Tag Archives: Philip K. Dick

We Can Remember the Dollhouse for You

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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One of the core philosophical mysteries that Philip K Dick lingered over throughout his career was the fragility of identity (and, by extension, reality). In particular, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” twists a very knotty philosophical quandary into one of PKD’s more intense action stories. Typically, PKD is more concerned with perception of reality but “We Can Remember…” focuses more intimately on the mutability of memory and its relationship with identity. The protagonist, one Douglas Quaid, undergoes a procedure to gain a desired false memory, only to stumble onto buried memories that shatter his identity, replacing his mundane life with that of a government assassin.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve ever seen Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and aren’t already acquainted with the plot of PKD’s seminal work, also adapted into film twice now, you’ll be now quite aware that “We Can Remember…” is the foundation upon which the show is based. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a crude summary; a corporation erases people’s identities and replaces them with useful identities until their debts are paid off.

One of the reasons why “We Can Remember…” seemed worthy of modernization as a TV series wasn’t just the possible complexities of a world where identities can be manufactured but the subtle thread of dystopianism, one that predates William Gibson’s corporations-as-gods cyberpunkism. In both Dollhouse and “We Can Remember…”, the powerful corporations responsible for identity manipulation don’t serve as arms of a nameless government but act independently of them and at odds with them, even.

In “We Can Remember…” it’s REKALL, the corporation, who triggers Douglas Quaid’s memories of his job as a government assassin and it’s left to the government to deal with the problem, though it’s again REKALL who provides the final resolution, or at least an intended one. It’s dystopian in the whole sense; Quaid was a government assassin who, had things gone according to plan, would never have awoken to his former identity and it is actually his false identity in denial of this that leads to the central conflict. “Real” Quaid, the government he worked for and REKALL are all complicit.

Dollhouse, on the other hand, is openly anti-corporation and, in its implications, a cautionary tale whose formula is “corporations + technology = bad.” This starts with the implication that Rossum Corporation took an invention intended to alleviate neurological disorders and turned it to arguably nefarious ends, and ends with a near-apocalypse. The depiction of the creators of this technology, as well as most of the technologically-inclined characters, is of sociopaths. Whedon’s Dollhouse has little sympathy for scientists and barely touches on the humanitarian uses of the Dollhouse technology.

On the other hand, in Philip K Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” the existence of mind-altering technology is far more benign and pragmatic than Whedon’s. REKALL runs a business granting people the chance to have memories of experiences they never had or to take on an identity they wish they could be. There’s no apocalyptic endgame and, to that extend, Dick seems to acknowledge the mundanity of postmodern culture in which everything is changing but nothing is different. In fact, he’s not even concerned with it, instead punctuating his tale with a very PKD-ian twist from out of left field. Dick was telling a story and not running a simulation revolving around a theoretical technology, one in which the driving individuals are improbably corrupt, as those in Dollhouse seemed to be.

And therein lies the disconnect of Whedon’s riff on PKD; Philip K Dick was writing Weird science fiction, with a capital “W.” The universe he portrayed in his books, unlike Whedon’s Dollhouse (and, perhaps more tellingly, Firefly), was ultimately an irrational universe. PKD wasn’t really a science fiction author, not in the vein of Asimov or Clarke, but more a postmodern mutation of the old Weird, like Lovecraft for the hard disk era. The relationship between the two is even more stark if you consider Philip K Dick’s overriding affinity for “the beyond” and extrastellar and ungraspable entities. And, really, that’s what drives his dystopias; that what should seem patently absurd and surreal by our standards is rendered mundane by the plastic nature of his realities.

Whedon’s “dystopia” is of an increasingly common and wearying breed; one that doggedly tracks down a line of best fit, averse to outliers and designed not just to suspend disbelief but to lock the viewer into a meticulous and intricate conundrum. And Whedon’s solution to the whole thing is, bizarrely, a sort of anti-science deus ex machine; it turns out the secret to countering the mind-wiping technology is hidden away in a particular character’s DNA.

This last revelation feels like a loose thread that Whedon could’ve malevolently ripped clean from the scrupulously woven fabric of Dollhouse’s reality by implying that perhaps this miracle DNA isn’t of terrestrial origin. It certainly would’ve infused such an appallingly cynical story with some much needed weirdness, the kind of weird that made Philip K Dick’s works compelling.

The sun never sets on the Trigan Empire

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Look and Learn magazine.

Look and Learn 1975

The home of cutaway technical drawings of everything from hydroelectric dams to airplanes; the repository of one page synopses of the venerable classics of literature, opera, and ballet; and the sanctum of illustrated lessons in history and geography. The Discovery Channel before people had even thought of the Discovery Channel. In its dying days, it hosted Tony Weare’s comic Rookwood of which I remember very little. In its prime, it serialized the single most popular feature in the entire magazine—The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire.

