In the beginning and coda to the highest grossing film to ever endorse terrorism as a virtue, V for Vendetta, narrator Evie Hammond says that ideas have power, but what really matters is the people behind them. Yet this film is strangely agnostic about truly committing to this theme; the titular protagonist, in his final martyrdom, declares that “beneath this mask there is an idea… And ideas are more than flesh. Ideas are bulletproof.”
But, as Evie Hammond asks after her friend (and torturer) V’s death, “what of the man and what he meant to me?” Today, I’m called to ask a similar question about two women who I have known only as ideas – masks, as it were. The Wachowski Sisters, once known by a slightly different name, directed and produced V and a slew of other mass market, big-budget films whose receptions ranged from the vicious – in the case of the recent Jupiter Ascending – to the rapturous, in the case of V and The Matrix. For reasons that are now eminently understandable and justifiable, the sisters have eschewed the press and contact with fandom, choosing to live intensely private lives. But the recent forced outing – the second the siblings have experienced – of Lilly Wachowski,who had chosen to identify herself to the public as Andy until this week, invite a conversation about a simple fact that should blow everyone’s mind like
Neo soaring out of that phone booth: several of the most popular cult action films of all time, including one which once held the title of “highest grossing ‘R’ rated film in history” until it was unceremoniously deposed by Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic religious fantasy The Passion of the Christ, were directed by two transgender women.
I do not know Lilly and Lana Wachowski. I only know the art they produced and the impact it had in my life. I’m a 28 year old college professor firmly enmeshed in the Matrix of everyday conformity, except for the one fact of transgender identity that unites me and them. Unlike Evie, what I have access to is the symbol, the mask, of the Wachowskis. Yet the glimpses we’ve so reluctantly been given, often at the hands of parasitic tabloid journalists, lead me to feel that, like Valerie in V for Vendetta writing her letter to nobody and everybody, even if I don’t know the Wachowski Sisters, I love them. Another one of my reclusive artistic idols, progressive rock virtuoso Tuomas Holopainen, founder of power metal extravaganza Nightwish, wrote in a song out of frustration with fans who thought they knew him because of his often intimate lyrics, “stop saying ‘I know how you feel. How can anyone understand how another feels?” I suspect the Wachowski Sisters, if they were to read this thinkpiece, might look askance at me for similar reasons – and yet I, and I don’t hesitate to say thousands of transgender fans if not millions, have this inexorable feeling that we know quite a lot about the Wachowskis from their work, and that we share commonalities of experience that are striking.
Like the Wachowski Sisters, my road to living authentically as who I am has been interrupted by numerous socially driven constraints on my freedom to be that person, that woman. I spent a lot of time wearing a mask that wasn’t me, and even long before I and possibly Lana and Lily themselves realized who I was, I saw the consistent theme in their films of a bisected identity, split between a professional and formal role validated by the rules of society and an authentic identity a person has found or created themselves.
The first of the Sisters’ movies to which I was exposed, The Matrix, was a giddy experience for a 14 year old “boy” who had not previously been permitted to watch “R” rated films. My father made an exception because of the film’s metaphoric and philosophical depth (blunt as it may have been). I responded particularly to the way that the Christlike savior figure Neo is split between two existences. As his nemesis, Hugo Weaving’s ingeniously portrayed Agent Smith of the Machine oppressors (more on him later), puts it:
You’ve been living two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one of these lives, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You pay your bills… You do your taxes… And you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias “Neo” and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, Mr. Anderson, and the other… Does not.
Like all of the dialogue in the early portion of The Matrix, Smith’s statement is literally true but not in the way he predicts (in the same way that Neo’s stoner friends think he needs to “unplug” with some mescaline and that he’s their “literal Jesus Christ”). But Smith is wrong about which life has a future. As I’ll discuss subsequently, all of the Wachowskis’ work – yes, even 2008’s family film Speed Racer – deals with a bisection of identity from true to authentic, from assigned by authority, to molded by the scars and traumas left by authority. Neo the hacker has a future of black leather, gunplay, karate, and literally dying – twice – for the sins of the human race. Conversely, Jupiter Jones of the much-maligned box office flop Jupiter Ascending chooses to destroy her offered life as a space empress to live as an undocumented immigrant in modern day Chicago. Admittedly, Jupiter Ascending came from the Sisters’ teenage fantasies, and I can’t help but suspect they made with the full knowledge that it would flop and they would be blamed, and that ultimately it wouldn’t matter because Hollywood wasn’t going to keep giving tr*nnies multimillion dollar budgets to make movies. But even so, what all Wachowski protagonists share is that they have someone telling them who they are, and that tale is a lie.
