“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.” Laurence Fishbourne’s Morpheus poses these iconic options to Keanu Reeves’ Neo in perhaps the crucial scene of the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, the 1999 science-fiction action masterpiece that has become a rosetta’s stone for cultural interpretation in the 25-plus years since its release.
According to Morpheus, the blue pill will keep Neo in the normal world, where he’ll be just like every other person, asleep to the truth. If he takes the red pill, he’ll awaken to truth in all its shocking terror and glory. The conceit of choosing between the binary options for approaching reality—the blue pill of ignorance and the red pill of awakening—is brilliant in its simplicity. In that vivid simplicity, it has become an allegory for almost every transcendent awakening that confronts people in the modern world. It speaks to all manners of transcendence as defined by the viewer, thus, epitomizing spiritual conversion in our modern, atomized times.
Calling The Matrix the definitive conversion narrative since 1999 is not hyperbole. The film anticipated the ways that digital realities, fragmented politics, and consumer capitalism have atomized our understanding of human reality and left us stranded in the 21st century, grasping in the dark for a semblance of the real. In the film, this is the result of machine overlords who have trapped humanity in a digital simulation of the world. The red pill is the key to waking up from the digital to the real. But the meaning of the film, the import of the “red pill” and the conversion to a true understanding of “the real,” is subjective. What is the reality we are waking up to? What is the metaphorical meaning of the film’s narrative? It’s all for us to decide. The film is a litmus test for the viewer and a call for awakening and liberation, literalized in the end credits song by Rage Against the Machine exhorting the viewer to “Wake Up.”
What does the red pill wake us up to in The Matrix? Is it the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, as a literal reading of the science fiction premise would have you think? Is it a feminist conspiracy against men in western culture, as purveyors of /TheRedPill posited over the past decade? Is the film about LGBTQ awakening and liberation from cisgender binaries? Does it warn of the dangers of capitalism and consumer culture and the anonymity of office life at the turn of the millennium? It all depends on what matters to you, what oppressive reality you need to awaken from, what new identity you need to claim in order to be liberated. It’s a film of spiritual import but it never (beyond the literal science-fiction premise) defines what animates its spirit as the definition is always personal.
Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity tells Neo that “The Matrix cannot tell you who you are,” implying that only Neo can make that determination. The implication is that the world, our perceived reality, cannot tell the viewer who they are. They have to determine it for themselves. Thus, they must take the red pill and transcend to a true understanding of their lives and the world they inhabit. The viewer can determine what that new meaning is. All that matters is that an awakening occurs. Hence, The Matrix is a clarion call for spiritual awakening in an era where spirituality is subjective, a transcendent epic for a fractured age. — Aren Bergstrom (3 Brothers Film)
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