But Dick, at his best, gave a pulp-poetic form to his unhinged passion - the androids with feelings, the nightmares hovering just out of sight. On some level, the belief in simulation theory is every insane homeless person on the sidewalk who thinks he’s talking to Neptune through a tin can. It has never been fully documented that he had that diagnosis, but his paranoia, his devout belief in his delusions, and his tendency to scribble them down in multi-thousand-word manifestos are classic hallmarks of the schizophrenic mind. One is tempted to say that Dick, under the influence of sodium pentothal, experienced a schizophrenic break. He’s a charismatic geek, with eccentric two-toned facial hair (a dark goatee that suddenly turns white on the cheeks), and he tells the story of how in 1974, after taking sodium pentothal, which he was given to have his wisdom teeth extracted, “I had a short, acute flash of recovered memory.” He called the experience 2-3-74, and what he glimpsed was the dystopian underbelly of America - another world, parallel to our own, that would soon take over, because it was real. “A Glitch in the Matrix” is divided into chapters (“Revelations: Seeing the Code,” “The Kingdom of God: Notes Toward a Digital Theology”), and each one is introduced by a clip of Dick, filmed in 1977 speaking to a roomful of fans in Metz, France. He thought of his novels as documentaries, in which he was writing down the things he’d glimpsed from an alternate reality more real than our own. How did he come up with it? Simple: He believed it. Dick, the science-fiction visionary who died in 1982, but not before laying down, in many of his stories and novels, the grand foundations for simulation theory. But the one who really paved the way for it - who gave it cachet, and a certain scruffy literary cool - was Philip K. So it’s both a reality theory and an extraterrestrial theory you could say that the alien cults of the late ’70s and ’80s paved the way for it. Here’s the metaphor the people we meet in “A Glitch in the Matrix” believe: that our lives are a computer simulation, engineered (and controlled) by an advanced civilization.
And you can chatter with your friends about it from your basement! (I’m talking to you, 45-year-old “Matrix” fanboy and simulation-theory addict.) (In “The Wizard of Oz,” the black-and-white Kansas sequences are “real,” but it’s the madly colorful action in Oz that’s real.) If you can just pop the right pill, or get to the right website, the truth - that it’s all an illusion! - will be there, and it will set you free. Then again, if you really want to unplug from the matrix, you might just go out on a limb and declare the following: that simulation theory, while fun to think about, is basically a crock - a debased product of a fantasy-fixated culture, which encourages people, more and more each day, to project their identities into avatars, to get lost in comic-book video-game worlds they think are “real,” and to regard their own lives as the dull, sad ones they’re stuck inside. If “A Glitch in the Matrix” is evidence, simulation theory is now threatening to turn a whole lot of us into Bill and Ted. Elon Musk says reality isn’t real! Whoa! Where can I sign up!? It’s hardly incidental that “The Matrix” starred Keanu Reeves.
#SIMULATION MOVIE MOD#
We see clips of Musk on a talk show saying, “The odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.” What his minions don’t understand is that he’s selling himself as an out-of-the-box mod futurist. Elon Musk is their tycoon celebrity hero. It’s got animated sequences that are like puckishly staged video games, and it features an ironic cast of giddy talking-head incels - a total arrested boys’ club, alternately fascinating and annoying.
#SIMULATION MOVIE MOVIE#
The movie takes the pulse of how science fiction has merged with our imaginations. “ A Glitch in the Matrix,” the new documentary directed by Rodney Ascher, who made the thrilling cinehaulic conspiracy-theory deep dive “Room 237” (which was about people who think that hidden messages are encoded in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”), gives each of those metaphors a workout.
You could also call it a rabbit hole, a looking glass, or this generation’s acid trip - a chemistry-free way of turning reality inside out. You might describe that as a philosophical stance, one that can be traced back to Descartes or even the parable of Plato’s Cave. There are words, and many metaphors, one could use to describe simulation theory: the belief, popularized two decades ago by “ The Matrix,” that the life we’re living - the people we know, the experiences we have, what we see, touch, think, and feel - is literally an illusion, an artificial façade orchestrated by minds far more developed than our own.
0 kommentar(er)
