The Matrix Sequels Are Good, Actually (Part 1) (Patreon)

Preamble:

This is the part of the video where we sing superlatives about The Matrix. You know The Matrix is good. It completely changed action cinema worldwide, and it became so ubiquitous that for a decade after its release in 1999 virtually every mid-tier action movie, cartoon, and tv show referenced something from The Matrix at least once. But it's not even just stylistically influential: the red pill/blue pill question made such an impression on popular culture that to this day we still use "taking the red pill" as a shorthand for coming to terms with mind-blowing truths, although this is uh, shall we say "politically fraught" in a way we'll explore more at length later in the video. Point is, even people who don't really like The Matrix have probably been forced to put more thought into their opinion about it than any other film made in the last century.

Less talked about, however, are its ignominious sequels: The Matrix Reloaded, released May 15th 2003, and The Matrix Revolutions, released November 3rd 2003. This isn't to say they are without cultural influence. Where bullet time and Laurence Fishburne came to represent The Matrix in our popular imagination, The Matrix Sequels came to be defined by a frumpy old Colonel Sanders looking dude saying "indubitably," and by Hugo Weaving mugging to the camera as infinite Agent Smiths. The first film is cool, sleek, even a bit edgy, but the sequels? Weird, offputting, silly, goofy, with parodies more often focusing in on how they feel largely nonsensical. Now, to be fair, there is a fair bit of goofiness in our memory of The Matrix with lines like "I know kung fu" being repeated ad nauseum, but even as aspects of the film gained a kind of cringe reputation for being too earnest and too edgy, I don't think this ever crossed over into saying "The Matrix is a bad movie," but rather that it's kind of silly and quaint even as it remains genuinely entertaining. In contrast, from day one the reception of the sequels was negative, the memes were mocking, and the parodies... oh god, the parodies. [snl sketch will ferrell as the architect "i am the architect, but you can call me larry" "hi larry"] Culturally speaking, if The Matrix is your cutely self-serious teenage nephew, then the sequels are that same nephew at 22, and everyone's tapping their wrist like "okay, but when are you going to grow up?"

The thing about these flash-in-the-pan memetic critical receptions is that the ghost of them tends to stick around, regardless of the actual quality of the film in question. Marriage Story, for example, COULD be a genuinely great film, but because it has that one extraordinarily memeable scene, loads of people are only ever gonna know it as the "every day i wake up" [smashes wall][cries] movie. But where The Matrix has gone through something of a cultural redemption, with both of its directors having come out as transgender women, and the film itself finally being acknowledged as a trans allegory, the sequels have so far received no such redemption. But with The Matrix 4 looming on the horizon, we think it's high time to give these movies their due. And boy howdy, do these movies deserve better than what they got!

Welcome, thought criminals! (hey I did it I found a good gender neutral greeting) it’s time for another patreon reward video, so today we’re defending The Matrix Sequels from the machines who have been trying to destroy them for one hundred years. These movies are big hefty BOYS and there’s a lot to unpack, which is why I’ve hired on my close friend Sarah to help me download the ability to give The Matrix Sequels the analysis they deserve.

Hi, my name is Sarah Zedig, my pronouns are she/her, and, uh [gestures at matrix poster on the wall] this isn't a prop for this video, I've actually had this poster for a very long time. I think it's important to say right up front that this isn't a bit, this isn't pop culture contrarianism just for the sake of it, I genuinely love these films and have since I was in high school. In fact it was the dual commentary tracks across all three of the Matrices, one helmed by critics who hated these movies and the other helmed by philosophers who enjoyed it, which suggested to me that I didn't want to be *just* a critic. This isn't about proving a point or pulling a gotcha for me, and I've had too many hours-long conversations with Sophie about these films to think that it's a bit for them either. I- we- think these movies are actually seriously good and deserve your time and attention, because for as long as this video is I guarantee you there's so much more that we couldn't even think to say in the first place!

