Reality Bytes: A Glitch In The Matrix
human history’s oldest cinematic metaphor, predating cinema by about 2319 years from the likely year of Plato’s death to the first public screening of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), not the first film ever made but one of the first ever screened publicly
If anyone familiar with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave - a speculation on belief versus knowledge as a means of making sense of our reality - was asked to point to a cultural work in which it serves as a jumping off point, that example will more than likely be a movie. It’s a highly cinema-friendly premise. Also more than likely, that movie would be The Matrix, or rather the first Matrix movie. A studio executive might see that Plato’s idea probably had limited sequel potential as a storyline, assuming they’d get the reference at all.
Here is my favorite illustration of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, narrated (and why not?) by Orson Welles:
The experience of watching a movie poses an uncanny literalization of what it is to be one of Plato’s prisoners of someone else’s reality. A film takes us into the headspace of a director. The laws and rules of reality and of nature are what they say it is. Time and space are pliable concepts, controlled by the director as a kind of puppeteer. Each film that’s made is its own created universe. To watch a film is to exist inside that universe for a little while. Of all disciplines, cinema may be the best equipped medium in which to explore this particular Platonic idea.
Fans of Rodney Ascher’s previous film, Room 237, which explores multiple hidden possibilities for interpreting The Shining, may see his new film, A Glitch in the Matrix, as playing the role of the escaped prisoner in the allegory. Grasping and seeking the truth. I would argue Ascher is instead one of the puppeteers, furthering the illusions that blind and bind the prisoners. I’m not going to claim here that I know what constitutes human reality and that Ascher and the subjects of his essay-form documentary don’t. I’m merely saying that A Glitch in the Matrix does for science what Room 237 did for film analysis: Insults it. Turns it into a guessing game. A party diversion. An anecdote.
His subjects present various ideas (and not actual scientific theories dealing with tangible elements that are testable) regarding Simulation Theory. It posits that our reality is a programmed, coded simulation designed by higher beings. It's a concept that alludes to Plato and certainly makes for interesting fiction; everything from Phillip Dick novels to the Matrix and movies like The Truman Show, Cube, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, or even The Conformist. But as various believers in Simulation Theory (most of them represented onscreen by their digital avatars - a tacky and undermining aesthetic choice) expound their presumptions, the concept reveals itself as basically little more than another matter of faith. It has about as much provability or disprovability as the existence of God.
I suppose it's meant to be enough just to mention Simulation Theory and speculate about it a little because most people are unfamiliar. But the way Simulation Theory is posited here mirrors the disaster of what passes in certain circles for critical thinking today. The subjects tell personal stories about how they arrived at the revelation of our suspect reality. At their core, these testimonials are a mixture of strong personal feelings, arbitrary bisociative connections and plain old speculative thinking.
These are simply beliefs that can't be arrived at from a place of reason. Since reason is not a factor here and since the documentary subjects can't work with tangible facts on what is essentially a matter of faith, we must judge them based on the fervency of belief and the potency of how that faith is communicated. Only Phillip Dick in an unearthed press conference admitted to this. The other subjects seem pretty dead certain. They see patterns everywhere and relate the quest to try to map or graph those patterns in a larger context as if it were a live action role-playing game. The whole thing is kind of a game.
It's called Bisociative Thinking and it trains one to connect seemingly disparate elements as if they were part of a pattern in service of a larger idea - typically in service of some form of confirmation bias. Patterns, not facts. It's a lot more fun and sexy than reading data, conducting and repeating tests, recording observations and actual study. Many of them appear to be very bright and articulate individuals. But they speak about Simulation Theory as if they were part of an in-crowd of metaphysical gumshoes. It comes off at times a lack of certain cognitive capacities for contextualizing observations about perception is the primary factor in their belief in the idea that we’re living in a simulation. A kind of abnegation of the process of actually thinking critically about existence.
