The concept propagated across the Internet, taken up by white supremacists and militant gamers alike by the Trump years, being “red-pilled” had come to connote just about any epiphany leading to a rightward political tilt on the part of the pill-taker.
Online pickup artists and other message-board misogynists were the first subculture to appropriate the notion of the red pill if you described yourself as “red-pilled,” it meant you’d accepted the supposed reality that the spread of feminism had rendered society anti-male. The scene in the first film where Neo chooses the red pill’s rude awakening over a blue pill that will return him to obliviousness now looks like a turning point in the history of American thought, although “thought” may not be exactly the right word. “The Matrix” is also like “Star Wars” in that we can’t avoid knowing about it, because we now live in a world that it helped shape. And, like “Star Wars,” it quickly became a pop-cultural myth unto itself, and a primary source to be stolen from.Ĭhances are you’re already aware of the original trilogy’s legacy, even if you’ve somehow avoided the films themselves. Practically every cool visual or narrative thing about it came from some other mythic or pop-cultural source, from scripture to anime. Like “Star Wars” before it, “The Matrix” was fundamentally recombinant, unprecedented in its joyful derivativeness. Neo spends the rest of the film and its two sequels bouncing back and forth between the simulated world, where he’s a leather-clad superhero increasingly unbound by physical laws, and the bleak real world, laid to waste by humanity’s long war with artificial intelligence. In “The Matrix,” from 1999, Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, who pops a mysterious red pill proffered by an equally mysterious stranger and promptly discovers that his so-called life as an alienated nineteen-nineties hacker with a cubicle-farm day job has, in fact, been a computer-generated dream, designed-I swear I’m going to get all this into a single sentence-to keep Anderson from realizing that he’s actually Neo, a kung-fu messiah destined to save a post-apocalyptic earth’s last living humans from a race of sentient machines who’ve hunted mankind to near-extinction.
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