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Red pill and blue pill

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The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are pop culture symbols representing the choice between embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red) and the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) .

The terms, popularized in science fiction culture, derive from the 1999 film The Matrix. In the movie, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The blue pill would allow him to remain in the fabricated reality of the Matrix. The red pill would lead to his escape from the Matrix and into the real world.

Background

In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) hears rumors of "The Matrix" and a mysterious man named Morpheus. Neo spends his nights at the computer trying to discover the secret of The Matrix. Eventually he is introduced to Morpheus by another hacker called Trinity.

After some explanation of the Matrix by Morpheus and the truth that he is just a small part of the Matrix and one of the Matrix's "slaves", Morpheus explains the choice to Neo:

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. Remember, all I'm offering is the truth – nothing more.

As narrated, the blue pill will allow the subject to remain in the fabricated reality of the Matrix, and the red pill serves as a "location device" to locate the subject's body in the real world and to prepare him to be "unplugged" from the Matrix. Each person has only one choice with no possibility to reverse their original choice. There are two kinds of people, the "bluepills", the people who took the blue pill or didn't choose yet, and the "redpills" who took the red pill and were freed from the Matrix.

Neo chooses the red pill and is shown the true nature of the Matrix; a detailed simulation of Earth circa 1999, in which the bodies of human inhabitants are stored in massive power plants, complacent in a mental prison, in order to convert their heat and bioelectrical energy into power for consumption by machines.

Predating The Matrix

The 1990 movie Total Recall features a red pill, which is offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger's character Douglas Quaid. He is told "it's a symbol – of your desire to return to reality".[1][2] No blue pill is present in the film, and the story centres on the very uncertainty of whether Quaid is dreaming or in the real world. However, the pill is offered to him with the claim that he is dreaming, and that the pill will return him to reality, with the words "inside your dream, you'll fall asleep".

Analysis

An essay written by Russell Blackford discusses the red and blue pills, questioning whether if a person were fully informed they would take the red pill, opting for the real world, believing that choosing physical reality over a digital simulation is not clear-cut. Both Neo and another character, Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), take the red pill over the blue pill, with the latter showing regret for having made such a choice, having stated that if Morpheus fully informed them of the situation, Cypher would have told Morpheus to "shove the red pill right up his [Morpheus's] ass." Blackford argues that The Matrix trilogy sets things up so that even if Neo fails, the taking of the red pill is worthwhile because he lives and dies authentically. Blackford and science-fiction writer James Patrick Kelly feel that The Matrix stacks the deck against machines and their simulated world.[3]

In the book The Art of the Start, author Guy Kawasaki uses the red pill as an analogue to leaders of new organizations, in that they face the same choice to either live in reality or fantasy. He adds that if they want to be successful, they have to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.[4]

Matrix Warrior: Being the One author Jake Horsley compared the red pill to LSD, citing a scene where Neo forms his own world outside of the Matrix. When he asks Morpheus if he could return, Morpheus responds by asking him if he would want to. Horsley also describes the blue pill as addictive, calling The Matrix series a continuous series of choices between taking the blue pill and not taking it. He adds that the habits and routines of people inside the Matrix are merely the people dosing themselves with the blue pill. While he describes the blue pill as a common thing, he states that the red pill is one-of-a-kind, and something someone may not even find.[5]

Other uses

  • The reference to the pills is also implemented in a special type of malware that utilizes the virtualization techniques of modern CPUs to execute as a hypervisor; as a virtual platform on which the entire operating system runs, it is capable of examining the entire state of the machine and to cause any behavior with full privilege, while the operating system "believes" itself to be running directly on physical hardware, creating a parallel to the illusory Matrix. Blue Pill describes the concept of infecting a machine while red pill techniques help the operating system to detect the presence of such a hypervisor.[6] These concepts were described by Joanna Rutkowska in 2006.
  • Until they were removed from the Maemo operating system application installer in January 2010, certain advanced features were unlocked by a "Red Pill Mode" easter egg to prevent accidental use by novice users but make them readily available to experienced users. This was activated by starting to add a catalog whose URL was "matrix" and then choosing to cancel. A dialog box would appear asking "Which pill?" with the choices "Red" or "Blue", allowing the user to enter red pill mode.[7][8] In "Red Pill" mode the installer allows the user to view and reconfigure system packages whose existence it normally does not acknowledge. In Blue Pill mode the installer displays only software installed by a user, creating the illusion that system software does not exist on the system.
  • The terms Red Pill and Blue Pill are colloquialisms for certain recreational drugs such as MDMA. This is an accepted popular culture reference in the rave scene, where it refers to the suggestion that taking a pill "releases" your mind from the "constraints of a fabricated reality"; a direct parallel with the subplot from the Matrix.[citation needed]
  • The concept of drugs that could either liberate one's consciousness or pacify them into apathy was explored by Aldous Huxley in his novels Island and Brave New World. The psychoactive mushrooms the inhabitants of Pala termed moksha-medicine in Island could be analogous to the red pill, while the blue pill would be an exact echo of the soma the citizens of the World State consumed daily in Brave New World.
  • The lines were used in the psy-trance group 1200 Micrograms' single "DMT".
  • The choice between taking a blue or red pill is a central metaphor in the 2011 Arte documentary film Marx Reloaded, in which philosophers including Slavoj Zizek and Nina Power explore solutions to the global economic and financial crisis of 2008–09. The film also contains an animated parody of the pill scene in The Matrix, with Leon Trotsky as Morpheus and Karl Marx as Neo.[9]
  • Television comedy series Workaholics character Shame from the street art collective episode states "congrats on taking the blue pill." Blake responds "I have no idea what he is saying."

See also

References

  1. ^ Total Recall - final script, SciFiScripts.com. Retrieved Jul 2013.
  2. ^ Dr. Edgemar's Pill, Total Recall (1990), MovieClips.com. Retrieved Jul 2013.
  3. ^ Kapell, Matthew; Doty, William G (2004-05-28). Jacking in to the Matrix franchise: cultural reception and interpretation. ISBN 978-0-8264-1588-2.
  4. ^ Kawasaki, Guy (2004). The art of the start: the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything. ISBN 978-1-59184-056-5.
  5. ^ Horsley, Jake (2003-11-08). Matrix Warrior: Being the One. ISBN 978-0-312-32264-9.
  6. ^ Joanna Rutkowska. Red Pill... or how to detect VMM using (almost) one CPU instruction(archive), Invisible Things Lab
  7. ^ "Red Pill mode". maemo.org wiki. Retrieved January 25, 2010.
  8. ^ "src/repo.cc". hildon-application-manager. Line 153. Retrieved January 25, 2010.
  9. ^ "Marx Reloaded trailer". Retrieved January 16, 2012.
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