Tricky Dick

Not the strangest bit of lore surrounding Philip K. Dick concerns the disappearance of his android — a remote-controlled replica of the sci-fi novelist created by fans and revealed at the premiere of the movie A Scanner Darkly in 2006. The synthetic replica of Dick was misplaced by an airline while in transit and has never been recovered.

Dick, who died in 1982, often wrote about androids and hallucinogenic drugs. But his own life and mental condition was nearly as bizarre as his fiction. (A biopic of Dick called The Owl in Twilight is now in production. It will reportedly star Paul Giammati.)

Dick was born, two weeks premature, in Chicago, 1928; his twin sister died five weeks later, a fact that deeply affected Dick’s later writing and world view. So, too, did the amphetamines he chugged down through the 1960s. At the age of 13, he had a recurring dream about searching for a comic book titled The Empire Never Ended that could explain the secrets of the universe. He never found it, but the title and theme worked their way into Dick’s later hallucinations, starting in the early ‘70s. After seeing a certain Pisces-designed necklace on a dental assistant in 1974, Dick began having strange, religious-themed visions. “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane,” he told one interviewer. The author began to believe he was two people: writer Philip K. Dick, and “Thomas,” a Christian who was persecuted by Romans in the first century A.D. Thus, the “alternate reality” of so much of Dick’s fiction had seeped into his own consciousness. The classic signs of schizophrenia.

Lately, there’s been a glut of Dick paperbacks circulating, not just in popular culture (one title even turns up on a recent Lost episode) but in Manila. I picked up a couple more titles recently at National Book Store — The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Our Friends from Frolix 8 — to add to the novel A Scanner Darkly, which I found more poignant than the Richard Linklater film. Oddly, the themes Dick wrote about in the mid-‘60s seem more and more timely as the decades wear on: people’s desire to escape, the alternative worlds made available to them, and the traps created by those alternate worlds.

For a writer this influential, few movies based on Dick works have been memorable. The best, by far, was Blade Runner (1982), which gained more Dickian dimension and flavor as director Ridley Scott tinkered around with the final cut, adding more ambiguity to Deckard’s existential dilemma. But the rest of the adaptations are spotty: Total Recall (1990), mashed into a Schwarzenegger shoot-‘em-up project, lost crucial layers; Minority Report (2002), an intriguing failure made by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise; Paycheck, a John Woo mistake from 2003 starring Ben Affleck; Next, a Nicolas Cage/Jessica Biel vehicle that didn’t do so well. Then there’s Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2005), a brave Rotoscoping effort that somewhat blurred Dick’s anti-drug message. The best uncredited Philip K. Dick knock-off was probably The Matrix (1999), the Wachowski Brothers’ take on a future where humans live in a virtual world to disguise their enslavement. Its dystopian theme spoke loudly to audiences at the verge of the 21st century.

Dipping into the first pages of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, you’re first struck by the description of a laptop computer — actually, a briefcase that doubles as a portable psychiatrist called Dr. Smile and also allows users to communicate across the globe. This was written in 1965, mind you. Much else in the novel still seems oddly up-to-date. There’s a future earth, now called Terra, in which overpopulation and global warming (the daily sunlight is brutal) requires unlucky citizens to be sent off to desolate Mars as colonists.

The poor colonists indulge in swallowing Can-D, a hallucinogenic drug that allows them to participate in a detailed virtual world involving a doll called Perky Pat — various clothes, accessories and other modifications make the illusion more complete. Users take Can-D and play with the female doll (or a male counterpart called Walt) and become swept into a simulation of Earth — a collective hallucination to help them while away the time on Mars. One can’t help thinking of all the virtual “environments” and “avatars” that today’s Net junkies spend their time meticulously crafting on Facebook, Second Life and other alternatives to the “real” world out there. This Dick guy wasn’t just visionary. He was dead on the money.

Mars colonists can never go back to Earth; they’ve been deemed genetically incapable of living in an environment where they would be “slowly cooked.” Yes, Dick predicted global warming. And he also imagined what would happen after Earth was used up and uninhabitable.

“Neo-Christians are taught to believe they’re travelers in a foreign land,” Anne said. “Wayfaring strangers. Now we really are; Earth is ceasing to  become our natural world, and certainly this will never be. We’ve got no world left!” She stared at Barney, her nostrils flaring. “No home at all!”

Al Gore couldn’t have said it better.

There’s an interesting point in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch where religion and hallucination converge — it predates the hippie dream of “cosmic consciousness” by about three years. The Can-D users indulge in promiscuous sex to pass the time, and take the drug simultaneously, so they can “share” in the virtual experience. Kind of like our own online entertainment nowadays, minus the hallucinogens.

The titular Eldritch is a mysterious businessman offering a new substance, Chew-Z, that may or may not be a little like the Catholic communion wafer: its users absorb a little bit of the Eldritch organism each time they swallow, and experience something like eternal life. But it’s unclear whether Eldritch is himself God, or being controlled by God, or simply an alien entity seeking expansion.

It’s nothing new to say that Philip K. Dick was a sci-fi prophet. He was obsessed with the notion of alternate worlds — that what we experience as reality is a vast hallucination, and we can’t tell the difference anymore. But here, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, he was peering past the shadow and light to ask what composes the soul, and who’s running the show. And his answers weren’t that out of this world after all.

True, Dick was paranoid, increasingly delusional and possibly schizophrenic in his final years. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong.