that people started to hear about it even offline.” 4 Also online the red pill meme continued spreading. As Kaitlyn Tiffany writes for The Atlantic: “Taking a red pill still meant opting in to a new worldview, but the worldview in question was now less clearly defined: QAnon believers took red pills, and so did garden-variety misogynists, MAGA diehards who simply loathed and distrusted the media. In subsequent years, redpilling spread more widely. 3 Redpilling thus became a meme of the “Manosphere”: a collection of websites and Internet fora (4chan, 8chan) on which men’s rights activists, incels (involuntary celibates), and pick-up coaches (who train men to conquer women) found each other in their misogyny. In 2012 Reddit saw the birth of a misogynist community called The Red Pill, whose members had awoken to an apparent feminist threat. “Or you take the red pill” ( The Matrix, Warner Bros, 1999)įollowing the Matrix trilogy, Neo’s choice has inspired quite a few people, mostly white men, to “take the red pill.” The red pill meme was coined by Silicon Valley developer and anti-liberal blogger Curtis Yarvin, who in 2007 under the pen name Mencius Moldbug posted “The Case against Democracy: Ten Red Pills.” 2 In the 2010s the trope became a point of reference for the neo-fascist alt right subculture. Against Matrix ideology-according to which human and artificially intelligent sentients may live together in harmony-I propose a more grounded posthuman outlook on our control society, in which datafication slices people into animate things. In this article I embrace such progressive gender and sexuality politics, but at the same time I am critical of the film’s and the franchise’s overall ethereal transhumanist outlook on digitization. Now, in an explicitly feminist and queer narrative Matrix Resurrections reclaims the red pill. Lana and Lily Wachowski) the neo-fascist alt right movement hijacked this trope, turning it into an anti-feminist meme. Following the original Matrix trilogy (1999/2003/2003, dir. The fourth Matrix film is worth seeing, because it steals back the franchise’s famous red pill trope. But I disagree with Zizek that the film is “not worth seeing” (which is why Zizek-so he claims-wrote his review without having seen the film). Lana Wachowski) is “boringly postmodern and an ideological fantasy.” 1 Ultimately, the film’s longing for synergy between humans and machines resonates just too much with the transhumanist fantasy that also drives Big Tech: an accelerationist new American Dream that burns out people and the planet. Slavoj Zizek is right: Matrix Resurrections (2021, dir.

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