Monday Morning Media Quarterback

Philip K. Dick led a Hollywood life and life after death.  “Dick had five failed marriages, wrote most of his novels while gobbling amphetamines and in the grips of  paranoia or religious visions, felt always the outsider” before his death at 53.

The troubled visionary thing is very romantic. It’s convenient for his legend and the PhD. student-like acolytes that Dick is dead, gone more than 25 years now. One of the greatest writers America has ever produced, Ray Bradbury, is still around and kicking, even outliving his favorite bookstores, but he’s not appreciated in the same cultish way as Dick.

A hack science fiction writer, Dick is best known as the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which became the film Bladerunner just after his death in 1982. Hollywood loves Dick, “His ideas turned out to be pitch-perfect for a Digital Age that wanted science fiction not just about aliens but also about the alienated.”

So Dick has had a Hollywood resurrection, with Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, Paul Verhoeven’s (and hilariously, Arnold Schwartzenneger’s) Total Recall, John Woo’s Paycheck, the crummy Nicholas Cage movie Next, the equally crummy Screamers and one of the best, A Scanner Darkly, the unhinged and drug-addled rotoscope masterpiece by Richard Linklater, starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson.

Kurt Vonnegut was probably Dick’s true contemporar.  Both for years were struggling sci-fi writers hacking out story after story. Vonnegut, who died only last year, (no cult for him, then) suffered from a problem opposite to that of Dick. Vonnegut’s books were critically acclaimed and mainstream successes, but the films made from them have left little impact.

A debate rages about the quality of Dick’s writing and the depth of his ideas. John Brunner, writing in 1966(!), said Dick’s ideas included “The empty world; the use of power; illusion substituting for reality; the malleability of externals under the influence of psychosis or drugs; the conflict between chance and determinism.” To which I would add “What is consciousness?” and of course “What is human?”

I’ve been reading Dick’s collected stories. Many are memorable, often with a visceral twist worthy of O.Henry. But the characters are often just stereotypes, particularly the women (at least they’re usually big-or conical-breasted).

Even the memorable Roy Batty only really came to life in the movies, thanks to Rutger Hauer and Ridley Scott.  So Dick would probably have been the first to appreciate the irony of his posthumous popularity in an era when the “average 15- to 24-year old…reads 8 minutes a day.”