Three years later, Ascher made The Nightmare, which focuses on sleep paralysis, a mysterious condition that leaves people awake but unable to move, and sometimes prone to terrifying hallucinations. The documentary tracks five obsessive viewers of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as they expound on their interpretations of the film’s hidden layers, elaborating on how it works as a metaphor for the Holocaust, or the genocide of Native Americans, or a confession that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 moon landing.
#A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX CODE#
2012’s Room 237 tackled the question of what happens when you treat a work of art as a code to be broken, one that will then yield its secrets to those who know where to look for them.
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The filmmaker has made a career out of unanswerable questions. If anyone is comfortable living with ambiguity, it’s Ascher. There are people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk who take it seriously, and I don’t have confidence that I’m the person who can either prove it to be real or debunk it the same way.”īut proving or disproving grand ideas has never been Ascher’s style anyway. “But I’m not 100 percent sure that’s true. “There was a temptation to say simulation theory is not real, that everybody needs to believe in reality,” Ascher says. It’s also an idea so widespread that dismissing it isn’t really an option. In a moment when the idea of objective truth has become more slippery than ever-when, say, claims of election fraud can lead to violence no matter how widely they’re disproved-the expanding acceptance of simulation theory has far-reaching implications, even for those whose first impulse is to dismiss it. (Mystwood also prefers to think in terms of 12-day spans rather than seven-day weeks, but that’s probably unrelated.) The documentary includes conversations with everyone from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, author of the influential article “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” to Brother Læo Mystwood, who sees coincidences and odd moments of synchronicity as proof of the simulation, particularly after a revelatory session inside a sensory-deprivation tank. Kind of like when we bought a new car we started seeing those cars everywhere we went.”Īscher’s latest documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix-which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend prior to its debut on VOD on February 5-explores simulation theory, which posits that what we call reality is actually a computer simulation, or something akin to it, and that everything from the chair in which you sit to your family, friends, and neighbors, to the thoughts rushing through your head as you read this article, can be reduced to lines of code. “I’ve got no idea if that’s because it is in fact catching on a popularity or that I’m looking for it.
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“I see it everywhere I go,” Ascher says via Zoom. Rodney Ascher is pretty sure we don’t live in a computer simulation, but he likes to hedge his bets.