During a recent appearance on “So true with Caleb Hearonpodcast, co-director Lilly Wachowski she was asked about some of the right-wing groups attaching their ideology to her 1999 sci-fi masterpiece.”Matrix” Wachowski said she is not bothered by conservative misinterpretations and knows how to separate herself from her films once they are released.
“You have to let your work go. People will interpret it the way they interpret it,” Wachowski said. “I look at all the crazy, mutant theories around the Matrix movies and the crazy ideologies that those movies helped create and I just say, 'What are you doing?' No! This is wrong! But I have to let it go to some extent… You can never make absolutely every person believe what you originally intended.”
“The Matrix”, especially the cult one “blue pill or red pill“, is the most famous example of right-wing appropriation of the film. In this scene, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, must take the red pill to free himself from the Matrix. In a political context, “red pill” is a term for a person who has become “woke” to the truth about society and often supports radical far-right ideology.
The Wachowskis previously explained that the “original intent” of The Matrix was to transgender allegory. Despite this, she said she wasn't surprised that the right was seizing on the film, since “right-wing ideology is appropriating absolutely everything.”
She added: “They appropriate leftist points of view and mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own, to obfuscate the true message. That's what fascism does. And that, of course, will happen.”
