Later, he describes how he was freaked out during church services when he realized that all the singing humans around him were basically just making sounds through “meat flaps” inside their bodies. Paul Gude, digitally costumed in some kind of shimmering, bejeweled Lion-O getup, talks about how, while growing up in a sparsely populated town in Illinois, he came to see the people around him as fake and the buildings as empty Western-movie-style façades. Less intimidating are the chatty interviews Ascher conducts with various individuals who discuss their own journeys toward simulation theory. ![]() What he’s saying may be nuts, but his laser-beam seriousness is compelling as with a cult leader, you’re afraid to doubt him. (“If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others,” Dick asides.) Buttoned-down and tense, his eyes occasionally darting around even as he reads from a prepared text, the author has the aura of both a seer and a madman. Dick, who declares to an audience in Metz, France, that we are living in a computer-programmed reality, one of many. It’s also just plain creepy: Ascher structures his journey around footage of a 1977 lecture by visionary sci-fi author and legendary paranoiac Philip K. It’s stuffed with ideas and stories, and it builds - amid its crowded latticework of potentially mind-melting theories - toward the kind of emotional conclusion one would not expect from a movie so immersed in abstract thought. Luckily for us, both life and the movie are real, and A Glitch in the Matrix, for all its digital constraints, is deliriously alive and expansive as well as riveting. The movie might have been as much an illusion as (allegedly) life itself. One suspects there was never any physical pointing of cameras, no arranging of big clunky lights, maybe not even anyone calling “Action!” And so, ultimately, no typical screening: No physical festival audience huddled into seats, no big screen, no director in duck boots and fleece awkwardly holding a mic, no dimming of the lights. When a home is shown, it’s a digital 3-D walk-through when we see an exterior, it’s from Google Street View. ![]() Aside from pre-existing film and news clips (of which there are admittedly many), the movie doesn’t seem to have any “real life” footage. Matching ethos and aesthetics, his interviews were all done via computer, with his subjects usually presenting themselves as fanciful, video-game-style avatars. A few days ago, while remotely introducing his movie A Glitch in the Matrix at the at-home Sundance Film Festival, director Rodney Ascher noted, with what I’m pretty sure was a chuckle, that “a film about virtual life, made virtually, is now premiering the same way.” It was, indeed, weirdly apropos: Ascher’s film focuses on the belief - fervently held by some - that our world is just a computer simulation à la The Matrix.
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