article on PKD and film

Source: National Post, July 13, 2002 v4 i219 pSP5(1).

Title: Worlds apart: why Hollywood adaptations like "Minority Report"
fail to capture the truly alternate universe of writer Philip K.
Dick. (Arts & Entertainment).
Author: Jason Anderson

People: Dick, Philip K.

The future, at least according to Philip K. Dick, has got a lot going for it
-- flying cars, sexy androids, synthetic animals. It all sounds so
scintillating, it's little wonder Hollywood has been inspired by the
science-fiction heavyweight. Though the hard-living Dick died 20 years ago,
his stories and novels anticipated many of the anxieties that grip our age --
fears about cloning and gene technology, the media's growing ability to
undermine or distort reality and the extent to which we can modify our minds
and bodies to create new, more fluid identities.

In the two decades since Blade Runner, Dick's work has inspired a long list of
movies, including Total Recall, Imposter and, most recently, Steven
Spielberg's Minority Report. Adaptations of his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly
and of two early stories, "King of the Elves" and "Paycheck," are currently in
the works.

Yet, few filmmakers have been brave enough to fully explore Dick's universe,
which is ultimately more about psychological and spiritual crises than
opportunities for boffo special effects. As Mark Steensland, the director of
the 2000 documentary The Gospel According to Philip K Dick, says, "Phil Dick
was more prescient about human psychology than about technology and society."
Indeed, Dick created a body of work that is wilder, weirder and potentially
more profound than any of the gadget-laden blockbusters.

Consider Spielberg's Minority Report, which, like many of the adaptations, is
based on one of many short stories from the '50s that the author -- born in
Chicago and a resident of northern California for most of his life -- churned
out for magazines such as Astounding and Beyond Fantasy Fiction. (This year,
Citadel Press reissued the bulk of Dick's short fiction in a five-volume
series.) Dick's "The Minority Report" begins: "The first thought Anderton had
when he saw the young man was: I'm getting bald. Bald and fat and old." In the
film, of course, Anderton is played by Tom Cruise, who may be entering middle
age but is neither bald nor fat. What the two works share is the general
premise that some time in the future, the police will be able to prevent
murders by employing precognitives ("precogs") who see them happen before they
occur, and that Anderton will discover he is predestined to kill a man he does
not know.

[Graphic omitted]Spielberg adds plenty of cool thingamajigs -- including a
police device that causes assailants to spontaneously vomit, and
advertisements that personally address passers-by. But he ultimately presents
a much more cheerful and humane version of the future than Dick ever did.
Along with Anderton's paunch, Spielberg has excised the paranoia and pessimism
pervasive in Dick's fiction from the era of Cold War hysteria and McCarthyite
witchhunts. (The author's growing affection for pharmaceutical drugs and
amphetamines did tend to colour his perceptions.) Spielberg's Minority Report
also devotes little time to the philosophical questions raised by the premise
-- that is, how would our behaviour change if we knew what we would do in the
future and would alternate futures be created?

A similar gloss characterized the film adaptation of "We Can Remember It for
You Wholesale," a short story about Martian wars and implanted memories that
audiences know as Total Recall. Though less elegant than Minority Report, the
action-thriller did capture some of the writer's cynicism and anarchic energy
But Arnold Schwarzenegger was too busy pummelling bad guys to dwell very much
on his character's identity crisis. Conventional action-movie heroics also
drove adaptations of "Impostor" -- Impostor (2001), about a scientist who may
really be a bomb-packing android -- and "Second Variety" -- Screamers (1995),
which featured Peter Weller baffling killer robots disguised as wounded
soldiers and orphaned children.

[Graphic omitted]Of the many screen versions of Dick's work, only Ridley
Scott's futuristic noir Blade Runner -- taken from the 1968 novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? -- explores the more ruminative elements of the
original text. Scott's and Dicks storylines differ substantially, but both
versions of this tale - about a detective (played by Harrison Ford in Scott's
film) who glumly hunts synthetic humans -- tackle the question that Dick, in a
1978 speech titled "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two
Days," articulated as a central topic in his writing: "What constitutes the
authentic human being?"

Philip K. Dick's other key theme is: "What is reality?" In the same speech,
Dick recalled that a Canadian college student once asked him for a one-line
definition of "reality." He told her: "Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn't go away." His concerns about the slippery nature of
reality were justified, he said, because "today we live in a society in which
spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big
corporations, by religious groups, political groups -- and the electronic
hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads
of the reader, the viewer, the listener." Anyone who feels the numbing effects
of modern media -- what a recent Harper's cover story termed "culture as
anesthetic" -- can relate to that statement.

At times, Dick had a fairly tangential relationship with reality in his own
life. Throughout the '50s and '60s, he believed the potentially subversive
nature of his stories caused him to become the subject of surveillance by the
CIA and the FBI. In his biography Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick,
Lawrence Sutin suggests Dick was occasionally right. In 1971, his house in San
Rafael, Calif., was burgled and a safe containing personal papers and,
possibly, drugs) blown up. The crime was never solved, causing no end of
speculation on Dicks part.

