5 Ways Philip K Dick's Insanity Changed the World of Movies
Sometimes you see a movie with a real mindfuck of a plot and you think, "Who the hell thinks up this stuff?"
It's pretty much one guy. His movies are on the way to grossing a billion dollars, but the man himself died broke, not having lived to see any of them.
Also, he was insane.
#5.
You Are a Fan of Philip K Dick, Whether You Know it or Not
His name was Philip K. Dick, and if you haven't heard of him you should try reading those words that appear on the screen at the start of a movie sometime. He was a prolific but not hugely popular sci-fi writer from the 1950s until his death in 1982, but now Hollywood seems determined to adapt every single one of the man's 44 novels and 120 short stories. Have you seen the new Matt Damon movie The Adjustment Bureau? About a politician who finds out that all of reality is in fact controlled by supernatural men in hats with the ability to stop time?
They use it the same way we'd use it: to watch people fuck.
It's adapted from a Philip K Dick short story, and it's typical Dick -- at the center is a likable everyman who finds out that reality is not what it seems. If you haven't seen that one, you've probably seen at least half of these Dick adaptations:
1982: Blade Runner -- Harrison Ford stars as an everyman cop who figures out he might be a robot in disguise.
1990: Total Recall -- Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as an everyman construction worker who figures out he might be living in a computer simulation, or is a secret agent who has been programmed with a false personality.
Some adaptations are...looser, than others.
1995: Screamers -- Peter "RoboCop" Weller stars as an everyman soldier who realizes the human enemies he thought he was fighting are actually robots in disguise.
2002: Minority Report -- Tom Cruise is an everyman cop who realizes the pre-crime unit he works for is not what it seems.
Man, you could spam dozens of YouTube comment #2es at a time with a computer like that.
2003: Paycheck -- Ben Affleck is an everyman engineer who finds his memory has been wiped and the job he has taken is not what it seems.
2006: A Scanner Darkly -- Keanu Reeves is an everyman who inhabits a world of hallucinations and "scrambled" agents where no one is what they seem.
2007: Next -- Nicolas Cage can see two minutes into the future or some shit.
Just skip this one.
That's not even a complete list. Eleven freaking stories from this one guy have been turned into movies, and right now no fewer than six more are being developed for film by the likes of Michel Gondry and Ridley Scott, including a Total Recall reboot starring Colin Farrell.
Name us one single writer, anywhere, from any genre, who can say the same (Dick was already the most adapted sci-fi author in film history several movies ago). And that's not even getting into all the movies that borrowed from Dick (aka The Truman Show, Inception, Vanilla Sky, The Matrix -- and then you have directors like Darren Aronofsky who refer to him as an influence).
"I'd like to thank Philip K. Dick and the half-liter of LSD I take with my cheerios every morning."
"Wow", you're no doubt thinking. "It must have been sweet to write all those stories that inspired hit movies. No doubt this Philip K. Dick was constantly lounging by the pool with Harrison Ford and had tons of money and was completely sane. lol Dick."
Unfortunately...
#4.
Dick Was Broke When He Died
Philip K Dick passed away just before Blade Runner came out and the Hollywood gold rush began. Even during the most profitable time of his career from 1965-1968. he was only making about $12,000 a year. For instance, in the early 50's when he wrote Paycheck he ironically was so poor he had to buy horse meat from a pet shop to survive.
We've all been there, Phil. Some of us go back from time to time when we're making fajitas.
Meanwhile, the $15 million Ben Affleck made from starring in the (shitty) adaptation was enough for Affleck to eat a different thoroughbred racehorse for dinner every day for the next three years. We're not saying that's what he did with the money of course, just that he should be man enough to come forward and admit it, and apologize to the foals for making them watch.
Twenty-plus years into his career, Dick was so broke that Robert Heinlein, an author who was his polar opposite, offered to buy him a typewriter. By the way, this was around the same time in his life that Dick began to believe he was traveling to ancient Rome, courtesy of a time travelling alien who visited him in his sleep.
