The Matrix Resurrections resonates with trans stories told across generations

(Each week, I’m publishing a new pop culture essay from a freelancer. Remember: Your subscription fee helps me pay these freelancers for their efforts! This week: Natalie Marlin on how The Matrix Resurrections resonates with trans people sharing their stories across generations.)

Coming-out stories too often fall into a predictable trap, especially coming-out stories focused on trans people. They either dwell on the long periods of denial and misery or focus on the difficulties of opening up to oneself and then the world. Therefore, they treat the act of coming out or starting hormones as the end of the story. This is not to say that those milestones are unimportant, but we trans people, like everyone else, often continue to weather trials long after those initial steps and find that our struggles never truly end. Sometimes that takes the form of interpersonal strife, or systemic poverty, or mental illness. Regardless, the story does not end with embracing who we are for almost all of us.

This understanding elucidates why Lana Wachowski would want to expand on the story that she and her sister Lilly began with The Matrix films over 20 years ago in 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections. Until recent revisionism (primarily driven by trans viewers), many advocated that the first film, 1999’s The Matrix, tells all the story that need be told. In that film, the act of self-actualization is the end of the story, and that was enough for many audience members. Just as The Matrix can be read in many ways beyond simply “a trans film” (especially considering the Wachowskis were not yet out when it was made), the common trans reading of this first film — about coming to terms with who you really are and the arduous path toward self-acceptance through doubt — is, like coming out narratives, only the beginning of a bigger story.

It's refreshing, then, that The Matrix Resurrections refutes a reductive approach to trans stories from its earliest moments. Though the film has proved to be rich in its possible readings, one that’s made explicit right from its opening moments is that the film is about stories. It's about why stories endure over time, how stories touch the lives of those who come far after them, and why stories are more open-ended than we've been led to believe. And everything the film has to say about stories is filtered through a pronounced trans lens.

In the film’s first sequence, new characters Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and Sequoia (Toby Onwumere) watch a recreation of the beginning of The Matrix as it plays out before them. They comment on both the familiarity of what they're seeing and how it varies from the way the story has been told before. When approached through a trans lens, Bugs and Sequoia are coded as a younger generation of trans people, speaking about Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), who came before them with awed reverence. Their dialogue echoes how trans people talk about our trans elders, who were out long before we knew ourselves.

Where Lana Wachowski and co-writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon complicate that notion is in how these new characters talk about those who came before them. Bugs finds herself speculating that “maybe this isn’t the story we think we know,” that things aren’t as cut-and-dry as the simplified narrative of transness led her to believe. It’s these words that tie into her true reason for returning to the past — Neo needs her help just as much as she had needed his.

‎In brief flashbacks, Bugs’s story unfolds. She was living within the simulation of the Matrix, oblivious to how it had kept her in the dark about her true self. It’s only when she gets a glimpse of Neo — who is about to step off the ledge of a building, in the first of many images in the film evoking suicide in the wake of isolation — and sees him for who he really is, rather than what others incorrectly perceive him to be, that she has her vital moment of self-recognition. The moment acts not only as the proverbial egg crack moment that awakens Bugs to her own metaphoric transness — Neo being the older trans figure who causes Bugs to grasp that she shares this identity — but it also becomes the revelation that Neo is just as in need of saving despite finding his similar truth long ago. This backstory serves as a crucial means to understand the subtext of mutual trans support that permeates The Matrix Resurrections.

This emphasis on reciprocal trans solidarity makes The Matrix Resurrections especially daring in the current landscape of trans media that still often focuses on singular trans lives amid otherwise cisgender settings. Rather than hinge on one individual trans story, The Matrix Resurrections is about how trans people thrive and find community in each other. It’s about how vital it is to have others like you looking out for you when you need it most, regardless of where either of you is in your transition. It’s about finding security knowing you have a network of kindred lives you can fall back on.

This sincere love for the power of trans bonds also drives Lana Wachowski’s rightful scorn at those who pervert that sincerity into something far more shallow. The antagonistic force in the film — suppressing Neo’s ability to know himself and find others like him — is his therapist. Known as The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), he convinces Neo that his true identity is a dangerous fabrication to be pushed down. In doing so, The Analyst hinders Neo’s ability to recognize his story in others, making his disaffected life feel like his only option.

By impeding Neo’s ability to find community in others like him and subvert the types of bonds that cisnormative society finds acceptable, the Analyst exists as a personified form of queer assimiliationism. He insists that the only way to live in his world is to conform to the status quo made by cisgender people in place of the truly revolutionary act of trans people coming together to seize the happiness they deserve.

The Analyst enacts this conformity within the film by rendering Neo’s reality of self-discovery as a video game — a commodified narrative passed off as fictional entertainment. This transformation most closely resembles how prominent queer and trans narratives are made toothless and “safe” for “inspirational” normative consumption, like the sanding down of Stonewall. In other words, cis commodification of trans stories like Neo’s removes the culpability of cisnormative oppression from cisgender people.

Under a system of queer assimilationism and reductive interpretations of trans stories, meaning and power are stripped from the idea of trans connection. They are made alien in the stories that once carried that impact. It’s no wonder, then, that Lana Wachowski has Bugs openly decry this storytelling tendency midway through the film, telling Neo, “They took your story — something that meant so much to people like me — and turned it into something trivial.”

‎But where The Matrix Resurrections truly excels in depicting the inherent communal strength of these trans stories is in its handling of Neo and Trinity’s romance. Their love for one another and bond through similar personal transitions made up the core of the first three Matrix films. So it’s only fitting that Wachowski turns the significance of their shared narrative — as revealed by the Analyst — into a literal force of unfathomable power in Resurrections. Because, for so many trans people, our love for one another feels earthshaking and revolutionary. That love feels so seemingly improbable in a world that’s told us our existence even as individual people is impossible that two of us finding connection feels potent enough to tear that entire world down.

The Matrix Resurrections reaches its emotional climax in Trinity’s reunion with Neo. She recounts how she found herself playing his video game and asking the question trans people may find themselves asking when hearing other trans narratives: “Why does this story feel like a memory?” Trinity cannot see her lived reality sitting before her, but she recognizes the familiarity in those stories all the same. That recognition is what ultimately allows her to know that this story is just as true as she senses, giving her the strength to refute the false identity The Analyst imparted on her and embrace the power of her love for Neo.

We might not be able to tell ourselves definitively that the stories we hear from others are true for us as well. But that cannot stop the feeling that arises deep within us when we spot a piece of ourselves in there, in the details we know so intimately that we cannot be making them up as fiction. There’s a relief in hearing a trans story where we see ourselves. We, like Trinity, “feel like [we’ve] been waiting our whole [lives]” for someone like us whom we’ll feel love and affinity for. We’ve been waiting for someone who will reassure us we’re not alone.

No matter how daunting it may be to face the reality of those stories and no matter what dangers the cisnormative world around us might impose to dissuade us, we know, as certainly as Trinity does: “We can’t go back.”

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