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Return conversation with filmmaker Rodney Ascher (Room 237, The Nightmare) on his new film Glitch in the Matrix & the many ins & outs of simulation theory.
Part One: Filtering Reality (0 – 30 mins)
Working on Glitch in the Matrix, Anthony Peake’s daemonic theory, sleep paralysis & simulation theory, video games & virtual reality, movies and consciousness, frontal lobe simulations, quasi-science and super-powers, technology & transformation, evolving ideas about simulated reality, intense world syndrome, unfiltered reality, necessary compartmentalization, enlightened perspectives, Erik Davis & P. K. Dick, literal believers, Nick Bostrum’s paper.
Part Two: When the Map Becomes the Territory (30 – 50 mins)
Radical technology, the internet of things, a mood of melancholy, the loss of doing nothing, nostalgia, how children used to roam, an energetic matrix, a digital map of the world, Pokemon, addiction to social media, overriding the programming, divided consciousness, Palmer Eldritch, technology as drug, the failure of satire, Face in the Crowd & Donald Trump
Part Three: A Continuum of Interest (50 mins – 1 hour 13 mins )
Freudian theory of traumatic re-enactment, the legendary status of childhood, humanizing The Shining, uncovering connections, defining childhood moments, Room 237, The Shining, dissolving into abstraction, personal obsessions, Rodney’s sleep paralysis, unresolved mysteries, a laser light show, a continuum of interest, an evolving methodology, El Duce Tapes, the creative process.
Part Four: 2020 Hindsight (1 hour 13 mins – end)
A trilogy of interpretation, the limits of subjectivity, non-player characters or real people, the ultimate conspiracy theory, updating the world, ancestor simulation, depersonalization, the feeling of being an authentic avatar, acting as a non-player character, David Icke’s paranoia, finding the style, animation effects, ETA on the movie, 2020 hindsight.
Songs: “Knob Wobbler,” by Gib Strange; “A Prayer” by The Bones of L.R Jones; “Taking My Child” by Norman Fagg; “Hell’s Heart” by Untitled red; “These Words” by Hazelwood Motel.
Just curious…has anyone else out there found that watching The Nightmare inspires sleep paralysis? Sleep paralysis has all but stopped for me…except when I watch the film. I’ve watched it 3 or 4 times now, many months apart each time, and without fail I get paralyzed and have an encounter that night. Morbid curiosity I know…
In a way, I guess you could say this makes the film really successful though, in that it portrays the experience accurately enough to cause a reliving of my own experiences…the psychic proximity of which actually inspires more to occur…or something like that. Sleep paralysis is really weird.
maybe it should come with a warning?
Are you familiar with Tom Campbell’s “big t.o.e” ? Very similar to simulation theory, except that in a simulation there is no free will, but in his theory every person is an individual conscience that controls a simulated body in the simulated world. Analogous to a video game. The purpose is for each conscience to have an environment to learn and lower its entropy. The greys are perhaps entities that can enter the game to keep it at its optimum level of playability, i.e. keep us humans from blowing ourselves up with nukes. On a side note, have you watched the Bob Lazar documentary, or his Joe Rogan interview? Seems very credible that there are craft from other worlds that the government has been trying to reverse engineer. Will be reading your trilogy in the future, so not sure if you completely dismiss the idea of ufos and greys being real. Do you have a recommended order to read your trilogy? I appreciate your hard work and point of view, seems to resonate with me.
I am familiar with that model yes; I don’t completely dismiss these elements but have spent a long time mapping the shape of the deception-distortion that has seeded such beliefs in us collectively over decades via the culture. Are angels that can be counted on the head of the pin true angels, or just mathematically-linguistic propositions (angles), place-fillers that are (perhaps) designed to be mis-taken for the thing they point at?
The trilogy requires no particular order but Seen & Not Seen is def. the first; part 1 of VOK follows directly on from SANS; POI was worked on during this entire period between SANS & vok part 1. VOK pt 2 came after POI was completed. So the “correct” order is, roughly: SANS; VOK part 1; POI; VOK part 2, or even: POI part 1; SANS; VOK part 1; POI part 2; VOK part 2.
O.K., thanks. I’ll hopefully start on them soon and give you some feedback, if I have anything interesting to say, which is hard for me to judge sometimes. Take care.