Or we are the only real person, playing the world like a video game. Boiled down to its crudest form, the thinking goes that somebody somewhere is playing us like a video game. Movie references aside, Glitch is Ascher’s most explicit deep-dive into the subject, interviewing a handful of people (several of whom have been computer-animated into 3D avatar form by comic-artist Chris Burnham alongside a team of professional pixel sculptors) who’ve become convinced to varying degrees that we are all living inside of a computer simulation. Indeed it only feels more scarily relevant with every passing year of Comet Pizza wishes and QAnon dreams. And it’s not a bad corner of story-telling to claim, the ways our reality (or should I say realities) are shaped, re-shaped, and misshaped by pop culture. Glitch feels especially of a piece with the Kubrick doc, although The Matrix here is more of an entry point than it is Ascher’s central text. These questions and many many many more are asked by pop-documentarian Rodney Ascher’s latest movie-adjacent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix, which comes nine years after Room 237, his heady leap into the bizarre conspiracy theories that surround Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining, and six years after The Nightmare, which dissected sleep paralysis to terrifying effect. Did we think much of alternate realities before March 31st of that year, when the Wachowskis shot the concepts of Simulation Theory into popular culture like a slo-mo bullet slicing through the air? Who were we then versus who are we now, and how do we get back to a pre-Neo simplicity? (Neo-Classic, if you might.) Like the two paths noted in a wood, one way marks ignorance the other knowledge the apple in the Garden of Eden simmered down and encased in gelatin for our pharmaceutical-friendly present day. “Red or blue,” the prominently sunglassed man asked. In the year 1999 humanity was presented with a pair of pills.

Glitch in the matrix real