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Philip K. Dick
Showing posts with label Philip K. Dick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philip K. Dick. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Philip K. Dick’s Masterpiece Years
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/books/23philip.html
Philip K. Dick’s Masterpiece Years
SCOTT TIMBERG
November 22, 2010
POINT REYES STATION, Calif. — Half a century later, Anne R. Dick still remembers the sunny October day she met a clean-shaven 29-year-old Berkeley exile who had just moved to this rural enclave in west Marin County, thick with eucalyptus trees and brooding owls.
The science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick was standing with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, rocking on his heels, and gazing at the floor of his house. In his flannel shirt and heavy army boots, he looked, she writes in a new book about him, “graceful and attractive — like someone wearing a disguise.”
She had gone that day in 1958 to introduce herself to Dick, her neighbor, who had moved to west Marin with his second wife, Kleo. Less than a year later, he and his wife split. And Anne Rubenstein, as she was then called, a skinny blond widow, and Dick, a struggling writer, were married. Five years later, they too divorced. In the meantime they had a daughter, and Ms. Dick ran a jewelry business; Dick grew a beard and wrote some of the novels that would eventually get him hailed as a West Coast Calvino or Borges. (The Library of America began issuing his novels in 2007.) Ms. Dick, now 83, would spend the ensuing years seeking the man behind the disguise.
That inquiry is the subject of “The Search for Philip K. Dick,” a biography dressed like a memoir, which was published this month by the San Francisco press Tachyon.
“I think he’s what you might call a psychomorph,” Ms. Dick said recently, sitting in the boxy, modernist home she once shared with him. “He was quite different with each person. He had this enormous gift of empathy, and he used it to woo and please and control. I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”
The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize. While there were stretches of Dick’s life in which he had roommates, a series of girlfriends or a tight group of male friends, the Point Reyes years were his most domestic.
David Gill, who wrote the book’s introduction and runs an obsessive blog, calls this “Dick’s family man period.”
The writer Jonathan Lethem, who included five novels from this period in the Library of America anthologies he edited of Dick’s essential works, calls it Dick’s most fruitful time.
“The river of his literary ambitions — his interest in ‘respectable’ literature — joins the river of his guilty, disreputable, explosively imaginative pulp writing,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview. “It’s the most important passage of his career — more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.”
This was a remarkably placid interval for Dick — a writer associated with paranoia, political extremism, various kinds of madness and heavy drug use — at least outwardly.
Ms. Dick, who does not suffer fools, recalls Point Reyes Station as a cow town, literally. She remembers the years with Phil, as she calls him, as mostly idyllic. He helped her bring up her three girls from her marriage to Richard Rubenstein, a San Francisco poet who had died suddenly. The couple raised fowl and black-faced sheep. Each morning Dick would walk through a barbed-wire-and-wooden-post fence and across a grassy meadow to a cabin he called the Hovel, where he did much of his writing.
Ms. Dick recalls wide-ranging, universe-spanning conversations, and lending books to her autodidact husband. In 1961, in the heyday of Freudian and Jungian theory, she gave him several books with introductions by Carl Jung. One, the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, would show up as a plot point in “High Castle” and guide its composition.
Ms. Dick says that while Dick was both agoraphobic and shy, he was a man of enormous personal magnetism. “He knew how to talk to people, to move their emotions and thoughts,” she said. “But he was too shy to go out into public. He could have been a great F.B.I. agent and a great actor.”
After the breakup of their marriage, Ms. Dick said she endured seeing herself reflected in several evil-wife characters in his later novels. Yet when he died in 1982, after a series of strokes, “everything changed,” she said.
“You see a person in the round,” she continued. “I started writing this after he died, because I was still so confused by what had happened.”
“The Search for Philip K. Dick” — which begins with the couple’s meeting, continues through Dick’s death, and then drops back to cover his birth and early life — was published obscurely in the 1990s and self-published earlier this year. The Tachyon publication, a more thoroughly edited and fact-checked version, provides an invaluable record of Dick’s Marin County years.
Much of what is revealed in the book is already known to scholars and is part of the biographical record. But by putting Dick’s life into human terms, Ms. Dick offers a window through which the curious — from the general reader to the fan boy — can approach this often inscrutable author, whose audience and critical standing have increased significantly in recent years.
Living in isolation, with fewer people than in urban Berkeley, Dick began to care about character for the first time, said Mr. Gill, a lecturer at San Francisco State University.
“He was no longer writing about things that could only take place in the future or after traveling to other worlds,” Mr. Gill said.
“He’s talking about the mundane things of the future — all very local and real and immediate” in novels like “Martian Time-Slip” and “Dr. Bloodmoney.” Mr. Gill added: “He’s writing about the Everyman, midlevel people who are almost powerless. His interest in the pedestrian sent science fiction in brave new directions.”
Dick, though, remains an enigma, even to his ex-wife. “Did Phil change identities,” her book wonders, “the way some people change their clothes?”
The marriage began to crumble as Dick’s self-doubt and paranoia increased. “Anne and I were having dreadful violent fights,” he wrote to a friend, “slamming each other around, smashing every object in the house — the kids were running in terror.”
