In 1977, Philip K. Dick gave a speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” in which he revealed that many of his dystopian novels weren’t the products of his imagination or dreams, but came from recovered memories of actual alternate worlds. Dick was entirely sincere, and this realization plagued him. Footage of this speech (and of Dick’s skeptical French audience) punctuate Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, which explores the psychological and cultural impacts of that moment when science fiction seeps into our reality.
In Ascher’s documentary (2012), we hear narrators discuss their interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s film (1980). Though the theories range from the reasonable to the ridiculous, they are all essentially presented the (2010), which explores a half-serious theory about the nightmare-inducing 1964 Screen Gems logo, to (2015), his documentary about night terrors—Ascher approaches all his subjects with the belief that they are being honest, even when they aren’t particularly exacting or introspective.