But before we get started, I think it's important we lay down a few caveats. First, and perhaps most important, is that we're not trying to say the Matrix Sequels are perfect. The title of this video is "The Matrix Sequels Are Good, Actually," not "The Matrix Sequels Are Unassailable Masterworks Of Cinema Actually." Now, given the correct interaction of substances either one of us might be compelled to make that exact point, BUT that's not our goal with this video. Our goal here is to convince you, dear viewer, that The Matrix Sequels are good, actually, and to explain the way in which they are good, actually. Because it's our opinion that these films are actually very ahead of their time, and we've got a pretty compelling case to make in that regard.

Second caveat: For the purposes of this video, we are viewing The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as a single 267 minute long film. This actually shouldn't even be a caveat as both films were shot simultaneously, released within six months of each other, and neither film really works on its own, but it's just unfortunately true that the popular conception of the sequels is that they are two separate movies that don't make sense and they're big and loud and dumb and lol this mfer said "ergo." The first step to appreciating these films for what they are is to abandon the notion that there is any significant distinction between them. As a quick example: In Reloaded, when the protagonists are chasing down a lead that involves them talking to a French pervert called The Merovingian, we get this extremely quick closeup of Neo noticing this man being led away from The Merovingian. It's barely more than a second but it's accompanied by a distinct musical cue as if to say, this man is important, remember this man. The problem is that we never see or hear about this man again in Reloaded, and the scene that follows his brief introduction is so weird that we're already likely to forget about that one stray close-up. It's not until Revolutions that we meet this man, Raja, and his family. If you see these as two separate films, both Raja's introduction and reincorporation are unsatisfying: it's too quick to stick with you in Reloaded, and too sudden to feel wholly natural in Revolutions... unless you watch them back to back, in which case Raja's first appearance is just frictive enough that you're likely to remember it when he shows up again at the start of Revolutions. Our point is that these films are internally structured to be viewed as one film, so from this point on we're just gonna refer to them as The Matrix Sequels, and if you've got a problem with that all we can say is that if you have the patience and attention span to binge watch every new season of Stranger Things in a single day, I think you can handle a five hour movie in your own home on your own time.

As a fun note, it’s interesting to interpret the title The Matrix: Reloaded as not just a pun about how both programs and guns can be “reloaded” haha very clever see, but also as a statement that in some ways The Matrix Sequels are retreading some of the philosophical ground of the first movie. It’s The Matrix: Reloaded. Therefore you could see that as the title or you could see Revolutions as the title, an obvious pun on the biblical “revelations” because it’s something about religion and also communism? We’ll get to that, oh baby we’ll get to THAT.

We’ll reference the fact of The Matrix Sequels as one movie as we go along using roughly the following format: “Important movie observation X, which by the way is good if you watch The Sequels as one movie, but doesn’t play if you watch them as two. Aren’t we clever, now give us money on patreon.”

Third caveat: we aren’t here to change your subjective taste. The action in The Matrix Trilogy is absolutely superb. The Wachowskis are absolutely fantastic at showing you what, in film theory, is known as “the coolest thing you’ve ever seen”. They’re superhuman at escalating action.

Look at the first film. We learn that ordinary people can learn kung fu just by knowing about the matrix, and become martial arts blackbelts by downloading the knowledge straight into their brains.

Morpheus teaches us that the power of belief is what makes you into a badass, and as the leader of the group, the alpha male, Morpheus has the strongest belief, so he’s the most powerful, but maybe, just maybe, Neo could be even more powerful, we don’t know. He’s the guy from all the YouTube thumbnails, he’s the sigma male!

So we’re viscerally aware of the philosophical stakes of this fight, and then on top of all that, Mouse runs to tell everyone “Morpheus is fighting Neo!!” and they all scramble over the breakfast table to come watch.

In the second movie when the agents first show up, Neo starts fighting them and instantly puts one hand behind his back, leading up to the bit where he throws a punch with it, which the agent catches. Indicating that Neo underestimated his opponents he simply states “hm. Upgrades” and then proceeds to beat the utter piss out of the three agents anyway.

