It's been over twenty years since the release of THE MATRIX, and much has been written about the hidden meanings behind the franchise. One theory that has persisted through the years is that the film is a transgender allegory, which certainly increased in popularity when Lilly and Lana Wachowski later came out as trans women. Given the film's focus on transformation, it's an easy theory to accept, and Lilly Wachowski confirmed the theory while speaking in a video interview for Netflix.
"I'm glad that people are talking about The Matrix movies with a trans narrative," Wachowski said. "I love how meaningful those films are to trans people… I’m glad that it has gotten out that that was the original intention. The corporate world wasn’t ready for it." The writer/director added that THE MATRIX was "all about the desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view." Lilly Wachowski also said that they had originally intended that the character of Switch (Belinda McClory) would be a man in the real world and a woman in the Matrix. In regards to how her identity informed THE MATRIX while they were writing it at the time, Lilly said that she didn't know "how present my transness was in the background of my brain as we were writing it up," but that Lana and herself were "existing in this space where the words didn't exist, so we were always living in a world of imagination. That’s why I gravitated toward science fiction and fantasy and played Dungeons and Dragons. It was all about creating worlds. It freed us up as filmmakers because we were able to imagine stuff at that time that you didn’t necessarily see onscreen, or even the idea of like, how can we exist in as many genres as possible? One of our things that we really enjoyed doing was sort of genre-bending, where you would have stuff that felt like kung-fu movies, anime, [and] westerns."
As we know, we'll be returning to the world of THE MATRIX before too long as production on the fourth film recently resumed after it was halted due to COVID-19 earlier in the year. Lilly Wachowski won't be involved this time around as she's working on the Showtime series Work in Progress, which leaves Lana Wachowski with directing the film solo. THE MATRIX 4 is expected to hit theaters on April 1, 2022.
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