Like just about every other millennial teenage male, I went to see The Matrix in the theater on opening weekend. As soon as the movie was over, I ran out the glass doors and up the nearest brick wall and screamed, “I’m in the Matrix!” I got in four wall-steps, then five, then fell.

Per teenage me, this was the meaning of The Matrix. Wall-walking. Bullet-dodging. Leather pants. Unbridled fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me righteousness. When, just before the credits rolled, my favorite Rage Against the Machine song began to play, I almost started crying. This movie got me. It was for me, for every angsty teen who yearned to escape this stale, suffocating world while doing sweet jump kicks. That’s what The Matrix was about. There was no other way to see it.

* * *

Before I’d ever actually heard Rage Against the Machine, I heard my friend Hans singing the most famous line from its most famous song to his little brother Ethan, who’d been pleading with Hans to stop teasing him. “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” Hans sang, as Ethan cried and cried.

Soon after that, I bought the first Rage record. I didn’t know who the burning guy on the cover was and we didn’t yet have the internet so I couldn’t find out. I didn’t get most of the lyrics, either. Didn’t even try to. I was mostly in it for Tom Morello, for his ten-ton power chords and borderline orgasmic riffs, which didn’t quite sound the same when I played them on my Fender Squier. I listened to that album over and over on my big headphones while kneeling on my soccer ball beanbag, doing geometry homework. I’d lip-sync the lines that sounded the coolest, lines like “radically poetic” and “a yellow ribbon instead of a swastika,” and when the most famous line played, I’d drop whatever I was doing and think about my mom and my dad and my bullies and my bus driver and all the others who wanted to hold me back. “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” I’d scream, silently.

* * *

In her essay “On Subtlety,” Meghan O’Gieblyn lists a half-dozen authors whose works, they insist, have been completely misunderstood by the public. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, interpreted by most as “a tract against the sex war,” was actually about madness, about healing oneself by first coming apart. Nietzsche, when he wrote about “splendid blond beasts,” was talking about lions, not Aryan men. Georgia O’Keefe was just painting flowers, you perverts.

* * *

In college, I discovered radicalism. I went from, freshman year, not really understanding the difference between Bush and Gore to, senior year, eating Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy for breakfast. I still listened to Rage all the time, still worshipped Tom Morello, but by this point I was very much in it for the lyrics. When Zach de la Rocha rapped about Mumia, about the Zapatistas, about “Al Gore or the son of a drug lord,” I got it, and felt good about getting it, about finding and connecting all of those dots. Rage was the soundtrack of the revolution, period. There was just no other way to hear it.

In those years, I revisited The Matrix, too. And while it still made me want to run up walls, it’d come to mean so much more. I’d begun to participate in workshops and discussion groups on privilege and oppression and social justice, and we talked, all the time, about the blue pill and the red pill. Taking the blue pill, in The Matrix, meant sticking with the status quo, keeping the wool pulled over your eyes, whereas taking the red pill meant, per Lawrence Fishburne’s Morpheus, descending into Wonderland and learning “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” In my college’s social justice circles, when we took the red pill, we were facing the truth about power, late capitalism, the white supremacist patriarchy. That’s what The Matrix was about. There was no other way to see it.

* * *

Few people would accuse Rage Against the Machine of subtlety. Pretty much every song on the band’s first album ends with Zach de la Rocha screaming what seems like each song’s central thesis. “No more lies!” “Freedom!” “Wake up!” “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

And yet.

In his podcast, 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Rob Harvilla dedicates an episode to Rage Against the Machine. He talks about Morello’s guitar pyrotechnics, about how “Down Rodeo” pretty much demands the listener play air bass, about the smug thrill of getting what de la Rocha is saying about Gaza, Tiananmen Square, Leonard Peltier. He also, reluctantly, addresses the many jokes about Rage “advocating for communism via albums released by Sony Records,” as well as the fact that Rage is so often what’s playing in high school weight rooms, at right-wing political rallies, in all sorts of places where people maybe aren’t quite listening to the lyrics. “The eternal Rage Against the Machine conundrum,” per Harvilla, is “what percentage of Rage Against the Machine’s fans got [the] message, and what percentage ignored the message entirely and just dug all the thrashing and screaming?”