The couple’s once idyllic domestic life ended quite unambiguously in 1963: Dick told neighbors his wife was trying to kill him, and, at a time when the rights of wives were less advanced, had her committed to a psychiatric institution for two weeks.
The memoir, for stretches a softly lighted Disney film with cavorting farm animals, takes a Samuel Fulleresque turn when Ms. Dick writes about being put in the care of duplicitous doctors and repeatedly spitting out a pill given to subdue her.
After she returned home, and Dick left to live with his mother in Berkeley, Ms. Dick found a large bill from the local pharmacist, listing drugs she did not know her husband was taking.
Strange turns like this, as painful as they were, helped her understand Dick’s painful fit with domestic life. “He gave a lot,” she said, 52 years after an innocent neighborly visit changed her life. “Maybe too much. He tied himself in knots, and then exploded, like a balloon.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 23, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.
Philip K. Dick’s Masterpiece Years
SCOTT TIMBERG
November 22, 2010
POINT REYES STATION, Calif. — Half a century later, Anne R. Dick still remembers the sunny October day she met a clean-shaven 29-year-old Berkeley exile who had just moved to this rural enclave in west Marin County, thick with eucalyptus trees and brooding owls.
The science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick was standing with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, rocking on his heels, and gazing at the floor of his house. In his flannel shirt and heavy army boots, he looked, she writes in a new book about him, “graceful and attractive — like someone wearing a disguise.”
She had gone that day in 1958 to introduce herself to Dick, her neighbor, who had moved to west Marin with his second wife, Kleo. Less than a year later, he and his wife split. And Anne Rubenstein, as she was then called, a skinny blond widow, and Dick, a struggling writer, were married. Five years later, they too divorced. In the meantime they had a daughter, and Ms. Dick ran a jewelry business; Dick grew a beard and wrote some of the novels that would eventually get him hailed as a West Coast Calvino or Borges. (The Library of America began issuing his novels in 2007.) Ms. Dick, now 83, would spend the ensuing years seeking the man behind the disguise.
That inquiry is the subject of “The Search for Philip K. Dick,” a biography dressed like a memoir, which was published this month by the San Francisco press Tachyon.
“I think he’s what you might call a psychomorph,” Ms. Dick said recently, sitting in the boxy, modernist home she once shared with him. “He was quite different with each person. He had this enormous gift of empathy, and he used it to woo and please and control. I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”
The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize. While there were stretches of Dick’s life in which he had roommates, a series of girlfriends or a tight group of male friends, the Point Reyes years were his most domestic.
David Gill, who wrote the book’s introduction and runs an obsessive blog, calls this “Dick’s family man period.”
The writer Jonathan Lethem, who included five novels from this period in the Library of America anthologies he edited of Dick’s essential works, calls it Dick’s most fruitful time.
“The river of his literary ambitions — his interest in ‘respectable’ literature — joins the river of his guilty, disreputable, explosively imaginative pulp writing,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview. “It’s the most important passage of his career — more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.”
This was a remarkably placid interval for Dick — a writer associated with paranoia, political extremism, various kinds of madness and heavy drug use — at least outwardly.
Ms. Dick, who does not suffer fools, recalls Point Reyes Station as a cow town, literally. She remembers the years with Phil, as she calls him, as mostly idyllic. He helped her bring up her three girls from her marriage to Richard Rubenstein, a San Francisco poet who had died suddenly. The couple raised fowl and black-faced sheep. Each morning Dick would walk through a barbed-wire-and-wooden-post fence and across a grassy meadow to a cabin he called the Hovel, where he did much of his writing.
Ms. Dick recalls wide-ranging, universe-spanning conversations, and lending books to her autodidact husband. In 1961, in the heyday of Freudian and Jungian theory, she gave him several books with introductions by Carl Jung. One, the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, would show up as a plot point in “High Castle” and guide its composition.
Ms. Dick says that while Dick was both agoraphobic and shy, he was a man of enormous personal magnetism. “He knew how to talk to people, to move their emotions and thoughts,” she said. “But he was too shy to go out into public. He could have been a great F.B.I. agent and a great actor.”
After the breakup of their marriage, Ms. Dick said she endured seeing herself reflected in several evil-wife characters in his later novels. Yet when he died in 1982, after a series of strokes, “everything changed,” she said.
“You see a person in the round,” she continued. “I started writing this after he died, because I was still so confused by what had happened.”
“The Search for Philip K. Dick” — which begins with the couple’s meeting, continues through Dick’s death, and then drops back to cover his birth and early life — was published obscurely in the 1990s and self-published earlier this year. The Tachyon publication, a more thoroughly edited and fact-checked version, provides an invaluable record of Dick’s Marin County years.
Much of what is revealed in the book is already known to scholars and is part of the biographical record. But by putting Dick’s life into human terms, Ms. Dick offers a window through which the curious — from the general reader to the fan boy — can approach this often inscrutable author, whose audience and critical standing have increased significantly in recent years.
Living in isolation, with fewer people than in urban Berkeley, Dick began to care about character for the first time, said Mr. Gill, a lecturer at San Francisco State University.
“He was no longer writing about things that could only take place in the future or after traveling to other worlds,” Mr. Gill said.