I don’t know how long Lilly Wachowski has been transitioned – she says it’s been some time, but thanks to her well earned, dutifully preserved, and unjustly shattered reclusiveness, I have no details. For me though it’s been three years—three years, which feel like forever. I, like Neo and like V, felt a pervasive sense of “wrongness” about the world, but still threw on suits, ties, and whatever else I could to try to make the role I was assigned feel right, until one day in 2013 I just couldn’t anymore, and the boy I was died as surely as Neo was executed by a Machine firing squad at the end of The Matrix. About six months into the process, when I, like Lilly and Lana before her, was known as my authentic self to my friends and family but as that old dead boy to the legal and financial systems of society, I felt a moment of acute dysphoria upon calling my bank and being addressed as “Mr. Lockhart,” when I was accustomed to “Ellie.” That distress turned into a sudden recognition of a parallel: Neo, throughout the Matrix trilogy, is constantly subjected to identification as his past identity, Thomas A. Anderson, the name the Machines’ system gave him. Agent Smith is keen on making sure that Neo remembers where he came from, refusing to address him as anything other than “Mr. Anderson” until the climax of to series’ finale – the moment where Smith’s capitulation to Neo’s chosen name leads to the death of both Smith and his enemy. (This ending is significantly more grim than the ones we see in Matrix and Sense8 as well as Jupiter Ascending, in which protagonists reject self-sacrifice in favor of self-validation – a message which is refreshing in the face of a popular culture which all too often seems to validate suicide, as V and the Matrix sequels appear to.)
There’s not a lot about the Wachowskis’ life that I can conclusively claim to know is represented in their work – but if there’s one thing that’s close to certain, it’s the theme of the self-destructive urge and the sense that there is no place in the world for people who are different to live as themselves. In one of her rare public speeches (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crHHycz7T_c), Lana Wachowski discusses her near-suicide attempt as a teenager. Preceding it, she wrote an extended suicide note in which she discussed the feeling that her death by her own hand was inevitable, because there was no place for her in the world. She then went to the Chicago L-train stop near the restaurant where she was writing, and prepared to step in front of the subway – and was only prevented from doing so by a stranger who made eye contact with her, preventing her from acting. That experience echoes the climactic fight between Neo and Smith in the original Matrix. Smith – who has repeatedly expressed his terror of infection with humanity (or, we might say, queerness), and who is identified in the sequels as literally being an aspect of Neo – holds Neo in front of the subway train and whispers in his ears as the train approaches “this is the sound of inevitability – it is the sound of your death.” Neo’s proclamation “my name is Neo,” echoed by the explicitly transgender Nomi Marks in the Wachowski Netflix series Sense8 when her mother refers to her by her former male name (“my name is Nomi!”), reads as a transcendent affirmation of a chosen identity – and bluntly, as a metaphor for transition.
It’s impossible to know until they offer some kind of perspective on their work – something they’ve been notoriously loath to do for, once again, quite understandable reasons – to what extent the Wachowski Sisters intentionally wrote allegories about gender transition into their films and television work, to what extent they subconsciously or semiconsciously inserted these concerns, and to what extent we’re simply reading too much into science fiction, action, and heist stories. But for transgender women the potential that two of us may have been secretly telling stories of their own lives and experiences for the better part of two decades is seductive. Transgender women are so infrequently represented in the popular media at all, and when they are given roles it is as obstacles, confusions, or threats to the normal lives of cisgender people in critically acclaimed films like Dallas Buyer’s Club and The Danish Girl —or as actively malicious monsters in horror films like Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Silence of the Lambs. While we do not know Lana and Lilly personally, so many of the experiences their characters – even those who appear to be cisgender males, like Neo and V – have echo with our lives.
I regret and condemn, along with many others (including Chelsea Manning, someone who has truly resisted the system and is paying a price as high as V, Neo, or any Wachowski heroine) the Daily Mail’s outing of Lilly Wachowski, as well as the previous and brutal outing of Lana during the production of the Matrix sequels. Yet I hope that like the protagonists of their films, the lives they’ve now been forced into become more fulfilling and offer them the opportunity to live in a way they have not before. If they wish to offer new perspectives on their work, I’ll be excited to hear it. If they chose to maintain their silence, thousands of trans people will still have the symbols they created and the oh-so-rare stories they gave us.
Let’s approach it differently: The Matrix is a dumb-as-shit proto-Silicon Valley libertarian allegory – thesis, this, except not getting the joke: https://xkcd.com/610/.
(Everybody’s now making fun of the MRAs for appropriating “the red pill,” but the joke’s on everybody else. The MRAs read the movie correctly. Which brings us to…)
If it also seems like an allegory for transgenderism, then maybe that means there’s something wrong with how we currently conceptualize transgenderism. (Emphasis on “if” – in The Matrix, everybody’s world is as wrong as Neo’s, but only Neo is bothered by it because Neo is one of the few people superior enough to notice.)
