The co-director of the popular "Matrix" trilogy Lilly Wachowski confirmed that the sci-fi series is a transgender allegory.
Responding to a question posed about this Matrix fan theory, Wachowski said she was “glad that it has gotten out that that was the original intention.”
“The world wasn’t quite ready yet,” Wachowski said during a Netflix video interview that was posted Tuesday. “The corporate world wasn’t ready for it.”
Lilly Wachowski and her sister Lana Wachowski, both trans women, together created the "Matrix" franchise and directed the first three films, released between 1999 and 2003. Lana is directing the fourth "Matrix" film herself, currently slated for a 2022 release.
The theory that the films are a trans allegory has flourished since Lana and Lilly both came out as trans after the films were released. Lilly herself alluded to that possibility in the acceptance speech for a 2016 GLAAD award for her Netflix series "Sense8."
In the YouTube video posted Tuesday, Wachowski said she loves how “meaningful” the films are to transgender people.
“The way that they come up to me and say: these movies saved my life,” Wachowski said, “I’m grateful that I can be throwing them a rope to help them along their journey.
She said the "Matrix" series was about a “desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view.”
She described Switch, “a character who would be a man in the real world and then a woman in the Matrix," as representative of where her and her sister’s “headspaces were” when they were making the films.
“I don’t know how present my transness was in the background of my brain as we were writing it,” Wachowski said, “but it all came from the same sort of fire that I'm talking about.”
