The Quest for Level Three: Level Up, Beyond Red Pills, Beyond Retro, Beyond Genre

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Have you ever reached a moment in your life where you have to level up? A friend who worked with Justin Sun claimed that Sun said that life is like a video game. The goal is to solve the problems and bop around until you get to the next level. To view life as Pac-Man makes the challenges and shocks easier to bear. Don't take it so personally. You're just in a video game. The goal is to level up.

We're currently on Level Two of the video game. I keep thinking of a video by Ed of The Outer Light / Outer Dark channel. It must have been posted about two years ago, but it feels like six months. He pondered how much he had learned, having spent his life digging around in conspiracy theories. He mentioned his claim to fame - he was the vlogger who identified the serpent face in the Papal Audience Hall, on 29 December 2016 - which later became an Internet meme. Even Know Your Meme didn't realize that Ed originally recognized that the Vatican is a seat of reptillian snake worship. If that doesn't red pill you, I don't know what will. It was all the more significant because Ed was raised Catholic, and the shock of the serpent room forced him to reassess his past.

"How far did I get, really?" he sighed, "At  least I'm not down there with the Pod People. I made it to Level Two. What's on Level Two?" He alluded to famous conspiracy theorists - the Alex Joneses and the Joe Rogans - and the kind of world view described by Dylan Louis Monroe's Deep State Mapping Project. These beliefs don't free us, they just divert and distract us. The challenge is to get past all of this, Ed mused, to reach Level Three. 

 

We now know that red-pilling is a trap. To see how and why, watch the video above. The Matrix film series, source of that gnostic meme which defined the first twenty-five years of the 21st century, showed its hand in the third film in the franchise. The Matrix Revolutions (2003) revealed that the Oracle had invented the red and blue pills as a control mechanism, to give rebellious humans the illusion of choice about leaving the Matrix.

The very first film in the Matrix series (1999) introduced red as a colour of deceit and caution, starting with the Woman in Red, played by Fiona Johnson. That actress was paired with Matt Doran, who played Mouse in The Matrix. The two actors reappeared together in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002), implying that the Star Wars franchise is a critical narrative control mechanism inside the universe of the Matrix film series. Rewatch the Matrix series, and you will see that the Oracle is constantly feeding characters drugs or food to change their minds, thereby deceiving them with the illusion that they have a choice about what they are going to do next. 

This means that red pilling is not about a Free Will (Christian) choice - it is about the serpent's offer of consumption from the Tree of Knowledge. The red pilled see themselves as consuming information to free themselves. But those who wield the narratives of control see in that consumption only a slave's choice of submission, of acceptance, of taking something into oneself in a state of powerlessness. 

Thus, the desire for re-empowerment is the cause which subjugates the consumer. All of this drags the narrative back to its core inspiration: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

The implications of the Oracle's actions were unclear until The Matrix Resurrections (2021), when we saw that the characters had never escaped the machines' system. The red pill had led to a false resolution of the story.  

The Merovingian hinted that that the red pill was never about choice: "Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without." The Merovingian claims that choice is not the starting point of action. "This is the nature of the universe. ... The truth is we are completely out of control. Causality - there is no escape from it. ... Our only peace is to understand it, to understand the why. ... Why is the only source of power. Without it, you are powerless." The real driver of the universe is cause and effect. Those with power control the 'why' in the push and pull between cause and effect.

In another scene, he says: "There is no action without consequence. ... Some might think this is a strange coincidence, but I do not. ... I have told you before there is no escaping the nature of the universe. It is that nature that has again brought you to me. Where some see coincidence, I see consequence. Where others see chance, I see cost." Perhaps the Merovingian is merely expressing the if-then condition that defines the machines' perspective.

Genre also makes us take a second look at the freedom promised by the red pill. The Matrix series is a neo-noir or cybernoir. The characters move through a hostile, overpowering environment; hope for change, for escape, for freedom, for transcendence, rapidly and repeatedly morphs into illusion. Whether it is fate or the Matrix's overarching control which defeats them, the characters never stand a chance. 

