REVISITING THE WACHOWSKIS:
An Introduction
One week from today, on June 5th, Netflix will premiere the entire first season of the Wachowski siblings’ first foray into television, Sense8. It’s about “about eight strangers around the world who experience a violent vision followed by the ability to connect with each other’s thoughts, actions and emotions,” and co-creator J. Michael Straczynski has said that the series will address head-on subjects he feels sci-fi tends to glide over, including sexuality, gender, and identity politics. He believes the series will “change the way you see television, in terms of production values, storytelling, scope, scale, and action.” To say I’m excited would be an understatement. I intend to be planted on the couch the entire day, soaking up as much of it as my eyeballs will let me. I’m also pretty confident that, no matter how good it really is, a whole lot of people are going to hate it. Because the Wachowskis just aren’t cool anymore. And I want to figure out where it all went wrong.
Because I think they’re fascinating. I think their films, at their best, are transcendent, a perfect distillation of the possibility of cinema. Even at their “worst,” I think their movies are packed to the brim with fantastic ideas, executed in stunning, innovative ways, all in the service of a radical optimism that, for some reason, simply doesn’t “work” for many critics today.
Much of the critical response to the Wachowskis post-The Matrix fascinates me, too, and gets at the heart of many questions about media criticism that I like to spend a lot of time thinking about and debating online. Were people vitriolically disappointed in Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending because they didn’t live up to whatever image of The Matrix they had built up in their heads? I think in large part, yes. I think people let their prior judgment of the Wachowskis’ potential cloud their reception of these films. But is that those movies’ fault? Is it the Wachowskis’? Should they have to top themselves every time? Should they have to make movies in the same vein, with remotely the same aims, just to give “the fans” what “everyone” wants? And if they don’t, if they choose to do something else, something drastically different than what they’ve done before and what they’ll do again, does that make those movies “bad?” What does “bad” even mean? Leading up to Sense8, I want to undertake a writing project to evaluate my own relationship to the Wachowskis, to their films, and to these larger questions of criticism and movie fandom more generally.
I took my little brother to see Speed Racer on opening weekend in 2008. I was a month away from graduating high school, about to head off to college and be away from him for the first time. We had an absolute blast. The film is stunningly kinetic, full of movement and color and bright, flashing lights. It was pure fun, a movie with a great sense of humor that isn’t afraid to wink knowingly at the audience. Nor is it afraid to go right for the heart, to explore deep familial bonds — specifically between older and younger brothers — without the slightest touch of cynicism. I doubt my eight-year-old brother picked up on any of that stuff, but it sure meant a lot to me. Was I the best older brother I could be? Had I spent enough time playing with him, now that I was going to be moving six hours away and wouldn’t be around for the next bunch of years of his life, just as Speed’s older brother Rex had suddenly disappeared? Going to see movies like Speed Racer together, I decided, was a pretty damn good start.
And then I got home and started reading reviews of what I assumed would be a universally-praised, inventive children’s movie. Instead, I found a whole lot of cynicism, which the movie so steadfastedly avoids. “You have to be 12 to like it,” said The Guardian. “Genuinely painful… like needles to the eyeballs,” said The Wall Street Journal.
There was one review, however, that seemed to “get” the movie the way I thought I did. (I am sadly no longer able to find it online). The review praised the film’s visuals, in all their all candy-colored, chaotic beauty. The critic loved the family story at the heart of the film, and he, like me, thought the frenzied, anime-inspired nature of it all actually complemented the borderline dark-at-times character work being done. He loved Susan Sarandon and John Goodman and Emile Hirsch and even the little kid brother everyone else had labeled annoying. And then the review concluded with, “As a movie for children, they don’t get any better. But for those of us hoping for The Matrix in cars, it’s a serious disappointment. One star.”
I hope I don’t need to elaborate on why that review made me angry, why it made me reconsider so much about what I thought about movies and movie criticism, and why it made me want to someday be better. Ever since, I have tried to approach every movie on its own, to allow any movie to do anything it sets out to do, and then to judge it by those merits, instead of setting my own expectations for something and being mad when I’m not given what I thought I was promised.
After Speed Racer was labeled a confusing disappointment and a failure, by the time Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending came along, everyone just knew those movies would be a mess, because after all, the Wachowskis made the Matrix sequels, and, remember how much everyone hated those? Not to mention, though, that Cloud Atlas has some of the most incredible, beautifully-edited action sequences of all time. And then Jupiter Ascending — a movie about a Russian immigrant maid discovering that she’s destined to be Queen of Bees and Also the Entire Universe, and falling in love with a half-werewolf, half-space-angel — well, it never had a chance. Never mind the fact that it’s a fascinating, gorgeously-filmed deconstruction of the white-male-centric hero’s journey usually portrayed in the space operas from which it draws much of its inspiration. The Wachowskis made it, so it’s gotta suck, right?
So, I want to go back through their oeuvre. I want to approach each of their movies as a Wachowski movie, to figure out what that even means, while simultaneously allowing each movie room to breathe, to tell me what it’s trying to be, without me imposing my own expectations on it. I want to pick apart the Wachowskis’ style, their sensibility, and their philosophy. I want to think about what it means, and why critics get mad, when a movie diverges from what we expected that style, sensibility, and philosophy to look like as their filmography evolved. And I want to look at the way the Wachowskis have grown into the standard-bearers for optimism and earnest-ness, in a culture so obsessed with cynicism and irony.
Because, really, for me, the key word there is evolution. I want filmmakers I like and respect to grow and change with each release. I don’t want to watch them make the same movie over and over, because then what’s the point? I want them to try, even if that means that people are ready to label them failures before even seeing their movies. I like seeing people try. Sometimes, I like seeing them “fail” because I think it will help them grow. I like losing myself in movies, and as far as I’m concerned, no one builds worlds better than the Wachowski siblings. As a wise man once said, I guess I just like liking things.