All this to lead up to a point that you can analyse what makes action good and why the Wachowskis are really good at it, but like any other matter of subjective taste we can’t just talk you into liking it if you don’t. Perfect case-in-point, I (Sophie) suffer from a rare brain disease where I like the scene in Matrix Reloaded where there are loads of Smiths fighting Neo and Sarah, like most adults, finds it overly long and drawn out.

We can agree on other things, like how that scene shows a turning point in the story of the sequels where Neo realises that Smith really is something different and he simply has to run away, but why bother trying to tell someone to like something they don’t like? After all, you’re a grown-up capable of watching a movie and forming your own opinions without needing YouTubers to construct them for you, right? Right?

We’re setting out here to talk about what we like about The Matrix Sequels, unpack what is frankly a very dense text, and hopefully give folks the tools to get the sequels better, and if you go watch them again, and with a new appreciation for what they’re about you like them more, that’s just spiffing.

And while we’re talking about how you watch The Matrix Sequels why not think a bit about genre? The Matrix was such a game-changing blockbuster when it came out that its cultural cache obscures a lot about where it came from. However, it’s a pretty unchallenging statement to label The Matrix as a cyberpunk story. The digital realm is a massive and in some ways far more important part of the world, it’s set in a dystopian future in which the convergence of oppressive hierarchies and evolving technology has destroyed the world. Why are we even bothering to justify this - just look at The Matrix: it’s all leather trenchcoats and hacking and running from the government and hacking and sunglasses and hacking. This doesn’t need defending, but it is interesting to examine the influence of cyberpunk media like Ghost in the Shell the fingerprints of which you can see all over The Matrix Trilogy - you can’t hide from us Kusanagi, your thermoptic camouflage doesn’t hide you from rigorous media analysis!
Sincerely though when you look at the influences on The Matrix, it’s very unsurprising that the 4th instalment in the series, The AniMatrix was an animated piece, and furthermore once you see how well the world and storytelling meshes with this format, it becomes apparent that even the Matrix Trilogy is, after a fashion, a kind of live-action anime. The world design, the soundtrack, and the cinematography right down to specific shots are so clearly anime-inspired that I think you get more out of even the goofiest, silliest looking action scenes in the Sequels if you think of them as anime, and again, when I say I, I mean me, Sophie, because I am the one here who thinks the fight scenes are good, and my contract with Sarah requires me to absolve her of any association with my worst opinions.

The AniMatrix feels very self-confident in what it is, which is an anthology of short films in different animation styles set in the world of The Matrix, some giving us deep lore or the history of specific characters, others just exploring interesting concepts, like “what if someone woke up from the matrix on their own without the support of the resistance?” or “what if there was a physics glitch in the simulation?”
Watching it gives you a sense of the broader world and some of the more interesting philosophical questions that naturally arise out of it, but that don’t necessarily fit in with the core film series or what that series is trying to say. Here’s an original example: In the world of The Matrix, most humans, and therefore most human culture and art exists within the matrix, and therefore is controlled at least indirectly by the machines, but still made by human beings. So can culture and art in Zion be said to be truly human or truly free? How about anti-machine art or art that alerts people to the existence of the matrix? What if your nuanced understanding of culture and art allowed you to understand messages from other people, provided that you both knew about the matrix, that would otherwise go undetected? There are so many interesting questions you can just sit around thinking about, but something interesting here is that the first film doesn’t really touch on them, it’s just there to sell you one big idea: the red pill. By contrast, ideas like that issue of human culture are at least touched on a little in The Matrix Sequels - we learn that vampires and werewolves used to exist in older versions of the matrix. Did the machines put them in because of authentic historical human culture, or did human culture inside the matrix invent those creatures because of the ones that used to exist and rarely still exist? This is a reflection of the concepts in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra, where the philosopher defines simulacra as reproductions that either lose meaning through reproduction or which are reproductions of an original that never existed in the first place.

