The Real Red Pill
One of the key phrases of the alt-right is that they took the ‘red pill’ made famous in the 1999 film The Matrix. The pill was offered to Neo by Morpheus. It would reveal to him the true nature of reality, and send him into an unrecognizable world much like Alice in Wonderland – “down the rabbit hole.” Also on offer was the ‘blue pill’ which would allow Neo to continue to live in a software delusion called the Matrix. Neo took the red pill because he realized something was wrong. But he didn’t become a fascist, white supremacist or an alt-righter. Quite the contrary…
This key right-wing cultural meme of red-pilling stolen from The Matrix is so full of flaws it again shows the incompetent nature of the alt-right. Like the 3 Stooges, they basically can’t get anything straight, especially meta-politics embedded in culture. They are no different than the vicious teenagers dressed like Neo in long, leather coats who shot up and killed students and teachers at Columbine High School in 1999. This wasn’t the message of the film except to perhaps the underdeveloped emotional brain of a kid.
The right-wing use of the term ‘red pilling’ was used first in the 1990s ‘Manosphere’ matrix of incels and men’s rights losers. These are mostly chauvinist males who can never get a woman to like them. Modern whiny little comedy bros like Bill Burr, who just appeared on Saturday Night Live, harp on women so much I have to wonder if he made up a wife to cover for him. She’s probably a mechanical doll.
The shallow alt-right idea is that the Matrix film rebels ‘oppose the system’ like they do! To them the ‘system’ is feminist, multi-national, democratic, socialist and equal. As any Marxist and most people paying attention know, reality is the exact opposite. In fact the alt-right fits better with the real matrix that exists now, which is unequal, anti-working class, exploitative, capitalist, mostly oriented towards white and male elites and actually undemocratic.
THE MOVIE
Lets look at the film The Matrix and the real red pill. First off, I have to say that in a political context like this film, the color red has represented revolutions against capitalists and feudalists since the French Revolution when red hats and red flags waved in the streets of Paris. Their hats were based on red Phrygian hats worn by freed slaves in Rome, 100s of years earlier. Politically it denotes revolutionary change, not counter-revolutionary change, affirmed by the red flags of the Russian, Chinese and other social revolutions. This political association existed in the U.S. until very recently, when CNN oddly started using the color red to denote states won by Republicans in elections. This doesn’t change the meaning of the color in politics. Sorry but culturally the ‘red’ pill is communist. One comic wag even suggested that the ‘red’ Republicans and the ‘blue’ Democrats are merely two pills leading to the same group of oligarchs dominating our capitalist matrix. Don’t take either pill!
So who are the rebels against the Matrix? Well, they could have been picked by a cultural Marxist. Their leader Morpheus is Laurence Fishburne – a very tough black man. Two women, including Neo’s romantic interest Trinity, are part of the pack, along with two more black men and two white guys. Neo likes Trinity and she him, so he’s no incel. Nor is he a chauvinist, much to Alt-Right chagrin. The Prophet helping the rebels is a middle-aged black woman living in a run-down apartment. So the rebels are not an isolated bunch of overweight white men sporting beards and AR-15s, they are a dreaded unified group covering various geographic origins. Yet who betrays the rebels in the first film? A whiny white guy, Cypher, who lusts after the illusions of a steak, money and status, not the austere but real underground life of the rebels. Yeah, a white guy. Did the identitarian alt-right notice that? No.
The ‘agents’ are digital machine men that look like they came out of the 1997 film Men in Black policing aliens. They might be reminiscent of the FBI but they are definitely the “Joe Friday” police type of detective – even the slow verbalisms of the top agent, Agent Smith, reflect this. Their backup in the movie are all police. They are dressed as identical corporate men in suits and ties, sort of frat-preppy Proud Boys with jobs. They are not the right-wing stereotypes of African-American gang-bangers or ratty anti-fascists. Nearly all of the real alt-right loves killer cops, and spends time defending them against Black Lives Matter. Here the cops defend the Matrix as you’d expect. Another fail.
VAMPIRES
What is the biggest secret of the Matrix, besides the fact that it is a digital facsimile covering a real world? The terrifying heart of the Matrix is how the machines milk the bio-energy of humans. It is a graphic portrayal of the exploitation of human energy and health – muscles, blood, bones and brains. It is a gruesome picture of exploitation, as the machines are basically vampires living off the life force of human beings.
