It was so damn perfect the people chose The Matrix for kicking off Arts Whistler's 2025 People's Film series—a mere nine days after Trump's coronation—that we should all give "The People" who voted for it a hearty pat on their collective back, or at least shake their collective hand. (The People’s Film is a Whistler fan favourite where the community votes on one of four movies related to a central theme.)
If you were too young to have soaked up The Matrix when it was first released, or too busy to catch it this go-round, it's no secret this 1999 piece of cinematic dynamite pretty much blew up movie-making—maybe even the way we think of reality—forever.
The first of what eventually grew into a series, The Matrix stars Keanu Reeves as Neo, a computer programmer-turned-hacker recruited by rebels to help them fight AI machines that have taken over the world and stuck all the humans inside a giant simulated reality called the Matrix. At one point, Neo can take a red pill, which would let him see what was really happening beyond the Matrix's simulated reality, or a blue pill, which would let him return to experiencing the la-la-land illusion.
The whole Matrix metaphor of feeling like you're trapped in a totally unreal reality has become a huge icon for the transgender community, and more. Many fans also think The Matrix was so cyber-prescient and AI-precognitive we could set all our futurism watches by it, even today. (Could anyone ever have imagined all the self-satisfied CEOs and billionaire owners/enablers of AI and social media at Trump's coronation along with the digital influencers tying their own hot-air balloons to same?)
The Matrix directors are the Wachowskis—trans sisters, Lilly and Lana, who grew up on comic books and gaming, and are still into them big time. Children of a Polish immigrant, they were both born as boys and grew up in Chicago, one of the sanctuary cities ICE has already raided—along with Dr. Phil, the TV personality!—for undocumented immigrants, as per Trump's first-day executive orders.
More Trump/Matrix ironies are at play than you can shake a stick at. Like his launch of a US$500-billion AI plan, and all the gender-affirming policies he nuked with another first-day executive order, declaring there are only two genders—male and female. This reality-warping order is straight out of The Matrix with statements like this: "These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality."
Huh. Beyond the theatrical Trumpian tossing of pens into the audience at the Capitol One Arena—like Eddie Van Halen tossing guitar picks into a crowd—after he signed eight executive orders onstage, all this makes me wonder two things: Did "The People" of Whistler have some kind of insider scoop on what he was going to sign into action when they voted on The Matrix? And what kind of movie-making dynamite can we expect from the Wachowskis now?
Never mind all the tariffs and "Canada, the 51st state" hoo-ha he continues to spout (the latter drawing audible gasps from participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos during his digital appearance there), if you're still on the fence about our new simulated reality, how about this? For several hours on Jan. 20, Meta showed exactly zero results on Instagram and Reddit for any Democrat or left-leaning hashtags (like #Democrat, #DNC or #TheLeft), while #Republican and the like popped up with millions of posts.
Remember, these are the same media platforms, now fact check-free, owned and operated by Mr. Zuckerberg—only one of the dozen or so social media giants, billionaire tech executives and other non-elected officials front and centre in the main "throne room" for the coronation, the Capitol Rotunda. Meanwhile, nary a state governor was to be seen there. Those would be the officials elected by millions of American voters.
As for that simulacra-type Democrat breach at Meta, even their own officials said they were baffled. Russian bots, anyone?
We know Russia, China and Iran all interfered with the 2016 U.S. election, and again in 2024, seeding divisive voter disinformation. Heck, never mind elections. There's pretty much a pernicious and constant firehose of online Matrix-ing happening around the world.
The not-for-profit Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMas), which was set up in Germany in 2021 to monitor extremism, identified more than 600 Doppelgänger posts coming out of Russia in the weeks before the upcoming German election. Mimicking reliable legacy media like der Spiegel, the posts are filled with lies and disinformation boosting the far-right AfD party. And they've attracted 2 million+ views. Similar Russian Doppelgänger campaigns to sow division and confusion amongst voters have previously mimicked The Guardian, France's Le Parisien and RBC Ukraine.
So where's Neo when we need him?
Don't think for a minute that Canada is immune to all this. But so far our response has been relatively, well, Canadian. In 2023, the feds set up a commission to look into foreign election interference. Like a scene from The Matrix, the final report came out the day before The People’s Film night. While it found no evidence of traitors, it warns about disinformation destroying our democracy. Shockingly, it does zip-all to set up a tangible monitoring tool like CeMAS, but MP Charlie Angus has called for an investigation into the reality-warping power of Mr. “X” Musk.
Before I sign off, here's one more mind-blower from our collective pseudo-reality. Last I checked, schools in Whistler and beyond still aren't educating kids on how to critically analyze what they see online.
Media literacy? Bias mindset? Really, couldn't we all take a semester-long course in both right now? (See Pique's excellent Jan. 17 "Opening Remarks" by our fearless editor, Braden Dupuis, for more on such reality warps.)
Meanwhile, the Wachowskis are still making movies, and The Matrix is alive and well.
So which pill would you like—the red one or the blue?
Don't miss Arts Whistler's Jan. 29 showing of The Matrix, and appropriate Agent "Granny" Smith cocktail with a red or blue pill garnish, at the Maury Young Arts Centre. And you can literally check it out at Whistler's public library, along with the original musical score or the fourth instalment—The Matrix: Resurrections.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who’s never swallowed a blue pill in her life.
