The best way to understand the broken, crazed, indulgent filmography of the Wachowski’s is as a quest to make the Matrix movie the Matrix would never make.
Time.
Is money.
And in the cold unfeeling eyes of Hollywood a “movie” is just a business strategy to convert two hours of your time into shareholder value.
Jupiter Ascending failed at that task. Spectacularly. It made $184 million dollars globally, but cost roughly the GDP of a small island nation to produce, generating such a severe loss for Warner Bros. that as punishment eight senior executives were mashed into time milk.
Watch the full video essay on YouTube
Why? Because it’s garbage. It is beautiful, glistening, high-fructose hilarious garbage. It’s the kind of movie that isn’t trying to make you laugh, yet leaves you wheezing at the screen asking, “Why? Who allowed this? Was everyone on set huffing industrial-grade furniture polish?”
Why make Mila Kunis a toilet cleaner? She’s about as believable in the role as Elijah Wood as He-Man.
Sure it’s the low origin for her galactic scale heroine. But depicting that would require that Mila do something called acting.
Imagine the thing called ACTING. Then imagine it’s anti-matter opposite. Anti-acting.
That is Mila Kunis screen presence.
Why is Eddie Redmayne attempting to keep a very dark secret from his own vocal cords? He spends half the film whispering like a haunted Victorian doll and the other half screaming like he just stepped on a Lego.
Why is Sean Bean…oh wait it’s a paycheque. Even Sean, a famously low effort actor, has never turned in a lazier performance.
Why is 78% of Jupiter Ascending’s screentime just an indecipherable sludge of brown CGI?
In the future people will just assume this is all AI slop, because it’s that “generic scifi” look, but back when Midjourney cost $2 million dollars a minute.
Yet, buried in this sea of CGI vomit is this kind of thing:
Jupiter Ascending fails as a mechanism to convert your time into Warner Bros shareholder capital. But.
It’s Redpilled.
“Bro, Americans will believe anything but the objective reality that capitalism as an economic organisation of society is responsible for exactly the things they are complaining about.”
Hasan Piker
There’s a reason the Redpill is red.
If you know, you know.
It is one of the great ironies of our age that people who claim to be a “thing” are almost always the exact opposite of that thing.
People with a Masters in Creative Writing struggle to write a compelling grocery list.
People who claim to be Woke are the least awake to their own internal dumpster-fire personalities.
And anyone—ABSOLUTELY ANYONE—who claims to be “Redpilled” is guaranteed to be the most Bluepilled motherfucker you have ever met in your life.
Taking the Redpill today is like selecting from an artisanal chocolate box of delusions.
The Manosphere offers to awaken you from the lie of feminism and unleash your inner Apex Predator Alpha-Wolf when
really
it’s not that girl on OnlyFans who’s keeping you down, you’re both victims of the system that turns your desire into a revenue stream.
The Alt-Right made you believe you’re fighting the Cathedral of the liberal establishment because you read a 4000 word blog post by a man who thinks this mid-life crisis biker jacket is a look. When
really
Being a Neoreactionary is just being an old reactionary. You want monarchy back because you think the king will be your mate. When really he’ll have you cleaning the cess pitt.
The Cryptobros told you fiat currency was why you can’t pay the rent. But they forgot to mention their imaginary monopoly money is directly owned by oligarchs.
The Transhumanists. You too can live forever if you buy their $99 a month supplement regime.
The Heterodox intellectuals and Contrarian thinkers. The Qanon conspiracists. The Flat Earthers. The Alien abductees. You people who think Joe Rogan is a deep state media outlet.
You aren’t fucking “Red Pilled”
Yet
For anyone who actually, genuinely doesn’t know, the Red Pill originates from the Matrix.
Neo after a lifetime seeking the Matrix is offered a choice.
What follows is arguably the greatest moment of pure science fiction in cinema. Neo’s awakening in the goo pod is the essence of what critic Darkko Suvin calls…
COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT
…a moment ago you believed reality was a green tinted city, now you see reality is pink tinted goo. Crucially, reality has not changed. Your cognition of reality has been estranged.
“Cognitive estrangement is a literary technique, primarily in science fiction, that makes the familiar world seem strange and new, forcing readers to re-examine their own reality through a “lens” of unfamiliar settings or concepts.”