“He’s talking about the mundane things of the future — all very local and real and immediate” in novels like “Martian Time-Slip” and “Dr. Bloodmoney.” Mr. Gill added: “He’s writing about the Everyman, midlevel people who are almost powerless. His interest in the pedestrian sent science fiction in brave new directions.”
Dick, though, remains an enigma, even to his ex-wife. “Did Phil change identities,” her book wonders, “the way some people change their clothes?”
The marriage began to crumble as Dick’s self-doubt and paranoia increased. “Anne and I were having dreadful violent fights,” he wrote to a friend, “slamming each other around, smashing every object in the house — the kids were running in terror.”
The couple’s once idyllic domestic life ended quite unambiguously in 1963: Dick told neighbors his wife was trying to kill him, and, at a time when the rights of wives were less advanced, had her committed to a psychiatric institution for two weeks.
The memoir, for stretches a softly lighted Disney film with cavorting farm animals, takes a Samuel Fulleresque turn when Ms. Dick writes about being put in the care of duplicitous doctors and repeatedly spitting out a pill given to subdue her.
After she returned home, and Dick left to live with his mother in Berkeley, Ms. Dick found a large bill from the local pharmacist, listing drugs she did not know her husband was taking.
Strange turns like this, as painful as they were, helped her understand Dick’s painful fit with domestic life. “He gave a lot,” she said, 52 years after an innocent neighborly visit changed her life. “Maybe too much. He tied himself in knots, and then exploded, like a balloon.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 23, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Chronic Citizen
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/art-entertainment/chronic-citizen-jonathan-lethem-pk-dick-why-novels-are-weird-technology-a
Chronic Citizen: Jonathan Lethem on P.K. Dick, Why Novels are a Weird Technology, and Constructed RealitiesErik Davis
December 18, 2009
While mainstream literary figures sometimes praise their fellow writers, rarely do they present themselves publicly as hardcore pop culture fans. Since the publication of his novels Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, as well as his reception of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, Jonathan Lethem has become a successful and widely-praised author of playful and intelligent literary fictions. He has also become probably the most visible fan and proponent of the science fiction of Philip K. Dick. A few years ago, Lethem was commissioned by the august Library of America to edit a volume of Dick‘s writings for the publisher‘s definitive canon of American letters. The initial volume, Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s was the best-selling title out of the gate in the history of the library, and two more lethem-edited volumes of Dick‘s work followed (Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s and Philip K. Dick: VALIS and Later Novels).Lethem began his own writing career drawing heavily from genre fiction, both SF and hard-boiled detective novels. But he avoided getting stuck in what some SF writers refer to as “the golden ghetto,” and his later work achieved mainstream recognition for more realistic, psychological, and crisply detailed tales largely rooted in a slightly altered version of the Tri-State area that is his home. His latest book, Chronic City, is a dark and druggy take on Manhattan — an anxious, funny, and disturbingly charming book infused with cannabis, conspiracies, astronauts, nihilistic artists, virtual objects, and pop culture mania. Though very much written in Lethem‘s mature voice, the book is also infused with the spirit of Philip K. Dick, who remains Lethem‘s first and most important influence.
ERIK DAVIS: How did you first encounter Philip Dick?
JONATHAN LETHEM: I first saw his books in my friend Carl‘s house. His dad was a science fiction fan. I was already reading the old classics — the Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury that were on my mother‘s shelves. But those books were written and packaged in a style that was very ‘40s and ‘50s. And these Philip K. Dick paperbacks from the ‘70s looked like a whole other flavor of stuff.
The first ones I saw were A Scanner Darkly and the Bantam reissues of Ubik and A Maze of Death. And I just immediately connected it with psychedelia and was drawn to it. I was thirteen or fourteen when I was devouring his work and just wanting to read as much of it as I could. By the time I was about eighteen, I had read every Dick book that had been published to that point. One way or another, I found them. I just identified with him totally, and it rearranged my thinking.
I moved to the Bay Area. It was like the husk of a plan, to go and meet him. But he died, so I went anyway. I tried to look for meaningful traces, including hanging out with Paul Williams and helping him with the Philip K. Dick Society. So it was a very shaping obsessing. I kind of apprenticed myself to the guild of Philip K. Dick.
ED: As a pop culture fan, and an intense Phil Dick fan, I find it incredibly satisfying that this author that I‘ve loved since I was a teenager is now getting his props. On the other hand, I cannot deny that there is something a bit sad about losing the esotericism of the cult. You yourself are a true fan, but one who has been instrumental in Dick‘s current canonization. How do you feel about that?
JL: I have a very divided conscience. I mean, just as an eyewitness, it‘s something to be incredibly proud of. It‘s almost unprecedented: the creation of a real canonical literary reputation when the person is dead and out of print, and when there was a pretty definite ceiling on how far he‘d ever gotten while he was still alive and in print.
For people familiar with Dick‘s personal experiences, his biography and his temperament, the ironies in that are deep and bitter and complicated. You inevitably think: if he‘d been alive, he would‘ve screwed this up. He would‘ve found some way to make it impossible that he could be treated with such simple reverence, because he was so distrustful of any form of institutional authority. He had a particularly deep, bitter and twisted suspiciousness about traditional literary authority and about academia. And frankly, to some extent, it‘s academia that‘s driven his acceptance in a canon.
