Tonight’s FNatM diary was written by Dbug. Use the second tip jar.
Philip K. Dick? Maybe you’ve never heard of him. Have you heard of Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Keanu Reeves? Those four actors have starred in four major movies based on stories written by PK Dick.
Philip K. Dick is probably my favorite science fiction writer and "Blade Runner," which was based on a PKD story, is probably my favorite science fiction movie. Tonight I'll educate you about the man and the movies that are directly (or indirectly) based on his work. There might even be a few connections with today’s sad anniversary. More below the fold.
First I have a personal story about my Mom. I was the oldest of seven children, so I played the role of the little adult who watched over my younger siblings and followed the rules without question. My mother would take all of us kids to the library on Saturday mornings, to return our old books and get new ones. She believed reading was a good thing. Now that I think about it, she might have had other reasons – to pry us away from Saturday morning cartoons and to let my Dad sleep late on Saturday if he wanted to.
I was eleven years old in the summer of 1968 – the year we moved from the old house in Fargo to the new and bigger house in Moorhead on the other side of the Red River (the same river that flooded about six or seven months ago). I had recently discovered science fiction and devoured everything I could find. I especially liked anthologies of short stories. If one story was boring or confusing, I could skip it and go to the next one. One Saturday, I asked a librarian where to find more books by some author (it might have been Robert Heinlein) and she showed me where they were. I picked out a few books and went to the front desk. The woman there said, "Is your mother here? She’ll have to give permission for you to check these out." Rules are rules, so I looked around for my mother and went over and said, "Mom, I need your permission to get these books." She didn’t say anything as we walked to the front desk.
My mother told the librarian, in a loud and angry voice (which surprised me because libraries have rules about that), "My son has my permission to check out any book he wants, whenever he wants, even if I’m not here. Write that down somewhere." The librarian said there was a rule that a child’s library card is only good for books from the children’s section because adult books might have inappropriate content that some parents don’t want their children to see. My mother said, "Well, you have my permission to give him an adult library card. And I don’t consider anything inappropriate." And that’s how I got an adult library card at the age of eleven (which greatly impressed some of my new friends when I enrolled at Riverside Elementary School in Moorhead).
1968 was the year I discovered the fiction of Philip K Dick in the adult section of the library. Thanks, Mom.
A Quick Biography of PK Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was born December 16, 1928 and died March 2, 1982. He and his twin sister were born prematurely and she died at the age of five weeks (something that haunted him throughout his life). He graduated in 1947 from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA, in the same graduating class as Ursula K. Le Guin – another legendary SF author. When he died, his body was buried next to his twin sister.
He sold his first story in 1952 and his first novel in 1955. He’s considered one of the great writers from the end of The Golden Age of Science Fiction and the beginning of the New Wave of Science Fiction. According to the Wikipedia article here, he wrote 36 novels and approximately 121 short stories. Dick won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963 ("The Man in the High Castle," an alternate history where the Germans and Japanese won WWII). He was nominated for two other Hugos, was nominated for five Nebulas, and won a John W. Campbell Award. Plus, after he died, the Philip K Dick award was named after him.
A 2005 issue of Time Magazine listed Dick’s novel "Ubik" as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to present (next to books by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and others). The same year, Time Magazine named "Blade Runner" as one of the 100 best movies of all time.
In 1975, Rolling Stone magazine published an article called "The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick." You can read a PDF here. You can also find a 2007 New Yorker article about him here.
Dickian Themes
If I had to write one sentence about PKD, I’d say that in his stories, "Reality is never what it seems." Quite often his characters are people oppressed by evil governments or evil corporations. Sometimes even aliens or supernatural forces. And the reality you think you perceive might be altered by drugs, insanity, or some sort of thought-control (your memories are either erased or added). See those people over there? Maybe they’re not really people. You might call it a paranoid world where the paranoia is justified. In a Philip K Dick story, the conspiracies are real; they aren’t just theories. (Hey, there’s an oblique reference to 9/11 and conspiracy theories!)
I suppose I should mention drugs. According to the articles I read, he once wrote eleven novels over a period of two years. He admitted that he did a lot of speed during that time, which would account for the paranoia and the conspiracy theories. He was tweaking. Towards the end of his life, he started to invent some strange religious ideas. But he was smart enough not to become another L. Ron Hubbard.
He’s also nothing like Robert Heinlein. Heinlein went to the Naval Academy (ever see the movie "Starship Troopers"?) and he was a straight-arrow, right-wing kind of guy. But even Heinlein recognized the genius of Dick. Here’s a PKD quote from the Wikipedia article:
"Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."
And that’s an argument in favor of universal, single-payer, national health care. We’ll save the lives of people like Philip K Dick, so they can thrive and create great art. And it’s also a reminder that a right-wing navy conservative (like Robert Heinlein) can sometimes act like a human being.
But let’s look at a few of Dick’s movies...
Blade Runner (1982)
Blade Runner was based on the PK Dick story, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" It starred Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard and was directed by Ridley Scott. I’ve seen three versions – the original theatrical release, the director’s cut, and a pre-release version originally shown to test audiences.
