Red pill and blue pill

The term redpill was popularized in science fiction culture via the 1999 movie The Matrix. The movie relies on the premise that an artificial reality that is advanced enough will be indistinguishable from reality and that no test exists that can conclusively prove that reality is not a simulation. This ties in closely with the idea that reality is subjective. In the movie, a Redpill is the term used to describe a human who has been freed from the Matrix, a fictional computer-generated world set in 1999. Bluepill refers to a human still connected to the Matrix.

Borrowing from the movie, the terms blue pill and red pill have become a popular metaphor for the choice between blissful ignorance (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful truth (red).

Background

In the Matrix Universe, an authorized member of a Zion ship crew offers a prospective human in the Matrix a choice of ingesting a red or blue pill. The blue pill causes the human to forget the meeting ever took place and remain in ignorance, while the red pill activates a trace program that allows the crew to locate the human's body in the Matrix powerplant.

"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 just how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Morpheus describes the effects of the two pills to Neo

Once the person is found, commands are sent to the pod to awake him or her, and the freed individual is rescued by the respective ship crew.

Redpills appear to have either seen "glitches" within the Matrix (e.g. a book continuously respawning on a shelf, regardless of attempts to remove the book), or who question their life within the Matrix, refusing to dismiss strange events. These are the people who see the Matrix as it is: an illusion.

According to Morpheus, leaving the Matrix can be traumatic, particularly to those who have lived in it for too long. As a rule, crews only offer the red pill to those younger than 18. After that, the risk of denial and psychotic episodes from the reality of separation is much higher. The exception to this rule (as seen in the movies) is Neo, whose age is around 30 when released by Morpheus.

The Matrix makes many references to past films and literature, and the idea of the red pill is no exception, having appeared in the the 1990 film Total Recall with the same premise – to wake the protagonist Arnold Schwarzenegger from his "dream". In the scene in question, the character Dr Edgemar tells Schwarzenegger that he is dreaming, and offers him a red pill with the words:

It's a symbol. Of your desire to return to reality. Inside your dream, you'll fall asleep. ^[1]^[2]

While this scene appears to be taking place in reality (Schwarzenegger notices a bead of sweat trickle down Edgemar's face, convincing him of this) the crucial point is that according to Dr Edgemar's argument Schwarzenegger is currently dreaming and therefore needs the red pill to take him out of his dream and back to reality. Schwarzenegger, however, kills Edgemar and it is left unknown what the pill does. ^[3]

Trivia

In the multiplayer game The Matrix Online, set in the events after The Matrix Revolutions, all playable characters are redpills.

In The Crystal Method's album, Community Service track sixteen is entitled "The Red Pill" and features multiple quotes from Morpheus' explanation of the pills.

Adobe Photoshop CS3's codename is "Red Pill".

The reference to the pills is also implemented in a special type of malware that utilizes the virtualisation 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 it's running directly on physical hardware, creating a parallel to the illusionary 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.

In the Maemo application installer, certain advanced features are unlocked by a "Red Pill Mode" easter egg. This is activated by starting to add a catalog called "matrix" and then choosing to cancel. A dialog box appears with the choices "Red Pill" or "Blue Pill", allowing the user to enter red pill mode.[1]

In Sims 2, if one of Sims has a "Science" job, a chance card may appear prompting the character to either select a red or blue pill.

In David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series of novels, the term "redpill" refers to a nuclear weapon.

In America's Best Dance Crew Week 7, the JabbaWockeeZ encore performance was titled "The Red Pill."

Emily Haines and the Soft Skelton's song "Doctor Blind" contains the lyrics "Doctor Blind, prescribe the red one" and "Doctor Blind, prescribe the blue one"

References

^ Total Recall - final script, scifiscripts.com, retrieved 8 Feb 2009.
^ When Edgemar says that "in your dream you will fall asleep", the inference is that "and then you will wake up in the real world".
^ No importance is actually placed on the pill's colour in this film: it is simply a pill that happens to be bright red – a complement to the colour of the planet Mars, whose dark red glow pervades many scenes in the film. The red pill/blue pill dichotomy does not come in until The Matrix.

Bloc Party's song 'She's Hearing Voices' contains the lyrics 'she has a red pill blue pill' and is supposedly about a paranoid schizophrenic

[1] Total Recall - final script, scifiscripts.com, retrieved 8 Feb 2009.

[2] When Edgemar says that "in your dream you will fall asleep", the inference is that "and then you will wake up in the real world".

[3] No importance is actually placed on the pill's colour in this film: it is simply a pill that happens to be bright red – a complement to the colour of the planet Mars, whose dark red glow pervades many scenes in the film. The red pill/blue pill dichotomy does not come in until The Matrix.

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