Lana Wachowski’s astonishing, warm, funny speech at a Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco is the best thing I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m glad to see it get passed around so widely today:

One of the things that’s so remarkable about Lana’s address—in addition to its artlessness, the result of her first major stint as a public speaker—is the way it addresses the inadequacy of everything from the gender binary, to our media culture, to the language we use to describe ourselves. She’s supporting HRC’s work even as she’s calling out the limitations of the current conversation about and tools for advancing equality. When she first uses the term “transition” to describe her physical transformation, she notes that “this is a very complicated word for me because of its complicity in a binary gender dynamic that I am not particularly comfortable with.” Lana explains that she has a horror of talk show culture because she can’t stand the idea of dealing with a host “whose sympathy underscores the inherent tragedy of my life as a transgendered person.” Recounting an incident in which her mother rescued her from the abuse of a nun at her Catholic school, Lana says that when her mother asked for an explanation of what happened, Lana explains “I have no real language to describe it…I am unable to understand why she can’t see me” And given the flights of imagination in her movies, Lana explains how difficult it was, as a child, to feel like “I was stupid and a liar because I myself was unable to imagine a world where I would ever fit in.” The world, in so many ways, is not enough. And the tools we have to improve it can only take us so far.

Lana’s explanation of her own approach to her coming-out process is also novel in an era when coming-out stories have become a highly valuable commodity with an established roll-out process. She’s approaching it from an extremely different angle, from the perspective of someone who has carefully guarded all aspects of her life to the extent of doing almost no publicity for her movies with her brother. “I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it seemed that my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others,” she says of her childhood. “If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value.”

Andy and Lana Wachowski have not stuck the landing on the emotional conclusion really, I think, since The Matrix, but they always produce a fantastic visual spectacle, and Cloud Atlas, which they directed in collaboration with Tom Twyker, looks like it’ll be no different:

One interesting piece of context for this very long trailer that the directors give in their commentary on it is that the actors, who are playing multiple parts in the movie, may be switching genders and races from storyline to storyline. I’ll be curious to see how the movie executes that, given the risk of handling blackface poorly. And I’d be fascinated to see what the movie (I haven’t read the book) ends up having to say about the commonality of human experience across race and gender, given that the time periods it spans, from 1850 into the distant future, are periods of radically changing conditions for women and people of color.

The movie also comes at a period of significant change for the Wachowskis. While I don’t like overreading creators’ personal experiences into their work unless they suggest that I ought to, it’s hard to see it as total coincidence that they’re making a movie about the continuity of the human soul no matter the body it’s in during a time when Lana, who was born Larry, went from living as a man to living as a woman. The Wachowskis have always been totally uninterested in discussing their personal lives, even when it means that something like the Rolling Stone story about Lana’s transition, which was salacious in the extreme, was published without comment from them. Perhaps they’ll break character here, and end up doing a magazine story or a profile. But if they don’t, there’s something radical about Lana just showing up as she is, without explanation. It’s a wonderful thing when gay and transgender people come out and tell their stories and act as role models for others. But there is no universal obligation for gay and transgender people to translate their lives for those who don’t understand them, or to put their sex lives or gender ahead of the work that made them famous and important.

Given some of the sillier elements that crept into the later movies in the Matrix trilogy; given the semi-disaster that was their adaptation of beloved cartoon Speed Racer; given the lurid way the media portrayed Lana Wachowski’s gender transition in the press; given the way the Wachowskis were treated for trying to make a hard-R love story that would have depicted a gay American soldier and an Iraqi man (I’d be curious how the trade press would have treated someone else trying to get a similar project into production); given that The Matrix itself is thirteen years old, it’s easy to forget how amazing it was to see that movie for the first time, how visionary the Wachowskis seemed all the way back in 1999. And maybe The Matrix will never register to a generation the same way it did to mine, those of us who grew up without the Internet and then had it open up before us. But if anything, we’re still living in the world they laid out for us, and grappling with the questions they posed before us. There may be less black leather and fewer mechanical nasties, but we still haven’t figured out how closely we can be tied to our technology and still stay healthy, and hackers still have cachet and the power to poke hard at our government and businesses.

All of which is a long way of saying that whatever has happened to them creatively and personally in the years since The Matrix was released, I want the Wachowskis to have a hit again, and I’m willing to give them a lot of credit and leeway as they try. I’m glad they got a shot at adapting Cloud Atlas. And I’m pretty excited to hear that they’ve signed up Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum to star in their next original movie, a science fiction project about which little is known called Jupiter Ascending. They did a nice job of working with Keanu Reeves’ blankness in the Matrix trilogy, and while I think Tatum’s proved that he’s more than a slab of beef, this might be an opportunity for him to convince those who are unmoved by A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints or 21 Jump Street.

The news of Jupiter Ascending also makes me feel like, despite my grumbling about the SyFy network yesterday, we might be entering a nice little moment for original sci-fi. Prometheus looks downright incredible, visually gorgeous and scary, and a reminder of the risks of our drive for exploration. I hadn’t even realized that Guy Pearce’s latest, Lockout, was a science fiction thriller until I saw a trailer for it in front of The Hunger Games this weekend. But I’m always down for a nasty, industrial view of space, where instead of the final frontier, it’s a place of exile and danger, in this case, for criminals and a few innocents. The Wachowskis found transcendence in metal, and wire, and castoff clothes once. I have such hopes for them taking us somewhere new, and frightening, and beautiful again.