It’s this cognitive estrangement, the transformation of how we perceive our reality, that in pop culture has come to be symbolised by the Red Pill.
Did you believe in democracy until the internet showed you both parties were masks for the same oligarchy?
Were you under the illusion that a BigMac was actually food but now realise it’s just agricultural waste products in a bun?
Did a tropical island for billionaire sex perverts sound like a conspiracy theory until recently?
The Red pill became one of the most potent symbols in 21st century pop culture because the condition of being Red pilled is now a constant.
Having your cognition estranged is table stakes for life in this century.
But how do we know our new perception, or new political perspective, or nutrition plan is truer than our old…delusion?
What if a year ago you went down an internet rabbit hole and discovered a rebel cell of religious fanatics who have convinced you it’s ok to kill the non-believers?
The first Matrix movie is a big dose of Blue pill, painted Red.
What The Matrix really captures, as we share the exhilaration and self-belief of Neo taking flight to Rage Against the Machine’s Wake-up, is the Dunning-Kruger of the freshly Red pilled.
I know you’re out there. I can hear the hum of the 5G towers now. I know you’re afraid. You’re afraid of a man who’s finally figured out that the “birds” on the power lines are just surveillance drones charging their batteries.
I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end—mostly because my Wi-Fi is being throttled by the Deep State. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin.
I’m going to hang up this phone—because I’m pretty sure the signal is scrambling my DNA—and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them why the “moon” looks a little too much like a projection screen on Tuesdays.
I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without Mandatory fluoride, Chemtrails ruining a perfectly good sunset, and Globalist lizard-people in high-waisted suits.
A world where anything is possible, as long as you have enough crypto and a Faraday cage in your basement. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you… whether or not you’ve done your own research.
Because The Matrix is the movie the Matrix makes to keep you in the Matrix.
The Matrix is Plato’s Cave. The most famous philosophical allegory. We are chained in a cave looking at shadows cast on the wall. But we can awaken from the matrix to the light of true
reality.
But what if there is no reality to awaken to? What if there are only more shadows? What if our cave is just inside another cave within a cave within…more caves?
What if beyond reality is hyperreality?
The Matrix puts on the table Simulacra and Simulation, the iconic 1981 work of postmodern philosophy by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
To introduce the philosophy of the hyperreal.
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland”
Jean Baudrillard
But the Matrix isn’t really about the hyperreal. Instead The Matrix tells us we can wake up from the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave to a real reality.
But Baudrillard’s hyperreal destroys that possibility.
The digital age that Baudrillard saw coming, of computer imagery, mass marketing, the internet, algorithmic advertising, video game addiction, politics-as-reality-tv and much more.
Overwrites reality with simulation, and replaces once real objects and experiences with simulacra.
Consider Häagen-Dazs, an invented word to persuade American consumers you are eating Danish ice-cream.
Or Donald Trump. A reality-tv star playing a billionaire who hoodwinked MAGA voters into making him a billionaire
Or AI, Large Language Models, a statistical mashup of the internet that spits out a pure simulacrum of truth.
Tradwives. Star Trek. Bitcoin. Jordan Peterson.
Our world is choking on third order simulacra of people and things that were once real.
Welcome to the desert of the postmodern.
Where the experience of awakening from the simulation…
…is just another simulation.
A product. A commodity. Giving you the subjective Red pill experience is a strategy used by gurus, grifters, life coaches, religions, self-help writers, political campaigns, governments and youtube video essayists.
To convert your time into money, into clicks, into power.
Jean Baudrillard hated The Matrix because it is a simulacum of the movie that might actually awaken you to the Matrix, offering a simplistic Platonic allegory instead of the complexity of hyperreality.
But the makers of The Matrix were themselves shaken awake by Baudrillard’s refusal to participate in the sequels, and his insult that they had made the movie the Matrix would make about the Matrix.
And the best way to understand the broken, crazed, indulgent filmography of the Wachowskis…
…and understand why Jupiter Ascending is both a flaming garbage pile and a dose of true Redpilled magnificence…
…is as a quest to make the Matrix movie the Matrix did NOT want them to make.
The first thing you notice watching Bound, the Wachowski’s first movie, back to back with The Matrix…
…is that the Wachowski’s had a type.
Gina Gerson is the prototype that became the Trinity archetype played by Carrie-Anne Moss The androgynous dark haired beauty, with the inverted triangle shoulder to hip ratio.