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Breugel Babel

[The Tower of Babel, Pieter Breugel the Elder]

No one outside the British Commonwealth is likely to have heard of The Trigan Empire. The Wikipedia page for Don Lawrence, the strip’s most revered artist, suggests that he was an influence on the likes of  Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, and Chris Weston. Neil Gaiman had this to say about the comic some ten years back:

 “When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. It was called The Trigan Empire — two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children’s magazine “Look And Learn”, which even schools who banned comics allowed. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous.”

There were other comics in Look and Learn of course. I distinctly remember that the stories from various ballets (like Giselle and Petrushka) were presented in the form of comics for example. However, there is no doubting that Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence’s The Trigan Empire was the king of the heap—the solitary reason why kids forced their parents to buy Look and Learn week in week out. There were other artists who followed in Lawrence’s wake once he broke with IPC (the magazine distributors) over pay but he was the good Trigan artist just as Barks was the good duck artist. For these children, The Trigan Empire became an education in what comic books could look like, never once realizing that Lawrence’s work on the series was in fact a high point in British comic art, one which has been rarely equaled.

Here are the initial stirrings of The Trigan Empire as related on the second and third pages of its opening story (from the pages of Ranger magazine, its initial home).

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A cosmo-craft crash lands in Florida and the documents retrieved from it are translated after decades of research. From the documents a  history of the world of Elekton emerges and the history of the rise and fall of the Trigan Empire. The Trigans are descended from the Vorgs, a nomadic race compelled to choose the ways of civilization due to the encroachment of their perennial enemies, the Lokans.

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Elekton was a world of wayward scientific evolution where individuals wore the armor and togas of the Roman empire while piloting modern day battleships, fighter jets, and rockets. The aircraft themselves would vary from vague facsimiles of Harrier jump jets (the British fighter elite of the day) to World War 2 heavy bombers fitted with jet engines—all this with little concern for the aerodynamic stability of this confluence of design. In many ways, the serial became a perfect reflection of the contents of the educational pamphlet enclosing it. One imagines that this mishmash of historical themes was created at least in part to fulfill an educational mission, to stimulate the curiosity of young children in the direction of the progress of European man.

The entirety of Don Lawrence’s work on The Trigan Empire has been reprinted in 12 slim hardcover volumes by the Don Lawrence Collection (under licence from DC Comics), an organization situated in the Netherlands, this being the nation which has best preserved the artist’s memory and much of his original art. The comics read seamlessly in episodes of varying length, with the reprintings often starting on a single facing page thus obscuring the 2-page a week format of the original strip.  New readers will be oblivious to the fact that every two page segment actually ends with a cliffhanger. As an “old” reader, I was periodically lulled into this smooth experience.

Take for example, the 18 page  story titled, “The Man from the Future” (1975), a tale which represents Lawrence’s return to the strip after a year long break.  It is also the first Trigan Empire story I remember reading.

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The story concerns a traveler from the future, an archivist who uses his intimate knowledge of the historical record for material gain and status. He arranges to buy a winning lottery ticket from its unsuspecting owner, “predicts” a Lokan attack thus inserting himself into the corridors of power, and then follows this up with a betrayal of the military plans of the Trigan political elite to the same Lokans.  On every second page, the final panel shows (consecutively) the pride of the Trigan navy sinking, Toth Zandu’s profession to his young audience that he can look into the future, an attack on the Trigan Bay Bridge, two threats on Zandu’s life, the destruction of the Trigan fleet and so on – thus propelling the narrative onward with each passing week.

Zandu believes that he is invulnerable because the history books he has consulted have recorded his preservation to a ripe old age. The reader is constantly placed in a position of sympathy for Zandu as he escapes from each threat on his life before falling on the penultimate page in part due to his over confidence.

In a short but unrelated commentary, the editors for the Don Lawrence collection suggest that politics was rarely in the minds of The Trigan Empire‘s creators, the exception being the  story titled, “The Mission of Lukaz Rann”, which takes in the subject of nuclear disarmament in the form of a planet killing bomb, and the practice of xenophobia in the guise of a demagogue based on the racist Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell.

Trigan Enoch Powell

There is some modest political correctness in this most British (post imperial) and conservative of comics. The dastardly Lokans who are colored green actually conform to no obvious race in many instances. They sometimes look like bearded Caucasians with a greenish hue and at other times like Africans or Asians (Indians?). Their one distinguishing trait is a perpetual state of irritation and fury, all knit brows and snarling teeth. A far cry then from their initial appearance in the first Trigan Empire tale where they seemed like refugees from Ming the Merciless’ army albeit with samurai  headdress.

