There is no better demonstration of The Matrix’s concept of the blue pill that leaves its victims able to perceive only the simulacrum of reality curated by the powers-that-be than that virtually every review of the sequel The Matrix Resurrections refers to the auteurs of the 1999 science-fiction classic and its depressing follow-ups as the “Wachowski sisters.”
Even more blue-pilled, many critics have convinced themselves not just to say that frauteurs Larry and Andy Wachowski are now Lana and Lilly, Hollywood’s most famous female sci-fi directors, but to believe it.
Bluest of all, more than a few have trained themselves to have faith not only that the Wachowskis are women in 2021, but also that they—due to transcendental gender dogma’s miraculous power to alter not just the present but the past—were female in 1999, and that therefore the original Matrix was made by women. As Orwell might assert, “The Wachowski brothers have always been the Wachowski sisters.”
Sure, a few showbiz figures such as Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling dare to be publicly red-pilled. But it’s much safer for one’s career to enthusiastically ingest the blue pill and believe.
Of course, The Matrix was just about the least feminine movie since, oh, say, The Deer Hunter, another film of vaulting masculine ambition from a director, Michael Cimino, who later flirted with declaring himself a woman. Neither The Matrix nor The Deer Hunter (much less Cimino’s bankruptingly grandiose Heaven’s Gate) would have been made by somebody who always felt like a girl on the inside.
You can’t trust anyone but your online friends. Maybe you really will save the world. Computer games are more real than what adults, who are zombies or evil mechanical brain controllers, call real life. It would be cool to have a girlfriend who is a butt-kicking videogame character and doesn’t care about dumb girl stuff.
And indeed, the Wachowskis’ boyhoods were awfully boyish. Besides being comic-book aficionados and fanatical Dungeons & Dragons players and videogamers, like so many other Chicago lads they loved Da Bulls. In 2006, these season ticket holders designed a new pregame player introduction light show for their favorite NBA team. The bros announced:
“As lifelong rabid Bulls fans, to have an opportunity to work with an organization that gave us so many fond memories we not only jumped at the chance, we asked, how high??”
While the brothers were trying to break into the movies, they supported themselves by running their own construction company.
In other words, the Wachowski brothers aren’t effeminate drag queens. Instead, they come from that small but influential high-IQ population of heterosexual ex-men who are typically motivated by their cross-dressing fetish.
On the rare occasions when some spoilsport points out that the Matrix movies, which likely contend with Black Hawk Down for most thousands of rounds of ammunition discharged, are obviously the product of a couple of hyper-male brains with the Wachowski brothers egging each other on to unprecedented heights of spergy fantasy, the response is usually: “Oh, they were just faking how masculine their imaginations are to cover up from society that they don’t fit in the gender binary.”
But no, that’s not how it works. Making memorable movies is hard, competitive work that taxes the filmmaker’s inner resources. Nobody could have faked The Matrix in 1999 if they weren’t really into it.
Nor, now that they are freed from society’s misapprehension of their true genders, have the Wachowskis since turned into the second coming of George Cukor and made insightful women’s pictures.
Instead of now making great girl movies, all that has happened is that the Wachowskis have gotten worse at making guy movies.