Blade Runner feels very film-noirish. Deckard is a special kind of cop (a blade runner) who is told to track down and kill three replicants who have escaped from an off-world colony and come to Earth. (Replicants are androids who look like people, but are treated like slaves.) Along the way, Deckard finds a fourth android (named Rachael) and they fall in love and go off at the end. That’s the short version. Oh, also, replicants have a pre-programmed death date.
There’s a great scene where one of the replicants (Rutger Hauer) goes to see the head of Tyrell Corporation who created him (Joe Turkel) and asks why he has to die and if the programming can be changed. The programming can’t be changed, so the creature kills the creator. The symbolism is obvious: a human (created one) kills the god who created him.
Here’s the scene where hunted becomes the hunter – the replicant (Rutger Hauer) turns on the cop (Harrison Ford) and chooses to save his life instead of letting him die. "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave." Then Rutger Hauer dies, because of the pre-programmed thing, and the bird flies out of his hand. Brilliant acting, brilliant direction, brilliant cinematography, and goddamn brilliant everything.
Here’s the Philip K Dick twist, and the most interesting question of the movie, at least to me. When Rachael discovers she’s a replicant, she goes to talk to Deckard. She remembers taking piano lessons when she was a girl. She remembers her parents and grandparents. But they’re not real memories; they’ve been implanted in her brain. Deckard then tells her a memory from when she was a girl about a scary spider outside her window (and he can’t possibly know about this memory unless someone told him about the implanted memories).
Then Rachael turns on Deckard and says, "How do you know you’re not a replicant?" If memories can be placed in your brain, how does anyone know that their memories are real?
The obvious answer: Deckard has to be a replicant. Absolutely. No question. First of all, it’s a Philip K. Dick story, so you question reality. Second, Deckard has dreams about unicorns. His boss (Edward James Olmos) leaves an origami unicorn outside his door. His boss knows what memories he has in his head because Deckard is a replicant.
Minority Report (2002)
Based on the PKD short story "Minority Report," the movie starred Tom Cruise and was directed by Steven Spielberg.
In this movie, the murder rate in Washington, DC, has fallen to zero. That’s because the police arrest people before they can murder someone. There’s a group of three people (called pre-cogs) who can see into the future (sometimes all three pre-cogs agree a murder will happen soon, sometimes only two agree (and the one who disagrees is the minority report)). If there’s going to be a murder, the pre-crime unit learns the time and place of the murder and they show up just in time to arrest the (soon-to-be) criminal. What a great system: you arrest the pre-criminals before they actually commit a crime.
Tom Cruise plays a cop (John Anderton) in the pre-crime unit. One day, Anderton’s name comes up as a future murderer. So he has to go on the run, hunted by his buddies on the police force, until he can figure out what’s really going on. Here’s a scene where he escapes from flying cops with jet packs (sort of a combination of Tom-Cruise-Mission-Impossible and Steven-Spielberg-Indiana-Jones):
Locking people up because they might commit a future crime? Lucky it’s just a science-fiction story. Wait a minute! Maybe we did something like that after 9/11.
Total Recall (1990)
PK Dick wrote a short story called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale." The movie starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and was directed by Paul Verhoeven.
In the future, there’s a company called Rekall, which sells memories of vacations. Instead of spending time and money to actually visit Hawaii or Mars, you can have memories of a wonderful trip implanted in your head.
Arnold Schwarnegger plays a construction worker named Douglas Quaid. And he’s married to Sharon Stone. He’s been having dreams about Mars, he goes to Rekall, things go wrong, he loses his memory, and goes to Mars. Then it becomes a typical action movie. People kill people. Things blow up and eventually the good guys win. There’s an early scene, where someone asks:
What's bullshit, Mr. Quaid? That you're having a paranoid episode triggered by acute neuro-chemical trauma? Or that you're really an invincible secret agent from Mars who's the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think he's a lowly construction worker?
That’s a such a Dickian question. Which is more likely – that you’re crazy or that you’re a secret agent from Mars? In the PKD universe, you aren't insane. You're a secret agent from Mars.
YouTube has disabled the embedding for this scene, but you can follow the link here (it's worth it to see the influence of PKD).
There are two ways of watching this movie – and either one is valid, because with Philip K Dick, you’re never quite sure what reality is: either 1) Quaid (Schwarzenegger) really is a construction worker and the whole movie is just a false memory about spies that has been planted in his brain by Rekall, or 2) Quaid really is a spy, they tried to erase his memories but failed, and the scenes on Mars are real. I like the second interpretation better.
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
This movie, based on a PKD novel of the same name, starred Keanu Reeves and was directed by Richard Linklater.
I don’t have much to say about this movie because I haven’t seen it. When it came out, I decided not to see it for two reasons:
- It’s rotoscoped, which means the director filmed live actors, but then the film was converted into something looking like a cartoon. There’s a really, really, really bad version of "The Hobbit" that was rotoscoped.