When I was a kid and I discovered Philip K. Dick, I felt that I‘d made this kind of soul mate contact with his work. It‘s a defining experience, and it feels like it‘s innate. For me, that experience was absolutely bound up in finding these books that were out of print. The books almost seemed like fictional artifacts. I couldn‘t believe there was such a writer. I still remember thinking his name seemed weird or that his titles seemed preposterous to me. It was like a secret reality unfolding in my life.
There‘s something about the essence of his writing that creates that feeling. And I think it‘s still creating it for let‘s say the 14-year-old equivalent of Erik Davis or Jonathan Lethem, who‘s discovering this book in the shiny expensive Vintage paperback editions. I still think there‘s something innately self-marginalizing, self-cultifying (if that‘s a word) about the writing. You feel like you‘re the only one who understands it, and he‘s the only one who understands you. It‘s like a cognitive version of a love affair. You‘re making this intimate connection with this other mind. He projected that into the work.
ED: In a way, Dick is the ideal highbrow-lowbrow saint. The academics will analyze the social critique, the metafiction, the dense weave of allusions, the importance of the themes as they relate to emerging problems of simulation and consciousness and existential anomie. And at the same time, there‘s a pop level that‘s most obviously manifested in cinema, a steady stream of Hollywood films which are mostly pretty corny. And both those levels of recognition have shaped the context that allowed the Library of America to say, “Okay. This guy gets the canon badge.”
But because I‘m one of these cultists, I have to believe that there‘s something more to it. It‘s because his books say something about our time, even more, in some ways, than his time — the ‘60s and ‘70s. Why are we hearing these books now? What are these books telling us?
JL: I‘ve always agreed with the view that — with science fiction — its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell‘s 1984, where he explicitly said “It‘s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.
That suggests that Dick‘s work is dated to the ‘60s and ‘70s. And I thought of him very much in this framework, and not as an extrapolative writer. He certainly doesn‘t have that kind of rigor or scientific chops that you find with someone like Bruce Sterling. But I think that Dick saw the makings of the contemporary reality we experience so profoundly. And this speaks to the difference layers of reality in his work — the way time moves at one clip according to the calendar, but other ways in terms of mental time, psychological time, social time, American historical time. Like if you look at the terms of this absurd, hysterical healthcare debate — it‘s basically McCarthyism again, the Red Scare. “Socialism is coming to get us.”
Dick looked around his world with a kind of skinlessness. He existed in the world and it just permeated him. Mid-‘50s America was overwhelmingly alive in his vision, in such a way that he saw it simultaneously as a present and as a future. He saw the makings of the late capitalist experience embedded in that mid-century triumphalist post-war moment. And it‘s as though he experienced it all, in all its absurdity and its tragedy, as this overwhelming vision. And he just jotted it down as frantically as he could. And the books are so raw with that perception that they still feel like a desperate attempt to record an arriving moment. I think that‘s the experience of reading Philip K. Dick. He seems to be frantically trying to transcribe an arriving reality that is urgent and totally fresh.
What‘s missing from both the academic and pop movie descriptions you mention is that Dick is an immensely personal writer. In his own way, he‘s a Beat or a proto-Beat. He‘s like Henry Miller. One of these gargantuan, slightly egotistical but insecure, garrulous personas that just pour themselves onto the page, and says, “Love me or hate me. This is what I feel. And these are the kind of women I find sexy. And oh my god, I hate them. They‘re consuming me. And I feel really stupid today, but I‘m going to tell you about....” And he just gives himself. And as anyone who‘s ever tried to write literary novels or stories or a memoir can tell you — it‘s not a small thing to pour yourself onto the page. And when it‘s accomplished, totally, you end up with the kind of monumental writers that many people find also unpleasant or toxic or unreadable.
ED: Dick set many of his tales in what we might now call a “posthuman” future of cognitive-enhancing drugs, psi powers, and other amplifications of human capacity. Many of the developments he envisioned in his own unique way are now edging ever closer to reality, and there are many enthusiasts. While not exactly bleak, Dick had a generally more dark and satiric — and often funny — take on cognitive enhancement. Was he a pessimist or a realist? How would you characterize his particularly lesson about human for today‘s enthusiastic transhumans?
JL: While I‘m hardly an expert on the reality of cognitive enhancement or the transhuman impulse as it‘s working itself out on the contemporary frontier, I suspect Dick had little to offer in the way of a “lesson” for aspirants, except in the senses that were relevant while he was coming of age as a writer — that‘s to say, when the breaking news in the framing of such matters involved names like Freud, Kinsey, Norbert Weiner and, well, A.E. Van Vogt. Dick‘s concerns were ultimately both epistemological and deeply moral — in the sense that a philosopher would use the world moral, not in the sense that, say, Joseph L. Breen would. You know, love, empathy, “what is human?” and so forth. For contemporary voyagers, these matters remain as Dick delineated them: exquisitely local, negotiated on the human-to-human, or human-to-self playing field according to an infinite number of variations and contexts. No sweeping paradigms will do here. We‘re all walking down the street conducting our self-Turing exams every time we pass a homeless person, or greet our spouse at the breakfast table.
