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delete your account, and abolish the family.
[cw: domestic abuse, derealisation]
as some of you might have noticed I am two weeks into a meltdown about The Matrix Resurrections. Have been through the expected phases (crying to music all evening, re-examining my life, putting asymmetric plaits in my hair, introducing myself to rink randos as Thene, insomnia, dancing to InfSoc in the kitchen, buying overpriced fanmerch, losing my Silvia Federici book & finding it in the bathroom sink) and eventually rolled down to the bottom of the crater (trauma memories) and am settling in here I guess. In my desperate (and counter-to-the-spirit-of-things) consumption of Takes I've noticed that very few people who've been writing about Resurrections focus on Trinity, and virtually none focus on the part of her story that struck me sideways into the abyss. Tbh on a surface level I assume it's because people are used to seeing men in their 50s in leading roles and know how to identify with them and use them in their own thinking; having a 50-something woman as an action-hero-love-interest is so unprecedented that they literally cannot see it, they are trained to not see it, whereas to those of us who actually try to look at what is there, Trinity could have done anything and still have been 100% new and exciting. Which is a damn shame bc what she did. what she DID. flattened me and set me on fire for two weeks.
Yeah I am referring to the part where a middle-aged woman, heroically and with deep integrity, ran out on her family. Men do this in adventure stories all the time. Seeing Trinity do it felt so taboo to me that I have been waiting for the wank ever since and there has not even been any. It's so transgressive it's not even comprehesible to most people. They keep talking like her walking away was about her name and not about the failed illusion of the nuclear family. (Yesterday I got a very precious fic comment that said 'it's amazing to me too that people have just ignored that Lana said "abolish the family" with her whole chest'.......YEAH).
I didn't realise til about a week into this meltdown that the part of me that was responding so hard to Trinity's role in Resurrections was....not my now. I was rolling around in loose threads, flicking through time, had been reading the oldest Matrix script draft online, updating my Twitter thread about all the orgasms in Reloaded, and I had an odd thought: I am barely older than Neo & Trinity were in the old series. There's nothing about my life now that makes Trinity's resistance toward the nuclear family resonant. turn it around: What I saw in Resurrections was, by coincidence, more like an echo of my life in 1999. So I tried to write that down in a way that would make sense to anyone else but had to stop when it occurred to me that most people have no idea what derealisation feels like or that it's most often a symptom of childhood domestic abuse. do i have to spell everything out? I only just realised how much you don't know. Read about it here if you want, or don't, I have no idea if it matters.
I don't think Trinity's story in Resurrections is intended to be about DV, but my response to it very much is. (And it has been extremely obvious from talking to friends that this film hits differently for DV survivors than it does for most other people). So, about 1999, which on a practical level was the worst year of my life. My father had a heart attack in the springtime, which meant that he was home 24/7 for 2 months having daily tantrums at me and not even doing the minimal practical parenting he usually did (driving places on Saturdays, procuring groceries for me to turn into food, laundry). At that point I'd been basically solo parenting my brother for about 8 months. That was life for another four and a half years.
Domestic violence occurs alongside emotional abuse - you never see the former without the latter, though the reverse is not true. I have often talked to other survivors about what happens when you're carrying the experience of both those things. We all, without exception, think that emotional abuse & neglect is more damaging than physical violence. I have heard the same thing from CSA survivors as well. Many of us, when talking to outsiders, feel we have to stress the violent and/or sexual elements of what happened to us even if those elements feel of minimal importance compared to the emotional abuse. I won't pretend to understand why derealisation exists but it's striking how it coexists with the difficulty of getting people to notice, believe, or understand our abuse at all. You're invisible to the world, and it slides out of your grip. You live in a haze interspersed with screaming. You live on a wire with no safety net. You don't feel alive except when you see the haunts, hiding in words and shadows, known only to you.
So that was me in 1999 - parenting, barely sleeping and derealised to all fuck.
"It's too late" is the heaviest line in Resurrections and I felt it then. I was fourteen years old and I thought I was decades too late for living. Foreshortened future is another common trauma symptom and extremely common for people like me (motherless kids, orphans, etc), but I also know a bunch of DV and/or CSA survivors with living parents who have foreshortened future. Right now I'm wondering how the abrupt cut-off for women in films and TV, where we turn 35 and vanish to the background, further compromises the ability of some of us to identify a sense of our future. (If you want to get more specific, look up my Motherless Daughters readthru from October and do the math, I'm not holding your damn hand here.)
I think I saw The Matrix the year after - video rental at secondary school bestie's house. I found it cool and it got me into 80s cyberpunk - loved Gibson's prose, hated Bruce Stirling's raging misogyny, etc. I remember a few years later on the internet running across people who were really into the 'we live in a simulation' thing, and look, that is baby mode when you're that derealised. I had no time for them. I had faeries and aliens up in here. I didn't need clumsy metaphysics because this isn't real was expressing a feeling I knew in my bones. Nothing in the whole world fits together right but you go on anyway. You try to fulfil your normal responsibilities - household, school, caring - but the rails are rarely there. You navigate by knotted ropes and starlight. Goals and plans are for other people; we're doing survival. And you get really into omens and fortune telling, because you have no future. Eventually, I got a handhold and then another and I started avoiding the fuck out of anyone who talks to faeries, those are not your friends. Living in reality, as a human, is really really important, and joyous, to me since then.
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I have amazing parents and the kind of childhood that I would always describe as pretty much perfect, growing up surrounded by adults that loved me and cared for me, from extended family to my parents’ network of socialist/alternative/green friends, fellow parents and cohabitants. I am immensely grateful.
I’m still in a Trinity post-Resurrections meltdown, because I still have to live in this society and experience what it puts women (mothers in all forms especially) through. I am a mother (by choice, twice, with five years in between to really decide if I want to do that again), so that’s the angle I mostly approach it from. The thing that has struck me repeatedly is that I’ve heard from women in all kinds of different family constellations (childfree; currently childless with varying thoughts on whether they want children; with children and varying levels of regret over having those children) how much Trinity in this movie spoke to them and how meaningful it was. And I think that speaks to both the transgressive nature of the movie and to the way the current norms and structures surrounding women and mothers harm all of us, no matter our choices.
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