[imagesource: The Matrix]

Since it debuted in 1999, just before the ‘new millennium’, The Matrix has become one of the most acclaimed and iconic sci-fi films of all time.

20 years later and people are still throwing the blue pill / red pill thing around.

Film critics have had a tendency to read the narrative as a critique of capitalism. Neo is a cog in a machine when he’s in the ‘real world’, forced to wear a suit and tie and bored out of his mind in a dull office space.

Then he takes the ‘red pill’ and finds out that he’s literally attached to a machine, the truth of the world is outside of anything that he could have imagined, and so on.

You know the plot. Everyone knows the plot – sort of.

Co-director of the film, Lilly Wachowski, recently participated in a Netflix documentary Disclosure which looks at the representation of transgendered people in television and the media.

Now she has revealed that there is a trans allegory running through The Matrix franchise that had to remain hidden until the world was ready for it, in an interview with Netflix Film Club:

Over to Esquire for a summary of the main points:

In the interview, Wachowski discusses how the arc of Switch, who is played by Belinda McClory in the film, was originally supposed to tie into The Matrix’s trans narrative.

Wachowski explained that Switch was first written to present as a man in the real world, and a woman in the Matrix. She added that it reflected where Lana and her own headspaces were at the time—the former privately transitioning a year after The Matrix’s debut.

Lilly and her sister Lana (below) are now writing the fourth instalment in the franchise, Matrix 4, set to debut on April 1, 2022.

“I don’t know how present my transness was in the background of my brain as we were writing it,” Wachowski said. “We were always living in a world of imagination.

Image: ET Live

That’s why I gravitated toward sci-fi and fantasy and played Dungeons and Dragons. It was all about creating worlds. It freed us up as filmmakers because we were able to imagine stuff at that time that you didn’t necessarily see onscreen.”

I’m keen to see how the allegory plays out in the fourth film.

[source:esquire]