The most recent Matrix movie tried to alleviate this pessimism with an idea that we can all hold hands with the machines, integrate with them, and at least that will mean we will cooperate. It's not really a manifesto for humanity's final triumph, although the Matrix films stumble again and again over the problem of true love and how it can break all systems of control. Through Neo and Trinity, the Matrix tries to ask: can true love conquer everything constructed in the world? Can love transcend cause and effect? Is it larger than free will? Can it overcome the darkness of a noir universe?

 

Conspiracy Theorizing as a Noir Legacy Genre 

In the real world beyond the Matrix films and red pill meme, we who believed we were red pilled - or even those who felt they were black pilled - similarly were further enslaved by the illusion of choice. Could we really use information and technology to enhance our free will? How many red-pilled people have escaped the system? And how many blue-pilled individuals have red pills managed to rally to humanity's cause? Scientific American, which derides conspiracy theorists as delusional freaks, argues that the core of their mentality is that of disempowered people seeking control in a chaotic world.

I would argue instead that conspiracy theorizing is a legacy genre, focused on processing contemporary social traumas. It derives from noir as a parent genre. And noir, in turn, was a genre which processed traumas from the Great Depression and World War II. Where can we go beyond this PTSD culture?  

In short, red-pilling didn't free us. Whether we took the proverbial red pill or the blue pill, we all more or less ended up in the same place. Either way, the goal is still to level up.

Retro

 

Can you level up by going back to the past? At one point, you could. Like the classic 1989 Cinemaware video game, It Came from the Desert, a lot of popular culture from the 1980s leveled up by paying homage to an earlier era, particularly the late 1930s through the 1950s. In its time, this game became cutting edge because it repackaged a concept from the 1954 monster movie, Them!   

There are hundreds of examples from 1980s' popular culture which rehashed themes from those critical mid-20th-century decades, but presented them in new contexts. Something about leveling up involves putting old wine in new bottles. However, we have to be careful not to carry forward old  ideas at the expense of real breakthroughs.

Genre

Image Source: ABC (Moonlighting, "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice)via Love Letters to Old Hollywood.

One of the cutting edge shows of the 1980s, the television comedy, Moonlighting (1985-1989), relied heavily on retro themes while adding a fresh, upbeat vibe. Moonlighting recalled the film noir genre. It first aired only 11 years after Roman Polanski's landmark neo-noir, Chinatown. It was similarly set in Los Angeles. But creator Glenn Gordon Caron softened its approach, adding romance and touches of Howard Hawks' comedies. It even featured Orson Welles in his last appearance on screen, in a 1985 nod to the show's 1940s' roots.

To this day, there is debate about what brought down this innovative show, which perfectly highlighted the visceral combination of leading talents Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis. Even though it challenged many conventions, it seems that Moonlighting couldn't level up and move beyond some elements of its source genres, romance, mystery, noir, and comedy. Some reporters call it a 'dramedy.'

The show also stayed contemporary by focusing on the 1980s' smashing of gender and class roles. Moonlighting raised the battle of the sexes to an art form. It also touched on the decade's class leveling, paradoxical social climbing, and painful class consciousness. While earlier generations could not clear this hurdle (for example: Sons and Lovers (1913); The Great Gatsby (1925); Five Easy Pieces (1970)), by the 1980s, people hoped they were progressive enough to overcome class differences. Think: Christie Brinkley's uptown girl marrying Billy Joel's downtown man (1983). 

The trope arose from the women's rights movement. There was a sense that a five-star emancipated woman could not find her match in her own class, and had to look for a real man in the working classes. That tension, unresolved, is also in The Outsiders (1983) and Bruce Springsteen's I'm on Fire (1985). Moonlighting peaked with this trope. Maddie Hayes was genuinely stuck. She couldn't choose a man from her own social class. An astronaut ticked all the boxes, but she just didn't love Mark Harmon's character, Sam. She loved David Addison.

 

 

 

While Moonlighting became a huge hit based on this good girl / bad boy dynamic, it could never reconcile the fundamental darkness of film noir as its source genre. Despite its lighter references to comedy and romance, especially Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, it was defeated and defeatist in the end. Noir could not be removed from its pedigree and that finally overwhelmed the story.

 

Initially, noir influenced the series' style more than its characters. There was still hope in season 3's love triangle. Moonlighting was noir-lite, pastel noir for Tuesday nights in the mid-to-late 1980s when people on their way to Wednesday's hump day wondered - would they or wouldn't they?