I actually sympathize a lot with your read of it as Silicon Valley bullshit. My doctoral thesis was about, to put it more than a little flippantly, “why nerd guys are the worst,” and my second chapter deals with a group that I can’t name in a way that can be googled because last time I named them publicly they showed up to declare that my nonexistent vagina was filled with cobwebs, but anyway, their name has Neo in it and rhymes with theo-crefactionary. I agree – and I honestly feel the Wachowskis would as well – that there are some toxic messages in The Matrix, just as there are in a lot of science fiction that centers on white dudes being, as you say, superior to others.
What I’m doing is essentially reading the Wachowskis’ corpus of works together. They reuse a *lot* of shit, and most recently in Sense8 (a work which is NOT without flaws, especially on the race angle that the sisters keep fucking up) they essentially took a shit on the climax of the Matrix by putting Morpheus’s monologue about how ordinary people are sheeple into the mouth of a villain and showing the protagonists pull off a rescue just like the Matrix climax while killing (almost) nobody, while one character dresses up in leather and trenchcoats and slow-mo kills people and is basically told to fuck off for being a monster by the rest of the group.
What I’m interested in, as I mentioned, is the *sentiments*, and in particular what the Wachowski Sisters mean to trans people and trans women in particular. As I said, we don’t get much representation, and representing us as ubermensches is… problematic (something my doctoral thesis, if I may arrogantly plug my own work again, addresses by discussing a certain trans woman who used to be with Occupy Wall Street and now believes she deserves to rule the world for being a superior white nerd) but it’s refreshing too. Additionally, I _do_ think that the Wachowskis work has matured and that their desire to adapt to the demands of Hollywood led to them inserting some toxicity that they can’t fully be blamed for (although they’re still fully responsible for the utter race fail that is Cloud Atlas.)
I do want to address your last comment too, though, as a Matrix fan: the original monologue at the end of the first film suggests that the Matrix is _not_ wrong, and the original script also presented the character Switch as intentionally transgender, and happier inside the Matrix than out because she looked the way she liked there. Here’s the monologue in question:
“I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I imagine you can also feel me. You won’t have to search for me anymore. I’m done running. Done hiding. Whether I’m done fighting, I suppose, is up to you. I believe deep down, we both want this world to change. I believe that the Matrix can remain our cage or it can become our chrysalis, that’s what you helped me to understand. That to be truly free, truly free, you cannot change your cage. You have to change yourself. When I used to look out at this world, all I could see was its edges, its boundaries, its leaders and laws. But now, I see another world. A different world where all things are possible. A world of hope. Of peace. I can’t tell you how to get there, but I know if you can free your mind, you’ll find the way.”
In any case, in the sequels, it’s established that the Matrix has to keep existing and a lot of people are better off staying there. For the Machines, in fact, finding self-realization happens _inside_ the Matrix. It’s a troublingly mixed metaphor and I’m not saying it’s perfect.
@Eleanor Lockhart
Your doctoral thesis sounds fantastic! (Is it publicly available?)
As was maybe not clear in my last comment, I agree that the question of what the Wachowskis and their work mean to people and why is more important than putting [i]The Matrix[/i] on trial. But I do think the “toxic” quality of [i]The Matrix[/i] is more important than any increase in maturity in their later work. [i]The Matrix[/i] is their most popular movie – the one that meant and continues to mean something to the greatest number of people – and, out of everything I’ve seen (I haven’t seen Sense8), easily their best – the one where they speak with the truth of poetic madness.
Their later films maybe tell us something about the Wachowskis themselves and their inner circle of fans. But it’s [i]The Matrix[/i] that can maybe point us toward some answers about our society as a whole – more specifically, for example, to the question: Why are our allegorists of liberation so lacking in anti-libertarian reflexes? And (maybe relatedly) why do so many of our prominent apparent radicals end up as Silicon Valley propagandists? (Like the Occupy activist who won’t be named and whose name rhymes with “money.”)
re: your second reply –
As I recall, what’s established is that the machines will let anybody go who realizes, on their own, that the matrix exists (and doesn’t like it) – and everybody else stays (without being asked). Which I’d say isn’t exactly the same thing.
Either way, this amounts to saying that the matrix is necessary and/or okay for everybody who isn’t as superior as Neo and a few other people.
Side note: Belatedly having read Noah’s new Guardian piece, I see that he beat me to the point re: MRAs.
“Why are our allegorists of liberation so lacking in anti-libertarian reflexes?” <— I apologize for the inevitable pain caused by the alliteration in this sentence. This, kids, is what happens when you rewrite without rereading.