[Graphic omitted]Then, beginning in February of 1974, Dick had a series of
visions. He believed he'd gained insights into the divine after being zapped
in the third eye with a pink laser beam. He had already professed an interest
in the long-suppressed religion known as Gnosticism, which experienced a
modern revival after the discovery of ancient Christian gospels in the '40s.
The visions further confirmed for him the Gnostic view that, as Sutin writes.
"our world is an illusory reality created by an evil, lesser deity."

Despite how all this makes him sound, Dick was not a raving lunatic. And
unlike Joseph Smith, the author of The Book of Mormon, or fellow SF scribe L.
Ron Hubbard, Dick was not inspired to start a religion. The depth and deftness
of such post-vision novels as Valis and The Divine Invasion prove that Dick
thought very carefully about what he had experienced. His vision of the
subjective nature of reality can be clearly seen in such movies as The Matrix,
eXistenZ and Vanilla Sky. Highly "phildickian" in nature, these films come
closer to the heart of his work than most official adaptations do.

But the film that has perhaps engaged most closely with the question "What is
reality?" is Waking Life, a critical favourite from last year. This mostly
plotless animated film follows a young man as he encounters a series of people
eager to tell him about philosophy, human consciousness and dream states. One
character, played by the film's director, Richard Linklater, tells the hero an
anecdote, which Dick originally related in the "How to Build a Universe"
speech: The character, like Dick, had come to believe he was living out parts
of a Philip K. Dick novel -- Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. What's more,
these events were analogous to incidents described in the Book of Acts in the
Bible. Dick's theory was that "in some important sense, time is not real" and
that we exist in a "counterfeit reality" created by an evil force to "wither
our faith in the return of Christ."

[Graphic omitted]While Waking Life doesn't present this bizarre hypothesis as
the gospel truth, the story fits in perfectly with the film's ruminations on
human potential and spiritual possibility. Given Linklater's interest in the
author, it's hardly surprising that he is set to direct the adaptation of A
Scanner Darkly, Dick's 1977 novel about an undercover cop who, due to a
drug-induced personality breakdown, ends up informing on himself. (When asked
to describe his level of Philip K. Dick fandom, Linklater says, "I'm a bit
more than a casual reader, but I don't consider myself a hardcore devotee. I'm
more of an appreciative reader.")

Because A Scanner Darkly hardly counts as science fiction -- it takes place
not in some futuristic milieu but the seedy Californian drug culture of the
early '70s -- Linklater's version will have more to do with psychological
crises than cool jet packs. Screen versions of "King of the Elves," by former
Simpsons writer Wally Wolodarsky, and "Paycheck," by Rush Hour director Brett
Ratner, are likely to be more fantastic.

But all of these movies will disseminate the "phildickian" worldview. In The
Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, his friend Robert Anton Wilson -- the
co-author, with Robert Shea, of The Illuminatus Trilogy, a classic of sci-fi
paranoia -- tells of a rumour, widespread since 1994, that Wilson had died.

Further, hardcore SF followers believed that the CIA had replaced him with an
android after his death. Wilson says that, having read Philip K. Dick, he
can't say with absolute certainty those rumours are untrue.

"I realize that if I were an android, I'd be properly programmed to believe
that I am Robert Anton Wilson," he says. "So that leaves me in a predicament
of not being sure whether I'm Robert Anton Wilson or an android programmed to
think, talk and act like him. I'm really grateful to Phil for that -- I guess
it gives me a certain agnostic detachment, which I think is necessary for
mental health."

Saturday Post

-- End --

rmjon23.TakeThisOut@aol.comraderie (RMJon23) wrote in message news:<20030727170457.23869.00000636.TakeThisOut@mb-m27.aol.com>...
> [...]
> Consider Spielberg's Minority Report, which, like many of the adaptations, is
> based on one of many short stories [...]

I think this is the key part of the article. I have read that in science
fiction (pre-SF series), you have to introduce a new (novel) idea in your
story, or else no one will want to read what you have to say. This is
especially true for short stories; there's one thing which blows you out
of the water, something you can state in a short sentence. (For "Minority
Report", it's the fact that a "strange loop" exists, because someone who
knows about "the future" can change it.) Short stories are best suited for
"The Twilight Zone" with its half-hour format.
Movies, however, require more of a plot. (Unless you're Britney Spears,
say.) Hence you have to have more to work with, i.e., a novel. That way,
you're not stringing along the audience a la a 2-hour shaggy dog story.
I would add "Total Recall" as an exception to the rule in the last
paragraph. Risking the wrath of "Dick-heads", I would like to go on record
saying that the movie was _better_ than the short story. This is because
the short story ends more or less when the company finds out that their
newest customer actually _did_ participate in a secret mission. The movie
went on to develop the theme, and even managed to put in another Dickian
twist: The hero is standing on Mars (which he freed), with the heroine, just
as the advertisement promised. Is it real, or is the hero back in the
reality simulator? (Obviously, the movie couldn't have gone on past that
moment without resolving this question.)
Just my 2 cents' worth.
-- Christopher Heckman