Perhaps the most iconic scene in The Matrix (even more than “I know kung fu”) comes at the end of the first act. The disaffected hacker Thomas Anderson, alias Neo (Keanu Reeves) – hounded by malevolent Agents and seeking the answer to the existential question “What is the Matrix?” – finally comes before the wise and enigmatic sage Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who offers him a choice. Morpheus presents Neo with two pills: one red, one blue. If he takes the blue pill, he will return to his old life of ignorance; if he takes the red pill, he will learn a truth that radically transforms his life. Upon choosing the red pill, Neo is pulled out of the virtual reality of the Matrix and into the real world.
The red pill is such a potent, easy-to-swallow image that it has become a staple of the modern lexicon. As far as pop culture concepts go, “taking the red pill” is almost as ubiquitous and generally understood as “using the Force.” (Among other things, it has been co-opted into contemporary political discourse in recent years.) We can all intuitively grasp what it means, and what it feels like, to “take the red pill” – to experience an epiphany in which scales fall from our eyes and we suddenly see how the world “really works” in a way that shifts and colors all previous understanding.
It is hardly a novel thought, twenty-five years after the release of The Matrix in 1999, to point out that Neo’s taking of the red pill plays like a pop rendition of Plato’s allegory of the cave. His mind is opened and he sees past the illusory shadows of the world he has lived in his entire life to glimpse a more substantial world above it, escaping from a false reality designed to imprison him into a true reality. (As in Plato’s allegory, Neo will later go back down “into the cave” to try and bring its denizens up and out into the plane where he now resides.)
Neo’s choice to take the red pill can also be read as a sort of conversion experience; like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, his eyes are suddenly and dramatically opened to a truth he was previously blind to. Neo is introduced asleep in front of his computer, lines of code from his monitor flickering over his face. Morpheus’ first words to him are the message, “Wake up, Neo…” Likewise, St. Paul describes conversion through the language of sleeping and waking in his Epistle to the Romans: “now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.” To take the red pill is to wake up out of a deceitful dream into a life more real than we could have previously conceived.
The moment in which Neo takes the red pill has a subtler and less-discussed analogue in the third act of The Matrix. After awakening Neo from the spiritual slumber of the Matrix, Morpheus tells him that he is “The One” – a messianic figure destined to free humanity from bondage to the machines. As Neo begins to step into his new identity as The One, the first person he saves is Morpheus himself, after he has been captured and chained by the Agents. However, at the culmination of the subsequent escape attempt, Neo is cornered and shot by his nemesis, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving).
When Agent Smith pumps Neo’s virtual body full of bullets, he really dies; the Agents check his pulse and confirm that he is “gone,” and in the real world outside the Matrix, where his body resides, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) sees his heart flatline. Shortly thereafter, though – revived, in a fairy tale touch, by the love of Trinity – Neo comes back to life. The resurrected Neo is no longer on the same level as the Agents. When Smith attempts to attack him again, Neo counters his blows with bemused ease, and when the other Agents shoot him, he simply holds up a hand and stops their bullets without any apparent effort.
It is at this point that Neo plucks one of the frozen bullets out of midair, holds it up between his finger and thumb, and looks at it, the way one might hold and look at a pill (an object with a similar rounded, cylindrical shape). Neo “takes” a bullet into his body and dies, just as his old life ended when he took the red pill. By taking the red pill, he came to see the real world, and thus came to a different understanding of the Matrix by looking at it from above, from outside. The bullet similarly changes Neo’s vision, but now he sees the Matrix differently from inside. After taking a bullet, he looks at the Agents and sees them as they really are – mere lines of code.
Merely knowing the truth is not the end of Neo’s journey in The Matrix. As Morpheus tells him, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and taking the path.” After all, it is possible for one who chooses the red pill to repudiate that choice; Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) came to know reality, but ultimately chooses to betray it in favor of unreality (“Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?” he laments to Neo).
Neo could renounce the real life he has been given, but he chooses to press on, into the mysterious truth that death is the only passage to new life. As one character puts it in a flippant remark that doubles as an unwitting prophecy: “You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.” Just as the red pill “killed” Thomas Anderson so he could be reborn as Neo, the bullet kills Neo so he can be reborn as The One – and just as Christ died so He could rise from the dead, we all must share in Christ’s death so we can be reborn into His new life.
