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.”
Director Duncan Jones has nothing to say about being or reality—not even something stupid to say, like The Matrix.
I was thinking about the Matrix the other day, and how much it really does seem to be a metaphor for the 90s Bubble Economy. Just that pervasive sense that prosperity isn’t real.
It is amazing yet predictable that with a writer with such a prolific and fertile imagination as PK Dick, that rather than dip back into his stories for more ideas, or even, horrors, try adapting some other of the millions of great science fiction stories by the many other brilliant writers of the genre, Hollywood dipshits would prefer to play it safe and moronic by remaking Total Recall.
Heh. PKD is kind of perfect for any discussion of late capitalism, I think. Ubik is explicitly about marketing gobbledygook as gnostic false reality, if I remember right….
James, I just saw the Total Recall remake…which is quite bad. I have an essay later this week at Splice about how PKD kind of predicts his own empty iteration, though…
Yeah, Ubik would make an interesting film as would 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich or almost anything else Dick wrote. But instead we get people making them into crap and most of the time it seems that they don’t even read the original stories first. Or, that they take all the best parts out to make them. I suppose A Scanner Darkly was pretty faithful but I wasn’t too thrilled with the rotoscoping approach.
All of science fiction is a tremendous reservior to select from but instead we have scifi channel with endless regurgitations of the same old Star Wars variations. At this point I hate fucking Star Wars and Lucas should be crushed under a horde made up of rotting ephemera printed with text about his “modern mythology”.
I love Palmer Eldritch, though don’t quite know how anyone would film it.
I still like the effects and look of the original star wars, especially Jim Henson’s contributions. But yeah, anyone who takes it seriously as a philosophical statement is obviously setting themselves up for ridicule.
Palmer Eldritch could make a great video game, though, especially if the player could never definitely know whether he or she has won…or indeed has played the game at all…
Chew-z 4 me, see?
From Tom Tomorrow: “The Republican Matrix”: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kittykowalski/76694164/#/photos/kittykowalski/76694164/lightbox/
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I still like the effects and look of the original star wars, especially Jim Henson’s contributions. But yeah, anyone who takes it seriously as a philosophical statement is obviously setting themselves up for ridicule.
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On the other hand:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Matrix-Philosophy-Welcome-Popular/dp/081269502X ,
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophers-Explore-Matrix-Christopher-Grau/dp/0195181077/ref=pd_sim_b_3 ,
http://www.amazon.com/Like-Splinter-Your-Mind-Philosophy/dp/1405125241/ref=pd_sim_b_1 ,
http://www.amazon.com/More-Matrix-Philosophy-Revolutions-Reloaded/dp/0812695720/ref=pd_sim_b_5 .
Oh, but wait:
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Philosophy-Powerful-Possibly/dp/0812695836/ref=pd_sim_b_4
And…sheesh!:
http://www.amazon.com/Batman-Philosophy-Knight-Blackwell-Culture/dp/0470270306/ref=pd_sim_b_3
In all fairness, looking at details of the last — which looked like the silliest — it looks like they’re just using the well-known mythos of the character in order to highlight philosophical questions…
At least the “original” Total Recall movie had its own identity within the director’s oeuvre (i.e. trashy, violent sleaze). Still, it didn’t even touch the real conceit of the original short story, which is more interesting than the rather trite angle of “oh, maybe his memories are real…or are they?”.
IMO, A Scanner Darkly is by far the best PKD adaptation. It really captured the feature of PKD that no other film seems interested in capturing, viz. that life in the future is dreary and banal, just like life in the present. All those covers to PKD’s books with shiny, gleaming and exciting future-worlds are completely wrong-headed; the best cover for a PKD book would show a low-level white-collar middle-aged dude watching TV, being hassled by his wife. Instead, we mostly get films that take the most obvious and easily adaptable feature, viz. the science-fiction “high concept”.
Noah, any chance of a PKD roundtable?