If we’re getting a bit dry and dense here that’s okay: we just want to demonstrate that there’s a lot to think about, and we’ll unpack it way more carefully in the remaining placeholder length edit this out of the video. Baudrillard though, is an interesting example, because his book is the single biggest philosophical influence on the franchise, and he had criticisms of where the first film fell short, that the sequels actually came back and redid better.

The point is, The Matrix Sequels ask a lot more interesting questions about the world, and take time to chew over their own philosophy, compared to The Matrix, which is the better Hollywood Movie but isn’t as fleshed out. For us to explain this all, the question of what The Matrix Sequels are about is central to why The Matrix Sequels are good, actually.

Part One: Trinity and Trans Lesbian Propaganda

It’s summary time! It’s synopsis time! It’s time to do the part of the video every writer hates but audiences need in order to remember the film! Here’s the first film real quick:

In The Matrix, Neo is a schlubby depressed white guy who gets courted by a queer polycule led by Morpheus, who tells Neo that he is trapped inside the Matrix, a simulation of human reality created by our machine overlords who harvest human beings for biofuel and that Neo might be “The One”. The One, of course, is prophesized by an enigmatic figured called The Oracle to one day end the war between man and machine. Eventually their polycule gets sold out by Buck Ange- I mean Cipher, and Morpheus is captured by Agent Smith. Agents work for the Matrix and are effectively invincible ["if you see an agent, do we what we do... run"]. But Neo realizes after some soul search that despite the Oracle telling him he isn't The One, "Neo" isn’t just short for Neoagina, it’s also an anagram of "one" so he decides to go fight Agent Smith, fucking beefs it super hard and dies like a chump, but then his leatherclad t4t girlfriend kisses him alive again like it's Act Six of Homestuck and now he's internet Jesus. The film ends with Neo penetrating Agent Smith and ascending to the heavens, and who else should play but Rage Against The Machine.

Let’s get to it really quick and straightforward: what’s the red pill? In the years since The Matrix came out every chud from Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump to your least favourite youtube skeptic has adopted “taking the red pill” as a metaphor for some kind of huge revelation about the nature of the world, somewhere between “feminists are bad” and “jews are importing immigrants to destroy the white race”, but, the original film is a trans allegory and the original “red pill” is literally estrogen.

The pills were red that’s what the red pill is.

Nowadays estrogen pills come in all sorts of colours, ironically enough blue is like? The most common one? This is a guess I’m saying things based on no data?

But the original red pill was a red estrogen pill to take to make you grow breasts and such because The Matrix is overpoweringly transgender, in every moment, every idea, every detail, and that’s why I celebrate the first trans cultural holiday, Get Really Baked And Watch The Matrix Day Feb 20th mark your calendars. It’s entirely a video in and of itself to go over how trans The Matrix is, but what we should first think about is the basic philosophy of the core premise.

When cis people talk about The Matrix being trans they often only mention the red pill thing “hey did you know the red pill was originally” yes we know, what isn’t really appreciated is that end to end The Matrix is a trans masterpiece, and while The Matrix Sequels branch out into an exploration of anticapitalism, critical race theory, power, control, post-structuralism, and more besides, they do so through a persistent trans lens.

In Julia Serano’s book Whipping Girl, she describes gender as being like “a job you can’t quit”. Some people are suited to the job are given, and those people cis. Some people really want to be good at the job and they try really hard to convince themselves they’re enjoying it and that it makes sense to keep going but sooner or later the fatigue creeps in. Some people are outright depressed by the job right from the get-go and know they need to get a different job. Others reject the work entirely and live in a post-work-post-gender utopia where there are no borders, no cops and no… hang on a second we might be mixing metaphors here…

The basic premise of The Matrix is that your reality is wrong is a way that you can only tell by feeling, and you can only confirm by seeking out other people who can feel it too. Where do you find those people? On internet forums from the safety of your bedroom of course! But if you investigate enough and reach out through the right channels you might get the opportunity to take a magic pill that lets you escape from the matrix and see your real body for the first time in your life.

