A Glitch in the Matrix

Imag­ine you’re at a din­ner par­ty, every­one is fin­ish­ing up and the port wine and cig­ars are brought out. Some­one pipes up with the ques­tion, ​“Do any of you believe we’re liv­ing in a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion, a lit­tle like the one pro­posed in the 1997 film The Matrix?” Rod­ney Ascher’s way­ward and fit­ful­ly provoca­tive doc­u­men­tary-essay hybrid A Glitch in the Matrix is pret­ty much a sim­u­la­tion of that con­ver­sa­tion, with some sharp, valid, thought-spark­ing obser­va­tions tossed across the table, but also a fair amount of inco­her­ent waffle.

What with this sub­ject mat­ter – by its very nature – being so con­cep­tu­al­ly sprawl­ing, the film lacks for a clear intel­lec­tu­al through­line, instead jump­ing through var­i­ous sub­chap­ters which cov­er var­i­ous ratio­nales artic­u­lat­ed by the believ­ers. Or, as they are cred­it­ed here, the ​“eye­wit­ness­es”. This set of sub­jects are pre­sent­ed on screen as ugly dig­i­tal avatars, though it’s nev­er cer­tain whether that’s due to an insid­er joke, an attempt to pro­tect their iden­ti­ty, or just a wacky aes­thet­ic touch to make the film feel more fun. They all have ill-defined, neb­u­lous pro­fes­sion­al back­grounds, but all are hap­py to draw on vivid per­son­al expe­ri­ences while detail­ing the evo­lu­tion of their own the­o­ries regard­ing life as a col­lec­tive simulation.

The prob­lem with the eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny is that it all comes across like con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry clap­trap, or dorm room pos­tu­la­tion pow­ered by soft drugs. It’s all high­ly sub­jec­tive and unsci­en­tif­ic, with entire alter­na­tive philoso­phies backed up with claims such as, ​“I thought of an orange fish and then I turned a cor­ner and there was a sign with an orange fish!” There’s a sense that these men (no women) are attempt­ing to sell you some­thing so that they might be able to feath­er their entre­pre­neur­ial nest.

Thank­ful­ly, Asch­er draws on tes­ti­mo­ny from experts who are observ­ing this phe­nom­e­non from the out­side, and con­tri­bu­tions by jour­nal­ist Emi­ly Pothast and nov­el­ist Jonathan Letham actu­al­ly help to build con­vinc­ing con­nec­tions between the­o­ry and a more objec­tive real­i­ty. Letham him­self con­tributed to a project in which he and var­i­ous col­leagues trun­cat­ed an 8,000 page Phillip K Dick ​“exe­ge­sis” of per­son­al thoughts about sim­u­la­tions, dystopias and dream life, and as we see in footage of an extreme­ly bizarre pub­lic lecture/​confessional from 1977, Dick him­self didn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly see his work as being couched in fantasy.

As with his 2012 film Room 237, which col­lect­ed togeth­er eccen­tric read­ings of Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, A Glitch in the Matrix uses this sub­ject mat­ter as a tro­jan horse to dis­cuss the genet­ic make-up of mod­ern con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and the fol­ly of human sug­gestibil­i­ty. In the film’s sec­ond half, the focus shifts to the case of Joshua Cooke whose love of The Matrix and its teach­ings led him at first to walk around shop­ping malls in a black trench coat and shades, then lat­er intone the dia­logue into emp­ty tele­phones and, final­ly, mur­der his par­ents with a shot­gun in a grue­some man­ner that aped the film’s main char­ac­ter, Neo.

After ini­tial talk of nos­tal­gia and dreams and the sense that sim­u­la­tion tech­nol­o­gy is real­ly ​“cool” (a very strange episode about the pro­fun­di­ty of Minecraft real­ly tests the patience), we final­ly arrive at the cold real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion and how these beliefs are essen­tial­ly incom­pat­i­ble with basic civic moral­i­ty. It’s cer­tain­ly a sub­ject wor­thy of dis­cus­sion, and every dud hypoth­e­sis is coun­tered by one that is gen­uine­ly stim­u­lat­ing. Yet spec­u­la­tion around this sub­ject has been broached on screen before – and with supe­ri­or results – by direc­tors such as Richard Lin­klater (2001’s Wak­ing Life) and Chris Mark­er (1997’s Lev­el 5).