Via Wikipedia Commons
"I'mf Philip K. Dick, and this terrifying android replica of me is less crazy than literally every sentence I ever uttered."
#3.
Did We Mention He Was Also Crazy?
And here's where the story takes a positively Dickian twist.
Audiences love these movies because of the patented "what's real and what's not" mindfuck twists. And it appears that Dick wrote them because he, himself, didn't know what was real. Dick was paranoid and may have been schizophrenic.
In other words, his mental illness has sold tens of millions of tickets.
Stay tuned for our next article, "7 Unexpected Benefits of Unmedicated Schizophrenia".
From the age of 7, Dick experienced vertigo so severe it led to him feeling completely disconnected from reality. When he started writing full time in the 50's he'd get paid about $20 per short story, which led to the formation of his amphetamine habit as he used to lock himself away with his drugs and his typewriter writing 68 pages a day (by comparison, writing machine Stephen King does 10 pages a day).
Then in February and March of 1974, Dick believed he started receiving a series of communications from an entity that he called VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligent System. These were delivered via an "information-rich pink beam" that transmitted directly into his mind. At first the messages were in the form of laser beams and geometric patterns, eventually they involved him living a double live as a persecuted Christian in Rome during the first century A.D. He ended up writing about these experiences in the books VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth and an 8,000 page long journal he called Exegesis. Here's one of his journal entries on the subject:
That pink beam is shooting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep into his brain right now.
"March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing."
Dick claimed that at one point VALIS informed him that his son's life was in danger from an undiagnosed hernia. Dick took his son to the hospital, the hernia was discovered and operated on and his son's life was saved.
It's okay if you need to take a few minutes to piece your shattered concept of reality back together. We'll wait.
You don't have to be crazy to write mind-bending science fiction, but it apparently helps. Many of Dick's stories revolve around questions about the nature of reality, schizophrenia, paranoia, drug use, religion and hallucinogenic imagery. Whether any of these are related to the fact that all his pre 1970 stories were written while high on amphetamines we'll leave for you to decide, but they totally were. The man would mix offworld colonies, cold war politics, Tibetan theology, corny advertising jingles, psionic powers, sentient jellies and small scale domestic drama. Not just in the same book -- all those elements could easily appear in the same paragraph.
We're shocked that Philip K. Dick-style writing isn't taught in any Writer's Workshops.
As soon as I saw this article on my Recommended delight I yelled with delight, for Dick is my favourite author ever. Great article!
ReplyDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, well, he was married, his real sheep had died and he'd replaced it with a replicant sheep so the neighbours wouldn't know. It was a status thing to have one of the last few surviving animals. To get Decker to do the job, he was promised a real live racehorse... Not in the movie so America could have another Harrison Ford hero instead of a real Philip K Dick character...
ReplyHe sounds like Phillip Shaffer, a Detroit auto worker who became convinced that his welding torch was a radio that would allow him to listen in on the thoughts of evil robots living inside the earth (which according to him was hollow.)His stories actually became very sucessful during his lifetime when they were picked up by a pulp magezine publisher. Shaffer didn't excactly get rich, but he did make enough royalties to pay his rent and buy massive quantities of liquor.
ReplyYou know a guy's a great author when one of his characters is threatened with legal action by a door. Just sayin'.
ReplyRichard Matheson. That guy has had a lot of movies based on his stuff.
ReplyThat awful thing made with Nicholas Cage is originally a super cool short story about a golden man who is trapped by the authorities.
ReplyMay you rest in peace forever, with your twin baby sister by your side, you wonderful patron saint of mind f**ks.
He had some... special views.
ReplyLike his story featuring a world where women have abortions done as a fashion statement, which gradually turned into killing their (male) toddlers. It also featured a father that wanted to escape with his son, but he came to a realization that "the women would never let him."
