It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. “You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. “You’ve felt it your entire life-that there’s something wrong with the world,” he tells his new protégé. There isn’t much he doesn’t know, and what he does know he relays in parables, which always leave room for Neo to make his own decisions. When we finally meet the man himself, we learn what we expected all along: Morpheus is an omniscient, god-like figure in this universe. Still, when Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) catches Anderson and describes Morpheus as a “terrorist” and “the most dangerous man alive,” it’s hard not to hear a little dog whistling-at least in retrospect. There is quite a bit of anticipation leading up to the moment, about 25 minutes into the film, when we finally see Morpheus, and the film doesn’t give us any reason to believe he would be Black (although Fisburne’s stoic and distinctive tenor leaves little to the imagination). As Anderson darts between cubicles and heads for a window, Morpheus somehow knows exactly what Anderson should do before he does it-but we don’t know why that is, or why he seems to view Anderson as someone worth protecting. We first meet Morpheus when Thomas Anderson, Neo’s alter ego in the Matrix, receives an unexpected visit from a group of white men in ominous dark sunglasses at his corporate job his phone rings, and a disembodied Morpheus proceeds to advise him on how to flee the building and escape the Agents, whose job is to literally “assimilate” people. What would the message of The Matrix be if we viewed it as a parable about Black identity? Does race actually play a role in the film, even if it never mentions it explicitly? If the film’s Black characters are leading the charge to free humanity from bondage and usher in a better world, could it be that the Matrix is a work of afrofuturism? Ahead of watching Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) reprise their roles in The Matrix: Resurrection, I revisited the original and took an inventory of its Black characters to find out. After all, the predicament humanity is up against could easily be seen as a metaphor for slavery. Morpheus and the Oracle (Gloria Foster), a woman who uses her clairvoyant powers to help the insurgency, aren’t just integral to the plot both intellectually and in the tactical sense, they’re characters who hold the keys to dismantling an oppressive system, which suggested to me that race was another through-line worth unpacking in the film. ![]() Much has been made of the film’s Christian undertones, and of course, it’s easy to read it as foreshadowing many of the discussions we’re having right now about technology, from the perils of artificial intelligence to the whole insanity around the metaverse.Īs a writer who writes about race, though, I couldn’t help noticing that some of the film’s most compelling and foundational characters were Black-even without a leading character in Will Smith, who famously turned down the role of Neo. But one of the things that makes The Matrix so special is that there is no one way to interpret it. Last year, director Lilly Wachowski explained to Netflix that the film’s science-fiction storyline was an allegory about transgender identity and a “desire for transformation.” (She and her sister Lana Wachowski both came out as trans after the film’s 1999 release).
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