Glitch in the Matrix, 2020.
Directed by Rodney Ascher.
SYNOPSIS:
Are we in fact living in a simulation? This is the question postulated, wrestled with, and ultimately argued for through archival footage, compelling interviews with real people shrouded in digital avatars, and a collection of cases from some of our most iconoclastic figures in contemporary culture.
Filmmaker Rodney Ascher is certainly no stranger to indulging conspiracy theorists, his terrifically entertaining 2012 documentary Room 237 probing the multitude of crackpot hypotheses centered around Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
And though Ascher’s overstuffed new documentary isn’t nearly as compulsively engaging or perversely amusing as that film, it offers just enough provocative food-for-thought to sustain interest throughout.
Ascher’s film is focused on “simulation theory,” the idea that our existence may not be real but in fact a curated, artificial one. It is of course a well that has been mined extensively by pop-culture over the decades – the work of Philip K. Dick and The Matrix proving the most obvious touchstones – though Ascher largely approaches the thesis through the perspectives of everyday believers.
These interviews, conducted through Skype with the participants disguised by amusingly otherworldly digital avatars, lend a surreal air to the doc from the jump; the very first man Ascher speaks to resembles an armoured monkey, inviting smirks before he even opens his mouth to wax existential.
Despite that initial jolting silliness, there are at least some interesting ideas to chew on here if you’re willing to accept them as merely ideas rather than truths – especially the belief that humanity’s perception of reality is defined by the technology of the era, hence why human brains are so often compared to computers today.
It’s certainly easy to dismiss much of the featured spit-balling as the brain simply participating in the pattern-finding it’s designed to, especially with phenomena like the “Mandela Effect”, which one subject posits is evidence of our non-reality. What the doc portrays more persuasively than the theory’s possible truth is its pervasiveness in culture, with variations on the concept posed by figures ranging from Plato to Descartes to Elon Musk.
There is a prevailing fascination here with the absurdity of human existence – how strange it is that we can walk and talk, and that simulation theory is really an attempt to parse the strange set of circumstances we all find ourselves in. One subject amusingly compares existence to a coded series of decision trees you might find in a video game, which begs the question – if we really are in a simulation, what the hell does reality actually look like? Is this just a crude imitation of what real life is?
If this all sounds fun and interesting enough, Ascher is ultimately unafraid to engage with the darker implications of simulation theory, that a steadfast belief your perceived reality is fake can prompt feelings that actions don’t have consequences. In one eerie aside, it’s suggested that if simulation theory were subscribed to en masse, carnage would run rampant in whatever this thing we call Earth actually is.
This is bolstered perhaps by a jaw-dropping interview with Joshua Cooke, a Matrix-obsessed teenager who in 2003 brutally murdered his parents amid the belief he was living in a fabricated world. Hearing Cooke calmly describe the events of that day, and how the graphic violence he inflicted didn’t match the sanitised Hollywood murder he’d been reared on, is deeply chilling. Some might question the worth of interviewing Cooke, but if nothing else his story represents the grimmer potential of a theory most would prefer to think of as playfully inquisitive.
To avoid the film feeling too much like a talking heads testimonial, Ascher supplements the interviews with a wealth of adventurous B-roll, incorporating clips from dozens of video games and movies alongside bespoke CGI animation.
Though Ascher isn’t left wanting for perspectives, the near-two-hour runtime does feel more a result of an undisciplined edit, with subjects often rambling and rather relishing the sounds of their own voices. Furthermore, Ascher can’t resist the urge to indulge a closing detour which suggests his film itself could be a “fail safe” that effectively unplugs people from the Matrix and allows them to escape. Again, it’s entertaining to a point if you don’t pay it much serious mind.
With most of the world cooped up in their homes, there’s probably never been a riper time for conspiracy theories to flourish, and one that suggests our known reality is false may well bring some measure of comfort in a time where a virus ravages the globe. Yet even with so much current context, the broadly compelling A Glitch in the Matrix doesn’t get close to the can’t-look-away oddball appeal of Ascher’s prior work.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