During the 2020 elections, I watched footage of Trump supporters slam-dancing to Rage outside a voting site where, they alleged, fraud was afoot. I snickered. I told my friends. It felt good, judging those Neanderthals for moshing to music that’d been made as a weapon against their beliefs.

At some point, I remembered being a high schooler. I remembered screaming lyrics I didn’t understand at my bullies, my mom. I remembered how good it felt.

* * *

I write a lot about masculinity. I write subtle stories about being a soft, shivery boy who didn’t know how to ask for what he needed, and I write subtle stories about being a soft, shivery man who yearns to be more or less or other than what patriarchy prescribes.

While working on these stories, I spend a lot of time thinking about language, about how I might best describe the masculinity I’m aspiring toward. And often enough, where I land is: I want to be a liberated man. I wanted to be liberated from manning up, from clamming up. Liberated from everything patriarchy has put on me and taken from me and asked me to do and be.

This, I tell myself, while sitting in my basement office, is what it means to be a liberated man.

There’s just no other way to see it.

* * *

Sometime in the past decade, men’s rights activists stole into The Matrix in the dead of night and absconded with the red pill. Whereas those words used to make me think of intensely earnest twenty-somethings discussing the “invisible knapsack of privilege,” they now call up the image of dozens of guys I went to high school with, sitting alone in dark rooms, plotting the revolution on 4chan.

In his book, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood, Casey Ryan Kelly breaks down the logic of these men who stole the Red Pill and built the “manosphere.” Their story of themselves, he says, can be summarized as follows:

(1) The innocent (white male) masses have been narcotized and live under an illusory, simulated reality characterized by the unthinking acceptance of progressive narratives (i.e., “the blue pill”); (2) under the canopy of this false reality, men are incapable of perceiving the ways in which they are victimized by women and kept apart from one another; (3) participation in the manosphere shocks (and raises) the conscience of the user, thereby unveiling to them the “desert of the Real” or the “true” and bleak material conditions that constitute their existence (“the red pill”); (4) the subject who once accepted society’s programming is reborn in cyberspace, where they can join a mythical multitude or collective body of liberated men who will overthrow the evil autocratic rule of feminism.

In this interpretation of The Matrix, the women are evil machines, the white men are the last real humans, and the bachelor pad is the Nebuchadnezzar. I assume kung fu is still kung fu.

Men’s rights activists, I’m sure, would say that this isn’t an interpretation. It just is.

For a long time, if you’d asked about my interpretation, I’d have probably said the same thing.

* * *

A few years ago, Lilly Wachowski, who’d co-directed The Matrix, and who’d by that point come out as a trans woman, gave a series of interviews in which she shared that, while she appreciated the various interpretations of her film (most of them, at least), it had on some level always been an allegory about being trans—“about a desire for transformation… from a closeted point of view.”

As soon as I heard this, I ran to my laptop and read every single thing the internet had to say about the topic. I digested the meta-narratives, the alternate readings of scenes I’d always thought I’d understood, the revelation that Switch’s character was originally written to present as male in the real world and female in the Matrix, the revelation that Keanu didn’t know it was a trans allegory, either.

I went to see the film again, in the theater, on the twentieth anniversary of its release. I tried as hard as I could to see it as a story about trans liberation. I did, at some points, manage to see that story. But not as clearly as I saw capitalist robots. Leather pants. Black boots dancing on brick walls.

* * *

Rob Harvilla opens that 60 Songs that Explain the 90s episode by talking about Ice-T’s 1992 song, “Cop Killer.” Both “Cop Killer” and “Killing in the Name,” Harvilla says, are about rising up against police brutality. The difference, of course, is that while you can’t ignore that “Cop Killer” is about killing cops, you can listen to “Killing in the Name” and hear whatever you want to hear.

The backlash against “Cop Killer” was so intense that Ice-T ended up pulling it from his album. He eventually re-released it as a free single, but for a long time you couldn’t find it anywhere.

Meanwhile, Rage Against the Machine’s debut album went triple platinum. In 2009, as part of a backlash against the British show X Factor, the song reached number one on the UK Christmas charts.

Rage, Harvilla says, made by far the more commercially successful song, the one with an exponentially larger cultural impact. Part of this, he thinks, has to do with their song’s subtlety, at least relative to “Cop Killer.” You can listen to Rage, and rage against the machine of your choice.

