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Philip K. Dick's Hollywood Afterlife
HarryLeBlanc writes "Wired has a long thoughtful article about Philip K Dick's posthumous Hollywood career. It has some interesting tidbits in it (imagine Total Recall directed by Cronenburg and starring William Hurt!), and does a good job of covering his Hollywood history (though it overlooks Barjo), and it doesn't gloss over how PKD would have hated what Hollywood has done to much of his work."
Much as Wired writers like to sensationalize everything nowadays, it is too much of a stretch to attribute all 'false realities' stories to Dick. Philosophers going back to Plato and Descartes have explored doubt of their external realities. They are certainly NOT Dick's themes.
Not that Blade Runner was a bad movie (it's one of my personal favorites), but it's not really a straightforward adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It certainly borrows some themes -- the androids, the bounty hunters (not called "blade runners" anywhere in the novel), and the artificial animals -- but the characters, the world vision, and the story structure are all quite different. The book, for example, contains no hints that Deckard is an android, and the film leaves out elements that were central to the novel -- Mercerism, Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends, the pervasive radiation that made the world of Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep nearly uninhabitable, and probably some others that I'm forgetting.
In short: a faithful adaptation of the book would look nothing like Blade Runner.
Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
movies ruin books is a common sentiment that i don't necessarily believe in: perhpas it's really just a matter of generational translation... and i DO believe that a good movie based on a good book will make more people *read the book* - hell even a bad movie may make more people read the book. so on the basic level, i think a movie is just a big ad for the book, and all ads suck by default. yet gattaca was awesome IMO - so if there's any existing team that could do it gracefully, it's them. IMO scanner darkly IS perhaps the most audience-friendly movie, single punchline, cute girl stealing coca cola, basically it's non-action, drama, and it is less n-dimensional than pkd's other stuff (valis for instance) so lends itself well to tasteful adaptation. IE don't need special effects, just good script & acting. blade runner was awesome - but only had 3 scenes in common with book. cunninham doing neuromancer... sigh. will never happen. and frankly i don't know if it should. cheers nano
The Man in the High Castle also would make a great movie. Hollywood needs to focus on his novels. His short stories just barely scratched the surface of what he was trying to reveal. Perhaps that is why they have been used mostly to date, because they are more skeletal and can be mutated into a product easily.
This is true of not only PKD, but of all novels in general. It's much easier to take a short story and pad it out to a feature length movie, than to take an existing novel-length story, cut out everything that won't work visually (remember, movies are about showing, not telling), and then try and bandage what's left into a cohesive plot. Also consider that much of the richness of the novel will be lost, as we don't have the available screen time to follow everybody's POV, or to track multiple storylines and/or subplots. Pretty much as a rule, writers try and find a central theme in a novel, pick out a few characters and main events, keep the time and setting (sometimes - sometimes not in the event of The 13th Floor), and write everything else from scratch.
Novella-sized stories, written in a cinematic style are easiest to translate to screen time, but even then, film being the collaborative medium it is, you got a lot of cooks, and a potentially spoiled broth...
I saw a preview for this as a trailer at Revolutions. It looks interesting, but I'm nervous about Dick stories becoming films. Total Recall was completely unDickian in tone and style; Imposter was closer, but lacked the kind of paranoid tension that would have given the movie meaning.
Three ideal PKD books/stories to make movies of: 1. Electric Ant, 2. The Unteleported Man, 3. the most obvious of all, The Man in the High Tower.
Doesn't this just ring true? We see politicians create anti-spam bills that will create more spam, help Medicare bills that will gut Medicare, Clean Air Acts designed to allow our air to get dirtier, acts to "save" the forests by cutting down the trees. We see propaganda from foreign news sources, and, sadly, from our own. We see commercials that say one thing while we know reality is the opposite. We "see" things on football fields and behind baseball diamonds that are not actually at the stadiums. We see Times Square electronically made over in order to insert a billboard that is not there in real life. We see Wall Street promising to get tough on corporate crime, while analysts give buy ratings to SCO.
We live a PKD existence! That's why his story themes resonate so strongly with us. We recognize it. Every day.
The radiation isn't explicitly mentioned, but there's definitely something fucked up with the world in Blade Runner. The perpetual rain, the near-deserted apartment blocks, the desperation to get away to the off-world colonies.. Whether it's massive irradiation or just total climate failure, it's pretty clear that the world is an unpleasant place.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
nah, I never bought that. I thought the story is FAR more powerful if deckard is a human, but grossly lacking the emotional maturity of a replicant.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Thank you for "getting it". This is why the Director's Cut was true to Dick, while telling a slightly different story. Ironically, Dick's ending was more "Hollywood", in that it was uplifting and contained a tiny ray of hope for Deckard.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Affleck: "To anybody who's ever thought, Did that happen or did I dream it? - you'd have to have a PhD in philosophy to get too deep into this, but it has to do with wanting to validate our own first-person experience."
