THE MATRIX

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.

To revisit The Matrix 20 years later is to make a jolting discovery almost immediately: It's not that complicated! A lowly computer hacker (Keanu Reeves's Neo) — a drudge, like so many late-'90s protagonists — is pulled into a pre-hashtag resistance he didn't know existed against a system he didn't know enslaved him. The rebels offer him enlightenment, but at a brutal price; he has to lose all delusion and realize he is literally part of an immense, systemic machine, doing the bidding of, well, take your pick: The Man. The Establishment. Corporate Overlords. The Government. The System. And only by knowing can he hope to be rescued from it. The plot is pretty basic, and the politics are alluringly, perhaps dangerously, viable for anyone of any ideology who feels pissed off. Few arguments have found themselves more adaptable to this moment than "You're getting screwed by a world you didn't invent and can't see, but the good news is that the cure is just willing yourself to see it."

For all the fan pages, the long and winding Wikis, the nods to Plato's Allegory of the Cave and to French critical theory, the hours upon hours of dauntingly labeled "philosophers' commentaries" that adorn the Blu-rays, the original movie itself is, in some ways, as plain as the green cursor blinking on a black screen that, quaintly, begins it. In memory, the premise of Lilly and Lana Wachowski's breakthrough film was an elaborate, wordy, barely comprehensible piece of world-building. But in truth, The Matrix gets most of the explanatory stuff out of the way in a few efficient strokes in its frontloaded first third so that it can get to the combo heist-movie–chase-movie–Sneakers–meets–Tron–meets–Mission: Impossible action flick that it becomes.

Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus lays it all out. "The Matrix is everywhere. It's all around us," he explains to Neo. "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth … that you are a slave, born into bondage … in a prison that you cannot touch … Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the story goes."

And there you have it: For all the ways in which it is subsequently elaborated on, that's really all you need to know to "get" The Matrix and to get everything, both benign and insidious, that it has spawned. In those brief screenwriting gestures, the Wachowskis concocted the perfect one-size-fits-all combination of flattery, paranoia, anti-corporate wokeness, libertarian belief in the primacy of the individual, and ideologically nonspecific anger at the system: a "Wake up, sheeple!" for its era and, even more, for ours. The film has spawned only one piece of durable slang — "Take the red pill" (the uses of which range from the jokey to the horrific) — but its attitudes have worked themselves into and, arguably, toxified much of our discourse. We live, today, in the anti-reality world The Matrix built.