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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Valis

I've just finished Philip K. Dick's Valis.  Anybody read it?  It is the most deeply, uncannily crazy novel I've ever read.  I feel like I shouldn't say the craziest book ever written, since I'm sure at least a couple of tyrannical dictators have written thoroughly bonkers autobiographies fueled only by insanity, rage, and the blood and tears of entire populations.  But it is the craziest thing I've ever read, by a long shot; and if there was an authoritative list of the 50 craziest novels floating around somewhere on the internet, I would be disappointed if Valis didn't make the top ten.

And it's not as if Mr. Dick is known for writing sensible, middle-of-the-road, beginner-friendly genre fiction.  He didn't pander, and I get the feeling he never really expected people to actually understand what he was writing.  Some of the most brain-blisteringly complex movies in the world are lifted directly from the Philip K. Dick catalog.  Mind you, Hollywood is typically forced to settle for the simplest of these, and they invariably have to dumb it down considerably.  Your average PKD short story is just slightly too complicated for a three-hour brain-teasing blockbuster.  The amazing thing, though--and this really is a startling testament to the genius of the man--is that enough movies have been made from this remarkable canon to actually identify trends in the film versions of PKD stories.  Watch your step when you get up, kids, 'cause I'm about to drop some knowledge.

If you wonder what the following movies have in common:

Blade Runner
Total Recall
Paycheck
A Scanner Darkly
Minority Report
The Adjustment Bureau

Then wonder no longer!  They are all ridiculously complicated.  Oh, and they were all cribbed from Dick's work.

A few trends, then, become clear.  First of all, only two of these movies come from full length novels: Blade Runner is from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and A Scanner Darkly comes from a novel of the same name.  For all that these two movies are immensely convoluted (and in the case of Blade Runner's Deckard, still the subject of belligerent collegiate debate) they are pretty damn simplistic compared to the original novels from which they were taken.  Although these movies are pretty fun, and more than a bit trippy, they don't actually provide the best context in which to understand Valis.


(By the way, although it might be condescending, I'm going to go ahead and keep referencing the film versions, on the theory that more people have watched these movies than have read the stories from which they came.  That could be wrong.  Don't care.  Over-explaining is more fun for me, so we're all going to have to put up with it.)

The best way to get at the crazy that is Valis is to take a quick look at the movies made from PKD short stories.  That's Total Recall, Paycheck, Minority Report, and The Adjustment Bureau.  (By the way, there are others, but I think they are probably less well known.  Besides this is what wikipedia and IMDB are for.  This is the internet; educate yourself.)

Now, I haven't seen The Adjustment Bureau (yet!) and Paycheck is kind of shit (which is too bad because the short story is beautiful and I want to make love to it) so I will just stick to Total Recall and Minority Report.  They come from short stories entitled "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" and "Minority Report," respectively.  Most of the convoluted plot stuff in these two short stories is actually what happens in the movies.  Mind you, they are complicated movies.  TR features a dude who pays to have memories of a 007-esque fantasy trip to a Mars colony implanted into his head.  The procedure reveals(?) that he's been the victim of a memory wipe, and he becomes extremely (Jason-Bourne-style) combative, claiming that his cover has been blown.  He then attempts to hook up with his secret-agent contacts on mars.  We the audience go back and forth for ages on whether or not he is the victim of crazy memory-implantation gone wrong, or whether he's actually a secret agent who was mind-wiped, but managed through sheer dumb luck to pick an imaginary vacation that exactly matched his pre-mind-wipe career and mission.  The movie manages to convey most of this confusion, although it leaves out the aliens and the magic wand.  (No, I shit you not, the PKD story has a magic wand...)

Minority Report is equally convoluted: our protagonist is the leader of a team of future-cops who use pool-dwelling psychics to just wreck the shit out of the bill of rights by arresting people moments before they commit crimes.  Said future cop is then arrested just before he is told that he'll commit a crime.  The movie only gets about this far into the plot before things start to rapidly diverge from the short story, which is really a masterpiece.    At any rate, his knowledge of the psychics' predictions actually affects what they predict.  So there is one possible future in which he kills a dude; one possible future where he sees the psychic's report and, armed with that foreknowledge, refrains from killing the dude; and a third possible future where he sees the whole entire messy plot played out in a psychic's brain before it even happens, and decides that he might as well kill the dude anyway.

Or anyway, that's what I remember.  To be fair, they are confusing books, and I probably got all of them wrong in one fashion or another.  Feel free to tell me about it in the comments section.  To sum up, though, this is a man who wrote short stories complicated enough that Spielberg can only capture about a third of a plot before he finishes up his 2.25 hour movie.  Imagine what a novel like that can do to your brain.

Now imagine that Philip K. Dick, the author, is a character in Valis.  And that he has a good friend named Horselover Fat: a schizophrenic meta-theologian who believes that God is attempting to fix the universe by beaming an extra-galactic pink laser into his brain.  And that, in fact, what the schizophrenic thinks is happening is actually happening.  And then imagine that Philip K Dick and his insane friend (whose name means Philip K Dick in Greek and German) have been the same person the entire time, Fight Club style.  That's not even the first half of this book.  I recommended it to a friend, and then had to take back that recommendation when I went back and actually thought about what I would be subjecting them to.

But if you'll excuse me, I really have to go find something else to read.

-Sleepyhead

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