A Glitch in the Matrix (2021): Room 237 director’s latest labyrinth (Review)

Everyone sees themselves as a hero in their own story. For some people, that’s a romantic lead, for others it’s a little guy against the system. Personally I see myself as a battered but unbowed white knight, who takes up his steed and his shield every time people start egregiously misunderstanding a Rodney Ascher film. The best-known of Ascher’s playfully disturbing documentaries is Room 237, a collection of eccentric fan theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Ascher’s interviewees ascribe covert meanings to Kubrick’s film ranging from Holocaust allegory to a bombshell revelation about the Apollo 11 mission; these interpretations have since been derided by Stephen King and Kubrick’s assistant Leon Vitali, which would be a serious problem if Room 237 was aiming to explain The Shining. It’s actually a film about how we experience and interpret movies, how they change as we change, and in doing so it deliberately makes itself hard to interpret. There are no authorial voiceovers, no observational scenes where we see the interviewees in their everyday life, no experts brought in to rebut the more wayward ideas. The viewer is simply expected to work out what is true and what isn’t on their own, and it’s interesting how difficult people seem to find that.

I don’t mean that as snark. If the protagonists of Ascher’s new film – A Glitch in the Matrix, released on Blu-Ray by Dogwoof – came up to you at a party and started expounding their theories, you’d reach a conclusion about them fairly quickly, even if it was just “how do I get away from this person?” But there’s an unspoken rule about the use of interviews and voiceovers in documentary, a rule that Ascher cheerfully and knowingly violates. We’ve all watched documentaries about people the film-makers don’t want us to sympathise with, whether it’s a historical dictator, a con artist or a serial killer. Except when a standard true crime documentary wants us to understand some killer’s delusions, it brings a psychiatrist on to explain them. Ascher would rather bring the killer on to talk about it themselves, which sounds irresponsible until you ask yourself: what’s the risk here? Even in these days of anti-vaccine paranoia and QAnon, it’s hard to imagine that an interview with, say, the Son of Sam would leave millions of viewers convinced their neighbour’s dog is telling them to kill.

A Glitch in the Matrix is about simulation theory, a mixture of thought experiment and conspiracy theory that’s been catching fire in some of the more excitable corners of the internet. Adherents believe that the visible world is a computer simulation, and collate various oddities that supposedly prove this. The most famous of these is the “Mandela effect”, whose devotees collect evidence of the past being rewritten, from Nelson Mandela’s date of death not matching their recollections to changes in the spelling and punctuation of brand names. The most obvious explanation for this – that people have simply misremembered it – is dismissed immediately. People would, it seems, rather believe they live in a false reality controlled by some despotic computer programmer than accept their memory might be fallible.

A lot of people find simulation theory believers extremely annoying, and the criticism of A Glitch in the Matrix generally comes from this angle: these people are annoying, and since Ascher does not overtly signal that he finds them annoying he must agree with them. But – again – if you came away from this film disliking the interviewees, surely the message you want is being transmitted? Considered as a film, A Glitch in the Matrix is slightly overlong but quintessentially Ascherian. As in Room 237, Ascher assembles his own argument through brilliantly selected archive clips. There’s a montage – worthy of Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation – of computer-generated armies being wiped out in Hollywood blockbusters, a modern cinematic cliche that becomes more disturbing when you realise a growing number of people see their fellow citizens as similarly expendable CGI beings. Without explicitly saying as much, the film’s barrage of digital imagery makes the argument that a society so saturated in CGI would naturally develop the belief that reality is a simulation. Several interviewees are anonymised behind computer-generated avatars, which allows for some wonderful bathetic humour when – say – an alien robot with a visible pulsating brain has to stop to check on his kids.

The most cutting moment of A Glitch in the Matrix comes when one interviewee offers TV news as evidence of the simulation. Newsreaders, he explains, just repeat the same phrases over and over again, almost as if they were programmed to. To back this up, Ascher uses a montage of local news hosts robotically chanting the phrase “a serious threat to our democracy”. You may recognise the clip. It’s a supercut that went viral in 2018, showing news channels owned by the Trump-supporting Sinclair Media Group reciting their boss’s talking points. By using this particular clip, Ascher is demonstrating that the rich don’t need to build some reality-simulating supercomputer to control our world; they can do it because they’re rich. This sense that simulation theory is a kind of philosophical controlled opposition, a way for the super-rich to distract people from the irrationality of the system they’ve constructed, becomes more acute when interviewees cite an interview with SNL funnyman Elon Musk as the impetus for them exploring the idea. Musk’s argument – that video games will one day look indistinguishable from reality, therefore reality is a video game – is beyond inane. By this reasoning, the fact that we can make extremely life-like waxworks means we are all waxworks. Yet everyone nods along and finds it fascinating. It’s not because they’re computer programs. It’s because they’re sycophants.

A Glitch in the Matrix is, in the end, more overtly critical of the theories it documents than Room 237, although it can be hard to appreciate that at first. Uncharacteristically, Ascher uses voiceover here, a computerised female voice that discusses the philosophical and cultural roots of simulation theory in a way that’s not a million miles from how the theory’s adherents would discuss it. This is, presumably, where some viewers abandoned ship: the opening half-hour or so of A Glitch in the Matrix feels like the kind of film about simulation theory that a simulation theorist would make. Those who stick with it will find that’s part of Ascher’s plan, and it’s why – to go back to that earlier point about the morality of allowing interviewees to discuss their delusions – A Glitch in the Matrix is a more responsible film than it looks. It offers believers an olive branch, an acknowledgement that this is fascinating stuff (and, to be clear, if all you get from simulation theory is a mind-stretching thought experiment, more power to you). Then it shows how this belief that you alone can see through reality can lead to some very, very dark places. Extras include art cards and a half-hour interview with Ascher that I deliberately didn’t watch – but if you do want to hear the director state his position on this subject, it’s there for you.

Why is a TV documentary about the one-time Ginger Spice our longest episode ever? Well, when it’s directed by Molly Dineen and it offers a window into the strange media landscape of turn-of-the-millennium Britain, there’s a fair bit to talk about. Graham is joined by Mark Cunliffe from We Are Cult (and The Geek Show, for that matter) to discuss celebrity in the Blair years, Geri Horner (then Halliwell)’s disastrous James Bond audition, her friendship with Prince Charles, the often prescient films of Dineen, “ass-flavoured bubblegum”, Derek and Clive for some reason… there’s a lot, OK.

MAY POP SCREEN +

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of A Glitch in the Matrix

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