I like the idea of reading “The Matrix” as a metaphor for the bubble economy. If taken as an expression of anxiety over fake prosperity (as opposed to say a post-structuralist commentary on the real) it seems a lot more prescient.
I liked Total Recall way more than Scanner Darkly. The rotoscoping is ugly, like James said…and I had other problems with it. Total Recall isn’t a work of genius or anything, but it’s campiness is a nice analog to PKD’s interest in falseness and fascimile.
I honestly hadn’t thought of a PKD roundtable, but yeah, that would be a lot of fun. Got a kind of big project in September, as you know, but maybe remind me after that and we’ll see if we can give it a shot.
I wonder…should it just be a general PKD roundtable, or focus on a single book…? Anyone have strong feelings?
As people often say when they have aesthetic disagreements: that [i.e. the ugliness] is a feature, not a bug. A PKD adaptation should look drab and unglamorous, as brown as a Vertigo comic. Blade Runner looks a lot more like Scott and Mead than Dick, for just that reason.
Rotoscoping doesn’t look drab and unglamorous; it looks stupid. PKD’s prose was sublime in its clumsiness; rotoscoping looks like somebody with no aesthetic sense just poured slick vomit over everything.
I’d be all for a smaller-than-life PKD film; old-style BBC klutziness would be lovely. But Scanner Darkly wasn’t that.
I’m up for a PDK fest! Dibs on “We Can Build You.”
I’m for the PKD fest too.
The most interesting adaptation I’ve seen for PKD didn’t even touch his SF. It was a French screen version of his mainstream novel, ‘Confessions of a Crap Eater’, released under the title ‘Confessions d’un Barjot’.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Rotoscoping doesn’t look drab and unglamorous; it looks stupid. PKD’s prose was sublime in its clumsiness; rotoscoping looks like somebody with no aesthetic sense just poured slick vomit over everything.
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Heh…bravo!
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…Total Recall isn’t a work of genius or anything, but it’s campiness is a nice analog to PKD’s interest in falseness and fascimile.
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“Total Recall” was fun; still its greatest moment was the most unsettlingly Philip K. Dickian: when…
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…Quaid encounters…Recall’s President, Dr. Edgemar. Edgemar insists Quaid is living out the implanted memories, and offers Quaid a pill that would wake him from the dream. Quaid refuses to take the pill when he sees Edgemar sweating…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall
Alas for Hollywood, PKD stories often have depressing endings; for instance, the Spielberg film of “Minority Report” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_%28film%29 ) ends happily, with its hero (“changed from a balding and out-of-shape old man to an athletic officer in his 40s”) exposing the fallibility of Precrime, thus scuttling the program. While ((SPOILER ALERT)) in the story, “Anderton commits his predicted murder to reinforce the validity of his flawed system but in doing so, proves its correctness.” ( http://www.enotes.com/minority-report-salem/minority-report )
Can’t find a detailed synopsis of the story, but the pretty good “Impostor” ( http://www.philipkdick.com/films_other.html ) movie had an ending which sure feels PKD’ish in its lack of uplift…
I agree that the pill episode is perhaps the movie’s high point…in no small part because of Sharon Stone, who is pretty much the best thing in the film.
The best moment of that film is hands-down when Arnold, wearing a towel on his head, pops open that screen with himself on it, saying “Get ready for a big surprise — you are not really you, you are me”. In his put on Austrian accent, it is simply hilarious. I miss the days when Arnold was like that.
I’d be up for a Dick roundtable too.
I think Total Recall may be Schwarzenegger’s best performance? He actually comes across as vulnerable at times, which is weird and pretty great.
Lots of enthusiasm for a PKD roundtable it looks like…I’ll definitely keep it in mind.
Keep not! DO!!
— Yoda Buchet
I’d be up for a Dick free-for-all. Hmm, that sounded more gay than I meant.
I’m totally up for this. Dick enthusiasts unite!
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