* * *

If I think about this too much, I start wanting to crawl into bed, give up, go to sleep. What’s the point of making art about resistance if it’s destined to be co-opted by bad actors? What’s the point of trying to tell subtle stories about alternative masculinities when patriarchal masculinity has a death grip on the cultural microphone? And is subtle storytelling even a good idea? Is it maybe kind of dangerous? If someone actually reads one of my subtle stories about boyhood, and that someone is a man I don’t agree with, will he maybe just skim it, nod along to the words about grievance and hurt but ignore the ones about growth and responsibility, then put on his “I Took the Red Pill” baseball cap and go mosh to Rage at his friendly neighborhood Trump rally? Did I really just put myself in the same league as Rage Against the Machine and the Wachowski sisters? What pill do I take to stop doing that?

* * *

In “On Subtlety,” Meghan O’Gieblyn tells a story about how, as a teen in Bible school, she found the subtlety of the gospel frustrating. Jesus was always giving esoteric answers to his disciples’ questions, and it drove O’Gieblyn nuts. Was it maybe kind of irresponsible, she asked her professor, that Jesus shared his all-encompassing truths via riddles and koans bound to be misinterpreted by the average human? After a long pause, her professor said, “One paradox has remained true throughout human history. The more explicitly God reveals himself to mankind, the more likely we are to reject him. Christ did finally declare himself the Son of God, and we crucified him.”

* * *

A few years ago, a meme about taking the red pill made its way around the manosphere. Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump both tweeted about it. Lilly Wachowski’s response: Fuck both of you.

No one seems to have misinterpreted that.

* * *

Near the end of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders’s masterclass on reading Russian short fiction, he talks about the connection—the unspoken pact—between writer and reader.

“The writer and the reader,” he says, “stand at either end of a pond. The writer drops a pebble in and the ripples reach the reader. The writer stands there, imagining the way the reader is receiving those ripples, by way of deciding which pebble to drop in next. Meanwhile, the reader receives those ripples and, somehow, they speak to her. In other words, they’re in connection.”

As I read these lines today, for the thirteenth or fourteenth time, I wonder if I ought to be spending less time thinking about subtlety versus directness, opacity versus transparency. Maybe the more important question has to do with abundance and scarcity. Disconnection and connection.

Every line in every story, Saunders says, is a pebble in a pond. And maybe every story, too, is a pebble. Every pebble a ripple, or perhaps a dot, a dot that can be connected another dot, then another.

Well before The Matrix, before Rage, I loved to play Connect the Dots.

I think about the dots I connected when I was a boy in the Nineties. I think about Fred Durst and Chuck Norris and No Fear and Mountain Dew and Andrew Dice Clay and blonde jokes and The Man Show and Smear the Queer and He-Man. I think about how, in order to find other dots, I had to flip back further in my Connect the Dots book, or maybe find another book entirely. I think about how, as a boy in rural Wisconsin with no internet access, I didn’t have many books lying around, and about how, while boys today can of course connect the manosphere to MAGA, red pills to white power, they can also see and connect so many other dots, make so many extraordinarily beautiful figures, figures that I, at their age, would’ve had to work so hard to find, if I could’ve found them at all. I think about The Matrix and Rage, about how different they look depending on what page they’re on and what other dots they’re surrounded by and connected to. I think about what a relief it would be to stop worrying about being a whole picture, and to think, instead, of being a dot. It’s good, I think, for a writer—a male writer, especially—to aspire to that. To being part of a picture. A dot on a page. A pebble in a pond.

* * *

Early in the film, before he’s swallowed the red pill, Neo asks Morpheus the question he can’t stop asking himself. “What,” Neo asks, “is the Matrix?”

Morpheus wrings his clasped hands. He’s cradling a small metal case.

“Unfortunately,” Morpheus says, “No one can be told what the Matrix is.”

He opens the case, which appears to hold two small pills.

“You have to see it,” he says, “for yourself.”

 

 

 

Brian Benson is the author of GOING SOMEWHERE and co-author, with Richard Brown, of THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at the Attic Institute. His essays have been published or are forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Tahoma Literary Review, Hippocampus, and Sweet, among several other journals.