Finally saw The Matrix

[lady_*nix]

That was... interesting. Watched it with a friend, honestly it was a better experience for that. Not least since I had someone to hug me during the body horror parts, LOL. It's definitely very trans, and a bit camp in an 80s B-movie way, but I can see how that went over a straight audience's heads.

What I can't see though, is how people can not just be MRAs after watching the film, but think it backs them up. The most MRA-like character in the film is... Cypher, who uses edginess and toxic masculine aggression to cover up his insecurity, and winds up betraying the crew. Who needs a Matrix when people have that level of denialism at the ready.

[SciFiFisher]

Just wait. There are three more movies.

[pumpkinpi]

I am so ignorant when it comes to underlying themes in movies, from Don't Look Up all the way back to the Matrix. I take them at face value until I get told there is more to it. I didn't know anything about the trans metaphor in the Matrix until last week. (I'm no Matrix expert, I saw it when #3 came out and have only seen bits of it.)

And in Don't Look Up, I had no idea it was an allegory about climate change. I did get the general allegory of how the media and politicians plug their ears and say la la la in the face of the disaster, but when I was watching it not one time did I think of CC. I was kind of embarrassed when MrPI pointed it out later!

[lady_*nix]

@pumpkinpi

To be fair re The Matrix, the only people who thought it was a trans allegory were... trans people. And a lot of that was probably after the Watchowskis got outed as trans. It's all shibboleths - stuff most people would miss unless it either affected them directly, or was something they e.g. wrote an academic paper on.

Once you see it though, you can't unsee it. All the way down to the androgynous appearance of most of the heroes, which is almost certainly deliberate.

[lady_*nix]

So I was iffy on posting this, but what the heck...

One of the things that also struck me a lot was the primacy of touch, intimacy, and tenderness among Morpheus' crew. It's not just Neo and Trinity. They're in each other's personal space, and touching each other as a display of friendship/affection, all the time. And when their comrades are plugged into the Matrix, they minister to their sleeping bodies the way a caretaker would... or a spouse.

Some of this is probably just "being a squad of soldiers" stuff, but I think it still stands in contrast to the usual hypermasculine action movie stuff. Especially seeing how the Agents and their police helpers behave.

And yeah sure - some of the stuff with the free humans is just "being a squad of soldiers", and some of the stuff with the Agents is just "being sociopathic AIs that pass as human". But remember that the Watchowskis wrote the rules for these films, and both were closeted trans women even at the time IIRC.