ED: For proponents of the Singularity, we are on the verge of massive technological transformations that involve some version of artificial or machine intelligence. Dick had a very particular take on intelligent machines, like Joe Chip‘s conapt or suitcase psychiatrists. While these devices are clearly fantastic and absurd, they also express some real insight and concerns about the cultural consequences of machine intelligence. Does Dick‘s take seem relevant now, thirty years later? What would he say to our contemporary gadget fetishism and addiction to information machines?
JL: My best guess about such matters is that each technological transformation, up to and perhaps including the Singularity, is going to work itself out vis-à-vis “the human” according to the deep principles of all media. Defined in its largest sense, as including things like cinema, theory, drugs, computing, moving type, music, etcetera, media is utterly consciousness-transforming in ways we can no longer competently examine, given how deeply they‘ve pervaded and altered the collective and individual consciousness that would be the only possible method for making that judgment. And yet -— we still feel so utterly human to ourselves, and the proof is in the anthropomorphic homeliness that pervades the ostensibly exalted “media” in return. We humanize them, shame them, colonize and debunk them with our persistent modes of sex and neurosis and community and commerce. We turn them into advertisements for ourselves, rather than opportunities for shedding ourselves. At least so far.
ED: You‘re pointing toward the psychological dimension of Dick‘s writing. Even when you are looking at the futuristic aspect, what‘s really being extrapolated is a certain kind of dreamlike, subjective response to changing technological conditions. And all that is intensified by Dick‘s own psychological sensitivity.
JL: Dick was supremely labile. He has the power to put himself, as a writer, at the mercy of his own inventions. He could construct realities and then immerse himself in them as though helpless. So he conveys the experience of the mind-altering or the reality-transforming better than nearly any writer who ever lived. As a creator of fantastical, preposterous kinds of realities that are nevertheless grounded in a critique or an insight, he was the best at two things: at making these things a kind of a reality; and then, at experiencing that reality as though it were a given. His characters — his proxies within the space of his own fictional world — are totally subsumed in it. There‘s no mastery exhibited. They‘re reading it. They‘re experiencing it. They‘re surviving it. They‘re not objective tour guides. His character is a sufferer who moves through these worlds.
ED: Given Dick‘s obsessions, it seems inevitable that he would wind up asking religious questions. These came to the head with the so-called “VALIS trilogy” he wrote toward the end of his life: VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. In the ‘70s, when he was read in kind of a proto-Marxist way by some critics, his later works were often dismissed at the works of a crazy man, even though the religious elements and visionary questions in his writing are evident from the get-go.
Today, some people continue to dislike these more explicitly spiritual works and prefer the more socially and critically dynamic ones of the ‘60s. Others see them as a crowning gesture. Did you have a sense of satisfaction in getting these three books included in the Library of America series?
JL: One of my goals was to get what I felt was the majority of Dick‘s masterpieces into the Library‘s three volumes. And for me, VALIS is probably one of his five greatest works. Leaving aside context, the voice, the form, the velocity, the humor, the emotion — it‘s a great novel. It would be a great novel in any writer‘s career. It had to be canonized if he was going to go into the canon. So the minute I knew we could do more books, I started scheming about how to make VALIS a part of the project. I like all three of the books that have been described as a trilogy, although I‘m skeptical about the whole trilogy idea. Besides VALIS, I think Transmigration of Timothy Archer may be among his greatest works. And Divine Invasion is rock solid.
ED: With your own new book, Chronic City, I can very much sense the way that Dick has marked you as a reader, as a writer, as a person in the world.
JL: In the process of editing these Dick books, I felt myself recapturing a feeling of intimate kinship that came from the very beginning of wanting to be a novelist — a feeling that I wanted to, in some way, project a relationship to Dick‘s writing. I wanted to find a way to extend my own feelings about it into fictional space. For me, this is a book that‘s suffused in his influence.
ED: Chronic City is a dark book. What does it mean to embark on a book that, while it‘s entertaining and there‘s plenty of nice people in it that you kind of want to spend time with, is also suffused with meditations on dread and the conundrum(s) of contemporary reality?
JL: Well, at the outset, if I started with that as a goal, I‘d never do it at all. You have to start in a kind of innocence. You have to think, “I‘ve got this funny idea.” You know, “What if there was this character who didn‘t know he was doing such and such. And that would be fun.” You start in a kind of willful naïveté about the breadth of your ambition as a survival trait — it‘s the only way to get in.
But I felt that this was a book, like Fortress of Solitude, where I wanted to disburden myself of a lot of anger. I think it‘s a response to living in a pretty dreadful moment — a series of dreadful moments in the last ten years. And it‘s a book about complicity, too — about going along with how wrong it all is because you find it entertaining or good enough or necessary, in various degrees.
ED: There is also an extraordinary amount of pot smoking in this book. Why so much?
JL: Confession compulsion? I don‘t know. One of the main subjects in my work is friendship, the experience of hanging out with people, of what it‘s like to really adore someone, argue with them, be obsessed with them — you know, compare your life to theirs, day in and day out. Chronic City is very much a book about friendship, and so I was trying to capture a certain vein of deep and silly and exhausted and slightly outlaw time-spending that is typified, for me, by getting high, with a certain personal group of people, again and again and again. Which isn‘t so much the stuff of my days right now — it can‘t be, you know — it‘s an older feeling. But it‘s one I hadn‘t ever gotten down the way I wanted to.