Karl Marx equated capitalism with vampirism. For instance, in Das Kapital, Marx describes his subject as “dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Capital is the ‘dead labor’ - much like a machine, which is called ‘fixed capital’ by Marx. So the red pill has revealed the real secret to Neo – humans are merely objects of use allowing ‘the machines’ to survive and control. While the alt-right ignores capitalism and the rich, or when they do, lie about it, here is revealed the secret every Marxist knows – capital exploits and uses workers, even when they don’t know it as they sleep blissfully in their pods. The alt-right loves capitalism, so they are actually on the side of the blood-suckers.
Are the machines running the software in the Matrix ‘just’ machines? Or do they really represent something or someone human, as Marx mentioned? Well the machines existing now that run our digital matrix are actually ‘the internet’ of computers, cell phones, routers, fiber lines, transmission towers, server farms, power grids, software programs and software code, with banks funding them. This is all dominated by libertarian billionaires and their corporations, in league with the U.S. government’s NSA. The real matrix is the World Wide Web, which the alt-right has thrived in, living in their basements as they do. It seems transparent that the movie Matrix’s ‘machines’ are a stand-in for the software- enabled machines that run capitalist and world society now. The machines are fixed capital. And who actually owns this fixed, dead capital in the real world? Capitalists.
What came before the Matrix in the film? Well, Neo sees the real world is a ruin. War between ‘machines’ and humans created it, as in the Terminator series. The ruined cities and nature underlying the Matrix can be seen as the dystopian results of imperial war and climate change. Both of which the alt-right love.
ORIGINS
Who are the Wachowskis, who both wrote and directed the film series? Cranky old guys who want a whites-only country? No. They are both trans women, Lana and Lilly, who were formerly men. Not very alt-right, that… They also wrote and produced “V for Vendetta” and “Cloud Atlas.” The former is an anti-royal anarchist film targeting King James I, which made those Vendetta masks worn in left and BLM protests popular. The latter is a compendium of stories of people fighting cruel nursing homes, racist ship captains and anti-gayness; a criminal oil industry company; a Korean dictatorship. None of this has anything to do with the alt-right.
Who wrote “Alice in Wonderland” in 1865, a book that might have inspired "The Matrix"? Lewis Carroll, an English writer, wrote it as a parody of Oxford and Christ Church Victorian popular culture. The biggest enemy is the reddish Queen of Hearts, whose attitude towards Alice is “Off With Her Head!” The Queen is a member of the House of Lancaster, which became the overbearing Lannisters of Game of Thrones. Royalty is not the precinct of Marxism, but it certainly is a favorite of reactionaries and rightists, who love inequality and yearn for a Dune-like feudal future. Carroll was no fan of royalty or power.
Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane wrote the song White Rabbit based on Alice in Wonderland, also riffing off these pills: "One pill makes you larger; one pill makes you small..." The Airplane were a very left-wing hippie band from San Francisco singing in another song, Volunteers: "Got a revolution, got a revolution..." So the origins of the red pill meme are actually the opposite of alt-right. Indeed, the whole film contradicts their fantasy. It is actually a leftist film, though flawed with an individual white savior as in so many ‘hero’ films.
According to an analysis of modern alt-right and Fascist thought, (“Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate”) even the method of the culture war that the red pill idea came from was inspired by Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and the European Frankfurt School. The pragmatic ‘intellectuals’ in the U.S. alt-right also borrowed much of their analysis from French rightists. So these red, white and blue flag-wavers can’t even think this shit up on their own!
The conservative and alt-right’s cultural heroes are isolated comics like Dennis Miller, low-grade rockers like Ted Nugent or Nordic black metal, light-weight actors like Adam Sandler and Chuck Norris, B-list celebrities like Reagan and Trump and bi-polar A-listers like Kanye West. What do you expect from a cultural perspective reeking of nostalgia, the 1950s, the occult, authoritarianism and archaic myths like Odin, the Nordic sagas or Teutonic Knights? The alt-right’s idea of ‘red pilling’ is a cosmic joke of misunderstanding. They are actually the blue-pillers of the capitalist Matrix pretending to be otherwise.
P.S. - The follow-up "Matrix-Resurrection" film is a romantic disaster, a copy of the earlier films which fucked-up and undermined those films at the same time. From the Critical Drinker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8n8WdpW9tA
Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “Gramsci,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Monsters of the Market,” “The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism.” The book “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate” will soon be reviewed as part of this anti-fascism series.
The Cultural Marxist
October
16, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment