on the Matrix

This is cinematic art at its purest.

«This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back.

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.»

But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, the matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.

I want a third pill. So what is the third pill?

Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake, fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.

If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it.

Slavoj Žižek em The perverst’s guide to cinema