ED: Part of the experience I have of novels these days is that it seems like the more awake and aware and acute they are, the more they are aware of their own fragility in the face of other kinds of narrative technologies. The most obvious example is simulation — immersive worlds that we can go into and reproduce behaviors that are more or less storylike. The fundamental character of a massive, open-ended, multi-player role-playing game is utterly different at this point than the character in a novel. How will novels stand up?
JL: I‘m far too close to one pole to illuminate. But I‘ll say that — in the face of certain kinds of rival technologies and rival frameworks for experiencing what we might call self-admitting false realities — novels are a class of virtual reality experience that has some very particular and innate bottom lines. And I happen to like those. As I see the rivals emerge, I feel that novel-making and reading becomes one option on a very large menu, and in some ways a rather antique or humble or lumpen example. But I also think some of the things that make it that are also deep strengths that are becoming more and more highlighted.
We talked about what makes Dick so compelling and personal — what made us each take him so personally when we discovered his work. And in some ways, those are elements that are innate to this very strange technology — this gigantic pile of sentences stuck between two hard covers, that someone makes this incredible commitment to read. It‘s a bizarre commitment, very unusual the first few times you make it — to just sit and follow, in order, each of these sentences and make the artificial reality come to life yourself by reading. It‘s a crazy technology, very specific and weird. Now may not be the time to take it for granted. Instead, maybe we should point out that by doing this, you do achieve a kind of weird mind meld.
ED: There are a number of Phil Dick-ian moments in Chronic City where we‘re on the edge of realizing that something we‘ve been taking for reality is a construct or is a convenient fiction. There‘s a palpable sense that recognizing this construct to its fullest extent would thrust you one into the cold vacuum of space. at the same time we are immersed in more and more media constructs every day. So as we edge closer to the anxious recognition of the reality construct, there are also more technologies of distraction that try to cover that over or displace it.
JL: The reason I tend to write from the complicit point of view is I‘m always struck by the deeply personal nature of the alliance we make with these opportunistic distraction mechanisms, the substitute realities that are offered to us, the way that we build ourselves into them. And that‘s why I always think that Dick was such an insightful writer — because he always took it personally. He was always aware of his own wish- fulfillment impulses, his own yearning to be consumed and seduced. And it‘s why his role as a fiction maker and as a liar was allied to his fascination and distrust of fictional realities, of marketing realities, of commercial realities and political realities — because he saw that they‘re rooted innately in storytelling and in emotional necessity. And that there are all sorts of things that turn out to be ideological all the way down to their bones — the family structures that we come up inside are themselves a form of storytelling, a form of myth-making and persuasion. We sell ourselves on versions of existence that are tolerable. We‘re all marketing.
ED: Towards the end of your book, I sense a deep ambivalence about the necessity of consoling fictions. Right next to the rage and the desire to expose the machine is a complicit adoption of conventional realities and more constructive views.
JL: Absolutely. What are the tolerances for the exposure of sustaining fictions in any given life? At some point, you‘re going to settle. You‘re going to make a snow globe and live inside it.
Erik Davis regularly posts to www.techgnosis.com. His most recent book was The Visionary State: A Journey through California‘s Spiritual Landscape.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Blade Runner: The Final Cut
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071103/REVIEWS08/71103001/1004
Great Movies
Blade Runner: The Final CutGreat Scott
Release Date: 1982
Nov 3, 2007
By Roger Ebert
In an earlier review of "Blade Runner," I wrote; "It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story." This seems a strange complaint, given that so much of the movie concerns who is, and is not, human, and what it means to be human anyway. Even one character we can safely assume is human, the reptilian Tyrell, czar of the corporation which manufactures replicants, strikes me as a possible replicant. And of the hero, Deckard (Harrison Ford), all we can say for sure is that director Ridley Scott has left clues in various versions of his film that can be used to prove that Deckard is a human -- or a replicant.
Now study that paragraph again and notice I have committed a journalistic misdemeanor. I have referred to replicants without ever establishing what a replicant is. It is a tribute to the influence and reach of "Blade Runner" that 25 years after its release virtually everyone reading this knows about replicants. Reviews of "The Wizard of Oz" never define Munchkins, do they? This is a seminal film, building on older classics like "Metropolis" or "Things to Come," but establishing a pervasive view of the future that has influenced science fiction films ever since. Its key legacies are: Giant global corporations, environmental decay, overcrowding, technological progress at the top, poverty or slavery at the bottom -- and, curiously, almost always a film noir vision. Look at "Dark City," "Total Recall," "Brazil," "12 Monkeys" or "Gattaca" and you will see its progeny.
I have never quite embraced "Blade Runner," admiring it at arm's length, but now it is time to cave in and admit it to the canon. Ridley Scott has released a "definitive version" subtitled "Blade Runner: The Final Cut," which will go first to theaters and then be released Dec.18 in three DVD editions, including a "Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition" that includes, according to a press release, "All 4 Previous Cuts, Including the Ultra-Rare 'Workprint' Version!" plus the usual deleted scenes, documentaries, bells and whistles.
