We Are Living In The Matrix

From red pills to simulation theory to the return of tiny sunglasses. The 20-year-old movie that got everything right.

- Mark Harris

The Matrix Built Our Reality-Denying World

The movie that gave all of us—including Alex Jones, flat-earthers, lizard-people conspiracists, and even Rachel Maddow—a new way to see (or not see) everything.

The Matrix was the first shot fired in what’s now considered a benchmark year for American movies—1999, the year that brought us Being John Malkovich and Magnolia, The Sixth Sense and Office Space, Fight Club and The Blair Witch Project and Election. And although few would claim it was the best of the bunch, it has worked its way into our thinking—for better and, unmistakably, for worse—as few other pieces of pop culture have done. We may talk about all those other movies. But Morpheus was right. In 2019, we are living in the Matrix.

Or, you know, maybe we’re not. Maybe in 2019, we just like to say things like “We are living in the Matrix”—and that may be the truest and deepest influence of a movie whose high-flown paranoia has insinuated itself into the way we live now. In an era when the president’s lawyer can go on TV and splutter, “Truth isn’t truth!” as if it’s something everyone should know, and endless speculative conversations proceed not from “What is reality?” but from “What if we’re living in a broken simulation?,” The Matrix is omnipresent—amazingly so, given how little we still talk about the actual movie. It’s not that the film was prescient. It didn’t anticipate our world. But it anticipated—and probably created—a new way of viewing that world. And, just as “Madness is the only sane response to a crazy world” fiction like Catch-22 had done a generation earlier, it granted everyone permission to refuse to contend with reality by deeming that refusal a form of hyperawareness.