I’ve made my feelings about the contributors to director Rodney Ascher’s documentary about The Shining – Room 237 (2012) – quite clear elsewhere; I’m still far from clear on some of the ideas held by its interviewees, nor indeed how there is any link between skiing and the Minotaur, much less how it’s related to Kubrick’s film. Well, upon seeing A Glitch in the Matrix, it’s clear that Ascher has once more found a lesser-heard minority with unorthodox ideas, and I suppose we shouldn’t shoot the messenger: it’s clearly something he’s rather good at. A Glitch in the Matrix examines ‘simulation theory’, the idea probably most-famously mooted in The Matrix in 1999 that we are, in fact, living in a simulation controlled by higher forces. Ascher’s approach here, as in Room 237, is to allow the participants to extoll their views without question; it’s…interesting to hear, but giving free rein to these people misses a trick, as far as I’m concerned. They’re crying out to be challenged.
The film starts as it means to go on, with an interviewee appearing in an avatar disguise; documentaries are choc-full of talking heads, but I suppose they aren’t often huge cyborg Anubis heads or vaping spacemen. Most of the main participants use these CGI guises, which look the part thematically whilst being presumably pointless; their views are outlandish but not illegal, and our simulation-creating overlords probably already know who they are, for reasons which become clear later. We’re coaxed into the worldview with an early consideration of how man has always sought analogy for his higher powers in whatever technology was available at any given point in time; once, this was aqueducts; now we see the brain as ‘a computer’, cos that’s what we have. The point here, apparently, is that one day in the future people may look down on us for our simplistic understanding of mind; therefore, we should appreciate that we know comparatively little.
This sounds fine to me, without being a step on the ladder to agreeing that we’re definitely subject to greater external forces which encompass everything we know – but for our documentary subjects, it’s practically a given. However, their journey to this acceptance is both the film’s most intriguing aspect and its biggest waste. Via a potted history of the growth of simulation theory, with time given to author Philip K. Dick’s late-life assertions that he had experienced ‘recovered memories’, via The Matrix (natch) through to Elon Musk’s high-profile support of the theory, we consider the likelihood that we exist in a complex programme which monitors us, dupes us and responds to us, doubling down if we get too close.
And here’s the rub: simulation theory, when it comes down to it, differs barely at all to the vast majority of conspiracy theories out there. To decipher them, it seems that we need a few good men: intelligent, but rootless, aimless characters, probably honed by gaming, who are primed to ‘spot the signs’, crack the code. Here, it’s with things like spotting alleged synchronicities and patterns, abilities which show off one’s open-eyed readiness to engage with the world on a higher level. One interviewee describes a long car journey with his father – the road was quiet, almost no people were around. From this, he extrapolated a scenario where ‘his’ simulation was being amended and rolled out to encompass his impromptu car journey; he fantasises that a small army of higher beings were all hands on deck at this moment, running additional footage and tweaking their software to keep him happy in his simulation. Not only does this kind of thinking emulate other, similar modern egotistical conspiracy theories, such as fantasising that a billionaire would care enough about your inconsequential movements to microchip you, but it allows the clearly socially-awkward, even socially-maladaptive to shift emphasis from their impaired ability to read other people, by creating a narrative which says these aren’t really people at all. The film does at least make clear, albeit indirectly, why this line of thinking is so appealing. It has the self-importance of every conspiracy which feels like a pat on the back for the clever person who finally saw things for what they are; it has the ‘I saw the light’ mentality of born-again Christianity, the existential angst which attempts to answer the question, ‘is this really it?’ and at its furthest, most pathological reaches, it’s schizophrenia with a tech manual, a paranoid fantasy of needing to protect oneself against malign others, people who look human, but can’t be.
So much for the content. This is all communicated fairly clearly – or, as much as it can be – with light-touch involvement from the filmmaking team. I do wish documentary films would dispense with that irritating trend of showing people getting seated and waiting for their take to start, but all in all, A Glitch in the Matrix is well edited together, with film clips, animated inserts, vintage TV footage, photographs and other efforts to give us something interesting to look at as we listen. It’s such a shame that there’s no opportunity to interrogate any of these ideas, though. I know, I know Ascher’s usual style is to give his participants the benefit of the doubt, but I think things could really have got interesting with even a few well-chosen questions. The film is one you almost can’t help talking over, so hard is it to resist picking faults with the logic at hand. Aside from anything else, no one gets to ask what is surely the most burning question: what on earth would be the purpose to such a simulation – in operating a coherent, consistent, continual system to dupe us all? What’s the bloody point? Give me billions of years of cold, hard chance and the chance evolutionary systems which gave rise to us humans any day – us flawed, unprecedented, pointless, pointlessly brilliant humans, as we are; oddities without answers, floating momentarily through space with no masters. A Glitch in the Matrix is an interesting, infuriating peep at a small number of representatives of a narrative very much of its time, though it’s a film which floats a few tantalising issues without address.
Magnolia Pictures released A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX in cinemas and on demand on February 5th, 2021.