It’s going to become a significant part of the Wachowski’s story that Lana in 2012 and Lilly in 2016 both announced their transgender identities, and Bound is their movie most overtly centred on gender.
The term “gender performativity” was introduced by the philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble.
And the Wachowski’s 1996 debut movie is an examination of the forces; social, economic, political that keep us “bound” within performative gender identities.
And it’s also cinematic erotica from the straight-to-DVD era, before the internet made pornography ubiquitous, that very much exploits and reinforces the very gender performativity it also critiques.
And this becomes the key characteristic of all the Wachowski’s movies.
The critique of ideas simultaneously being exploited for entertainment. Capitalist blockbusters that critique capitalism. Movies that show you the Matrix to keep you in the Matrix.
All, except one.
It’s self-evident that the Matrix sequels, Revolutions and Reloaded, are an attempt to answer Baudrillard’s critique.
While still being effects driven kungfu action blockbuster extravaganzas.
The only bearable way to watch these movies is the Dezionzed edit, which you can simulate by skipping the painfully bad scenes in Zion.
Zion is basically like being told the trust fund kids who showed up for Fyre festival will save the world.
Even if it was true, everyone else would rather die.
And even if you can ignore or skip Zion, Matrix Reloaded is structurally crippled by the decision to make it a video game tie-in with Enter the Matrix…
…a kamikaze attempt to bootstrap the career of Jada Pinkett-Smith as Niobe, an acting talent only slightly less compelling than Mila Kunis.
But if you can mentally reconstruct a decently edited movie, and somehow purge the cringe “orgasm cake” from your memory, the Matrix sequels are…half a great movie.
That movie climaxes as Neo confronts the Architect of The Matrix.
The most pertinent but least relevant question to ask about the Architect is why he’s Sigmund Freud. And you’ll find an entire video about that elsewhere on yhe Science Fiction channel.
The Architect is the answer to the unresolved equation of the original Matrix. Neo’s Red pilled rebellion is not a true awakening to reality, but is in fact just another control mechanism within the Matrix, an awakening only to the complexity of hyperreality.
Great.
But instead of reckoning with the hyperreal contradiction, instead of tracking what we are to do as humans when we realise there is no way out of the hyperreal trap we find ourselves in.
The Matrix sequels double down in completely the opposite direction. Neo is actually Digital Jesus and the next couple of hours are a mess of junk CGI…
…as Neo, who is garbed as a Catholic seminarian the whole time, beats up Satan Smith.
Under the tension of being movies the Matrix would make about the Matrix, while trying desperately not to be, the Matrix sequels simply
implode.
Science fiction is an art form born in short stories.
And The Matrix as science fiction has some of its best ideas when liberated from the blockbuster movie format.
The Animatrix main contribution to the mythos is that machines might be making a perfectly ethical and good choice to subdue or destroy humanity.
Man’s inhumanity to man is the defining quality of human history. War. Murder. Slavery.
And humanity, of course, subjects sentient machines to exactly the same exploitation as sentient humans.
In a shocking moment of cognitive estrangement, the machine’s sociopathic hatred of the human becomes logical, perhaps even a good thing.
Maybe the real Red pill is understanding that human reality was never all that.
MORPHEUS vs GROYPER
INT – NIGHT
Thunder rumbles. Rain pours down outside the windows of a dark, decrepit room.
MORPHEUS sits in a leather armchair. Opposite him sits GROYPER. Groyper is slouching so low he is almost horizontal. He crunches loudly on a chip.
MORPHEUS
(Dramatic pause)
Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life.
GROYPER
(Mouth full)
Is it indigestion? Because I ate like, four burritos before I logged on.
MORPHEUS
(Ignoring him)
It is the feeling that there is something wrong with the world. You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Morpheus opens his palms.
Left Hand: A shiny RED PILL.
Right Hand: A glowing BLUE PILL.
MORPHEUS
All I offer is the truth.
GROYPER
Okay, quick Q. What does the Red pill do?
MORPHEUS
You will join the resistance. You will fight the machines in the scorched desert of the real world. You will eat protein sludge and sleep in cold steel bunkers.
GROYPER (Grimacing)
Cringe. Too much cardio. Blue pill.
MORPHEUS
The Blue Pill returns you to the simulation. A prison for your mind. A world of illusion.
