The Matrix Co-Director Calls Out Right-Wing Hijacking of the Movie
The Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski is calling out right-wing attempts to co-opt the film’s ideas, using a recent podcast appearance to unpack how its themes have been twisted and why those misreadings persist.
Quick one: Lilly Wachowski popped up on a podcast and talked about how people keep twisting The Matrix into whatever they want it to be. Yes, that includes right-wing groups grabbing bits of the movie and running with them. She gets why it happens, she hates it, and she has a new way of dealing with it.
The setup
Wachowski was on the podcast 'So True with Caleb Hearon' and dug into the long, weird afterlife of The Matrix. If you saw Lana mentioned elsewhere, to be clear: this was Lilly speaking.
On watching The Matrix get misread
She says once you release a piece of art, you cannot control what people do with it. That part is just reality. But it does not mean she enjoys the spin jobs. She talked about looking at the 'crazy, mutant theories' built around the films and the ideologies they supposedly fueled, and her gut reaction is basically: 'What are you doing? No! That is wrong!' Still, she knows you cannot force everyone to see the exact intention behind your work, so she has learned to let some of that go.
How she keeps her sanity now
Instead of trying to please or reach a giant, catch-all audience, Wachowski focuses on the process of making the thing. The making is the point. The rest is noise.
'I make to make. That experience is the reason you are there. Not what comes after. And so, as an artist, I try to be as present as possible now. I want to be present and relish every single day of the making that I have.'
Her take on the political co-opting
Wachowski did not mince words. In her view, right-wing ideology will grab anything, especially ideas that start on the left, then twist them for propaganda and muddy the original message. As she put it, that is what fascism does, and it is going to happen with basically everything.
- She cannot control interpretations once a film is out in the world.
- She finds a lot of Matrix fan theories and spinoff ideologies flat-out wrong, and yes, that is frustrating.
- Her creative pivot: make for the sake of making, and be present in the work, not the discourse.
- Her read on politics: right-wing groups appropriate and mutate left-leaning ideas to obscure their intent; that pattern is not unique to The Matrix.
So if you are wondering how she processes years of the red-pill-ification of The Matrix (even if she did not name-check it here), the answer is: she does the work, lets the misreads roll off as much as possible, and keeps it moving.