“This pill is neutral, tasteless unbelief,” he wrote in 2019. One of the original users of the pro-men “red pill” metaphor, Curtis Yarvin, described a “clear pill”, an “integrity check” that involves testing commonly-received explanations by trying to imagine a world in which they were untrue, and (because they aren’t) accepting the explanation. This describes a state of optimism diametrically opposed to the depressive realism of the black. On the Right, meanwhile, men who had previously been pick-up artists have lately begun taking the “God pill” or “white pill”. At the end of the trailer, you can see me asking for “two red pills”, which now seems frankly excessive. (Well, the colour just made it too easy.) One Matrix-influenced documentary from 2012, titled Marx Reloaded, for which I confess I was interviewed, attempted to wrest the metaphor from resentful men and turn it into a revolutionary way of viewing the world. Some tried to repurpose the red pill for Marxist ends. The “purple-pilled” were, if you like, centrists in the never-ending war of the sexes: “Both men and women have their problems,” they might say, “but let’s not blame each other for everything.” In between, some described themselves as “purple-pilled”, indicating a position somewhere between the women-blaming “red-pilled” and the feminist, occasionally misandrous “blue-pilled”. Online, “taking the black pill” meant that you understood that the world was hopeless, and that if you were unattractive that the world held out no promise for you (perhaps something of a self-fulfilling prophecy). The “black pill” was a darker, nihilistic version of the red. A Reddit community called TheRedPill (now “quarantined”, meaning you have to confirm you really want to visit it) was for a time the fulcrum of this often-misogynistic way of seeing the world. For a lot of men, opening your eyes to this “reality” flipped the script. Here, the red pill came to stand in for the “truth” that – far from being a male-dominated world, as mainstream liberal feminist-inflected culture would have it – it is in fact the men who are worse off. Starting with the idea that the red pill would show you the truth about “how things really are”, the pill metaphor instead got taken up by the “manosphere”, that portion of the internet dedicated to all things masculinist, including pick-up artists, men’s-rights activists and even male separatists (known as MGTOW or “Men Going Their Own Way”, aiming to live without women). This was not what the dominant use of the “red pill” idea became. One of the characters, Switch, though, was originally written as a man in one world and a woman in another.

Lilly Wachowski, who with her sister Lana directed the first three films, stated in 2020 that the films represented the transgender experience: this was “the original intention” of The Matrix, she said, but that at the time the corporate world “wasn’t ready for it”. It’s no wonder that in the original, Morpheus refers to the most druggy children’s book of all, Alice in Wonderland: “Take the red pill… and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” The trailer for Resurrections had for a soundtrack White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane’s superlative 1967 paean to this idea.īut since the franchise began in 1999, the red-pill metaphor in particular has run riot. Pills to make you high, pills to put you to sleep. There are pills for birth control, for blood pressure, for depression, for a headache. We really do, in fact, live in a pill culture. The new Matrix has kept the franchise’s “pill” theme alive: the website for the new film offers you the choice, once again, of red and blue. Whether we’re wondering whether we’re all brains in a vat, or bemoaning the misleading nature of the phenomenal world, or watching the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave rather than staring madly into the truth of the Sun, mankind has long suspected that what we see isn’t how it really is. Its fleeting properties disguise and mask the true nature of the absolute. Maya is an ancient idea in Hinduism and Buddhism with similar connotations to that of the Matrix (which in Middle English meant “womb”), namely that this world is an illusion.

In the original 1999 film, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is offered by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) the choice between taking a blue pill and a red pill: the former will allow him to remain in ignorance in a dream-like simulation, while the latter will show him reality – how things really are. In the meantime, aspects of the original trilogy have spilled out all over our culture, and nothing more so than the idea of the “red pill”. The Matrix Resurrections follows The Matrix Revolutions, which came out in 2003 (almost two decades ago).

Matrix red pill blue pill poster