...Mostly satirical, just like assloads of other things fictional, also like assloads of other things fictional, it's more or less a creative and twisted way of explaining real live bulls**t in ways that regular human speech hellf**king can't.
It says I'm the first comment on here, but that can't be right...
ReplyI just wanted to say I heart Dick all day, every day. Also, I actually had a workshop that dedicated an entire month to Science Fiction. And two weeks of that was straight Dick. My teacher had half of his book in paperback (and that's still like what, a hundred million novels?) This article reminded me a lot of his Dick-driven diatribes. He told us Phil never got to see a single one of his stories put to film, but he DID get to see a trailer for Blade Runner and called Ridley Scott right after and told the director to "get out of his head!"
And knowing Dick, he probably meant it literally.
Not that I'm ignoring the content of your post but I seriously laughed when I read the following sentences as my brain decided to take them out of context..
"I heart Dick all day, everyday."
"Two weeks of that was straight Dick."
"Dick-driven diatribes." (Awesome band name btw)
Poor Phillip K Dick for having a last name that will eventually become slang for penis...
Oh, no. Rest assured that you took everyone of my Dicks in exactly the right context.
OK, article, worth a browse, not a read, since I haven't seen any of the movies listed (with the exception of the first matrix). DADoES is a solid read, though.
ReplyStop spamming us with your commas Uzumenee... And what the fawk does "OK, article, worth a browse," even mean? Its like you are talking to the article itself, or am I getting Dick-paranoid?
Let me ask you something: Would you trust a film critic that reviewed every movie based solely on it's trailer?
That's why your comment was worthless after the first five words. Read the article, THEN critique.
This was a very good, very timely article. However, it doesn't seem you're that familiar with Philip K Dick. His primary theme is crushing paranoia. The whole reality-isn't-what-it-seems thing isn't the main theme of PKD's work, but it is one of his more common ones. The whole likeable everyman thing is dead wrong. I've found his protagonists are, if anything, typically unlikeable or important people. What Hollywood turns them into is another matter, but you're talking about his books here.
ReplyBladerunner was about a bounty hunter who (despite some of the comments) is left with an extremely clear answer about whether or not he's an android. The question takes up maybe a third of the book at most. The question never even gets revisited after the answer. However, the book does subtly play on the question of religion and if belief can make something real even if it's completely false.
Total Recall was pretty similar to the movie, in regards to a man having a vacation of himself as a secret agent implanted. It winds up unlocking his memories, and it turns out the same thing happened previously except he'd actually become a secret agent/assassin. The story was more about the sci-fi theme of if memories make us who we are than reality turning out to not be as it seems. The protagonist also wasn't terribly likeable; he is basically a bored, self-absorbed asshat with a subconscious hunger for importance.
Screamers [Second Variety] was about an everyman soldier, yes. However both the movie and the story where about paranoia causing two enemies to attempt to join forces to not be horribly murdered by the soldier's side's recently-upgraded, human-imitating robots. (Spoiler alert: the robots murder the s**t out of them anyways.)
Imposter (which became a movie in 2001) was about a high-ranking rocket scientist who finds himself persecuted on the possibility he is an android-bomb designed to murder said scientist, take his place, and blow up a bunch of important people.
Minority Report was about a high-ranking government official who runs and founded Pre-Crime, not an everyman cop. In fact, the quirk of the story was that what happened literally could only happen to him because of his position of authority in Pre-Crime. He doesn't discover "the pre-crime unit he works for is not what it seems" but that he's been predicted to kill a retired, high-ranking military general he's never met. I won't ruin the ending, but I will say if they'd stuck with the short story the movie would have blown people's minds.
Paycheck was about a likeable everyman, yes, but he's investigating why he'd agree to a memory wipe for a bag of junk (which he figures out very quickly). Then he begins a quest to blackmail his way into the corp he worked for, in order to protect himself from the government that is rapidly turning to a police state. Calling that "reality isn't what it seems" is a huge stretch. I would go so far to say totally inaccurate.
