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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.
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...
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.
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".