With two volumes of his novels being reissued by the Library of America, the science fiction author Philip K. Dick appears finally to have achieved the kind of mainstream respectability that eluded him during his life—something that this profoundly subversive writer may well have relished and been deeply suspicious of in equal measure.  Science fiction was always something of a pretext for Dick; he had relatively little interest in the futuristic, technological, or predictive sides of the genre.  Instead, its forms and conventions afforded him the imaginative freedom to explore more basic questions concerning the human condition: the nature of identity, mental illness, the fragility of reality—all themes he would obsessively return to in his work. 

His influence is perhaps most strongly felt in film—beyond the novels and stories that have been made into movies (including the four in this series), his dark, paranoid sensibility has permeated science fiction films from The Matrix to Berlin and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Much of Dick’s appeal to filmmakers rests in the pulp-ish quality of his work.  This is especially evident in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), adapted from the short story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Although widely regarded as being among the finest science fiction movies made (despite its initial financial and critical failure), it feels less like a science fiction film than it does a noir film that happens to be set in the future.  Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a detective given the job of tracking and destroying four mutinous replicants—android slave workers that have escaped from an off-colony world in search of their creator.  More even than its dramatization of Dick’s preoccupying question of what it means to be human—how do we know we’re human? how do we know what’s real?—it is Scott’s visual articulation of the future as a seedy, dilapidated landscape of dark, rain-soaked streets, all entropy, decline and abandonment, that secured the film’s place as a cult classic.

The clones in Impostor might be regarded as perfected replicants—identical copies of human originals, complete with memories, only they also carry small nuclear bombs in their chests.  Gary Fleder’s 2001 film is, in fact, the second adaptation of Dick’s 1953 story of the same name.  Gary Sinese plays Spencer Olham, a top-secret government weapons designer who is arrested by a clandestine government organization on suspicion of being a clone created by the hostile alien race wanting to take over Earth.  The organization captured an alien transmission that stated that Olham’s clone was going to assassinate the chancellor when he came into contact with her, but Olham defends his humanity.

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of another short story, Minority Report (2002), considers the paradoxes of a world transformed by the existence of precognitive mutants who have the ability to see into the future.  Differences in their “reports” presupposes the possibility of alternative futures, which is only hope Precrime Police Commissioner John A. Anderton (Tom Cruise) has once it is predicted that he will murder a man he has never heard of in the next 36 hours.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) may be most faithful adaptation of any of Dick’s works; it returns to the theme of the dangerous fluidity of identity and the notion that reality may be just a construct imposed upon us by some external, malevolent force (more than likely a faceless corporation or sinister government).  Set in a totalitarian society in a near future (which, again, differs little from our present), undercover detective Bob Arctor is working with a small time group of drug users trying to reach the big distributors of a highly addictive and brain-damaging drug called Substance D.  Arctor begins to develop severe cognitive problems associated with his Substance D use, resulting in an inability to distinguish between his roles as drug user and undercover policeman, placing him in the unfortunate position of having to investigate himself without realizing it.  Written and directed by Richard Linklater, the film was initially shot digitally and then animated using a technique called interpolated rotoscoping.

Join us as we explore these four films Thursdays at 3pm in the Community Meeting Room.

July 10—Blade Runner
July 24—Impostor
August 7—Minority Report
August 21—A Scanner Darkly

This event sponsored by the Rye Free Reading Room.

This event is tagged Teens - Adult - Movies -

This event will be repeated on:

• Thursday, August 21, 2008 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM