A Glitch in the Matrix: Reality Not the Only Thing Put to the Test in Wonky Documentary

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

Over the past year of pandemic isolation and political chaos, even an inflexible sceptic might wonder if we’re undergoing a sort of a collective bizarre stress test. That makes the new documentary A Glitch in the Matrix timely.

Shot largely through Zoom interviews, with some subjects in digital costumes — along with flurries of film clips and computer animation, and a robotic woman’s voiceover — Glitch employs a scattershot means to illustrate a fragmenting sense of reality.

Rodney Ascher, who has previously made the documentaries Room 237 about obsessive interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and The Nightmare about sleep paralysis, focuses on another a niche subject known as the “simulation hypothesis.”

Popularized by Swedish-born Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, the conjecture is given the rapidly accelerating pace of computing power, what we imagine is real-life may be no more than a “post-human” computer simulation.

The model is a seductive thought experiment in an era of sophisticated game design and the prevailing fascination with automation, or codes, in various disciplines. But Bostrom’s hypothesis is by no means universally endorsed (for an outline of the pros and cons of the discussion, see here), though inventor Elon Musk and popular astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson are on board. So, apparently, are legions of fans of the Keanu Reeves-starring Matrix movie trilogy and video game players.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

In a cursory historical survey, the film notes that speculations about the often-illusory nature of experience aren’t new, from Plato’s allegory of prisoners in a cave mistaking shadows for reality, to René Descartes supposition that an evil demon could have created all his sense impressions.

Jumping ahead to the more recent past, Glitch provides considerable screen time to a 1977 speech in France by science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick, whose works have been a goldmine for movie and television (Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Man in High Castle). Dick’s “insight,” triggered by a sodium pentathol dose, was that not only does the fabric of reality have holes in it, we can sometimes glimpse someone peeking through them.

This sounds less like philosophy than paranoia or at least apophenia (the tendency to see meaningful patterns in random events) but Ascher is happy to jump down that rabbit hole. In fact, the film suffers from the over-interpreting mental “glitch,” eagerly connecting coincidence, mental illness, drug experiences, religious awe, computer gaming, and science fiction movies in an over-arching pattern.

All this is fleshed out with images from an animation, and a barrage of clips from movies and television series including, of course, The Matrix trilogy, from which the film takes its title.

While Bostrom, Dick, and a couple of other cultural commentators — or “expert witnesses” — provide some context for these themes, Ascher’s film focuses on five “eye-witnesses” who have turned the notion of living in a game or experiment into a quasi-religion, with similar issues about pre-destination.

Four of these men appear, sort of, via Zoom webcams in a digitally created sci-fi costumes in front of a webcam. A fifth subject, Joshua Cooke, heard in a phone call from prison, describes in detail how his obsession with The Matrix, complicated by his diagnosed schizophrenia, led him to kill his adoptive parents. Helpfully, the animators have created a detailed digital rendering of his home where he committed the murders.

Late in the film, writer Emily Pothast (at last a female!) suggests that the path out of this “solipsism” is an erotic connection, but even this is something of cliché. (If only these guys could put down their game controllers, they could get girlfriends!) Shake your head and there’s also a web of inter-subjective intersections, including language, which define what it means to be human. Whether life is an experiment or not, we’re all in this together.

A Glitch in the Matrix. Directed by Rodney Ascher. With “experts” Nick Bostrom, Erik Davis, Emily Pothast, Chris Ware and Jeremy Felts, and “eyewitnesses” Joshua Cooke, Paule Gudelia, Alex DeVine, Brother Laeo Mystood and Jesse Orion. Available to rent from February 5 on Apple TV app and other VOD platforms. It is also available to rent on virtual cinema including Cinematheque at Home (February 5) and Hot Docs at Home (February 11) across Canada.