A Scanner Darkly - I haven't read this one yet.
Radio Free Albemuth (a movie I didn't know they'd made in 2010) - Fits what you said pretty well.
Next - The character Nicholas cage was based on from The Golden Man was a teenage mutant. Absolutely nothing about it falls under the category of reality not being what it seems or an everyman. It even strays from his common theme of paranoia. That story was about humankind dealing with the possibility that radiation-boosted evolution had made us doomed us to die out in place of the next best thing. On the flipside, if they'd kept the story straight, Nicholas Cage would have played a mute.
Jesus Christ, man... go outside or something.
wtb more Heinlein based movies.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI dont think youd Actually like them. Most of his writing is very shallow though he has some great stuff. ALL of his writing pushes his absolute fascination with and approval of Fascism.. despite his claims of being "libertarian".
not to mention the incest.... >.>
if you actually read some of Heinlein's work, you would see that he most definitely does NOT promote fascism. try reading some of his short stories like "If this Goes On." or "Coventry." Better yet, how's about some of his most famous work - "Stranger in a Strange Land", "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", etc.
Total Recall reboot? That hurts my heart.
ReplyGet your ass to mars.
Get your ass to mars.
Get your ass to mars.......
I feel your pain. :( They're remaking a perfectly good movie while tons of his easily film-able stories lie unused.
I feel old that it's already been deemed time for a Total Recall reboot.
I bet it was amphetamine psychosis rather than schizophrenia. Paranoia and halucinations would definitely come from not sleeping and taking tons of amphetamines. Ever seen Requiem for a Dream?
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesOr it could have been schizophrenia amplified by amphetamines, since he appears to have been crazy since always.
Or aliens were beaming information into his brain.
Why is it when someone is creative, when they expose average poeple theyre "insane" or "drugged". Is it that average peoples minds are truely that blank? That boring?
i think chitoryu12 is onto something
Well, cdreid, while I see where you're coming from, in this particular case the guy actually DID take a shitload of drugs. And whether it was diagnosed or not, his beliefs and claims DO sound like they were caused by the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. While I do think that sometimes creative people are unfairly treated as "weirdos", Dick actually was a drug addict and probably a schizo. Doesn't make his work any less awesome, though.
Hollywood has never remade a Dick story. They take his ideas and make them into movies.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesBTW: Bladerunner the detective was NEVER an android in the story.
For the less dense of us, the point was he wasn't sure that he wasn't a robot.
^^ this. it was a minor point, but still a point
In the book, Deckard has a vision of Mercer, the man at the centre of the empathy-religion that the humans invent to differentiate themselves from the otherwise-superior replicants. He therefore knows at this point that he is human.
Okay, here's me throwing down the Sci-Fi nerd gauntlet (it's actually a sonic screwdriver, if you're curious...)
Now, it's been a while since I read it, but I remember DADoES having a chapter where men show up and drag Deckard away to an office where they then pop open his chest, revealing circuits and analog tape spools and general android guts. The tapes are Deckard's recorded memories and the men cut out a section they'd rather him forget, including the part where they came and got him and dragged him away, and then the chapter just ends...
And the next chapter starts off right before where the men clipped his memory AND THE WHOLE REST OF THE BOOK Deckard goes on believing he's a human when we, the reader, know good and f**king well that he's an android; the thing he hunts for a living.
Seriously, if I just made that plot thread up and then inserted it into my memory of Do Androids Dream, then I'm a mother-effing genius. I'm also a bat-s**t crazy womanizer who believes the almighty craps knowledge through a pink laser-pointer. Still, genius.
@TheCoolestGuy - you DID make that up. Absolutely. I just read the book about six months ago and that totally did not happen. Deckard DOES get picked up by another agent (whom he does not recognize) and taken to a false police station, which turns out is actually run by replicants to help protect them. (He was picked up after 'retiring' one of the replicants on the list he inherited from Holden, being accused of murder.) This is the only part of the book where Deckard doubts whether or not he is human. As it turns out, the agent who picks him up is actually a replicant, but doesn't know it. Deckard is able to determine this and kills him, and that wraps everything up. Deckard is definitely human in DADoES.