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As for the barbarians at the gate, they were inevitably the Mongol hordes and vicious Native American “savages.” Maybe there were some Parthians thrown in for good measure but I don’t remember any. Just as the technology of the Trigans represented a patchwork of Western civilization and military dominance—from swords and sandals right up to weapons of mass destruction—so too did their enemies reflect the unchanging status of Western vulnerability as described by Joseph Schumpeter in “The Sociology of Imperialisms”:

“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies….Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.”

Trigan Lukaz Rann

The entire premise of the stories in The Trigan Empire was that they were transcribed from historical documents retrieved from a spacecraft. This would suggest a hagiographic record and, as Butterworth, intimates in “The Man from the Future,” outright lies. The Trigan hegemony triumphantly bringing peace and good will to the surrounding provinces and also ushering foreign nationals to its shores—this triumph of Western civilization resembling a fairy tale vision of the beneficent Pax Romana  transferred to a semi-futuristic “Europe” bordered by barbarians and villains.

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Consider more carefully the two pages shown above. The Lokan artillery divisions with their modern helmets are laying waste to a field of Trigan tanks (which look curiously like mutant combinations of a German Tiger and Panther tank) in a bravura display of destruction by Lawrence. Time and again throughout his tenure on the series, Lawrence would display his mastery of smoke, fire, and the implements of war.The retreating armies of the Trigans are not in the familiar bowl-shaped caps of the British infantry, nor the ceremonial galeas often seen on the heads of Trigo (the emperor) and his retinue. Instead, we find the equally familiar round helmets of the German army (the Nazis were of course enamored of all things Roman).

Perhaps the Nazis simply had the most attractive uniforms and the best looking tanks. The British made toy tanks I was given as a child included not only a suitably patriotic Saladin but also a German Tiger tank and a Jagdpanther. When you’re producing two water-colored pages (or more) every week for a children’s magazine, you can probably be forgiven for reaching for the coolest military ephemera at hand, particularly those which would be most attractive and recognizable to a young audience.

Yet it is hard to resist the suggestion here of an alternate history where the “civilizing” force of the Nazis has encompassed an entire continent producing a land of general tolerance, as well as law and order. A careful discussion of politics was beyond the remit of the series but the script clearly shows a subtle understanding of history out of keeping with its primary purpose as entertainment for under 10 year olds. A history where Churchill is both celebrated as a national hero and reviled as a man of unholy inclinations as demonstrated by his following statements:

 “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.” (12 May 1919)

“I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas… It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.” (6th July 1944)

When Toth Zandu’s deceit is finally discovered, Peric— the wisest man on Elekton, and clearly modeled on a stateless Greek—decides that history must be altered. But not only in order to deceive Zandu but to cover up their own foolishness:

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In this sense, “The Man from the Future” affirms that history is not only written by the victors but also to preserve the dignity of the ruling class. If there was any semblance of tyranny or embarrassment in the record of the Trigan Empire, it has been systematically but ineffectively wiped out. For there is another unspoken question at the end of this tale. As I have mentioned, the comics which comprise The Trigan Empire are supposed to be histories in themselves.  Who then wrote this “correct” history of Elekton and uncovered Peric’s deception?

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle concerns just such a history where the Axis have triumphed and the “yanks” are now the “white barbarian Neanderthals.” Yet the reality of this physical apprehension is questioned by the book within a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The fake “antiques” peddled by another character, Frank Frink, are authenticated by mere pieces of paper as Wyndam-Matson (Frink’s employer) relates to an audience of one:

 ” ‘..a gun goes through a famous battle…and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.’ He tapped his head. ‘In the mind, not the gun.’..[ ]…’I’d have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it’s all a fake, a mass delusion. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!'”

In melding the objects of war and civilization almost indiscriminately and in professing the wavering basis of the historical record, “The Man from the Future” partakes (if on a more elementary level) of this turmoil in historicity. For it calls into the question the entire beneficent record of the Trigans.

Like a scribe taking in the history of European man a millennium hence, it provides a panorama of Western civilization—the histories contiguous and undifferentiated by mere national boundaries. It relates a heroic and selective history of the Greeks and Romans but also communicates more subtly the devices of Fascism (and Hitler in particular); indulging simultaneously in the belief that all men are created equal while holding to disfiguring conceptions of everything without the borders of the empire—a surreptitious and perhaps unwitting interrogation of the basis of Western civilization from the perspective of a Boy’s Own adventure comic.

