Lilly Wachowski on Right-Wing Misinterpretations of ‘The Matrix’: ‘You Have to Let Go of Your Work’

During a recent appearance on the “So True with Caleb Hearon” podcast, co-director Lilly Wachowski was asked about certain right-wing groups attaching their ideologies to her 1999 sci-fi masterpiece “The Matrix.” Wachowski said she’s unbothered by conservative misinterpretations and knows how to separate herself from her films once they’re released to the public.

“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it,” Wachowski said. “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.”

“The Matrix,” specifically the iconic “blue pill or red pill” scene, is the most famous example of the film being appropriated by the right. In the scene, Keanu Reeves’ Neo must take the red pill in order to be freed from the Matrix. In the political context, “red pilled” is a term for someone who has “woken up” to the truth about society and often aligns with radical far-right ideology.

Wachowski has previously explained that the “original intention” of “The Matrix” was to be a transgender allegory. Even so, she said she’s unsurprised the right has latched on to the film since “right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything.”

She added, “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.”