The red pill leads to reality and the struggle against the false world, and the blue pill allows him to continue on in literal and metaphorical slumber. Morpheus, the leader of the rebels, finds Neo in the matrix and offers him two pills. The pill theory that now politicizes The Matrix can be traced to the movie’s pivotal moment of choice. In The Matrix, your body is the measure of true reality, and the key to invincibility is the understanding that the boundaries of life exist only in your mind. And beyond the shared androgyny of the movie’s stars, the Wachowskis expand the queer potential of their story by drawing attention to the physical experience of life as an embodied being. This team of tender cohorts includes a love interest played by Carrie-Anne Moss, whose pale and disaffected beauty is maybe intentionally rivaled onscreen only by that of Keanu Reeves. Neo’s power as the predestined hero of the new world is unleashed by the support and love of a diverse community of rebels. Neo frees himself from the glossy world of ad-friendly images to enter the true steampunky future, where the necessities of life are more base and presumably more real. Baudrillard, in typical philosopher fashion, refused all association with the blockbuster upon its release, but the seeds of his social critique remain visible if you want to see them. Prior to filming, they requested that their star Keanu Reeves read Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a work of postmodern philosophy that claims society’s reliance on mass media has trapped humanity in a copy world made of relentless symbolism. Watching The Matrix with the lives and work of the genre-bending Wachowski sisters in mind, their influences and their intentions don’t seem so far off from their queer pulp work on Bound or Sense 8.
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