GROYPER
Does the illusion have 5G and those little mini-pizzas?
MORPHEUS
Yes, but they are false. The taste is merely electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
GROYPER
Bro, if the electrical signals taste like pepperoni, I literally do not care.
(He reaches out)
Gimme the Blue.
MORPHEUS
(Retracting hand)
GROYPER
Morpheus, my guy. Look at you. You’re wearing sunglasses indoors at night. You look stressed. I’m trying to go back to my stream. I was about to hit Gold rank. Blue pill. Now.
MORPHEUS
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
GROYPER
Blue Pill!
MORPHEUS
(Opens Left Hand – Red Pill)
You take the Red Pill: You wake up. You see the truth. You will see the global supply chains built on suffering. You will understand that your clothes are made by sorrow, your food is poison, and the government is a lizard-run Ponzi scheme designed to harvest your anxiety. You will feel the crushing weight of systemic injustice every waking second.
GROYPER
(Deadpan)
Yikes. That sounds super toxic.
MORPHEUS: You will learn the entire global economy is a hallucination. The banks are bankrupt. Your savings are imaginary numbers.
GROYPER: So you’re saying my credit card debt isn’t real? Based.
MORPHEUS: The government is recording every private moment of your life through your webcam.
GROYPER: Hope they like watching a grown man cry while eating Bagel Bites.
MORPHEUS: Every news station is owned by one conglomerate script-feeding you lies to keep you docile.
GROYPER: That’s why I get all my news from Asmongold.
MORPHEUS: You are living in a pod full of goo, naked, bald, and hooked up to tubes.
GROYPER: Free rent, free pool. You’re really bad at making this sound bad.
MORPHEUS
(Desperate)
Look. If you take the Red Pill, you become a hero. You save humanity.
GROYPER
Okay, but consider this: If I take the Blue Pill, I can be a level 90 Warlock and I don’t have to wear that itchy wool sweater everyone in Zion wears. Seriously, look at your shirt. It has holes in it. You live in a sewer, Morpheus. You are a sewer rat.
MORPHEUS
It is a ship! The Nebuchadnezzar!
GROYPER
It’s a sewer ship. You eat slime. I eat steak.
MORPHEUS
THE STEAK IS NOT REAL!
GROYPER
(Leans in close)
Does. It. Matter?
Morpheus freezes. He looks at the Red Pill in his hand. He looks at his tattered clothes. He looks at Groyper, who is inexplicably holding a bubble tea that materialized out of nowhere.
GROYPER
Come on, Morph. Join the vibes. We have air conditioning. We have cat videos. We have ignorance. It’s bliss, bro. It’s literally bliss.
Morpheus’s hand shakes. He looks at the Red Pill. He looks at the Blue Pill.
MORPHEUS
Does the Blue Pill have … HBO Max?
GROYPER
We got the bundle, fam.
Morpheus snatches the Blue Pill.
MORPHEUS
Blue pill me.
They fist bump.
FADE OUT.
I’m not going to say a lot about Speed Racer here.
Patrick H Willems makes a detailed case for the Wachowski’s fourth movie as the most important movie of the 21st century so far.
I’m just going to point out that Speed Racer is the story of a young man who discovers his heroic drive is, literally, just a hack exploited to power the public spectacle
of capitalism.
The Red pill is red for a reason.
In a shocking turn of events, Alan Moore was not happy with the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta.
And with good reason.
”It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country… It’s a thwarted and distorted 1980s Manhattan fantasy of asinine American liberal values.”
Alan Moore
Moore is widely hated for his negative critiques of adaptations of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and…well…not League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which everyone agrees was total shite.
But you have to remember that Alan Moore knows the score, and most “fans” are unconscious consumers, not ready to leave their goo pods, who will fight to defend the very system that entraps them.
And Moore writes to wake you up, not keep you immersed in the goo.
Even with a story as clearly revolutionary as V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis make decisions that replace revolution with a more palatable box office experience.
Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a story of two diametrically opposed ideologies. Fascism as the system of absolute submission to the power of the state, represented by the Norsefire regime…
…vs pure and absolute Anarchism, the complete liquidation of state power which is the goal of V.
By heavily insinuating that the state uses “false flag” terrorist attacks…
…to usher in fascist control of the people, the movie reflected George Dubya Bush era anxiety around new state powers like the Patriot Act.