Other people who exist comfortably in the virtual world are so embedded in this reality that if you try to tell them about the real world they not only get upset but transform into Agents who will do anything to put an end to you on the spot. Morpheus tells Neo that literally anyone they have not unplugged from the matrix is a potential agent.

You might have noticed that every character in the Matrix Trilogy has a wild nutty hacker name, and if you think it through that’s because of the integral transness of the core concept. They all met online as hackers and used their internet usernames for each other, and then when they discovered their true selves in the real world they rejected the names that were given to them in the matrix and just kept using their hacker names.

This is the deliberate focus of the train scene in The Matrix where Neo rejects Agent Smith constantly calling him the wrong name - Mr. Anderson - as well as gendering him male. Neo proclaims “My name is Neo” just as he throws off Smith and jumps out of the path of the oncoming train. This is likely inspired by something Lana Wachowski described in an award acceptance speech, where she describes her experience of a near suicide attempt as a young person due to crippling dysphoria:

“As I grew older an intense anxious isolation coupled with constant insomnia began to inculcate an inescapable depression. I have never slept much but during my sophomore year in high school, while I watched many of my male friends start to develop facial hair, I kept this strange relentless vigil staring in the mirror for hours, afraid of what one day I might see. Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head -- that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable.”

Describing the experience directly she says:

“I know the train platform will be empty at night because it always is. I let the B train go by because I know the A train will be next and it doesn’t stop. When I see the headlight I take off my backpack and I put it on the bench. It has the note in front of it. I try not to think of anything but jumping as the train comes. Just as the platform begins to rumble suddenly I notice someone walking down the ramp. It is a skinny older old man wearing overly large, 1970s square-style glasses that remind of the ones my grandma wears. He stares at me the way animals stare at each other. I don’t know why he wouldn’t look away. All I know is that because he didn’t, I am still here.
Years later I find the courage to admit that I am transgender and this doesn’t mean that I am unlovable. I meet a woman, the first person that has made me understand that they love me not in spite of my difference but because of it. She is the first person to see me as a whole being. And every morning I get to wake up beside her I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for those two blue eyes in my life.”
There’s a lot of mileage within this premise and they do a lot with it that, especially if you’re trans, is incredibly powerful and moving, like Trinity’s allusion to “where that road goes” for example, but once again this video is not here to sit around picking apart the beautiful transness of The Matrix and crying February 20th mark your calendars.

I specifically remember a multitude of lunchtime conversations around the release of The Matrix Reloaded where my 12 and 13 year old peers described Trinity as "a bitch," saying they wished Neo would just "[description of casual domestic violence omitted]." In fact, if you take a cursory glance at a lot of the conversations around these films online, you'll see that sentiment pop up fairly often. Rather than try to disprove or undermine this perception, I actually think it's more interesting to look at it as the intended affect from a specific segment of the audience. Trinity, from the moment she first shows up, is so thoroughly lesbian-coded it's hard to even to quantify. And lesbians, culturally speaking, are often characterized as bitchy, mean, and unlikeable, which probably has nothing to do with the fact that most stories in Hollywood are written and directed by men who think it's a violation of their human rights when a woman tells them "no."

In the first scene where Neo meets Trinity, in the dialogue a big emphasis is put on how he assumed the hacker he heard about online would be a man, with Neo saying “I thought you were a guy” and Trinity saying “most guys do”. Besides that, there are a bunch of things, like the focus on her back and shoulders, which is simultaneously coding her to be attractive to women who love women, but also.. Arguably??? It’s also making her appear as potentially trans. It’s… arguably, what they’ve done here is make her… clockable? This analysis is something that’s very messy, because it’s so much not about things you point to and evidence carefully and logically, it’s a lot much more about ~vibes~

So bear with us as we become your tour guides through The Matrix’s Vibe Zone.

What we really want from the vibe zone is an understanding of the way this trilogy constructs themes, because a huge part of what is carried across from the first film into The Matrix Sequels is about this vibe. Gender is a very strange and abstract thing. It’s like the matrix - that’s the original allegory of the film. It’s so all-encompassing and totally surrounding that it’s incomprehensible, but contextually gender can be understood way more easily. Being a woman is a very abstract sort of thing, but being a woman who loves women, being a lesbian, is very concrete. It should be noted that Lana Wachowski was dating a woman she is now married to when she wrote The Matrix.

Trinity is made up to be attractive to women who are attracted to women first and foremost, and firstly if you’re a person who thinks they’re a man watching this film, then seeing her and wanting to be a lesbian is a big transgendered moment for you congratulations sweaty we’re so proud, and secondly, seeing Neo love her creates this undeniable vibe Neo & Trinity are lesbians. You just look at them and they’re lesbians. That’s what they are.

Look at this poster for Matrix Reloaded, that’s uhhh, that’s two women:

Woah what’s that going on in their sunglasses?

We can both attest to the gender affirming nature of dating women as women and seeing the tangible but very difficult to describe ways that it’s different from dating women when you perceive yourself as a man. Your relationship to other women becomes sapphic, which becomes part of how you know. Neo has a frankly really odd vibe as a male protagonist because he’s actually not a male protagonist but a woman, and his relationship with Trinity is unlike other heterosexual relationships on screen because it’s actually not a heterosexual relationship but a lesbian one. During their sex scene in the Sequels their two smooth hairless bodies are such a focus and also just generally, the soft, quiet gay vibes between these two are overpowering.

There are also, it’s important to note, some extremely bad vibes going on in The Matrix: Cipher, the guy who betrays the runners and murders Dozer, Apoc and Switch, is an absurdly villainous-looking dude. It really seems bizarre that they even associate with him, he’s just so god damn villainous but then you remember Buck Angel looks like that in real fucking life.

The Buck Angel Tangent

There is a popular modern reading of the character of Cipher that Cipher is Buck Angel. Why is this? Well, Buck Angel, famous trans man and porn actor, was infamously the man who outed Lana Wachowski to the press when she was very much not out. It’s actually a nightmare to go back and read 2000s era gossip columns outing her, because the misgendering and transphobic abuse is so over the top that the sentences sometimes simply don’t make grammatical sense. Some people will change pronouns for her mid-sentence, others will be talking about her taking estrogen while throwing he’s and him’s around, it’s a mess. But the crucial detail here is that when the press came looking into Lana sniffing for any kind of gossip, Buck Angel threw her under the whole entire bus, because, and this can’t be stressed enough, Buck is a massive piece of shit.

Mr. Angel has spent his more recent years insisting non-binary identities are fake, siding with famous and dangerous transphobes like Graham Linehan and Posie Parker and funnily enough, continuing to throw the whole trans community under the bus in order to be seen by bigots as “one of the good ones”. Naturally behaviour like this along with the disgusting betrayal to a fellow transgender person who made The Matrix which, as we’ve established is so thoroughly about being trans, all seems like really compelling evidence in the reading that Buck Angel is Cipher, the character who sells out the other runners to the agents in exchange for the opportunity to go back to sleep and re-enter the matrix. In the allegory of the film, Cipher is someone who wants to be totally accepted by cis people, or even be able to convince himself he is cis.

When Cipher unplugs Switch, who the Wachowski Sisters originally wanted to be played by actors of different genders inside and outside the matrix, Switch says “not like this” in a moment reflecting the realisation of their worst fear: that someone from their own community, someone who should be on their side, would betray and murder them.

There’s one enormous hole in this reading though, and it does entirely sink the thing: Buck Angel didn’t meet Lana Wachowski until after The Matrix was out. In fact in the Rolling Stone article where he outed her, he refers to her as “the [word that is not woman] who made The Matrix”. The funny thing though is that this makes the reading only more compelling. Cipher is so entirely and completely a representation of the kind of person who Buck Angel is, that it’s not untrue, even if it isn’t historical, to say “Cipher is Buck Angel”.

