For a lot of men, opening your eyes to this “reality” flipped the script. Here, the red pill came to stand in for the “truth” that – far from being a male-dominated world, as mainstream liberal feminist-inflected culture would have it – it is in fact the men who are worse off. Starting with the idea that the red pill would show you the truth about “how things really are”, the pill metaphor instead got taken up by the “manosphere”, that portion of the internet dedicated to all things masculinist, including pick-up artists, men’s-rights activists and even male separatists (known as MGTOW or “Men Going Their Own Way”, aiming to live without women). This was not what the dominant use of the “red pill” idea became. One of the characters, Switch, though, was originally written as a man in one world and a woman in another. Lilly Wachowski, who with her sister Lana directed the first three films, stated in 2020 that the films represented the transgender experience: this was “the original intention” of The Matrix, she said, but that at the time the corporate world “wasn’t ready for it”. It’s no wonder that in the original, Morpheus refers to the most druggy children’s book of all, Alice in Wonderland: “Take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” The trailer for Resurrections had for a soundtrack White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane’s superlative 1967 paean to this idea.īut since the franchise began in 1999, the red-pill metaphor in particular has run riot. Pills to make you high, pills to put you to sleep. There are pills for birth control, for blood pressure, for depression, for a headache. We really do, in fact, live in a pill culture. The new Matrix has kept the franchise’s “pill” theme alive: the website for the new film offers you the choice, once again, of red and blue. Whether we’re wondering whether we’re all brains in a vat, or bemoaning the misleading nature of the phenomenal world, or watching the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave rather than staring madly into the truth of the Sun, mankind has long suspected that what we see isn’t how it really is. Its fleeting properties disguise and mask the true nature of the absolute. Maya is an ancient idea in Hinduism and Buddhism with similar connotations to that of the Matrix (which in Middle English meant “womb”), namely that this world is an illusion. In the original 1999 film, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is offered by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) the choice between taking a blue pill and a red pill: the former will allow him to remain in ignorance in a dream-like simulation, while the latter will show him reality – how things really are. In the meantime, aspects of the original trilogy have spilled out all over our culture, and nothing more so than the idea of the “red pill”. The Matrix Resurrections follows The Matrix Revolutions, which came out in 2003 (almost two decades ago). The red pill would make him completely self-aware of the simulation he's in and, in theory, allow him to escape the manufactured reality.Another Matrix is upon us. On the other hand, the red pill would allow him to fully understand what the Matrix is and what the illusions were hiding about life outside the Matrix. Taking the blue pill would seemingly have no effect, as Neo would return to his normal life, having his mind altered to the state in which he was oblivious to the Matrix and any illusions throughout his life. Morpheus then gives him a choice between two pills, one red and one blue, that carry drastically different side effects. In the scene, The Matrix's main character Neo, played by John Wick's legendary Keanu Reeves, approaches an all-knowing man named Morpheus to gain some insight into the world around him. Even those who haven't seen any of the movies are likely to know about the red pill/blue pill scene that's been relentlessly memed for years. Related: The Barbie Movie May Have More In Common With Elf Than Just Will FerrellĪll these years later, The Matrix references are everywhere. While this general idea has been explored in recent utopia-focused dramas like Don't Worry Darling, the most well-known and beloved simulation movie was released in 1999 with The Matrix. Barbieland is like a simulated or manufactured existence, and it's so perfect that most of the diverse array of Barbies and Kens living there are oblivious. From the trailers and plot information released about the upcoming Barbie movie, it's fair to assume that Margot Robbie's Barbie is simply aware that her reality is off.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |