Higher Meanings: Trans Metaphor

On December 21, 2021 (the day before The Matrix Resurrections was released in the U.S.), The BBC published a news story: The Matrix is a 'trans metaphor', Lilly Wachowski says.

The article states that the films' "original intention" was to serve as this metaphor. Some people are taking this to mean that the Wachowskis actually put this metaphor into the movies. I take this statement differently. I believe the Wachowskis wanted to put the metaphor in, but because "the world wasn't quite ready" (as Lilly also stated), they didn't, or at least not to the degree they would have liked. Instead, they put in little tiny references, such as a minor character named Switch who doesn't make it past the first movie and who is apparently a man in the real world but a woman in the Matrix. I say "apparently" because very few people (certainly not myself) pick up on this on their own by watching the movie, even when they watch it 10 times. I only first incorporated Switch's transgender identity into this website years ago when I read the theory in a forum, and it made sense to me. It was so inconsequential to the meaning of the movie that I put it at the very end of a webpage that I consider a sort of "Easter egg" on this website. (It's only "sort of" an Easter egg because there are two places on this website, including right here, that explicitly direct the user to find it by clicking on the title bar.) I did not update what I wrote about Switch when the transgender metaphor news came out. What you see there now is what I originally wrote a decade or more ago.

Supposing the three movies were to be reinterpreted this way, this new interpretation contradicts much of what we had already learned from past interviews, not to mention somehow eluding many critics and fans who have gone far out of their way looking for higher meanings, metaphors, allegories and hidden meanings in the Matrix movies over the past two decades.

First, the Wachowskis are on record (in an interview with fans in a chat room) saying essentially that any interpretation of the movies that is genuinely felt by the audience member is valid:

In fact, in a 2012 interview with the AV Club, the Wachowskis explicitly state that the Matrix trilogy is created with the explicit intention of not telling people what to think about the movies:

Even more explicitly, the liner notes of The Ultimate Matrix Collection Blu-Ray set (2008) includes an introduction written by the Wachowskis, in which they say:

Second, what point of view, metaphor, philosophy, religion, etc. is not portrayed in the movies? To be clear, I'm not just talking about little references here and there such as the license plate of Smith's car in the beginning of the second movie, or the Biblical names of the hovercrafts. I'm using a much higher bar than that. I'm talking about major themes that are established in the first movie and that are robustly present throughout all three movies on a level that is so obvious, nobody can deny it.

The biggest example would be getting people to think about whether we are (ourselves) in a Matrix or some kind of dream world. Many very smart people today do believe that it is mathematically most probable (as in 99.999999% or more certain) that we are currently living in a simulation, including Elon Musk. I don't know what to think about that, but the point is, the Wachowskis very successfully get everyone who has seen these movies to at least entertain this thought. There is no bigger theme in the Matrix movies than this theme. Other examples of major themes would be the Christian parallel with Neo (a mathematical Jesus), the constant struggle between fate and choice, the role that purpose, power and control play in society, the path seeking Buddhist enlightenment, and way too many more to list.

The Wachowskis affirm this rhetorical question in the same interview, in an overwhelming way:

In fact, the Wachowskis did such an incredible job of putting so many major themes into the movies, that I would argue they have something in common with the Internet. Virtually anything you can think of has an Internet website devoted to it, and likewise, virtually any major theme you can find in any other movie or work of literature can be found in the Matrix movies. This makes forming new symbolic / allegoric connections not only possible, but even inevitable.

So, in that sense, I agree. It's a Baudrillard allegory, a Carroll allegory, Jesus allegory, a Descartes/Putnam allegory, a Popper allegory, a Kant allegory, a Zhuangzi allegory, a Buddhism allegory, a math allegory, a computer allegory, and maybe if we try really hard to see it, a trans allegory.

Two Nails in the Coffin

In a 2021 Netflix video, Lilly doesn't know "...how present my transness was in the background of my brain as we were writing" the Matrix. This reinforces that while this may have been a wish, a state of mind... an unrealized desire... it was not the reality of what got recorded onto the actual film. It didn't make it into the movies on any kind of grand scale.

Even Keanu Reeves himself says in a Variety interview (Aug 2020):

This is striking since Keanu Reeves was asked by the Wachowskis to read three books: Simulacra and Simulation (Jean Baudrillard), Out of Control (Kevin Kelly) and Evolution Psychology (Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarate), before he could even open up the script. It seems to me that the Wachowskis went way above and beyond what directors normally do in preparing the lead role to understand what the movie was all about, and yet they said nothing to him about what they say now was the main allegorical idea behind the movie.

My Thoughts

The BBC writes in the article as its subheading, "The Matrix films are about being transgender, the trilogy's co-director says." I think there is some play with words here. What does it mean for a film to be "about" a thing? Are we talking about the plot? No, the Matrix is "about" humans trying to escape from a computer simulation prison. Are we talking about major themes that everyone sees on their own? Clearly not. Are we talking about little symbols and hints here and there? If so, that would hardly qualify usage of the word "about." Are the movies "about" transgenderism? That is a leap that my mind cannot make.

I can understand and empathize with the Wachowskis wanting to make everyone see what these movies are about to them. People see what they want to see. Some people in the trans community saw the red/blue pills as hormone pills, and the "splinter in the mind" could perhaps refer to gender dysphoria, a rare mental disorder. But this isn't a major theme. The pills, the splinter, and Switch are mere elements, much like the white rabbit, backdoors or a literal "bug" placed in Neo's abdomen. Original intent or not, the movies are what they are.

It's certainly interesting to know what the Wachowskis would have wanted the movies to be about had it not been that "the corporate world wasn't ready" (in Lilly's words) for the message they wished to send. While there is a hint of that in the movies, most of what is "in" the movies is everything else, from religion to philosophy. For myself, my friends, family, fans, and literally every other fan/critic website I've seen on the Matrix movies, the movies are the same today as they were before this new news came out. The trans allegory was apparently the original intention, but this intention did not manifest in reality.

What's The Matrix about? Two decades ago, it was about "what a person gets out of the movie," and it still is.

Matrix Resurrections

I assumed M4 would present a prominent trans theme. I was surprised that the trans theme was nearly as subtle and neutral as in the first three movies, with only a few small references here and there. What's more, there are even a couple scenes that appear to frame the trans theme in a negative light, since the concept of binarism carries negative connotation within the trans community, and yet it is the villain who uses non-binarism to reinforce the lies that have been fed to Neo:

As neutral/vague as most references are, and with references like this that even seem to go in the other direction, it is feasible for some to even see M4 as a trans backlash metaphor. To clarify for those who don't quite understand this, I will relay a couple of stories that coincidentally come straight from the corporate culture of computer programming.

In a one-week tech industry seminar a friend of mine was recently required to go through as part of his employment, one of many activities he had to complete that week was to indicate where he was on a "male/female spectrum." The spectrum's endpoints were faded into nothing, and he and his coworkers were all told that "nobody is 100% male or female." Before that, they had been told that it would be considered "transphobic" for anyone to consider themselves 100% male or 100% female. Evidently, this Diversity-Inclusion-Equity training workshop was forcing everyone to declare that they are non-binary, even if they didn't agree. One person asked where "manly man" fit on the spectrum which prompted many to laugh; he was called into HR minutes later because this joke was creating an environment of "toxic masculinity." Two years ago, the same friend working for the same company was required to pick a pronoun other than the one he identifies with, and spend the entire day insisting that everyone else use that pronoun, correcting them when they use the wrong one. Even more recently, the employees were all given a test apparently used by psychologists to determine what percentage male/female a person is. According to my friend and all of the coworkers he works closely with, the test was rigged in order to guarantee the outcome that nobody is declared 100% male or 100% female. My friend was declared to be more than 20% female because of various nonsense reasons, such as his inability to name all of the players on his favorite sports team. Later, the company told all employees that they needed to adopt the pronouns assigned to them by the test and put them on LinkedIn, and after employees complied, LinkedIn put pride flags in the signatures of all complying employees.

During the Neo/Smith fight scene in M4, we also have this dialogue:

In this scene, not only is Neo's arch-rival promoting the nature and truth of binary existence along with a bunch of other truths, we even have the protagonist agreeing with him.

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