Ghostbusters, Eighties Nerds and the Need for a Bully

Finally got my next video up, a quick take on why Ghostbusters fanboys are getting so bent out of shape over the new film:

The Matrix As Transgender Metaphor

This time I’m taking on one of the classic movies of the nineties, and how its tale of fighting back against the inevitable robot revolution is actually a metaphor for the lives of its creators.

Zero Dark Thirty: Revenge, American Style

Finally got my new video critique up, this time about Kathryn Bigelow’s eternally controversial Zero Dark Thirty and how it’s a much more conventional revenge thriller than you might think.

The Matrix as Transgender Metaphor

As one of the defining films of my generation The Matrix has always cast a long shadow, both in its incredible genre influence and its eternal tendency to bring absolute morons out of the woodwork declaring it to be the most intelligent and meaningful film ever made for suggesting the world isn’t real (with Inception nobly taking the baton for kids today). I have a different, more personal reading of this movie however as being fundamentally about one woman’s journey into the world, and it begins with its directors.

The Wachowskis, under attack from a pink cephalopod

Lana Wachowski as you may know is transgender, and I see The Matrix as being a metaphor for a trans woman coming out and asserting her identity against a world which refuses to acknowledge her. The film runs on an extremely blunt ‘rebirth as your true self’ metaphor with a protagonist whose name literally means ‘new’ (I love Wachowski subtlety), and while on its own this could symbolise practically anything what strikes me about its execution is that Neo’s embrace of his identity as ‘The One’ against the world oppressing him is represented by his name.

In the extremely on-the-nose interrogation scene early on, Agent Smith describes him as having two lives with two different names. In public he is Mr Thomas Anderson, while in private he goes by Neo, a name he picked himself. Throughout the film he is only referred to by the former by representatives of authority, his boss and Smith (almost always specifically as ‘Mister’ Anderson), while his friends only ever use the name he chose himself.

Note the outfits

On its own this could represent anything, but what clinches it for me is that Neo’s big moment of asserting his true identity as ‘the One’ by defeating an Agent is preceded by this exchange:

Agent Smith: You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.
Neo: My name is Neo. [Smashes Smith with a train]

Of all the possible things he could have said in the face of death, he chose to assert his name.

I think it’s also worth noting the position Neo is in at the film’s end. He’s discovered who he truly is, embraced that in the face of the world’s attempt to stop him and found his own power, but the world itself has not changed. He hasn’t led a glorious revolution and upended the status quo, it’s still in place essentially unchanged, still views him as a threat and with his newfound openness about who he is will likely redouble its attempt to oppress him.

I think queer interpretations can be found in almost all the Wachowski’s works. Besides the obvious example of Bound and Sense8, Racer X’s situation of being unable to tell his family he changed his appearance and identity could could be seen as analogous to Lana having transitioned by Speed Racer’s production, but not being publicly out at the time, and a whole book could be written on the gender-switching politics of Cloud Atlas. I’ve no idea of knowing whether The Matrix was intended the way I see it, or if Lana deliberately drew on her experiences writing the film but I certainly feel there’s more textual evidence for this reading than for, say, the popular queer reading of Frozen.