The Matrix exports the cyberpunk operating system to a planetary audience, then loses control of its own metaphors

MAR 31 1999 · 12:00

Video: What is The Matrix? | The Matrix [Open Matte] Date: 1999-03-31 · Type: literature · Tags: wachowskis, the-matrix, red-pill, bullet-time, baudrillard, orange-pilling, visual-canon, metaphor-capture "You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." The Wachowskis — coming off the small noir *Bound* (1996) — convinced Joel Silver that they could synthesize Gibson's Sprawl, Oshii's visual formalism, and the bullet-time aesthetic of Hong Kong action cinema into a single $63 million Hollywood feature. *The Matrix* opened 31 March 1999, grossed $467 million worldwide, and won four Academy Awards. Its technical contribution (the "bullet-time" 360-degree photography rig) was absorbed into the visual language of commercial cinema within eighteen months. Its philosophical contribution was absorbed into something far stranger. The red pill/blue pill binary — choose to see reality as it is, or continue in comfortable illusion — is the film's load-bearing metaphor, and it was loose enough to be picked up by almost anyone who needed a vocabulary for claiming that they, uniquely, had escaped false consciousness. By 2012 it was circulating in manosphere forums as a metaphor for misogynist "awakening." By 2015 it was standard alt-right vocabulary. By 2017 the crypto community had reappropriated the color — "orange-pilling," the act of converting someone to Bitcoin — with a directness that was either ironic or amnesiac depending on who you asked. Lilly Wachowski, in a 2020 interview, noted what she thought about the red pill's adoption by Elon Musk and the right. The film's acknowledged intellectual debts are the Specter archive in miniature: *Neuromancer*, *Ghost in the Shell*, Grant Morrison's *The Invisibles*, and Jean Baudrillard's *Simulacra and Simulation* (hollow-booked on Neo's shelf). The cypherpunks had read all of the above. The film was the moment all of that became common cultural knowledge, which is to say the moment it stopped being a secret. Facts • Released 31 March 1999 (U.S.), 7 May 1999 (UK). Directors: Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Budget: $63 million; gross: ~$467 million. • Academy Awards (March 2000): Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing. • Primary acknowledged influences: Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell (1995), The Invisibles, Simulacra and Simulation. • Wachowskis showed Oshii's Ghost in the Shell to Joel Silver as visual proof-of-concept. • Red pill trajectory: Wachowskis 1999 → manosphere ~2012 → alt-right ~2015 → 'orange-pilling' Bitcoin community ~2017–ongoing. Primary Documents • The Matrix — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix • The Matrix: how the Wachowskis changed sci-fi — BFI — https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/matrix-wachowskis-keanu-reeves