The 2005 movie scripted by the Wachowski’s and directed by James Mcteague replaces the rise of anarchism…
…with the restoration of democracy.
In fairness to V for Vendetta, it did literally flood the world with a second potent cultural symbol after the Red pill.
V masks, the face of Guy Fawkes, as styled by David Lloyd, were mass-produced for the movie.
And adopted by the Occupy Wall Street anarchist protest movement that followed the 2009 financial crisis.
I joined the Occupy London protest and visited Occupy Oakland in 2011. With all due respect to my thirty something self, and the people I met and spoke with.
We weren’t prepared for the reality of anarchist revolution. We wanted a fairer deal under capitalism.
Not the absolute dissolution of the state that Alan Moore depicts in V.
We wanted just a taste of revolution, not a full dose of the Red pill.
English socialists have a secret motto.
Semper Eadem was the latin motto of Elizabeth I of England, meaning “always the same”.
The city of Leicester where I lived for many years, a Labour stronghold and a former industrial capital devastated by globalisation, has long held Semper Eadem as its motto.
Nothing changes.
Socialists don’t even need to subvert the motto. Power is always the same, however much it might appear to change over time.
Cloud Atlas by David Michell is a novel about the archetypes that travel through time. Personalities, societies, and stories, that reoccur from the ancient past into the future.
Cloud Atlas the movie is a more specific tale of specific people who reincarnate across time. Halle Berry and Tom Hanks occurring again and again in new facial prosthetics never stops being a little bit absurd.
But with Cloud Atlas, their first film in collaboration with David Michell, who also contributed to the final Matrix movie, the Wachowski’s for the first time come close to making a movie the Matrix would never make.
Cloud Atlas captures a singular idea. That power is the same, in every time and every age, power and our struggle against power never really changes.
And if you can grasp that you have finally swallowed a dose of the Red pill.
Balem Abrasax: My mother made me understand that every human society is a pyramid and that some lives will always matter more than others. It is better to accept this than to pretend it isn’t true.
Balem Abrasax: My mother… My mother taught me what was necessary to rule in this universe.
Jupiter Jones: By killing people?
Balem Abrasax: [throws up his hands] I create life! And I destroy it. Life in an act of consumption, Jupiter. To live is to consume. Now, the human beings on your planet are merely a resource waiting to be converted into capital. And this entire enterprise is just a small part in a vast and beautiful machine defined by evolution, designed to a single purpose… To create profit.
The Wachowski’s put the key to their philosophy into the mouths of prophets and mad men.
Morpheus’ revelation that the Matrix exists to turn the human into a Duracell.
(The original concept of human brains as the processing substrate for the Matrix is much stronger…but the battery is a potent symbol.)
Agent Smith explaining that the Matrix must make men suffer for us to accept it.
The Architect demonstrating that revolution against the machine is just another system within the machine.
And the Abrasax family forcing open our throats to make us swallow their pill.
The elites who rule over us. Who have always ruled over us. Be they kings, or capitalists, or immortal space lords, believe what Balem Abrasax believes.
They believe human society is always a pyramid that crushes life at the bottom.
They believe that to live is to consume. And that the value of other human life is as a resource to be turned into capital.
They believe that this is the inescapable truth of a vast and beautiful
machine.
And that their position at the top of the pyramid is determined by god…or the machine. Which ultimately are the same thing.
And this is the Blue pill.
The essence of the Blue pill is the belief that reality is a machine, that its power is irresistible. That we are not free to choose differently.
So it’s a bit of a shitter for the Abrasax clan and their ilk that Mummy Abrasax reincarnates to take the power back.
It’s a neat twist that Mila Kunis defeats the capitalist machine by reclaiming legal ownership of her property rights and then CHOOSING to make the world better.
If only our capitalist elites had such character.
Let’s state what Jupiter Ascending only implies. Mummy Abrasax was the most powerful being in the universe. The peak of the pyramid. The master of the machine.
And her existence was so horrifying she killed herself.
Even Eddie Redmayne’s Victorian doll villain hates himself.
The kings and capitalists of history hate you. But the only thing they hate more than you is themselves. They hate humanity. They are hate.
So Mommy Abrasax reincarnates as the lowliest toilet cleaner to learn about the one thing that can defeat the hate machine.
To take the Red pill is to awaken from the machine.