 

Just a Dull Thing In His Dream

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The Total Recall remake is almost Platonic in that it’s pristinely superfluous. Remakes always feel more than a little pointless, but at least when you watch something like The Thing remake, or the I Spit On Your Grave remake, you get a sense that the people making the film actually liked the original… or at least saw it. Director Len Wiseman, though, has no discernible affection for his source material, nor anything to say to it.  The film is one long, uninvolving chase sequence, through which Colin Farrell (Douglas Quaid) wanders like a mildly confused puppy; in comparison with his bland performance, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990s original comes across like Laurence Olivier.  Jessica Biel (Melina) is even less involving, if such a thing is possible. Only Kate Beckinsale as Quaid’s “wife” Lori makes any pretense to watchability, throwing herself into the Queen Bitch/assassin role with welcome relish.  She still doesn’t have anything like the vindictive charge that Sharon Stone did in the original—but in this turkey, every flicker of adequacy counts.

What’s odd is that Total Recall‘s utter awfulness is, in some ways, true to its roots—not the 1990 movie, but the 1966 Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”  Dick’s story was not awful in itself, exactly. Rather, it was meta-awful, a semi-parody, dealing explicitly with the crappiness of its own genre.

In the story, loser clerk Douglas Quaid wants to go to Mars, which is to say, he wants to be in a science-fiction story. He clings to this dream even when his wife suggests a real-life vacation. “A dream, I bet,” his wife sneers at him, “you’re always full of them.”

Quaid is indeed full of dreams… and those dreams are all real. This is true in the narrative: when Quaid goes to Rekal, Incorporated to have memories of a Mars trip implanted, he discovers that he has in fact already been to Mars as a mind-wiped secret agent. But Quaid’s vision is true more broadly as well. He imagines that he is a character in a genre narrative—and he is, in fact, a character in a genre narrative.

These are, moreover, idiotic, and are specifically referred to, and thought of within the story, as idiotic. Quaid’s desire to go to Mars is presented as infantile silliness. But even worse is the end of the story, where Quaid sits for another memory implant, this one based on his deepest desires. He apparently has long had a fantasy in which, as a child, he meets an alien race which declares that its plans to destroy the earth. Quaid treats them with such kindness that they decide to wait to destroy the world until he dies. This fantasy of a pious savior is, as one character remarks, “the most grandiose fantasy I ever ran across”—a quintessence of preposterous self-centeredness.  And within the story his self-centeredness turns out to be entirely validated. Quaid really is the center of the universe; he really did meet those aliens, and when he dies, so does the world. Which, again, is not just true, but meta-true: Quaid is the main character, and Philip K. Dick built the story, and the universe, for him and around him.

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” then, doesn’t so much reveal hidden depths as it flips open to pull the outside in. The title is a promise, not just to Quaid, but to the person flipping the pages. What it promised, specifically, is dreams, and in this case the dream that is promised is a dream of a dream. The story is a fantasy about having a fantasy, which means it’s in some sense not a fantasy at all.

The 1990 movie replaced the story’s recursive puzzle-box structure with camp, but the end effect is not dissimilar. Sharon Stone’s performance, in particular, is a masterpiece of self-referential cheese. She plays Quaid’s wife Lori as a perfect saccharine romantic glob of gush, all kittenish blonde affirmation and vacuous sex appeal—until the moment Quaid leaves for work, when her face goes blank and dull, like a performer after the camera’s turned off. After Quaid discovers that Lori’s a killer spy… she still keeps up the performance, assuring him that he was the best assignment ever and urging him to tie her up (“I never knew you were so kinky,” Schwarzenegger deadpans.) She tells him that their whole marriage is a fake, and it takes a moment to register that she’s speaking the absolute truth. The marriage isn’t real; it’s a staged performance—and so her artificial staginess, rather than undercutting verisimilitude, enacts it. When Stone “appears” on Mars to tell Quaid that he’s in a psychotic fugue state and his whole adventure is happening in his head, she’s acting the part of acting a part. The whole adventure really is in the audience’s head; the performance really is a performance, and Stone’s weirdly context-less over-sincerity, pleading earnestly with Quaid as if they’re both on a soap opera soundstage, rather than on Mars only underlines the truth that they are, in fact, on a soundstage, not on Mars. Genre, in this case, is the lie that tells the truth; if you have a transparent trope, the transparency, at least, is solid.

The half-assed 2012 remake, then, is a fitting addition to the series. It’s nothing but a third-rate genre exercise, but Dick’s story is precisely about the embarrassing appeal of third-rate genre exercises. As the memory programmer comments in Dick’s story:

“Programming an artificial memory of a trip to another planet —with or without the added fillip of being a secret agent—showed up on the firm’s work-schedule with monotonous regularity… ersatz planetary travel has become our bread and butter.”