- Keanu Reeves is a horrible actor. Not that he’s bad at acting – he doesn’t act at all. He delivers every line in a deadpan, emotionless way. He doesn’t act happy or act sad, he just reads the lines in a monotone. I didn’t think I could take the combination of Keanu Reeves and rotoscoping. So I didn’t see the movie.
As I understand it, Keanu Reeves plays an undercover narcotics cop. His undercover name is Bob, but his name at the police station is Fred. He wears a scramble suit (which changes his appearance, so he looks different to the cops and the drug users). He gets addicted to the hallucinogenic Substance D. One of his roommates turns him into the police as a terrorist. The drug disconnects the two halves of his brain – one half is Bob the druggie, the other half is Fred the cop. In other words, it’s a typical Philip K Dick story where the main character can’t tell what reality is.
Here’s the trailer from the movie:
The Owl In Daylight (not yet released)
According to IMDB, Paul Giamatti is working on a movie based on the life of Philip K Dick, tentatively titled "The Owl in Daylight" Giamatti plans to play the PK Dick character. No word on when (or if) it will be released. Trivia time: Did you know that Paul Giamatti’s father was Bart Giamatti, former President of Yale and former Baseball Commissioner?
PKD Stories That Inspired Other Movies
I vividly remember reading the PKD short story "Second Variety" when I was 11 or 12 years old. In this story, set in the future, there’s been a long and bloody war between two sides (let’s call them Americans and Russians). The Americans have invented a killing machine called a "claw," which is "a churning sphere of blades and metal." But the automated factories that make the claws have evolved a killer robot that resembles a wounded soldier (version 1) and another that looks like a young boy (version 3). The human soldiers feel sorry for these pitiable people, let them into their bunkers, and everyone inside gets killed by the whirling blades. Nobody knows what the second version looks like, but it could like anything. Look over there: Is that a real person or a killer robot? Looks like a person, but if I invite it inside, it could kill all of us.
Before writing this diary, I had never heard of the movie Screamers (1995). But apparently it’s based pretty closely on this story.
But the other movie that borrowed this idea (killing machines that look like people) is The Terminator. It’s such a Dickian scenario. One day, Sarah Connor is an ordinary waitress working in an ordinary restaurant, then, all of a sudden reality turns upside down and some guy she doesn’t know is trying to kill her. Another guy shows up and tells her the killer is a robot from the future. And at the beginning of the second movie, she’s in an insane asylum. Typical Philip K Dick. Reality is never what it seems. People who look like people might be killer robots. If you tell people the truth, you're thrown into an asylum and studied through a small window.
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There’s another PKD novel from 1959 called "Time Out of Joint," about a guy whose family resembles something from a 1950s TV show (Leave it to Beaver, or Make Room For Daddy, or The Dick Van Dyke Show, or whatever) Here’s a description of the beginning (from Wikipedia):
As the novel opens, its protagonist Ragle Gumm believes that he lives in the year 1959 in a quiet American suburb. His unusual profession consists of repeatedly winning the cash prize in a local newspaper competition featuring the question, "Where will the little green man be next?". However, at intervals some object around him, such as a drink stand in the local park, fades away into nothingness, leaving behind only a small slip of paper with the name of the object printed on it. Other mysterious events occur, including references to objects that would be anachronisms in 1959 and the mention of the name Ragle Gumm by people who have no apparent reason to do so, including military air pilots. Few other characters notice these or experience similar anomalies; the sole exception is Ragle's supposed brother-in-law, Victor "Vic" Nielson, in whom he confides.
It turns out that the Moon colonists have started a revolution against the Earth. The Moon is like the colonists of 1776 America and the Earth is like England. It’s not 1959, it’s the future. When Ragle Gumm solves the ordinary-looking puzzle in the daily newspaper, he’s really using his brilliant mathematical mind to figure out where the enemy’s missiles will hit. So the 1959-era village where he lives is absolutely fake and everyone in the town is an actor trying to make him feel comfortable. Their job is to get him to solve the puzzle.
When I saw The Truman Show (1998), after about ten or fifteen minutes, I said to myself, "This is a Philip K Dick story! They might not admit it, but it’s a fake town where everyone knows the secret except the protagonist."
Other Movies Influenced by Dick
I've come up with a few more movies that might be called Dickian because reality is never what it seems to be:
Groundhog Day (which I would argue is a description of the Buddhist theory of reincarnation – and I think PK Dick would have appreciated the story)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (two characters with erased memories)
"Life on Mars" (a brilliant TV show that was cancelled after one season; the main character is thrown back 30 years in time, but he can’t figure out if it was a time machine or aliens or if he’s in a coma)
Memento (the guy can’t remember, so he writes notes to himself)
The Usual Suspects (not science fiction, but when you see the bulletin board and he stops limping, you realize that the reality you believed in was not really reality)
Brazil (a dark dystopian comedy, with computers and big government and torture)
The Matrix (Keanu Reeves, who makes me yawn)
Johnny Mnemonic (based on a story by William Gibson, who is a literary descendant of PKD, and possibly the only Keanu Reeves movie I might put on my top 100)
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And that's the 9/11 version of Friday Night of the Movies. Any cogent comments about what might or might not be reality? Did I forget a Dickian movie?