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The Red Pill: The Matrix’s Narrative of accepting yourself!

An editorial by Azzam Abdur-Rahman A less sad thought but one that dawned on me as I have rewatched The Matrix like a thousand times in my life; as the directors careers and lives changed the films grew mode subversive and fascinating. When I saw it as a kid it was the coolest movie. It was the distillation of action films as a whole into this Uber film, blending Hong Kong martial arts, wild gun fights and sci-fi into a wild miasma of entertainment. Now, it screams to be a film about what it means to be trapped in a world where you feel like you wear a facade to survive. That your true self sits just beneath the surface and until you accept that you will slowly die in madness. But getting free comes at a cost, a cost when you consider that you are now alienated from the world you hated. One that has comforts and is the devil you know. It become a violent scary world that leaves you surrounded by a surrogate family who is there for you but you still miss that original warm bath. It’s hard to ignore the coming out and transitioning of it when you know both the directors are Trans-Women and made the film before transitioning. It isn’t subtle but as an adult with many teams, non-gender conforming people in and around my life it gives me a wholesome sense of joy that a film about struggling with feeling yourself has gunfights. What is less fun, what is less sensible is how people with right wing ideals view the ideas of the matrix on a broken macro level, the film isn’t about getting free from tyranny of some faceless machine. It’s about opening yourself up accepting what you know to be true and frowning stronger for yourself. The Red Pill isn’t some grand conspiracy. It isn’t conservatives talking about Qanon or broken ideals of what this nation was built on. So you can get why the director of this film fucking hates that her work is used as some basic bitch verbiage of joining a cult like political belief. These people misunderstand the Matrix. Hell even Patton Oswalt misunderstands Cypher. Cypher can’t handle the social isolation of who he is at his soul, it makes him angry. It makes him violent because he has been told what he is, is wrong. Being free came at a price and he misses the warm bath. He is someone who rejects LGBTQ after acknowledging they were one and supporting things like camps for “fixing people” and “programs” you can’t go back. Cypher can never be whatever his dead name is again no matter how much he wants. I know this is long and wild but these thoughts I believe are what continue to help this film have legs in our world. The 90’s had tons of hacker painted action films but none remain relevant beyond fashion. The Matrix does because it is living art. It’s meaning and subtext and grown more dense and in someways heart warming as time as gone one. So if you read this and you transitioned becoming you truest self. You are NEO. You are the ONE. You will bring balance to your world and you can fight off the agents and the machines telling you to sit in your battery sack with a name that doesn’t represent you.

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