The remake doesn’t actually involve interplanetary travel, but the point stands. People’s deepest fantasies aren’t individual desires; they’re repetitive genre product which can be purchased wholesale. Quaid’s fantasies are the most real things about him, and they are as generically tedious as the reality from which they are a putative escape. For Philip K. Dick, or some iteration of him, we are just bad remakes of someone else’s dream.

The Future Will Be Stupid…Today!

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After watching Minority Report last night, I was surprised to discover that most critics do not consider it to be an utter and complete piece of crap. Roger Ebert, in particular, had an absolutely gushing review, in which he praised the film for being “a thriller and a human story, a movie of ideas that’s also a whodunit.”

Ebert is by all accounts a lovely human being, but every time I read something by him, I am reminded that he does not have the critical sense that God gave a roach. Even an insect that frolics in filth would be hard pressed to find any enjoyment in such a shiny, treacly, turkey of a film. Spielberg as director has found perhaps the perfect outlet for his glibness in this tale of precognitive saviors. The film grinds frictionlessly along, a remorselessly predictable blueprint for itself. Flawed hero, tragic backstory, clever chase scene, cleverer chase scene, cleverest chase scene, false antagonist, twist, real antagonist, reconciliation with perfectly domestic yet also spunky wife. Like the precogs, we can see it all coming and all going too; painful echoes of sentiment past sliding down our brainstems as we float weightlessly in an infinite vat of sentimental horseshit.

The emotional core of the film is (you could predict it) the tragic backstory I mentioned. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is a efficient no-nonsense police guy in the precrime unit, snooping out murders before they happen. Beneath his gruff exterior and Hollywood good looks, though, lurks a sadness; his 5-year old disappeared from a public pool. Anderton’s marriage collapsed, and now he takes drugs (ooooh…dark) and watches 3-D home movies of his son and wife. His heart is tugged while watching them and our heart is tugged while watching him; it’s a testament to the power of film and to “complex human feelings”, in Ebert’s words.

Said complex human feelings being: hey, losing a kid — that really sucks. If that happens to you, you’ve got to be deep, right? That is the extent of the film’s character development; Anderton has no other discernible personality traits; nor does his wife. The film’s stupid, by-the-numbers plot, it’s utterly facile and familiar characters, are all supposed to be redeemed by dropping a murdered five-year old onto them from a great height.

Before I had a kid myself, I found this sort of mindless, self-serving manipulation unpleasant. Now that I have a child of my own, who is actually a person rather than a trope, I find it even more detestable. At the end of the film, Anderton indignantly yells at his stupid standard-issue corrupt boss for manipulating his love for his child. Rarely have I seen a moment of such utterly clueless hypocrisy. The whole film is nothing but a giant machine designed to turn unearned pathos into critical bona fides. The closing scene with Anderton, where reunited with his now pregnant wife he touches her stomach, is a blindingly offensive capstone to a thoroughly offensive film, a smug reassuring happy-ending which obligatorily replaces one blank child-marker with another. The kids are just there to make us interested in the utterly uninteresting “star”; a dead child for motivation in the bulk of the story; a live one to wrap things up neatly. What could be wrong with that?

It hardly seems worth mentioning, but the movie looks dreadful too — all smooth lines and computer graphics, a future as streamlined Disneyland, where even the poverty and grime look like part of an amusement park ride, and cops invade everyone’s civil liberties with cute animated spiders that make you wish you could get warrantless retinal scans too. Maybe the precogs could foresee a worse filmmaker than Steven Spielberg sometime in the far future, but right now, as far as I’m concerned, he’s got no challengers.

Meta-Dumb

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Source Code marks a watershed moment in Hollywood’s assimilation of Philip K. Dick. From direct lifts like Blade Runner and Total Recall to bastardized second-hand derivations such as The Matrix, PKD’s obsessive relationship with reality and that reality’s breakdown has become a staple of Hollywood sci-fi.  At one time, a sci-fi movie meant ray guns and spaceships and hyper-warp-drives and green-skinned girls who needed to be taught the meaning of love. And I guess they can still be about those things, more or less…but generally everybody prefers it if the green-skinned girl is a mental projection of an android locked in a magic matrix. Heroism is best when sprinkled with paranoia, and technobabble is always improved when leavened with facile ontological speculation.

And so Source Code. This movie is not based on a PKD novel or story. It’s just a dumb Hollywood film, and a dumb Hollywood sci-fi film is now a sci-fi film that includes PKD as part of its DNA. Director Duncan Jones has nothing to say about being or reality—not even something stupid to say, like The Matrix. The PKD elements in this film have no meaning. They’re there for the same reason that Michelle Monaghan is playing a blandly spunky nonentity named Christina and for the same reason that Jake Gyllenhall has that stubble and raffish smile. None of it is intended to make a point or prompt a thought. It’s included solely because it’s what you want from your movies.

