Are We All Ghosts in the Machine?

A few hundred days into the most digitized era of our lives, and it's hard not to see the world as all zeroes and ones. Even documentarian Rodney Ascher, whose technological doc A Glitch in the Matrix debuted last week at the Sundance Film Festival, is getting those analog blues. "The irony that this is a virtual Sundance has not been lost on me."

A Glitch in the Matrix, which is available as a virtual cinema release now, explores the recent growth in fascination with what is known as simulation theory. That's the idea that we're all actually living in a giant digital simulation, rather than a 'real' world. Much as the idea of gods as hunters, carving the world out of carcasses, was replaced by the divine architect, now God is a programmer.

Following on from his earlier trips into cultural obsession, like the conspiracy theories surrounding The Shining in Room 237, Ascher's documentary doesn't explore simulation theory itself, but instead looks at those who subscribe to it, and what their particular and peculiar version of this philosophical construct says about them.

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Austin Chronicle: The idea of simulation theory had been bubbling away for years, and Philip K. Dick was always the touchstone. Then in the mid-90s there was this explosion of films, all in production at the same time, that embedded it in the popular consciousness.

Rodney Ascher: It's the way that television was invented by multiple people at the same time. There was something in the air in the mid-to-late 90s that simulation theory needed to break through into the movies in some way. I was a particular fan of eXistenZ, as much as I loved The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, and that was based on the same book (Simulacron-3) that Fassbender used for that mini-series World on a Wire in the '70s. So it wasn't like it emerged out of nowhere when The Matrix came out, but that was the one that captured people's imaginations, and started affecting people's minds.

AC: Part of The Matrix's success was that laid everything out very simply. It's existentialism for beginners, and Morpheus' job, as a narrative construct, was to explain to you, at any point, what's happening and what theory you need to understand, then give you just enough to get you through the scene.

RA: It had clever little allusions to predecessors like Alice Through the Looking Glass, and simulations and simulacra in the book. They're not pretending to have invented this idea, even though they're taking it to this new place. There's that moment when Morpheus and Neo are in that white room watching the TV, and we intercut that with the Orson Welles animation of Plato's Cave, because it's a very similar moment.

AC: I'd never seen that footage before.

RA: It's cool, isn't it? It was part of a series of three Orson Welles-narrated educational shorts that he did back then, and I don't have to tell you how excited I was to have Orson Welles' voice in the soundtrack of this movie.

I'd found a really lo-fi version online, and getting it into the film was a little tricky. On one hand, we had to locate the producer to procure the rights, but he didn't have a really good copy of it. Through some amazing good fortune, on the 15th Google search I did I was able to discover the Museum of the Moving Image in Melbourne, Australia had a print, and they ran an HD telecine for us

AC: Your other documentaries often deal with obsession, and they're always an area where, as a filmmaker, you can fall down a rabbit hole. When do you know when a topic is worthy or a feature, and when do you go, 'OK, the 27-minute mark is where this belongs'?

RA: Well, some of that is frankly a commercial concern, I hate to admit - at least the last shorts that I've done. "Primal Scream," the thing I did for Shudder about the trailer for the Anthony Hopkins/Richard Attenborough ventriloquist horror Magic, we had a slot that that was designed to fit into, and I don't think I could have squeezed a feature out of kids' fears of a trailer for a 1970s ventriloquism movie - except that it opened up into bigger issues of fears of dolls, and the uncanny valley.

This one was always a broad enough topic that a feature made sense. The first cut of this movie was three hours long, and even this one is missing many elements and many ideas that are certainly pertinent to the subject but I wasn't able to find a place for them in a movie that makes sense. Someone had proposed this as a short to me, but it didn't make sense because there was too much to it, too many angles to come at it from.

AC: Your films are often heavily defined by their structure. In Room 237, you take an episodic approach, looking at theories about The Shining in turn. Here, you anonymize your interviewees by masking them with CGI disguises, and they are only revealed by what they say.

RA: What's notable about them is their stories: not the fact that this one's a teacher, and this one works at a tech company, and this one's a writer. They weren't celebrity interviews, they were real people interviews. I think that gave us a little bit of liberty to play with their identity. Often it's their childhood experiences that mattered, more than them talking from a voice of authority because they have this degree, and are teaching at such-and-such university.

I always like to let those stories play out, and to make a movie like this the writing process is all about sequencing. I talk to somebody for two or three hours, I break down the notable parts of the conversation into three-minute sequences, put them on a board and structure them 15 different ways, and try to find a flow that makes sense and reveals new information that energizes and surprises along the way. ... I'm certainly not dropping things into a structure that I had before I did the interviews, before I got deep into the cuts of the film. It reveals itself along the way.

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A Glitch in the Matrix is available now as a virtual cinema release. Read our review, and find showtimes, here.