The biggest change Scott made in earlier versions was to drop the voice-over narration from the 1982 original. Spoken by Ford, channeling Philip Marlowe, it explained things on behalf of a studio nervous that we wouldn't understand the film. Since much of the interest in the film has been generated by what we weren't sure we understood, that turned out to be no problem. The ending has been tweaked from bleak to romantic to existential to an assortment of the above, and shots have come and gone, but for me the most important change in the 2007 version is in the print itself.
Scott has resisted the temptation to go back and replace analog special effects with new GCI work (which disturbed many fans of George Lucas' "Star Wars") and has kept Douglas Turnbull's virtuoso original special effects, while enhancing, restoring, cleaning and scrubbing both visuals and sound so the film reflects a higher technical standard than ever before. It looks so great, you're tempted to say the hell with the story, let's just watch it.
But the story benefits, too, by seeming more to inhabit its world than be laid on top of it. The action follows Deckard, a "blade runner" who is assigned to track down and kill six rebel replicants who have returned illegally from off-worlds to earth, and are thought to be in Los Angeles. (The movie never actually deals with more than five replicants, however, unless, as the critic Tim Dirks speculates, Deckard might be the sixth). Replicants, as you know, are androids who are "more human than human," manufactured to perform skilled slave labor on earth colonies. They are born fully formed, supplied with artificial memories of their "pasts," and set to break down after four years, because after that point they are so smart they have a tendency to develop human emotions and feelings and have the audacity to think of themselves as human. Next thing you know, they'll want the vote, and civil rights. Much of this comes from the original Philip K. Dick story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Since replicants in general do not know they are replicants, there can be real poignancy in their lives. We feel sympathy for one in particular, Rachael (Sean Young), who finds herself involved in romance with Deckard. He loves her even though he has reason to believe she is a replicant, but a very good one, almost impossible to detect.
What I have always wondered is why the Tyrell Corporation made their androids so lifelike. Why not give them four arms and settle the matter, and get more work out of them? Is there a buried possibility that Tyrell's long-range plan is to replace humans altogether? Is the whole blade-running caper simply a cover for his scheme? But never mind. What matters to the viewer is that the ground rules seem to be in place, and apply in one of the most extraordinary worlds ever created in a film.
The skies are always dark with airborne filth in this Los Angeles of the future. It usually rains. The infrastructure looks a lot like now, except older and more crowded, and with the addition of vast floating zeppelins, individual flying cars, and towering buildings of unimaginable size. When I first saw the film I was impressed by the giant billboards with moving, speaking faces on them, touting Coca-Cola and other products. Now I walk over to Millennium Park and see giant faces looming above me, smiling, winking, and periodically spitting (but not Coke). As for the flying cars, these have been a staple of sci-fi magazine covers for decades, but remain wildly impractical and dangerous, unless locked into a control grid.
The "human story," as I think of it, involves practical tests to determine if an individual is a replicant or not, and impractical tests (such as love) to determine how much that matters to (a) people, if they are in love with a replicant, and (b) replicants, if they know they are replicants. This has always been a contrived problem, easily avoidable in practical ways, unless (as I suspect) the Tyrell Corporation has more up its sleeves than arms. But to stumble on plot logic seems absurd in a film that is more about vision. And I continue to find it fascinating how film noir, a genre born in the 1940s, has such a hammerlock on the future (look at "Dark City" again). I suspect film noir is so fruitful and suggestive that if you bring it on board, half your set and costume decisions have been made for you, and you know what your tone will be.
Ridley Scott is a considerable director who makes no small plans. His credits include "Alien," "Legend," the inexplicable "1492," "Gladiator," "Black Hawk Down" and the brilliant "Matchstick Men," and his "American Gangster" opened Friday in theaters. He has the gift of making action on a vast scale seem comprehensible. I have been assured that my problems in the past with "Blade Runner" represent a failure of my own taste and imagination, but if the film was perfect, why has Sir Ridley continued to tinker with it, and now released his fifth version? I guess he's only... human.
Ridley Scott's "Alien" is also included in the Great Movies Collection.
Cast & Credits
Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Starring: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Joanna Cassidy, Daryl Hannah and Edward James Olmos.
Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (for violence and brief nudity.) A restored 35mm print of the "Blade Runner: The Final Cut" is playing at the Music Box Theatre and AMC Barrington.
Great Movies
Blade Runner: The Final CutGreat Scott
Release Date: 1982
Nov 3, 2007
By Roger Ebert
In an earlier review of "Blade Runner," I wrote; "It looks fabulous, it uses special effects to create a new world of its own, but it is thin in its human story." This seems a strange complaint, given that so much of the movie concerns who is, and is not, human, and what it means to be human anyway. Even one character we can safely assume is human, the reptilian Tyrell, czar of the corporation which manufactures replicants, strikes me as a possible replicant. And of the hero, Deckard (Harrison Ford), all we can say for sure is that director Ridley Scott has left clues in various versions of his film that can be used to prove that Deckard is a human -- or a replicant.