Not that I hated the film. After all, I’m a lot like everybody else. I think Michelle Monaghan is cute, and, what the hell, Jake Gyllenhall too. Moreover, there is something breathtaking in the film’s self-referential glorification of its own rampant insubstantiality. The pseudo-scientific explanations are delivered with an insouciant bone-headedness; someone babbles about parabolic logic and after-images in human brains and then, hey presto! Our hero Colter Stevens goes back to relive the same eight minutes in somebody else’s life before a Chicago commuter train blows up. Why? How? Is he reliving the actual destruction of the train? Is he reliving a memory? Who knows? Who cares?  The point is…err? What exactly is the point?

Diagetically, who knows? Extra-diagetically, though, the movie is mostly about patting itself on the back for its own wonderfulness in being a movie (starring Jake Gyllenhall!) Like an actor, Colter takes over someone else’s life (Sean Fentriss). Like a movie star, inhabiting another person doesn’t change his appearance at all; he still looks and behaves like the same Gyllenhall we know and love. And, as in all movie-making, the same scene is redone over and over again; Jake goes back on the train to relive the same eight minutes and back on the train to relive the same eight minutes and back on the train to relive the same eight minutes, all at the orders of the vaguely sinister, crippled (crippled=sinister!) director figure Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright.)

There are various ins and outs and you learn The Shocking Truth About Colter at one point and there are moral dilemmas and whatnot. But! Eventually Gyllenhall/Colter/Sean gets the scene perfectly right by (a) saving the world as per the action/adventure genre, and (b) acting all cute/nutty/in-touch-with-his-feelings and thereby sweetly connecting with the girl of his dreams as per the romantic comedy genre. The gratuitously preposterous manner in which the happy ending is dropped from a great height upon our protagonists is not a mistake or an oversight. It’s the film’s entire purpose.

PKD saw the gaps in reality as disturbing and ominous—a sign of our distance from God and truth. But Hollywood doesn’t fear unreality. On the contrary, ersatz pasteboard is Hollywood’s glory. Reality isn’t real, you say? That just makes it so much the easier to jury-rig the requisite inspirational conclusion! For Source Code the plot hole is the basic blueprint of existence. It’s the idiocy that assures us that—for half an hour at least, and in the movie’s own words—“everything is going to be okay.”
 

PKD Through History

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We had a little chatter about Philip K. Dick a couple weeks ago in comments, so I thought I’d reprint this tribute. It originally ran on Poor Mojo’s Almanac.
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I.
“France is the name of our starship,” Maximilien Robespierre tells Danton, “and France is the name of the planet from which we come. But the true France is our destination, the land of equality and virtue to which mankind has always been rising, which you and I shall finally attain!”

Robespierre straps on his blaster and inspects the ship. He checks each porthole for cracks, examines each control panel for tampering. He discovers seven men smuggling Thermidorian Brainburning Petals, sets his weapon to “Guillotine”, and executes them on the spot. He calls his crew together and paces in front of them. “Citizens,” he cries, “it has come to my attention that giant green alien psychic royalists are seeking to invade our democratic ship! Even now their agents may be teleporting on board; even now they may be among us, attempting to introduce their evil morale weakening substances into our untainted bloodstreams! We must be strong, we must be vigilant, we must shoot to kill anything we see that is green or giant or that demonstrates unnatural mental powers!

A ragged cheer rises from those assembled; the men raise their blasters, the women toss flowers. Already, though, Robespierre can see that several of the citizens are tinged with green; even some of the children appear to be larger than any three normal men. After he dismisses the assembly, Robespierre commands the ship’s computer to play patriotic songs, but still he feels weak and sad as he stands alone with Danton on the bridge. “It is hard,” he says, “this voyage, without knowing how long we must travel or exactly where we are going.”

“Yes it is,” Danton agrees. Robespierre notes that the other man does not move his lips when he speaks; as he watches, in fact, Danton grows enormous, his face becoming a vast expanse of green.

Robespierre retreats to his own quarters. He sits down at his plain desk and listens with eyes closed as the Muzak version of the “Marseillaise” drones from his nondescript terminal. “Computer,” he says. “What percent of the crew aboard this ship are aliens?”

“One hundred percent,” the computer says.

Robespierre nods. When he opens his eyes, he sees that his desk is covered with purple Thermidorian Bulbs.

“Computer,” he says again, keeping his voice steady. “Does that include me?”