It’s healthy to imagine the impossible when it comes to the questions science is unable to answer. Arthur C. Clarke believed that the impossible frames the coordinates by which we understand what is possible. But I think Ascher’s subjects (whom it should be noted seem to be cut from the same homogenous cloth as far as race, gender and class) haven’t really done the heavy lifting. They’ve merely connected disparate strands of information, mixed with happenstance testimonials and gut feelings (the residue of skillful B.S.) and called it a theory and no conscionable intellect would denigrate Theory this way. In other words, it’s a truth one makes up as one goes along. It's why we have this pervasive culture of lunatic conspiracy theorizing. That thing that wrecked the American discourse.
Don’t get me wrong: I like nerding out with brainy, circular conversations about science, perception and the nature of reality as much as the next nerd. But the discourse in this film is off-putting and perhaps even a little dangerous. It takes the form of a dialogue about physics and science and adds the machinations of religious faith and connective wheel-spinning and this is a bad thing, with great potential for social malice.
There's a stretch in the film that deals with a young man who killed his parents in cold blood with a shotgun because his Matrix-addled head didn't believe his reality was real. This should have provided a more sobering aspect to Ascher’s film. A fair chink of time is spent on this horrific story. But Ascher offers almost no subjective take on it. It’s just something that happened. The sense of emotional detachment is a little scary. This is not a game. It has real-life consequences. It mirrors and promotes the kind of destructive anti-thinking that’s wreaking havoc on society.
This looks cool but I’m at a loss to remember what idea it was supposed to be illustrating.
Public figures like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who's said the likelihood of a Simulated Reality is greater than 50-50, charge themselves with the task of trying to further popularize and mainstream science in a political climate that can be hostile to it in many areas. This is a noble task but I don't think this is the right way to do it. Ascher’s subjects believe Science, Religion and Philosophy are all connected. I strongly disagree. I don't think science can and should play nicely with the other two kids. Physicists have confirmed natural laws with a very high degree of precision and it doesn't seem right to me for what is speculated upon and felt and assumed to undermine what is testable and logical. This is what religion already does. When will human beings get away from this impulse?
I like to keep an open mind about life and not make assumptions. And there’s a myth about science that its practitioners and defenders believe science is equipped to answer all the eternal questions and solve all the major problems. And while this is not true (for example, the Universe seems to be expanding and we have no idea why), something just seems wrong and senseless about a reality in which so many noticeable tears and cracks in the fabric are possible. The fabric of our universe and the natural laws that govern it just doesn’t seem to me like it would have been created or evolutionarily developed in such a way as to be utterly riddled with glitches that only social outcasts can see.
The movie shows us that Elon Musk is a believer in Simulation Theory and since he's one of the richest people in the world - despite being less a scientist than an entrepreneur with a tech/science background - we must then take the ideas seriously. For me, the Matrix films themselves struggled enough with the juggling of their philosophical, religious and scientific influences before utterly collapsing under the weight of their cinematic influences. But the success of figures like Musk and of the Matrix franchise indicates the way ideas are legitimized in modern society is largely as a by-product of their ability to make money and generate buzz.
It’s not that legitimacy is not possible when ideas are propped up by pop culture. But we must be calling its motives into question for that reason. In First World nations in the 21st century, the invisible hand of multi-million dollar PR campaigns sadly may have much greater deceptive agency over our decisions and destinies than any number of shadow puppeteers that are structuring our temporal existence. The illusion of our existence may contain a great deal more reality than we may want to believe.
In his three-part documentary miniseries, A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) , powerhouse Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls for “a third pill,” to “perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.”
Soon a new Matrix movie will be upon us and this kind of discussion may resurface in pop culture, along with the violence it may genuinely influence or be falsely accused of influencing. But it doesn’t change the nature of the very college-level discussion this movie puts up on a pedestal. These presumptions - they don't work. It's not a serious scientific argument. They have to be taken on faith.
Well....fine. Doesn't mean it's wrong. But science already has enough of an uphill battle asserting itself into public acceptance as an endeavor that will ensure our survival. Much in the same way that the practice of film criticism - and journalism by extension - had enough people and organizations debasing and mocking it before Ascher made Room 237, a film I cannot abide. And just like the tantalizing, nerdy ideas about what's really going on in The Shining in that film, it would be one thing to simply enjoy A Glitch In The Matrix as entertainment if there wasn't such potential for disastrous social consequences.
This is an opinion though. So it's not a fact.
