The Matrix co-creator has apparently made her peace with absolute morons misreading her work.
The Matrix was always going to attract a wide range of critical interpretations. For all the gunfire and kung fu, it’s a big, dense philosophical text (whether it’s a successful one is left up for debate) that invites deep digging. Unfortunately, some of the people digging deep are pretty dense themselves, leading to the film’s concept of “taking the red pill” to be adopted by the right as a metaphor for… I dunno, the moment your soul dies or something. But, fair’s fair, it also led to one of my favourite exchanges in the history of the internet:
Great stuff. Ya love ta see it.
However, in the five years since that five star tweet, Lilly Wachowski, who co-wrote and co-directed the Matrix trilogy with her sister, Lana, has mellowed just a tad.
Wachowski was recently on the podcast So True with Caleb Hearon while filming her upcoming movie Trash Mountain in Chicago, and described how she’d become more philosophical about how others took in her body of work.
“You have to let go of your work,” Wachowski said. “People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it. I look at all of the crazy, mutant theories around the Matrix films and the crazy ideologies that those films helped create and I just go, ‘What are you doing? No! That’s wrong!’ But I have to let it go to some extent. You’re never gonna be able to make absolutely every person believe what you initially intended.”
Wachowski went on to say that such repurposing was inevitable because, in her view, “…right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything.
“They appropriate left-wing points of view and they mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own to obfuscate what the real message is. This is what fascism does. And so, of course, that’s going to happen.”
Which is a depressing thought, but a hard on to argue with. You can watch the whole interview here:
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