This is what writers like Dick are up against -- an audience (and even actors in movies based on his works!) that thinks a doctorate is needed to look beneath the veneer. But then, if the Hollywood versions bring more readers to the original works...
SPOILER SPACE follows
Someone noted that the parts *after* the main lead "imprisonment" could just be manufactured hallucinations. In a previous sequence, one of the pre-crime squad gives an off-hand remark about the fact that when you are in the "punitive coma" you sleep whatever reality you want.
So everything we see after Cruise's character is captured could be his dream of how things should go, not necessarily reality itself.
This would explain the improbable ending and be quite faithful to Dick's ideas, even if the director does not clearly states how things "really are".
I'm just re-reading a French translation book titled "Blade Runner", but from the original "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". It has references to "Blade Runners" in it, I'm beginning to wonder how bastardized the translation is. The rest of the book so far (only read about 30 pages on the way in to work this morning) is far enough away from the movie plot, and I read it about 8 years ago and it certainly seems to resemble DADoES. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Also, the more I read about PK Dick, the more I feel that he was ahead of his time. "Time Out of Joint" which I have also recently read in French (living in Paris means the best book bargains are in the local language... I'd love to pick up cheap English originals) was written in the 1950s IIRC, and yet it's as if it could have been written yesterday. Sure, the occasional reference to technology which sounds a little out of date does happen, but for the mind that's really easy to step over, because everything else just fits. Sure, it is paranoid, but when you question everything you see on TV about politics these days, you ask yourself what influence one guy (Bush, Blair, whatever) really has over the thousands of people who are really employed in making policy. Indeed, the influence those thousands have on the leader figure is what we should be more worried about.
In England, where we only have a population of 60 million, it's perhaps less flagrant than in the US, but somewhere along the line we are all many steps removed from any policy decisions, we mostly get to say yes or no about once every 4 years and most of us don't even vote in local elections. Michael Moore had a point when he said running for election in small-fry local posts is enough to get in sometimes. Don't bother pointing out the holes and contradictions in some of his other lefty liberal stuff though, I'm well aware of those. I digress.
The point with PK Dick's writing, at least that of it which I have read, is that the individual is studied much more than the collective. The paranoia inherent in a lot of the work is because the stuff is so based on an individuals attempt to understand reality. It's almost a solipsistic nightmare sometimes. Art can really start to get somewhere with our current malaise. Because the way we think and interpret is what really matters for us as individual human beings. And our current malaise is just that: faced with an increasing access to all sorts of societies, individuals, and cultures, our biggest problem is first how to situate ourselves. No longer (or rarely) do we live in smaller, closer-knit communities, but rather in almost separate little units - which do not interconnect based on local geography but rather along interest based lines and public gatherings...
When we start automatically watering down a lowest common denominator for mass marketing... we're really pulling away from what Dick's writing does to us, in making us look at our own individual reaction to current society and current social groups. The feeling you have after the cited movies are just reflections in a distorted mirror of the feelings that are conveyed when you read the books.
I know that to have mass appeal, a movie should respect a certain number of things which are the antithesis of what real film art is about, but raising the bar a little would gradually educate the filmgoing public - indeed there are literally millions of us who would really go after a less "clean cut happy ending experience". The global market is there now, you don't have to market to the whole of ABC1 audience in suburban midtown multiplexes.
I wish that some independent film maker could fix up to do a truer adaptation of a PKD short story, and really leave it hanging at the end. Just the other day I saw Intolerable Cruelty, and couldn't help thinking that the happy ending was tacked on in order to pass some kind of Hollywood audience standard. Cut the movie about 10 minutes earlier, where the roles suddenly reverse in favour of the character played by
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Minority Report took things in the right direction for the first 2/3rds. But that stupid "echo murder" crap leading upto the happy ending bit it.
The ending is actually ambiguous. In the middle of the story we hear that the culprits put under the "halo" have pleasant dreams. Everything that happens after Tom Cruise receives his halo can be such a dream! What really happened is your choice as a viewer - there is no actual hint into any direction. I'd say it's as phildickian as it gets!
So what's the point of all the questions asked in conjunction with the Voight-Kampf test? They virtually all relate to the crime/immorality of killing live animals. There's also the artificial snake scale that points Deckard in the right direction. And the very premise of the movie, the giant corporation that makes replicants--what's the point of replicants if you have plenty of healthy living humans to send offworld? There's not much in the movie that doesn't relate to artificial life forms. It's just not shoved down your throat like it is in the novel. It's a bit more subtle and requires a bit more thought to see it, but it's certainly there. And the kipple does in fact appear in the video game, though it's only hinted at by the polluted atmosphere of the movie and to some degree is transported INTO the city rather than left at the outskirts. In fact, it could be argued that the deserted apartment building in which the engineer lives IS on the outskirts. The dripping water certainly indicates it's in a rather rundown area, and Deckard is actually challenged by the police when he enters the area.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.