Have you ever thought that you might be in an alternate reality, or a digital world, not unlike the Matrix? I don’t mean in a think piece, post-2016 election sort of way that is desperate to theorize why and how our world is so hideous. I’m talking about a hard break with reality.

The two years before coming out as transgender featured regular episodes where reality ceased. It was easy to hide because it would be tiny actions that threw me off, like a car being parked at night in the spot I typically park or a crucial ingredient not being on the shelf at the grocery store. I spent two years existing in this terrified state and refusing to discuss it. I came out to my friends that I’d been hiding as a trans person the entire time. The episodes stopped, almost immediately.

In 2020, entertainment writers confirmed what a lot of us had known about The Matrix movies, the now-undisputable fact that it’s an allegory for the transgender experience, and directed by two transgender women. At the time of the original trilogies release, Lana and Lilly Wachowski were appearing as two male directors. The film was assumed to describe a more mainstream experience since the white, straight male is considered to have the most universal of experiences. The confirmation that The Matrix is a queer narrative turned this assumption over for examination, and The Matrix Resurrections delivers the confirmation that it deserves.

Thirty minutes into viewing Resurrections it stirred up enough feeling that I knew that this movie would have a tight grip. Usually when I finish watching a movie my first action is to to jump online and read as many comments, hot takes, Reddit posts and articles as I can, filling out parts I didn’t understand and help develop my own opinion. For The Matrix Resurrections I didn’t want to tarnish my viewing before putting fingers to keyboard if only because I know my experience as a transgender viewer is going to be vastly different from that of someone who is cisgender. It’s one of the only mainstream movies that tells a story allegorical to people like me, and explicitly so. 

It’s one of the only mainstream movies that tells a story allegorical to people like me, and explicitly so. 

Dominating what little commentary I have read about the movie is the usage of cultural and self references, none of which are subtle, that some viewers are describing as grating, too over the top. When we open The Matrix Resurrections, we find ourselves right back where we started with Neo, now inhabiting a reality that looks remarkably like the Matrix from which he has already escaped in the previous three films. The setting gives us an opportunity to see director Lana Wachowski’s (directing solo this time, without sister Lilly) view on how our culture has evolved, or not evolved, in the decades since the original film. While I’m a lover of the obvious, I can understand where the cringing stems, like an early moment where we learn that Trinity has been renamed “Tiffany,” with a “Chad” husband in this new iteration of the old Matrix program.

Wachowski’s disdain is obvious to any of us who have used the Internet beyond Facebook in the last decade, or have at least been in a bar where real life Chad types are known to roam. The first third of the movie is also packed with jabs at Warner Brothers as a studio and the content making machine in its entirety, as energetic young people babble buzzwords in the direction of an overwhelmed, depressed, and very much asleep Neo who is right back where he started. We get the idea that everyone has an opinion on the Matrix, and has decided that it’s their experience as much as anyone else’s in this universe as Neo grimances his way through corporate meetings. These people think they can relate to him, but they can’t, and neither party can put their finger on exactly why. 

Are these little references annoying? Necessary? Considering the cultural impact of the Blue Pill and Red Pill allegory, I think it’s absurd to dismiss Wachowski’s heavy hand. The most violent and hateful social movements in the United States today have co opted the symbolism of the first movie, as it’s subtlety was not only misread, but completely bastardized by far-right communities which seek to eradicate people like The Wachowski Sisters and myself. “The Red Pill,” or being redpilled, has become a way for bigots to describe their preferred flavor of bigotry as it’s applied so widely to everything from becoming in incel (involuntary celibate) to neo-Nazi theories about white genocide and oppression. Apart from one’s own opinions on the integrity of blatant references, it strikes me as her way of sucking the rot out of the wound she inadvertently created, but shouldn’t bear any responsibility for. 

Are these little references annoying? Necessary?

I wonder too, if cisgender and/or heterosexual viewers are even seeing the knives for what they are. Is the pairing of Tiffany (Trinity) and Chad a cheap middle finger or is the presentation of our badass Trinity turned into a reluctant mother a bigger shout about the confines of straightness and the willingness of millennials and gen Xers to go along with the dream of the American nuclear family? During the final confrontation, when Trinity remembers her true identity and rounds on her Matrix husband, she forcefully spits at him, “My name is Trinity!” and snaps back to her role as resident baddie.