 

 

Maybe the question wasn't could these characters have sex. Perhaps it was: could they marry and stay interesting? The model for this was Hart to Hart (1979-1984), although considering Robert Wagner's real life marital history with Natalie Wood, it was weird to present him as an ideal fantasy husband. In a 1986 episode, an alternate fate for the Blue Moon Detective Agency saw it bought out by the characters from Hart to Hart.

Writers tried to combine the thriller / suspense genre with marriage in True Lies (1994); Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005); The Americans (2013-2018); and Black Bag (2025). To accommodate a marriage, the detective concept oddly has to 'grow up' and shift from mystery to espionage. Even James Bond managed to get married. But by the end of the series, the leads on Moonlighting wouldn't or couldn't get married. At the start of the fourth season, the writers introduced the idea that a settled relationship would compromise the characters and make them neutered and boring. Ray Charles told David: "The trade, whatever you're willing to give up. Once you fix a tomcat, you can't unfix him." This was a stylish way of saying that noir characters inhabit a hopeless world, and their flaws make it impossible for them to overcome the challenges of that world. 

Perhaps the theme which needed to evolve in the Moonlighting narrative was not marriage, but love. Despite its notorious production problems in its fourth and fifth seasons, writers blamed the plot for the show's decline. Moonlighting became a cautionary tale for television and screen writers the world over. The demise of Moonlighting introduced a fatal assumption that writers must never unite two actors who have genuine chemistry, because the romance which that chemistry generates inevitably blossoms into a love story. 

The problem is that love stories have their own genre formulas which are fixed in mundane realities. If they are dealing with marriages and families, these narratives don't mesh well with more exciting genres.

To succeed after the third season, Moonlighting would have had to cross into a new genre that included love and commitment. But the places where it had to go were not necessarily compatible with the show's eclectic blend of mystery, drama, comedy, musicals, and romance. The show might have grown up and become an international spy thriller, but that would have removed the comedy, unless it veered into something like Beat the Devil (1953) or Topkapi (1964). After season three, the characters would have had to level up and take more high profile cases. In other words, as the characters got serious, the agency should have gotten serious, too. It might have worked if the detective agency's clients had begun to reflect the dark side of Hollywood. There was little of Los Angeles in the show and that theme could have been expanded. To be fair, the writers did explore other genres in season five of the show, including horror in the episode, "I See England, I See France, I See Maddie's Netherworld."

But the writers were not up to a complete overhaul and upgrade of the show's concept, nor were the actors under the conditions at the time, nor was the network. The writers' strike in 1988 derailed the show in its fourth season. 

Despite all of this, Moonlighting became legendary because its failure was blamed on the plot, not on its production problems. Industry writers mistakenly assumed that what killed the show was the characters having sex. Actually, if plot was to blame, it was for the completely opposite reason: the writers killed the show by constantly thwarting David and Maddie's union. The audience wanted to see them together.

After Moonlighting was canceled, other series' writers took away the wrong-headed lesson that devoted couples can't be interesting and audiences are only interested in the build-up to coupledom. In countless dramas, writers deliberately split characters up to prolong the audience's anticipation. But dividing paired actors with great chemistry almost always leads to a drop in ratings and enormous audience frustration.

In The Man in the High Castle, fans chewed over the forced breakup of Joe and Juliana, long after the show ended. When actor Jason O'Mara was introduced as a love interest for Juliana in seasons three and four, one commenter on a fan forum called him, 'Discount Joe.' The commenter even remarked that there was nothing wrong with O'Mara on his own. But he was clearly just a replacement for actor Luke Kleintank, and O'Mara was playing the character that Joe should have become. That didn't work, because O'Mara wasn't Joe.

Fans of these shows especially don't like it when writers pry apart their shipped characters. Interestingly, the fictional couple can be challenged by a major interloper - like Sam on Moonlighting  - but the writers should only do it once. If it is done over and over, as was done on Moonlighting after season three, the audience loses its willing suspension of disbelief. The writers' interference begins to show through the characters; the drama becomes stale, transparent, manipulative and fake.