However, I did just watch the "Final Cut" version of Bladerunner last night and I am having quite a bit of trouble understanding why people think Deckard is a replicant in that as well. As far as I could tell there is only one moment when Rachael asks him if he's ever taken the Voight-Kampf test himself, and he doesn't answer, and then that's that. I don't know.
Swibble.
ReplyThank you.
The correct response: "My swibble is working just fine, THANK YOU!"
P.K. Dick is my favorite author, even though his writing was atrocious (grammar, sentence structure, etc., left a lot to be desired, and I often found myself re-reading sections to figure out who was speaking which sentences). Getting past that, the ideas are the best science fiction. Sci-Fi is not just aliens. It really boils down to how technology will affect the average person. Before there was virtual reality, Dick was thinking about how such a thing could mess with a person's mind and make them question their own existence and what they would do when they couldn't make the distinction. I highly recommend reading his work.
ReplyI know what you mean. One of his crippling flaws was his complete inability to write a good ending.
"The computer said, 's**t...'"
But his openings were awesome.
...That's what she said.
Today I learned that I greatly enjoy works inspired by PKD. Also, Blade Runner and Minority Report ruled.
ReplyMichael Crichton has had 14 novels adapted to film and television, and he is still working. Some other people have mentioned Stephen King.
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesThe list of PK Dick stories that have been adapted, not so impressive. Blade Runner is great, but that's about it. So, no, despite what "#5" says, I'm not a fan, and I am well aware of it. This is the first Cracked list I really disagree with.
Dude, Michael Crichton had died two or three years ago, what do you mean by "he is still working". I am a fan of his works. Crichton had written since the 60s. Haven't read his last two books though.
Btw, I haven't read PKD's short stories and novels but I always enjoy the movie adaptation.
I doubt Chrichton is working without some Weekend at Bernie's style shenanigans considering he's been dead for over 2 years.
Considering your opening statement argues that a deadman is still working, I'm going to have to discount the entirety of your comment. I know it's considered poor form to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" but really, this comment is bad and you should feel bad.
You're a dope, dude. Michael Crichton died in 2008.
And just because Crichton has had a lot of stuff adapted (most of which has been, let's face it, pretty damn awful), it doesn't mean that Phillip K. Dick is any less awesome.
Also, did anybody mention he's dead? Because he's dead.
Michael Crichton is dead. OR IS HE?? DUN DUN DUUUN!! Zombie Crichton.
Zombie Crichton seconded...
Plus I'm still waiting for Pirate Latitudes 2: "The Rise of Cthulhu"
I'm still trying to figure out what the f**k Dick's financial situation was has to do with s**t. How exectly did this change the world of movies?
ReplyHis financial situation was probably an offshoot of his "insanity" as listed in the article's title, and his stories and subsequent movie adaptations have been a major influence of modern Hollywood, as well as video games and movies worldwide.
That "making $12k in 1965" comment, though, needs some clarification. If it was $12k in today's money then that's pretty sad, but $12k in 1965 currency is close to $85k today, when adjusted for inflation.
Philip K Dick wasn't crazy, he had temporal lobe epilepsy. No one diagnosed him in life, but academics today widely believe this is right on. If you did read VALIS, the signs are all there.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesBut crazy and temporal lobe epilepsy, when put into the whole "time travelling aliems" context, have the same signs.
What is crazy? Most of these "crazy" people can be diagnosed with some kind of medical condition and then after that we can't call them crazy anymore. So should we call them crazy anyway or should we have never called them crazy? Depends on what your definition of crazy is I guess. Either way we are a pretty unforgiving, judgmental society when it comes to the ill, especially the mentally ill.
I would rather be crazy than mentally ill, personally.