While trans writers have been telling everyone who reads their work for years now that there is blatant reference to deadnaming in The Matrix, or the act of calling a transgender person their former (and wrong) name, there remains a reluctance to recognize this kind of moment for exactly what it is. The common opinion on the Tiffany detail (and let’s not forget Thomas Anderson, AKA Neo) is that she was renamed to merely show us a sense of normalcy, but it’s lazy to stop at “normalcy” when The Matrix Resurrections names precisely what the filmmaker does not like about “normal,” namely that it’s rooted cisheteropatriarchy. See what I have to do when the wishes of Miss Wachowski go unnoticed? I have to pull out the big theory words, so how’s that for a heavy hand?

The advancement of a character that I’m still examining under a microscope is that of Agent Smith, previously played by Hugo Weaving, and recast as Jonathan Groff in this iteration as an “exile program” version of the famed villain. I can acknowledge the shared heartbreak of Weaving not making a return to the films, as he was busy with the most British Actor schedule conflict possible: a stage play. The Agent Smith hand-gifted to us by Jonathan Groff however, is just tonally different enough from the original to add to the allure of living in the relative safety of the Matrix. Sure, Smith has also been neutered in the digital world, now working as Neo’s boss at a video game development company, but he’s been tweaked into a kind of cruel-yet-sexy executive that many viewers might find themselves envying. Resurrection’s Agent Smith wants nothing more than to return the Matrix program to how it was before all of this nonsense with Neo and humanity’s attempts at revolution, as that was at least an environment that gave him what he imagines as more agency and control. Despite a population of machines defecting from their own in pursuit of a human and machine alliance, despite this opportunity for Smith to become a defector himself and battle for the equality of all beings, Smith remains attached to the old ways. His torture under the new Matrix program has taught him nothing of empathy or liberation, and instead, this imprisonment has only inspired him to become the being that holds the keys to the jail itself.

I’ve spent so much of my own life wondering about the Agent Smith types in our world, seeing them among communities who recognize the oppression of all of us, but choose instead to fight only for the rights and sovereignty of those who look and think like they do. He’s not always going to be the insurrectionist with a flag. Sometimes Agent Smith is embedded in our seemingly progressive communities. Agent Smith might be the openly queer Democrat seeking to uplift their friends, but frowns at the prospect of bussing programs at the local public school. Agent Smith may have even knocked on my door a few times, in the shape of my very own reflection telling me that transition and coming out would rob me of my basic comforts and personhood, and that faking it was the only means of survival. Agent Smith comes in many forms, but Agent Smith is always wrong. 

Sometimes Agent Smith is embedded in our seemingly progressive communities.

The Matrix Resurrections may use the obvious to retell this story, but the emotions I would process while viewing were not the ones I anticipated. There’s plenty of hell-yeah fist pumping for what I see as the trans agenda, (motorcycles and spaceships aplenty!) but the moments I found most striking all come back to the losing of one’s reality. Twenty years ago, Neo appeared as quiet, lonely, perhaps a little bit bored. Our Resurrections Neo is all of these things, but amplified through the lens of understanding the trans experience. He’s tortured and distraught as opposed to feeling a low hum of depression when he’s separated from his true personhood and identity. He isolates and agonizes, all while sitting behind a computer monitor and piecing together his view of what his correct life should look like, even if his memory is scrambled and making this task all the more challenging. 

The worst pain I’ve felt in relation to my own transness is tied to the denial of reality and trying to fake my way through a world I did not belong, playing a character who was a work of my own fiction before having my own breakthrough. Resurrections appeals to the part of me that loves time loops and repetition as a tool in story plots, and serves to confirm what trans people already know about transition being a nonlinear experience. As much as we might know ourselves, as deeply as we have looked inside the people we are and cleared out the faulty programming of our former lives, there will always be moments where we need to stop and ground ourselves back into the current moment. I’ve often told my loved ones that using the correct names and pronouns for transgender people isn’t just a sign of respect, it’s a recognition of the truth and an affirmation of reality. When you’ve spent months or years working so hard to know who you are well enough to present on the outside as a trans person, the deadnaming at the pharmacy or “m’am” at the grocery store just feels like another glitch in the Matrix. If Neo, a superhero who can fly and bend space can forget who he is for an entire small lifetime, then perhaps those of us who live with our reality questioned on a daily basis need to be a little more gentle with ourselves when those glitches appear. 

The Matrix Resurrections does what is necessary to make its message known. If this fourth installment in a multi decade allegory about what it can feel like to be transgender isn’t obvious enough, exercise that empathy muscle and think a little harder. You don’t even need to bother with any red pills to get there.

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