Credit: Dangerous Minds / Warner Bros.

Believe it or not, there was a time not so long ago when people didn’t know what The Matrix was, not just as a film, either, but The Matrix as a very concept.

It was the heart of its marketing campaign. The film barely had a tagline, just its website, where one would normally be, and even then, that website still played on people’s basic curiosity. Why else would they name their site “whatisthematrix.com”? All this to say that when the truth was revealed, and The Matrix was shown to be a computer simulation of reality that all living beings were trapped in, people’s minds were thoroughly blown. Even before they got to the kung-fu, balletic gunfights and that bit where Keanu Reeves’ mouth fuses shut and the agents put a robot squid in his belly button.

The Matrix, as all of us totally well-adjusted pop culture junkies know, became a global smash. However, while the action was incredible and the special effects era-defining, both of those factors can also be said for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While that film is a masterpiece, it’s not a culturally relevant touchstone a quarter of a century after its release the way The Matrix is and I think that is down to just how much the central idea resonated with people.

The unreality of life in the 21st century made people genuinely relate to Reeves’ Neo. A man who discovers that nothing in his life is real and that the only way to genuinely live an autonomous life is to rebel against the system. People still take this message to heart, and depressingly enough, a number of them get the entire wrong end of the stick. Reasoning that a film by two transgender women about the act of coming out as transgender is actually about hating women is enough to make you hate the very concept of subjective art interpretation.

It would take a lot to make the Red Pill incel movement look like the second-worst thing that The Matrix fandom ever produced, but that’s exactly what happened.

What is ‘The Matrix’ defence?

In 2002, Tonda Lynn Ansley lived in a rented house in Butler County, Ohio. She was polite, respectful, always on time with her rent and in early July of that year, with a bunch of witnesses around her, she stepped outside to meet her landlord, pulled a gun on her and shot her in the head. Police couldn’t fathom why she did what she did, especially because she went into custody quietly, immediately accepting what she’d done. Over the next few days, she began talking, and what she had to say was alarming.

She said that after a few viewings of The Matrix, she began to suspect that she was living in a simulation herself. She had also seen her landlady in her dreams trying to keep her tethered to this “virtual road” and, as her confusion got more severe, was tempted to take drastic action against someone she saw as, first and foremost, not real, and secondly, an oppressor. Once she’d done the act, she knew she couldn’t take it back, and the fog cleared enough for her to go quietly.

Her story was found to check out due to no evidence of any other conflict between Ansley and her landlady, alongside some evidence that Ansley had suffered previous breaks from reality. Thus, the jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. She’s not alone in this. Not only in the same insanity argument but also, in the tragic case of Vadim Mieseges of San Francisco, one year later, they both took it out on their landlady. Which isn’t praxis, kids. Neo, as we all know, helped his landlady take out her garbage.

Before he pleaded guilty to murdering his adopted parents, this was also going to be the defence of Joshua Cooke. The bloodiest story of all, however, was that of Lee Boyd Malvo. Malvo shot 30 people over a three-week span in October 2002 with a sniper rifle, killing many of them and maiming the rest. While he never used The Matrix as a legal defence, he did cite the film many times during his arrest and his time in jail.

A truly dark thing to be associated with, but there are few more effective ways of illustrating the premise of The Matrix‘s dark power.