“You are an alien,” the computer says.

Robespierre feels tears on his cheeks. All our efforts, he thinks. All the lives lost for nothing. We will not create a new age of reason, we will not free ourselves from tyranny. We will never reach France.

“Yes,” says the computer, although Robespierre did not speak aloud. “We are already heading back. We are returning to France.”

II.

Salesperson Immanuel Kant pitches over the counter medication on prime-time holovid. “Feeling down?” he asks, grinning furiously into the camera even as he pops a small white capsule into his mouth. “Are you depressed, dreary, anxious? Luckily for you, there’s a product that can help. After years of measuring, quantifying, parceling, and splicing, our scientists have finally discovered the formula for God. Caught in the middle of a nuclear holocaust, an alien invasion, a meteor shower, a messy divorce? Then try Numenol, the amazing drug that can make you divine! That’s Numenol — for fast, fast transcendence! Available in tablet or capsule.”

Unemployed Aerocar Repairman Immanuel Kant sits in his run-down apartment in the sky-bubble city of Konigsberg on the planet Jupiter and watches the salesperson on the holovid. “That’s what I need!” he thinks to himself. “Instant revelation — a way out of this mess of my life! ” He half turns on the couch to address his wife in the kitchen. “Say, honey,” he calls. “Have you heard of this new drug, Numenol ? I think I’m going to run down to the drugstore and pick some up!”

His wife, Supermarket Cashier Immanuel Kant, comes out of the kitchen. He smooths his dress. “Actually,” he says, “I bought some just the other day. The effects are very strange. Not at all as advertised.” He glances contemplatively out of the window. On the street below, underneath the towering atmosphere dome Immanuel Kant walks arm in arm with Immanuel Kant as Immanuel Kant navigates his aerocar amidst the skyscrapers in which Immanuel Kant attends meetings directed by Immanuel Kant concerning the new plans for a hundred Immanuel Kants to colonize yet another planet far off among the stars.

Night falls on Konigsberg and Immanuel Kant stands outside a holovid store. Behind the glass, five rows of 3-d images of Immanuel Kant jabber incessantly into the darkness. Immanuel Kant spits on the sidewalk in disgust. “A fine job you’ve done,” he says angrily. “I could have spent the rest of my days quietly enough here. I had problems, sure, but they weren’t insoluble. And now look at me! I’ve murdered a man on Venus and been raped in the Alpha Centuri system, down the block my wife hates me and on the other side of this world I’ve contracted a horrible disease that’s making my face melt. I have lice and a headache and a cold and I can’t find work or food or cash to pay the rent. I trusted you to make me God, and instead you’ve just made me more confused and miserable than I ever was before!”

The hologram Immanuel Kants each raise an admonishing index finger. “Now Immanuel,” they say. “We understand that things seem hopeless at the moment and that you feel like you’re no further along than you ever were. But we’d like to remind you that these things take time. We’ve gotten omnipresence now, so surely omnipotence and omniscience and eternal youth etc., won’t take us much longer. You’ve just got to have a little faith, keep smiling, and we assure you that you won’t be disappointed. Trust me. You have your own word on it.”

Kant turns from the screens, his fists clenched. But what can I do? he thinks. He looks up at the stars, shining high above the sleeping city, even as, in a spaceship somewhere far above the dome, he looks down upon Jupiter, upon himself. His hands relax, he draws a deep breath. Behind him, Immanuel Kant on the screens watches Immanuel Kant with shoulders slumped walk alone into the darkened town.

III.

Saint Bernadette looks out the window of her parents cubicle on Venus and sees a girl no larger than herself standing without any breathing equipment on the surface of the planet. She puts on her own respirator and goes outside.

“Why can you breath out here?” Bernadette asks.

“Que soy era Immaculado Conceptiou,” says the girl. “I am the Immaculate Conception, Mother of God.”

The Virgin Mary becomes an instant celebrity. She appears on talk shows and launches her own satellite to relay pre-taped advice round the clock. She personally visits as many family cubicles as she can. “I have been sent by Earthgov to let you all know the colonies have not been forgotten,” she says. “There is still a place for your souls on earth after death.” Everywhere the colonists are happier. Bernadette’s own parents begin to smile on occasion, where before they had been always silent and grim.

When Bernadette turns twenty, two policemen come to take her to a detention camp. “You are sick,” the first one explains. He is huge; his purple uniform stretches before her like a wall. “We’re very sorry to have to do this to a saint,” the second one says, gently taking her wrist. His eyes are blue and sad. “But you have asthma — we can’t allow such deviations. Our population must be pure if we want to continue to survive.”

“Mary could cure me,” Bernadette says.