So it’s important that everyone knows: BUCK ANGEL HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PIECE OF SHIT but the character is there to remind us of something more general, a type of person who is the absolute god damn worst, who also Buck Angel is. Oddly enough this isn’t the only time that the Matrix trilogy predicts a type of person so completely it gives you chills, it also does this with Agent Smith, but we’ll get to that later.

End of Buck Angel Tangent

The Wachowski sisters, but Lana Wachowski in particular has a history of pushing to get trans representation in media, and sadly there’s historically been a lot of pushback, so it’s probably worth saying that so much of The Matrix Trilogy’s queerness only gets to exist in the vibe zone because they literally weren’t allowed to put explicitly trans characters in it.

There’s this great bit in an interview with Sense8 co-writer J Michael Strazynski where he describes the moment he suggested adding a trans character to the show:

The funny thing is that when we were working out who the characters were going to be, we had pretty much all of them locked except Nomi. I was saying, “This is a character who’s a hacker, who is a bridge between different kinds of worlds. It would be kind of cool if she was transgendered.” And Lana shot up out of her chair, dancing around, going, “It wasn’t me this time! It was him! It was his idea!”

Famously, as we already mentioned, the character of Switch was intended to be played by actors of different genders in the matrix and the real world, but the studio pushed back on it and forced them to change it.

It’s important to understand this theme conveyed so heavily through ~vibes~ because a product of that is that is rolls a few things together. As we’ve covered, Neo and Trinity’s sapphic vibes are integral to Neo’s transness, and that means that queerness and love become one united element in the series.

Neo’s indecision is a huge running theme of The Matrix Sequels that we’ll address in the next section. His first line of dialog in Reloaded is “I wish I knew what to do” and The Sequels basically bombard us with different points of view trying to tell Neo what to do, and he repeatedly takes the route of instinct and emotion instead of something backed up by long monologues or ideology. Trinity being the object of his affection, is therefore what some people might see as being “in the way” of him making “rational decisions” but this is actually part of a theme we’ll explore just now about love being the core human element.

In his monologue at the end of The Matrix, Smith insists that humanity is a virus and “I am the cure”, which is kind of interesting in this film that pits our queer-vibed protagonists against these agents who want to destroy them, because even to this day, violent homophobes and transphobes call queer people “a disease” and essentially, market themselves as the cure. In The Matrix Sequels Smith has another monologue at the end where he derides various emotions and explains as “vagaries of perception”, just illusion conjured by the human machine, but what is his most despised and antithetical quality? “Only the human mind could come up with something as insipid as love”

It’s really interesting that he brings up love here at this point where trinity has died and so the recurring theme of love seems to be out of the series, but then again love has been central to all the climactic moments of the series so far. At the end of The Matrix, when Neo gets shot dead it is Trinity’s kiss that brings him back, at the midpoint climax of The Sequels it’s Neo’s decision to save Trinity that throws The Architect’s plan out the window, and now at the end, Smith picks on love of all things to deride.

This scene is complex in its setup and payoff, because a bunch of it revolves around the ability to supposedly see the future, but we’ll get to that in the next section. Either way, Smith (the Smith who was originally The Oracle) says to Neo “Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo”, which is significant firstly because it is one of literally two times in the whole series he calls Neo by his name, secondly because this is the final confrontation of this film where at the same point of the first film Neo proclaimed “my name is Neo”, and thirdly because Smith is able to quote from this scene he wasn’t present for, only because he retains some part of The Oracle. He overwrites every person, human and program, in the matrix but all of them remain a part of him somehow, and it’s that vital element, choice, love, queerness, humanity, that Smith can’t reconcile. The problem for this agent of the status quo, this anti-queer bigot, is that queerness can’t be stopped, so when he finally gets what he wants and absorbs Neo, the whole thing comes crashing down around him.

Smith is the monster of the Matrix, because the matrix is trying to fit the natural diversity, difference, choice, queerness and love that makes up human life into a rigid machine system, and ultimately it’s that vital human element which is Smith’s undoing.