Yeah, I believe Noah invited me to write this piece as sort of a contrast/counterpoint to his view. I think the misinterpretation of *The Matrix* – and also *V*, which I insist on reading as entirely separate from the Alan Moore comic and sidestepping the question of which is more important – stems from a number of different things. First of all, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you or anyone who reads this blog that Americans in general are deeply embedded in a shitty ass ideological mindset that leads to libertarianism on one end, fascism on another, and which Silicon Valley wants to merge into a combination of both. The Wachowskis are conspicuously American filmmakers – they don’t necessarily *want to be*, but everything they make drips with American ideology.
My second point is much more speculative and I want to say that I’m saying it as a commenter on this piece, and it should not be read as part of the original piece to which I’ve signed a certain level of professional credibility because I simply don’t have the evidence to substantiate this speculation. My own experience of being a (formerly) closeted transsexual is that the combination of jealousy and utter self-loathing that you can feel when trying to be someone you ultimately can’t be (that is, your assigned gender identity, “Mister Anderson,” whatever) also leads to the temptation to blame people who seem to go through life so easily. In many ways, the scene where Morpheus lectures Neo about those who have not been awakened, and the film’s incredibly dismissive attitudes toward the lives of everyone who isn’t part of the revolution, reminds me of “die cis scum” attitudes I see in the trans community. All that said, we’re talking about two people who, whether they knew it or not at the time (or perhaps one knew and the other didn’t, like I said *we really don’t know, and it’s not really our business,* but I still want to know) were closeted trans women living professional lives as men – living a lie to themselves as well as others. I know that made me angry – before I *knew* I was trans, I actually hated men (I now don’t at all, it was projected self-loathing of the mask I was wearing).
So, did the Wachowskis make the violence and superiority complex of the original films intentionally to represent “trans/queer folks are better/more awakened than cis people”? I hope not, consciously, but it’s possible. I definitely think that’s what’s going on with the few trans folks who have found themselves allying with the reactionary elements of Silicon Valley, and I can say it’s a dark path I came close to walking myself (it was only transition itself that saved me from it).
Incidentally, you asked about my doctoral dissertation. Unfortunately for my own professional needs I have to “embargo” it while I try to turn it into journal articles, but I can share it by email – you can contact me at lockhart underscore ellie at yahoo dot com. The first chapter deals with another nerd fairy tale which I used to truly love – unlike *The Matrix* though, I can’t ultimately defend *Ender’s Game* and I think there’s a very clear path from EG – > Enn Are Exx -> Reproductively Capable Worker Ants (which are the chapters of my dissertation). *The Matrix* likely plays a role in the same superiority narrative. At the same time, I think that the ultimate “culprit” in the case of the films for the toxic narrative elements is, again,the self-destruction (that’s easy to project outward) that trans people get taught by society. I think it’s unfortunate that the Ws’ later works get less attention because they really do go back and essentially redo their earlier stuff, with some pretty clear contempt for the things we’re criticizing here. (Also, their first film *Bound* has little of the issues we’re talking about but a TON of the trans stuff.)
I don’t think Americans’ ideological mindset is particularly shitty. All cultures have their own self destructive tendencies, libertarianism just happens to be one of ours. (Whether “fascism” in an American context is supposed to mean the Klan, the Standard Oil trust, or Donald Trump, I’d say that’s a waste of a word that should be specifically used for a different, basically Catholic European phenomenon – including the Nazis, sort of, who initially came mostly from Catholic Germany and Austria, then ultimately got most of their votes in Protestant Germany.)
Thank you for the rest of your very interesting reply!
Ender’s Game vs. the Matrix is an interesting contrast. I think Ender’s Game is a lot better, basically because it’s way more ideologically committed to its evilness. The Matrix really is a mess (imo) which mostly stumbles around through standard issue savior-dude tropes and PKD boilerplate; there’s a lot of ugly messages, but they al seem second hand. Ender’s Game, though, is really a quite carefully thought through and intensely imagined ode to the morality of genocide.
I think The Matrix is a lot better because the costumes are cool. I mean this quite seriously.
An striking thing about Ender’s Game is that it seems like it could have been written to exactly confirm Leslie Fiedler’s diagnosis of American literature of 37 years previously:
(I’m not sure it isn’t merely insufferable. Maybe it looked more like tragedy when manifested in the America of the ’40s, for the same reason that King Lear’s sentimentality seems more impressive than King John’s.)
That’s a great quote, and yes, perfect for Ender’s Game.
I am not as taken with the Matrix costumes, I don’t think. They’re okay. The design is definitely the thing to like about the Matrix, though. Not as good as Star Wars, but pretty fun.