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May 18, 2003 - Free Your Mind:The Matrix, Buffy, Tom Cruise, and The Green Pill
Life is not lost by dying, life is lost minute by minute, day by day, in all the thousand small, uncaring ways.
A moment of freedom can scar you for the rest of your life. The memory becomes a point of comparison were the litany of boring jobs, legal drugs (think caffeine and alcohol), "thank God it's Friday" attitudes, and media mediated reality, become reminders of the inescapable trap life seems to be. You may begin to wish that you could be released from your burdensome soul a la Angel's moment of true happiness with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or by Tom "I am not gay" Cruise's bloody bite as the more literate vampire Lestat. You may just flail about looking for that misplaced Prozac or Paxil.
Speaking of pills: Supposedly, taking the red pill in the un-loaded original Matrix would strip away the blissful soulless ignorance that the blue pill would allow you to live in forever. The over-loaded Matrix sequel, intentionally or not, turns the red pill into the blue pill. Neo, who partakes of the red-pill sacrament, is set free. He now lives in a world of endless adventure and wondrous clarity, but is the red pill world any less of an illusion that that of the blue pill? Only months ago, for the first time in history, there was a massive global antiwar movement. Now, antiwar/anti-occupation protests barely make the news, The Matrix: Reloaded is now the number two movie debut of all time, those pesky terrorists are still blowing things up, and the end of the world is neigh on the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.... ...and I am still a hypocrite who drinks tripple grande soy lattes before photographing protests, loves Matrix-like cheap philosophizing, and is, to be honest, really looking forward to the Buffy finale. Oh well, given the choice between the red and blue pill I would probably swallow both of them and then ask for the green one.
Links Symbolism in The Matrix: Reloaded Institute for Global Communications Nice things going on in the world
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