Now study that paragraph again and notice I have committed a journalistic misdemeanor. I have referred to replicants without ever establishing what a replicant is. It is a tribute to the influence and reach of "Blade Runner" that 25 years after its release virtually everyone reading this knows about replicants. Reviews of "The Wizard of Oz" never define Munchkins, do they? This is a seminal film, building on older classics like "Metropolis" or "Things to Come," but establishing a pervasive view of the future that has influenced science fiction films ever since. Its key legacies are: Giant global corporations, environmental decay, overcrowding, technological progress at the top, poverty or slavery at the bottom -- and, curiously, almost always a film noir vision. Look at "Dark City," "Total Recall," "Brazil," "12 Monkeys" or "Gattaca" and you will see its progeny.
I have never quite embraced "Blade Runner," admiring it at arm's length, but now it is time to cave in and admit it to the canon. Ridley Scott has released a "definitive version" subtitled "Blade Runner: The Final Cut," which will go first to theaters and then be released Dec.18 in three DVD editions, including a "Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition" that includes, according to a press release, "All 4 Previous Cuts, Including the Ultra-Rare 'Workprint' Version!" plus the usual deleted scenes, documentaries, bells and whistles.
The biggest change Scott made in earlier versions was to drop the voice-over narration from the 1982 original. Spoken by Ford, channeling Philip Marlowe, it explained things on behalf of a studio nervous that we wouldn't understand the film. Since much of the interest in the film has been generated by what we weren't sure we understood, that turned out to be no problem. The ending has been tweaked from bleak to romantic to existential to an assortment of the above, and shots have come and gone, but for me the most important change in the 2007 version is in the print itself.
Scott has resisted the temptation to go back and replace analog special effects with new GCI work (which disturbed many fans of George Lucas' "Star Wars") and has kept Douglas Turnbull's virtuoso original special effects, while enhancing, restoring, cleaning and scrubbing both visuals and sound so the film reflects a higher technical standard than ever before. It looks so great, you're tempted to say the hell with the story, let's just watch it.
But the story benefits, too, by seeming more to inhabit its world than be laid on top of it. The action follows Deckard, a "blade runner" who is assigned to track down and kill six rebel replicants who have returned illegally from off-worlds to earth, and are thought to be in Los Angeles. (The movie never actually deals with more than five replicants, however, unless, as the critic Tim Dirks speculates, Deckard might be the sixth). Replicants, as you know, are androids who are "more human than human," manufactured to perform skilled slave labor on earth colonies. They are born fully formed, supplied with artificial memories of their "pasts," and set to break down after four years, because after that point they are so smart they have a tendency to develop human emotions and feelings and have the audacity to think of themselves as human. Next thing you know, they'll want the vote, and civil rights. Much of this comes from the original Philip K. Dick story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Since replicants in general do not know they are replicants, there can be real poignancy in their lives. We feel sympathy for one in particular, Rachael (Sean Young), who finds herself involved in romance with Deckard. He loves her even though he has reason to believe she is a replicant, but a very good one, almost impossible to detect.
What I have always wondered is why the Tyrell Corporation made their androids so lifelike. Why not give them four arms and settle the matter, and get more work out of them? Is there a buried possibility that Tyrell's long-range plan is to replace humans altogether? Is the whole blade-running caper simply a cover for his scheme? But never mind. What matters to the viewer is that the ground rules seem to be in place, and apply in one of the most extraordinary worlds ever created in a film.
The skies are always dark with airborne filth in this Los Angeles of the future. It usually rains. The infrastructure looks a lot like now, except older and more crowded, and with the addition of vast floating zeppelins, individual flying cars, and towering buildings of unimaginable size. When I first saw the film I was impressed by the giant billboards with moving, speaking faces on them, touting Coca-Cola and other products. Now I walk over to Millennium Park and see giant faces looming above me, smiling, winking, and periodically spitting (but not Coke). As for the flying cars, these have been a staple of sci-fi magazine covers for decades, but remain wildly impractical and dangerous, unless locked into a control grid.
The "human story," as I think of it, involves practical tests to determine if an individual is a replicant or not, and impractical tests (such as love) to determine how much that matters to (a) people, if they are in love with a replicant, and (b) replicants, if they know they are replicants. This has always been a contrived problem, easily avoidable in practical ways, unless (as I suspect) the Tyrell Corporation has more up its sleeves than arms. But to stumble on plot logic seems absurd in a film that is more about vision. And I continue to find it fascinating how film noir, a genre born in the 1940s, has such a hammerlock on the future (look at "Dark City" again). I suspect film noir is so fruitful and suggestive that if you bring it on board, half your set and costume decisions have been made for you, and you know what your tone will be.
Ridley Scott is a considerable director who makes no small plans. His credits include "Alien," "Legend," the inexplicable "1492," "Gladiator," "Black Hawk Down" and the brilliant "Matchstick Men," and his "American Gangster" opened Friday in theaters. He has the gift of making action on a vast scale seem comprehensible. I have been assured that my problems in the past with "Blade Runner" represent a failure of my own taste and imagination, but if the film was perfect, why has Sir Ridley continued to tinker with it, and now released his fifth version? I guess he's only... human.
Ridley Scott's "Alien" is also included in the Great Movies Collection.
Cast & Credits
Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Starring: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Joanna Cassidy, Daryl Hannah and Edward James Olmos.
Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (for violence and brief nudity.) A restored 35mm print of the "Blade Runner: The Final Cut" is playing at the Music Box Theatre and AMC Barrington.
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