Fans also hate waiting years for the characters to return to coupledom, only to have the reunion ruined. By the 2010s, the Moonlighting curse reached a dead end; it had evolved into a trope that led industry writers to make female characters murder their male counterparts, or vice versa. Examples: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2001); Lara Croft: Tomb Raider -  The Cradle of Life (2003); Game of Thrones (2011-2019); The 100 (2014-2020); and The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019). This was their creative solution? They really cannot figure out how to present a deeply committed couple in a dramatic plot. It's easier to kill the characters than it is to develop them.

Fans want their happy ending - and they want to know how a happy ending can persist and survive in a cruel world. They want to see a 'love conquers all' genre.

You don't have to look far on social media to find fan fictions, fan websites, and video and music montages in which fans have tried to restore a fictional couple to what they feel they should have and could have been. You would think some of these industry writers might actually read fan fictions to consider how a new romantic love genre could work. Fanfics are fascinating because their writers are not in the industry and are not on anyone's payroll. They can do whatever they want. And they have likely figured out some of the options for this new romantic genre. But because they are not part of the industry, almost no one reads their work. With the advent of AI, we might see animations and dramatizations of fanfics, which will break through some of these barriers.

 All of this is a problem not for actors, but for writers. Why can't they level up and depict a higher love which stays exciting? The audience has a natural desire to see two compatible archetypes, an animus and an anima, unite. It's one of the most profound creative impulses in the world, a pairing of opposites which can and will overcome duality. But that removal of duality is equated with a loss of dramatic tension. 

It's not a new problem. How many stories end with: 'And they lived happily ever after,' with no exploration of the reality of an ideal brought to life? What we get instead in the romance genre is a celebration of flaws and limitations in marriage. At this point, you have a few paths: existential films about the angst of daily life, or cheery Hallmark movies. The cat and mouse games of courtship are long gone. This is about the agony of the ticking clock, the realities of compromise; and if you want comedy at this point, you'd have to leave sitcoms and go for stand-up. As Chris Rock put it, soulmates don't exist, and married people are neutered adults: "You were not her first choice."

Another reason for writers' failure to invent a new genre and new perspective of love is probably because existing narratives reinforce current social systems. Even rebellious genres like noir and its offshoots lead you right back to where you started (back to the Matrix!). There's no transcendent love genre which beats the system. From Romeo and Juliet to The Great Gatsby, from Bonnie and Clyde to The Handmaid's Tale, from Blade Runner to Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Moonlighting to The X-Files to The Matrix, the message is: you can't escape the system, and if you're in a couple, you really can't. Forget it. These stories toy with disobedience while doubling down on acquiescence, surrender and conformity. They reinforce the idea that love traps you in soul-destroying mediocrity. The current mainstream romantic narrative offers a message of despair: love equals prison. Love equals loss of self, hopes, and dreams.

This is a lie because there genuine love - a soul-based love - is revolutionary. It breaks systems. It smashes conventions. It reinvents how we tell stories. We have yet to establish a genre which depicts transcendent love, such as described in Elton John's song, The One (1992). We have trouble finding a narrative where the "pieces finally fit":

There are caravans we follow
Drunken nights in dark hotels
When chances breathe between the silence
Where sex and love no longer gel, oh
For each man, in his time, is Cain
Until he walks along the beach
And sees his future in the water
A long, lost heart within his reach 

It is quite rare to see depictions of this form of love in romantic story-telling; certainly, there is no separate genre or set of narrative rules for it because it is so rare. Some examples include: Waking the Dead (2000), based on a novel from 1986 by Scott Spencer which critics did not understand. In a 1986 NYT review, Michiko Kakutani couldn't grasp what the writer was on about. What was this eternal love - something beyond soulmates? It challenged social conventions so completely that it looked immature, half-baked and fake to her. At best, it was simply bad writing: "his orchestration of Fielding's continuing obsession with Sarah becomes an increasingly empty display of narrative pyrotechnics." She couldn't understand that Spencer was describing a different kind of love that existed in a place beyond our social construct. Perhaps in the same category, we might find: Wuthering Heights and its adaptations (1847); Immortal Beloved (1994); Dark City (1998); In the Mood for Love (2000); and The Notebook (2004). In these stories, love is a next-level force which anticipates a new society. It's a love that wants to break through the Matrix. We don't yet have conventions for telling that kind of love story.