The Matrix director and trans icon Lilly Wachowski was funny and philosophical last week when asked by comedian Caleb Hearon about the “loser freaks” twisting her message in the classic trilogy to their own red-America ideological ends.

The label got a big laugh from the writer/director, 57, who came out as trans in 2008, nine years after the first film in the series debuted in 1999.

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“Like, why are members of the Trump administration talking about The Matrix like it was made for them and their ideology when it came from you, and that’s not you at all?” Hearon asked on the Thanksgiving edition of his podcast So True with Caleb Hearon.

Her answer? She’s basically over it, with some caveats.

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“Of course, that’s going to happen,” she said. “They do it with absolutely everything.”

“This is what fascism does,” she said.

“You have to let go of your work,” she counseled. “People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it.”  

Top of the list of most repurposed Matrix iconography: MAGA’s version of “red-pilling.”

Faced with a choice in the film of taking the red pill or the blue pill, Keanu Reeves’ Neo chooses the red pill to escape The Matrix’s simulation and wake up to reality.

MAGA co-opted that idea — complete with the perfect color scheme — to popularize “red-pilling” as waking up to the “fact” that modern society is run by a “global” (read Jewish) cabal of pedophiles that’s emasculating men, pushing LGBTQ+ ideology, and promoting a Great Replacement of white Christians for Black and Brown rapists and killers, among other theories.

Wachowski threw up her arms.

“I look at all of the crazy, mutant theories around The Matrix films and the crazy ideologies that those films helped create, and I just go, ‘What are you doing? No! That’s wrong!’ But I have to let it go to some extent,” she said.

Wachowski cited Trump’s executive order declaring the existence of only two sexes, male and female, as another example of MAGA and fascist propaganda.

“They’re calling it science, but it is not science. And that is what fascism does. It takes these things, these ideas, and they turn them into something else.”

“Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything,” she said. “They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda to obfuscate what the real message is.”

In The Matrix’s case, it’s just not possible to “make absolutely every person believe” what she and her sister and collaborator Lana Wachowski intended when they made the films.

Ironically enough, that message was one about the trans experience, though the sisters knew the “world wasn’t quite ready” to hear it explicitly at the time. Lana Wachowski came out as trans in 2016.

Once a film is finished, Wachowski said, it’s out of the artist’s hands, for better or worse.

In other words, MAGA is going to MAGA, and that’s not her problem.

“I don’t make stuff anymore with the idea that I want it to reach as many people as possible, she added. “I make to make, right?”

“When I think about The Matrix and this ‘success’ that it had, I mean, that is something that I think that artists or filmmakers, or any artist really, they place too much emphasis on those kinds of successes. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a success,” she said.

“The beauty of filmmaking is that you get to come together in this community, all these different artists, and bring this thing that is in your brain into this new form. That new form is a collective art piece.”

“As an artist, I try to be as present as possible now,” she said. “I want to be present and relish every single day of the making that I have.”

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