I disliked Matrix Resurrections when I first saw it. I wanted that Matrix experience again.
Because I’m far from immune to what The Matrix offers. From the ego trip. From the dream of being The One.
And I wasn’t alone. Matrix Resurrections was slated and hated on release because it fails at being a product to convert your time into capital.
The Matrix is the movie the Matrix makes to keep you in the Matrix because it functioned as a commodity that sells you a pre-packaged experience of being the One.
The Matrix gives you a series of timed dopamine hits, a measure of brain activity, and an experience of faux awakening.
It is a perfect mechanism to convert two hours of your time into shareholder value without ever disturbing you in your pink goo pod.
The Matrix offers you the Red pill but is in fact a dose of the Blue pill.
Because to take the Red pill you have to not be the One.
And the whole point of the fourth Matrix movie is to deny you the experience of being the One.
Keanu Reeves desperately swallowing more and more Blue pills is what legendary playwright Bertolt Brecht called a Gestus.
An exaggerated physical gesture which shows us the psychological reality of a character.
Far from wanting to escape The Matrix, Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson in Matrix Resurrections is desperately trying to stay in the Matrix.
Just like all of us.
Brecht was a Marxist theorist and creator, who critiqued the way theatre, cinema and culture at large provided a “spectacle” to distract the masses from the reality of capitalism.
Brecht therefore practised an Epic Theatre, that used specific techniques to disrupt the spectacle and force the audience to see that reality.
Whether deliberately or through a kind of co-evolution, Matrix Resurrections is like a text book in Brechtian theatre techniques.
Because Lana Wachowski, who returned solo for the task, is determined to make the Matrix movie that the Matrix would never make.
Matrix 4 repeatedly shatters the “fourth wall”, by literally placing us on a theatre stage with the original Matrix projected on a screen.
To constantly break us out of the immersive experience of watching a Matrix movie, to remind us that we are in the Matrix.
Matrix 4 is an anti-action movie, a resistance to what Brecht called “Culinary Theatre”. Instead of offering you one tasty action scene after another to snack on, Matrix 4 forces you out of consumer mode with anti-action, fight scenes that deliberately never deliver heroic release.
All of this is to achieve what Brecht called Verfremsdungseffekt, to make the familiar corporate entertainment brand of The Matrix
Strange again
Yes, Matrix 4 is deliberately broken as a way to get back to the profound cognitive estrangement we last experienced in that pivotal scene in Matrix 1
As a consumer experience to amuse pod people Matrix 4 fails, so that it can succeed as f*cking amazing science fiction.
THE ANALYST
The Analyst: Now, my predecessor loved precision. His Matrix was all fussy facts and equations. He hated the human mind. So he never bothered to realize that you don’t give a shit about facts.
The Analyst: It’s all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one in here.
The Analyst: And you people believe the craziest shit. Why? What validates and makes your fictions real? Feelings.
The Analyst: Here’s the thing about feelings. They’re so much easier to control than facts. Turns out, in my Matrix, the worse we treat you, the more we manipulate you, the more energy you produce. It’s nuts. I’ve been setting productivity records every year since I took over. And, the best part, zero resistance. People stay in their pods, happier than pigs in shit.
The Analyst: The key to it all? You. And her. Quietly yearning for what you don’t have, while dreading losing what you do.
The Analyst: For 99.9% of your race, that is the definition of reality. Desire and fear, baby.
The Analyst: The sheeple aren’t going anywhere. They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty.
Matrix 4 is the Matrix movie the Matrix did not want the Wachowski’s to make.
I think Jean Baudrillard would have liked it.
Because after a quarter century the Matrix franchise finally makes us swallow the Red pill.
We live in a system of power that controls how we think and what we believe.
We are told stories of being the One to distract us from recognising we are one of many.
And fantasies of awakening that are just more complex ways of staying asleep.
Even our desire for revolution can be repackaged and sold back to us as restoration.
Our heroic drives are just another weakness to be exploited.
And this system, call it slavery, feudalism or capitalism, has been the same for thousands and thousands of years.
The elite who sell their souls to this system for power, from kings to capitalists, hate you, only slightly less, than they hate themselves.
And the final insult is that this system is not an irresistible machine that can never be changed
This system is powerful only because
You like it
You choose it
And you can change it
Now you’re fuck*ng Red pilled!
Damien Walter 