“The policemen exchange glances. “Perhaps,” says the one with blue eyes.

At the camp Bernadette lives in a room with many other men and women. Some of them are lame, some are blind, some can’t hear. Every day they all go to the surface to farm the Venusian dust. Bernadette’s asthma grows much worse.

One night she wakes up and finds the blue-eyed policeman leaning over her. His flashlight casts eerie shadows on his face. “Are you awake?” he asks.

She nods, feels a shiver of fear. “Yes,” she says.

“Listen,” he says. He focuses on a spot to the left of her head. She notices that he is not wearing his hat — his hair is pale in the dim light. “Listen, I can see that you’re a loving type of person. I think that’s why you’re sick. I don’t think you have asthma at all. It’s psychosomatic, a symptom — it’s a kind of cry for affection. This world, Venus, it pulls us apart from each other.” He reaches out awkwardly, takes her hand in his own. “I want to help you,” he says, “If you’ll love me….”

Bernadette looks in disbelief at her own hand in the policeman’s grip. He thinks I’m going to get better because he says so, she thinks distantly. He’s as sick as me, sicker. He has no grip on reality at all.

“Leave me alone,” she says aloud. Her breath whistles as she inhales. There is a shallowness in her chest.

The policeman lets go of her hand. He takes a step back and shines the light at her face, so she can’t see him at all. “All right,” he says. His voice is ugly with anger. “If that’s the way you want it. I know your game. You’re too good for me, right? You want to be sick so your precious Virgin can come and heal you. Well, let me tell you something. The Virgin, she doesn’t exist, see? She’s an android. And Earthgov didn’t even send it, either, because Earth’s been a dead planet for years now — they blew themselves up long ago. It was Venusgov that built Mary, to raise morale among the stupid farmer underlings like you. So how do you like that? You just gave up your chance to live for the sake of a machine.”

Bernadette lies alone in the dark as the policeman stamps down the long hallway to the door, slams it behind him. She wonders if anyone else in the whole room is awake. She can’t hear over the sounds of her own gasping breaths. She sucks air into her lungs as hard as she can, but she can’t get enough. That man’s killed me, she realizes. I don’t even want to live now. She tries to convince herself that he was lying, but she can’t do it. He had seemed so confident and she has no energy. Everything is taken up by the need for the next breath, and the next. The Virgin a robot, she thinks. But she wasn’t lying. Made without intercourse. Soldered and hammered, rather. Immaculate Conception.

The room fades, disappearing into black as Bernadette’s strength ebbs. Then there is blinding light. Mary bends down, takes Bernadette in strong metal arms.

“Will you heal me?” Bernadette asks. “Will you take me to Earth?”

“All are healed,” Mary says. “All are taken to Earth.” Around the room, from every bed, the crippled rise dancing on metal limbs, the blind open photoelectric eyes, the mute begin to sing from stereo voice boxes. Mary’s face is a painted mask of tenderness as Bernadette inhales with plastic lungs the poisoned air of Earth.

IV.

Philip K. Dick leaps from his chair, suddenly awake. “I had a dream!” he exclaims. “A dream that all of history had turned into my novels, that I was writing the script of reality!” He blinks twice rapidly, scratches his beard and looks around the room. The party has ground to a tired end; no one is listening to him. Maximilien Robespierre lies unconscious on the couch. Saint Bernadette sits on the bare wood floor, sucking on an unlit hash pipe and staring wide-eyed at the toe of her shoe. Immanuel Kant leans on a broken lamp, wearing underwear, socks, and an expression of dazed befuddlement.

Phil isn’t discouraged. He raises his voice, waves his arms, downs a fistful of amphetamines. “So what that means,” he shouts, “is that when I die is the Apocalypse, when I stop writing for a moment everything stops! We’re not even here right now since I’m not at the typewriter!”

Kant lets go of the lamp, crosses his arms on his chest, shouts something inarticulate and falls to the floor with a crash. Friedan has woken up and is making a vague effort to roll Robespierre off the couch. Bernadette begins coughing violently.

Phil bites his lip. He looks from Kant to Bernadette to Robespierre to Friedan. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says. “I have to get going…got work to do, got to bring you all into being!” But he doesn’t leave. Instead he takes two hesitant steps forward and squats down beside Bernadette. She is still coughing. “Stop that,” he pleads. Instead she coughs harder, bending so far forward that her face almost touches the ground. The hash pipe falls from her fingers and the burnt ashes jump from the bowl, scatter across the floor. Phil stares at them helplessly. They look like a burning spaceship, a metal hand, a frightening alien face. Still he keeps looking, desperately hoping to find some pattern beyond indifference and pain, some way to create the world.