The surprisingly anti-progressive, even right-wing, politics of The Matrix Resurrections
First reason: The violence
First of all, we have to talk about the shift in the violence. Specifically, who the violence is directed towards. Violence in cinema seems too fundamentally American to be inherently left-wing or right-wing, but while the previous movies meticulously focused the violence on clear agents of evil (sometimes capital-letter Agents) intermingled with a few classical foes like flying vampires, the new movie redirects violence to people who seem like anyone else except for some seriously dilated pupils. This is a major change in messaging. Nor is it meant to convey some deeper, hidden message about sleeper cells: at one point the flamboyant and kink-friendly barista emerges as an enemy to be slam-kicked. What sort of progressive revolution is that?
On top of that, the movie climaxes with the jaw-dislocation, then near-decapitation of one of the main villains — but in a weirdly saccharine, slapstick sort of way that was packed into an embarrassingly bad metaphor about painting the skies with rainbows. The jarring violence felt less like a catharsis or critique, and more like the very violent anti-LGBT content that circulates on the same social media that the film claims to criticize. It felt like the work of someone stunningly out of touch with the people struggling to escape that exact type of violence happening in the real world.
Dehumanizing a Black character and actor
To my surprise, the film treated a Black character as interchangeable. 2½-hour long story short, Neo creates a game-version of Morpheus, who then becomes a Matrix-version of Morpheus, and ultimately a robot-version of Morpheus. Out of the context of the previous films, this was fine. But in context, this played into some extremely troubling cultural precedents.
Most importantly, a profoundly influential Black role was literally dehumanized. There is really no way around this: a very human person was changed into a robot — and not just any robot, but a White-passing lead’s synthetic creation who serves as a kind of workhorse and savior, sometimes disassembling then reassembling in a bare-chested cloud of magnetic muscles. We as audiences should have some standards when it comes to racial equality and racial equity in storytelling.
These problems are squarely and exclusively with the filmmakers themselves, as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s performance itself was one of the highlights of the entire film. Yet despite his best efforts, the anti-progressive stance of the filmmakers was an unwelcome intrusion. In the real world, Lawrence Fishburne’s interviews on being un-cast without any notice allude to the troubling power dynamics around this Black lead. Making matters worse, the filmmakers clearly tried to make Yahya as Lawrence-esque as possible.
Surprisingly White
Racial issues did not end there: in fact, the film centered and elevated Whiteness.
Of course, the two leads are obviously very White-passing, or at least very proximal to Whiteness — and I say this about Keanu Reeves’ mixed ancestry as someone who myself is also mixed-Asian but White-passing.
However, the issue comes from how, when you dig deeper, The Matrix Resurrections has clear racial hierarchization although it seems to pride itself on inclusivity on the surface. Aside from the issue of introducing Morpheus as a “magical” helper, much of the central tension in the second act of the film comes from overriding Black authority by a frankly individualistic White man literally named The One. It was mildly infuriating to see Black strength expressed by Jada Pinkett Smith, only to see her authority quickly thrown by the wayside because of White priorities. It made the main story arc seem more sophomoric and belittling than like a testament to love.
Decadence, not liberation
The move describes liberation in literal and metaphorical ways, but the the perspectives are clearly comes from a very high place on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — like, a multimilion dollar Hollywood place. This speaks more to a message of conservative exclusion, not radically inclusive liberation.
To be totally honest, for months I had been brimming with anticipation for what the brilliant filmmakers would come up with to bring a radical message of freedom to the masses. Instead, the movie essentially ended with three White characters in a bourgeois San Francisco home talking about painting the sky with rainbows — and lots of violence.
There are literally millions of people dying in wars, and billions of people living under varying degrees of totalitarian oppression. There are LGBT people killed every single day. There is such a profound lack of freedom in the world. Yet sitting there in the theater, I felt like someone’s uncomfortable plus-one being invited to a wealthy cocktail party where people talk about “class struggle” from the comfort of their staffed manors. It was an embarrassment to see.
Foreign policy dwells on — yep, you guessed it
Ironically, the filmmakers projected their own anti-progressive cognitive dissonance regarding issues in their own backyard. Midway through the film, there is a thinly veiled criticism of Israel that managed to be both antisemitic and islamophobic. The State of Israel is the last country in the entire Middle East with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim populations all growing, and where the majority of people genuinely work hard to live together in peace. But that is of little consequence to the filmmakers, who point-blank slam Z̶i̶o̶n̶i̶s̶m̶ Zion as its own matrix of bloodlust, division, and madness.
There is a lot to criticize about Israel, but out of over 190 countries in the world, it is an antisemitic choice to use it as a moral mirror for all of mankind itself— especially by Americans, of all people. On top of that, it is islamophobic to shine a lens away from Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where altogether millions of Muslims are being killed by right-wing fascists supported by foreign powers. That has powerful resonance with the supposed premise of the film, but their Muslims voices are being systematically silenced, and the filmmakers gladly participate by diverting an important opportunity for attention.
And of course, altogether, it is both antisemitic and islamophobic to decree that somehow Muslims and Jews are collectives that are unable to coexist. It was done so casually, so matter-of-factly, that it had a fundamentally American egotism — the kind that has repeatedly led to interventions and regime changes overseas.
Homelessness: the not-so-blind spot
The most shocking thing to me was what the film did not show.
The film is mostly set in San Francisco, but the crisis of homelessness is nowhere to be seen — except to be mocked. There is no way you consciously set a film in San Francisco and just forget about homelessness: you have to deliberately conduct an act of erasure to avoid the topic. In fact, making the film inherently requires street sweeps, considered by many to be a controversial tactic of police brutality. For a film about oppression in a broken system and human beings kept in t̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ sacs, the silence around homelessness was deafening.
But to clearly show overt aggression, the only appearance of people experiencing homelessness center around unbelievably degrading, shockingly dehumanizing portrayals of the Merovingian and his cronies being dragged up with messy hair, dirt-smeared faces, ragged beards, and tattered clothing. The film crew needed to literally expel people experiencing homelessness from several city blocks in San Francisco, and yet people experiencing homeless appear for little purpose other than to be beaten up and used as comic relief to be laughed at specifically for looking homeless.
Lying in bed after the movie, the more I thought about this, the more it deeply troubled me. Fundamentally, The Matrix Resurrections is about how Neo and Trinity have such a powerful love for each other that an entire virtual reality is tempered and powered through harnessing their love as an underlying natural force. If either Neo or Trinity are removed, then the entire Matrix is destabilized. One of the clearest ways to show a “glitch in the system” would have been to directly show what San Francisco is actually like, where thousands of veterans and people struggling with addiction are treated like human trash. This is a real-life glitch, and could have shown with shocking realism what happens in a system where love is no longer the underlying energy that fundamentally glues everything together. However, the filmmakers chose to physically scrape away any signs of these people from their filming radius and use a weird scene of mass suicide to portray things getting stormy and hectic.
So what does this mean?
We have to interrogate what we watch. We have to be vigilant. We have to have standards. And unfortunately, sometimes that means recognizing the altogether human shortcomings of filmmakers who had every opportunity to get things right.
