Review: A Glitch in the Matrix Compellingly Ponders If We’re Living in a Simulation

Rodney Ascher’s essay documentary A Glitch in the Matrix explores the in-vogue and tantalizingly bleak notion that we’re living in a simulated world fostered by a “posthuman” entity, perhaps a futuristic generation of ourselves that has melded with our technology. This theory isn’t solely entertained by stoner philosophy majors, cinephiles, and gamers: Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson have spoken of the validity of this idea, and in 2003 Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote an influential article (“Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”) that broke down simulation theory into mathematical equations and probabilities. Bostrom and others point to the leap in technology made between the early 1980s and today, in which primitive games like Pong have given way to virtual reality and pocket-sized supercomputers like modern cellphones. If such strides can be made in a few decades, what kind of illusions, or existences, can be fashioned in centuries or millennia?

It’s astonishing to think that “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” was written before the emergence of the iPhone, the “cloud,” and ultra-advanced video games, not to mention before online conspiracy theories became mainstream. As in Room 237 and The Nightmare, Ascher is less interested in “proving” A Glitch in the Matrix’s high concept than in exploring its emotional necessity. The need to believe that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a Rosetta stone of American conspiracy rhymes with the longing to discover that we’re bits of program on an alien or posthuman motherboard thousands of years in the future. These possibilities inform life with meaning, perhaps rendering everyday banalities and terrors manageable. Which is to say that such theories have quite a bit common with religion, as both distract from a possibility that many humans find most unmooring of all: that we are simply mammals, talking cattle whose destiny is to fertilize the earth. In fact, simulation theory suggests nothing less than a kind of secularized religion, offering a more scientific search for God.

Ascher interviews writers and artists, including Erik Davis and Paul Gude, who speak of simulation theory in personal terms, as well as Bostrom, who views this riddle as a pragmatic problem to be solved. And with the exception of Bostrom, the other interviewees are resonantly obscured by digital veils that serve to physicalize their notion of themselves as simulations. This belief might spring from the fact that these dudes, like many of us, spend too much time by themselves in their own minds, leading to the sort of solipsism that might be necessary in order to believe in the fakeness of everything. The contrast between the men’s gentle, matter-of-fact voices and their garish digital avatars—a lion in medieval armor, an overweight alien in a space suit, another alien-looking thing with a brain visible under a helmet—quite movingly suggests the safety of online aliases as well as an unrequited need for connection. The men are reaching out to Ascher and us—but not entirely.

The fantasies and experiences shared by these men in A Glitch in the Matrix are often frightening. One subject speaks of sitting in a church as a young boy and considering the absurdity of our ability to speak, to produce sounds via “meat flaps.” He says this thought spurred him to realize that existence is an illusion, and he envisioned the church dissolving in front of him to reveal a null void that parallels the sensory deprivation chamber that another speaker mentions. These stories are dramatized, as the stories of The Nightmare were, via starkly unsettling, surreal animation that rivals the imagery of any recent horror film. One image, of an avatar disintegrating in the water of the sensory deprivation chamber, cuts to the bone of the terror of anonymity driving the layperson’s idea of simulation theory.

Ascher intersperses his own images with those of other films and stories that have dealt with variations of what has come to be known as simulation theory. Footage of a speech that Philip K. Dick gave in 1977 at a science fiction convention in Metz, France, during which the author claimed to access parallel dimensions, is heavily utilized here, and Dick’s assertions are all the eerier now given the unparalleled prescience of his writing, which abounds in militarized police states and corporatized alternate realities. Ascher also samples Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, Alex Proyas’s Dark City, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, and most inevitably the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, a seismic exploration of the dream obsession that drives a vast portion of pop culture.

What are films themselves but simulations, dreams within dreams that suggest our longing to mold reality in our own image? In Ascher’s hands, these sequences suggest less a clip show than a portion of a great cultural slipstream. As the filmmaker reminds us, we’ve always wanted to prove the falseness of our existence, from Plato in his cave to Neo in a metallic cocoon fostered by insectile supercomputers from the future. By allowing a hacker dweeb to fashion himself as a sexy trench coat-clad warrior, The Matrix cannily taps into the fantasies of martyrdom and acclaim that might drive people socially adrift and lost in technology.

The Matrix also mines the ugliest elements of entitlement that spring from the isolation that our techno-society enables with increasing efficiency, especially in this age of social distancing. Discovering that his life is a simulation run by a malevolent robotic race, Neo and his band of freedom fighters assemble an arsenal and mow down bystanders with disgusting casualness—a plot development that positioned The Matrix as a bible for all sorts of outcasts searching for empowerment and meaning. (This trans allegory’s brilliance, and dangerousness, resides in the fact that it can and has been utilized to affirm the legitimacy of any ideology, including those of misogynists, white supremacists, and school shooters.) Ascher interviews a particularly deranged Matrix obsessive, Joshua Cooke, who murdered his parents in 2003 with a 12-gauge shotgun when he was 19, convinced that he was living in a simulation and was, presumably, looking for a disruption to awaken him. (It should be noted that Bostrom didn’t position simulation theory as a justification for nihilism, insisting that such a conclusion should not inspire us to “go crazy,” but to seek greater truth into the nature of our existence.)

Obsessed with The Matrix, Cooke talks of buying a black trench coat from Hot Topic and walking through a mall, noticing as spectators steered clear of him. Cooke’s mania continued to grow, as he recalls picking up a phone and saying Neo’s final words in the first film, out of hopes that such an incantation would bring him into the real world. Cooke’s calm, despairing, guilt-ridden recollections of his double murder—accompanied by images that connote a dislocated consciousness let loose in a house that’s merely a set—are this film’s dark, authentically horrifying heart, suggesting how culture shapes madness and vice versa. A Glitch in the Matrix reaffirms that Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express. His ongoing subject is the modern mythology we erect in order to justify our estrangement and myopia.