It is widely believed that in 1926, Earnest Hemingway wrote his first novella, The Torrents of Spring, to elude a bad contract with his then-publisher. Hemingway wrote it in just 10 days, employing a sardonic tone to skewer his modern realist contemporaries at the publishing house.

The Matrix Resurrections, written and directed by Lana Wachowski, feels as if it was made with similar intentions. The film fiddles with the fourth wall, flippantly jesting at its redundancy in the Matrix cannon.