For him, “hypercapitalism” had destroyed the very idea of reality – whereas The Matrix had a whole new one ready to go as soon as Neo could overthrow the machines. But the film only moved Baudrillard to protest that it was a misrepresentation. The Wachowskis had Morpheus intone the phrase from a Chesterfield armchair set in the smoking ruins of our former civilisation. To ‘redpill’ is now a verb, opening the eyes of far-right recruits to hated oppressors – feminists and people of colourīaudrillard called it “the desert of the real”. Take The Matrix – living on in those gifs, pop songs and this piece in the Guardian, but actually watched with vanishing rarity. Jobs, novels, architecture, ideologies, wars: they were all just copies and copies of copies of long gone originals. While the pages were hollowed out to hold an illicit cache of computer disks, Reeves had been required by the Wachowskis to read the book, to better acquaint himself with the film’s most treasured influence.Ī postmodernist darling, Baudrillard put forth a slippery but naggingly brilliant idea – that reality itself had been replaced with endless reproductions of what simply felt like it. During the film, Neo pulls from a shelf a hardback, Simulacra and Simulation, by academic and provocateur Jean Baudrillard. For a time, the shriek and whirr of your dial-up modem could take you – eventually – to the official Matrix website, where densely argued academic papers were hosted on the corporate dime of Warner Bros.īut the mind to which the Wachowskis paid their deepest tribute was unimpressed. High-profile essay collections found existentialists, nihilists, Christian theologians, Zen Buddhists and a dozen other schools of thought throwing metaphysical buns at each other over the meaning of the movie. By the 1980s, we had the theory of the brain in the vat – built on the impossibility of ever knowing for sure that you aren’t exactly that, your whole life simply electrical impulses wired into your tank.įor the philosophers of 1999, The Matrix meant boom time. Then came the first meditation of Descartes (1641), speculating that everything his senses told him might just be the work of an “evil demon”. In the allegory of the cave, Plato presented humanity chained to a cave wall, taking passing shadows for reality.

In fact, as sibling co-creators the Wachowskis alluded to on screen, the film was just the latest in a long line of variations on a theme, nestled in the mainstream of philosophy. People fretted about the “millennium bug” and reality TV. Despite sunlit economies and political stability, a strange ennui and mistrust of technology hung over the end of the 90s. Of course, Neo chose red, as we told ourselves we would, too. How would we know? More ticklish still, would we want to? If, like Reeves’s weary hacker Neo, we were approached by Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus, would we take the blue pill to return us to life as it merely seemed to be? Or the red that promised us – however terrible – the real? But the premise was what made it a phenomenon, the idea our whole reality might be a virtual concoction. Yet for a relic, it never slipped far from view – still a familiar reference in a world divided between internet and IRL (in real life), its characters endlessly circulating in memes and gifs, often as vehicles for the acrid politics that define our 21st century.Ĭharli XCX and Troye Sivan on the cover of ‘1999’īack in the 20th, much of the highest excitement was reserved for the visuals – the “digital rain” of green code, the bullets slowed to a stop while Reeves swayed around them.

“1999”, the recent song from Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, features wistful lyrics (“Those days, it was so much better”) and cover art in which the millennial pop stars wear the black leather costumes made famous by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as they battled the machines enslaving humanity.

By the time of the first sequel four years later, they were already half-vanished, replaced by a private army of Nokias and Motorolas.īut now The Matrix is a relic too, a quaint slice of 90s nostalgia about to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Payphones were still everywhere in western cities when the film came out in March 1999.

T he Matrix has barely started when a phone booth is demolished, left as a smashed pancake of glass and metal.

Matrix red pill blue pill scene