Is real life actually a simulation? A new documentary examines those who think they know
Building his latest documentary around impossibly big questions, a cheeky '90s cyber aesthetic and the words of visionary author Philip K. Dick, director Rodney Ascher explores the labyrinthine terrain between science fiction and reality in "A Glitch in the Matrix," tackling an age-old conundrum: Are we living in a simulation?
A genre filmmaker whose natural inquisitiveness lent itself to feature documentaries — including 2012's "Room 237," about Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," and 2015's sleep paralysis exploration "The Nightmare" — Ascher now explores another niche corner of humankind's search for meaning and truth. But as he dove deeper into "Matrix," the film took an unexpected turn.
"I didn’t know that it was going towards horror; I thought it was going towards science fiction," said Ascher, whose film, conceived before the pandemic and completed remotely during it, premiered at this year's virtual Sundance Film Festival.
Blending sci-fi cinema and video game iconography, the academic theories of experts such as Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and firsthand musings from "eyewitnesses" who are transformed on screen into otherworldly CG avatars, "Matrix" explores wide-ranging implications of simulation theory with imaginative, pop culture-infused flair.
In its most chilling and controversial sequence, "Matrix" employs photogrammetry and eerie computer animation to re-create the 2003 night when teenager Joshua Cooke, obsessed with the 1999 film "The Matrix," murdered his parents. The case spawned the "Matrix defense," in which a defendant claims they believed they were in a simulation of the real world. Cooke is interviewed in the film from prison, where he is serving a 40-year sentence.
Beaming in via videochat, Ascher discussed the methods and origins of the film and considered the ways it has garnered unexpected relevancy since it first began. The film is now available on VOD and in virtual cinemas.
"We’re in a world where there are not just disagreements about opinions, but disagreements about facts," he said. "And I like to think that this project can be a good entryway into talking about that stuff — maybe as a piece of self-examination, wondering, if we’re all living in our own Plato’s Caves, how accurate are the shadows that we choose to spend the most time looking at?"
t looks like the conversation that we’re having right now, you and me, but we actually shot the interviews in 2019. It’s a very strange coincidence that a movie that is built on these Skype calls, these webcam video calls, is getting released into a world in which we’re all interacting with each other through these images. In some ways having an avatar speaking to people in these interviews, people speaking in their real world environments, might seem a little bit like a satire of the first few COVID-19 projects that have hit. Or just the way that we live. A very strange coincidence, but not the only one.
Have you experienced instances of déjà vu, glitches or synchronicities you can’t explain?
Synchronicities, for sure. Even in the course of this film. The name that [Dick] came up with for the day that he had this big revelation in February and March of 1974, he called 2-3-7… 4. ["Room 237," Ascher's documentary about "The Shining," is titled after a motif in the Kubrick film.] Philip K. Dick wrote extensively about Martian colonies, and ["Glitch in the Matrix" subject] Jesse [Orion] thinks we need to colonize Martian planets in order to get our message out to the creator. And, Elon Musk is working on a Mars colony. All three of them are thinking Mars is the place.
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