Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Dick’s character, named Quail, exemplifies a wholly different view of the nature of technology. Quail finds that the spy agency he worked for is trying to kill him because of the resurgence of his memories, and when he tries to escape from their grasp he confronts a key problem: a security device planted in his brain that can track him anywhere and read his every thought. Quail states that, “The thing lived inside him, within his own brain. Feeding, listening, feeding.” This device, which in the movie is only a tracking device, transmits his every thought to the police immediately. At one point an officer informs Quail that “anything you think may be held against you.” Quail recognizes that his resistance is futile. He turns himself in before any high speed chases or gun battles ensue, hoping that the establishment can successfully erase his memory once again, without killing him.

  While in the movie, technology is cast as the savior of the oppressed, something we can activate confident in its benevolence, in the story, it is the technology itself that oppresses. Such a difference is not mere coincidence. It hints at the philosophical commitments that specific filmmakers, and perhaps filmmaking itself, have inscribed upon Dick in an attempt to place him lucratively on the screen.

  Nagging Spouses and Robotic Home-Wreckers

  This Hollywoodization effect extends even to the relationships portrayed in Dick’s short stories and novels. Dick had different ideas about love, marriage, and romantic relationships that challenge the familiar Hollywood romantic storyline in which star-crossed lovers overcome obstacles to reunite and ride off into the sunset of eternal bliss. Consider, for instance, the contrast between Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner. In the movie, we find our world-weary hero Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, alone and unattached, a bachelor living in a small apartment lining the urban landscape. Deckard is drawn to the replicant Rachael, and a classic romantic storyline ensues that ends with the two confessing their love for one another and running away together.

  Dick’s Deckard, however, starts the narrative by waking up next to his wife, Iran, who is neither a diminutive woman who desires to be rescued, nor a strong female character, but rather an emotionally unstable harpy who badgers Deckard for most of the story. Our novel’s Rachael Rosen is introduced as a love interest, but rather than being the shy, receptive character of the movie, this Rachael is a sociopath who seduces Deckard in an attempt to make it impossible for him to kill androids like her. In one case we see a knight in shining armor rescuing a woman in distress, while in the other we see a nebbish police grunt being manipulated by a psychopathic machine. The differences here are easy to spot. But what are significantly harder to spot, are the philosophical implications of this wholesale rewriting of Dick that occurs in Hollywood film.

  Scott versus Linklater

  There are any number of interesting levels on which to observe the contrast between Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly, beginning with the directors. Ridley Scott is the muscular director of sweeping stories of heroic characters in trying circumstances: Thelma and Louise, G.I. Jane, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster. Richard Linklater’s typical film is smaller in nature, quieter, often lacking a central protagonist, much less a heroic character: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Waking Life. Visually, the “look” of Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly could not be more different. Scott’s film is all postmodern urban noir, the screen packed with the overwhelming sights and sounds of future technology run amok, assaulting the viewer’s senses. Linklater, on the other hand, deliberately inserts a break between the viewer and the screen, rotoscoping over the well-known visages of his famous stars. A Scanner Darkly is more suburban sunny earth tones, more cartoonish, more everyday.

  Beyond these surface differences, Scott and Linklater take very divergent approaches to their source material. Dick is wildly transformed by Scott. Blade Runner is only loosely based on Dick’s novel, as has been widely remarked upon, most perceptively by the film critic David Edelstein, who notes:

  There is no getting around the fact that the movie misses almost entirely the psychological complexity of its source, one of [Dick’s] most tantalizing explorations of the human capacity for empathy. The bleary gumshoe hero of the film has little connection to the book’s unhappily married drudge, who mechanically executes ‘replicants’ as a means to afford animals (now rare and expensive) for display.

  In contrast, A Scanner Darkly remains authentic to the novel with Linklater foregrounding the relationship of the movie to its author. Early in the movie, Dick’s face appears as part of the scramble suit and the film closes with the “Author’s Note” from the novel, drawing clear connections to biographical details of Dick’s life. Linklater involved Dick’s daughters early on, who were often present on the set, and who remarked upon the authenticity of some of those sets, especially the suburban Orange County home where much of the action of the movie takes place.

  Deckard versus Arctor

  These two films also offer an interesting and contrasting take on Dick’s theme of the hero. Harrison Ford was in the midst of his successful run as Han Solo in the Star Wars films while filming Blade Runner. While Ford’s Deckard is more world-weary and has less swagger than Han Solo, he finally proves the heroic character, surmounting considerable challenges and ultimately saving the damsel in distress.

  A Scanner Darkly takes a different tack, subverting the heroic character of the typical Hollywoodized Dick film by taking an actor best recognized at the time for his role as Neo, savior of the human race, and making him into Bob Arctor, described in the film as the ultimate everyman, a fractured and flawed character addicted to Substance D and subjected to spying on himself. Here too, A Scanner Darkly aligns itself with its text, identifying not with heroic characters but with the freaks and losers that populated both Dick’s life and his novels and which he often wrote approvingly about. The cast reads like a who’s who of Hollywood’s stoners and losers: Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr.

  There are parallels between Rick Deckard and Bob Arctor. Both are lawmen tasked with protecting society from external threats (replicants/Substance D) produced by shadowy organizations (Tyrell Corporation/New Path). Both have a troubled relationship to their professions, are matched with a nemesis whose own humanity is in doubt (Roy Batty/James Barris), and pursue a female whose self-identity is in question (Rachael/ Donna). These surface parallels, though, belie more significant differences.

  While the action in the movies shifts from the urban realm of Los Angeles in Blade Runner to the suburban realm of Anaheim and Orange County in A Scanner Darkly, both characters end up breaking through to a more “natural” realm. In the theatrical release of Blade Runner, however, that natural realm is portrayed as an Edenic outside to the nightmarish cityscape, while Bob Arctor ends up in a decidedly more ambiguous place, a corn field owned by New Path which serves as a cover for growing the little blue flowers that go into the manufacture of Substance D. In Blade Runner, nature is an escape and an alternative to the nightmarish uncertainty caused by technological development, while in A Scanner Darkly, even nature has been subverted into a means to enslave and dehumanize people.

  Where Deckard seeks an escape from his dark world, Bob Arctor is drawn to darkness:

  I hated my life, my house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell ugly things and surprising things and sometimes little wondrous things spill out at me constantly and I can count on nothing.

  And while Deckard successfully navigates a relationship with the replicant Rachael, running off together into their uncertain future, Bob is continuously frustrated in his efforts to “get into Donna’s pants” and she ultimately betrays and uses him.

  We witness an even more significant difference between Deckard and Arctor as we observe the paths each character takes in their respective films. Blade Runner recounts the education of Deckard and his
achievement of humanity through the redemptive figure of Rachael, while A Scanner Darkly tells the story of Arctor’s progressive dehumanization, the breakdown of his personality amidst the rampant use of drugs and technology. And Donna/Audrey doesn’t turn out to offer any redemption. Indeed, she’s the agent behind his destruction, sacrificing his humanity, transforming him into something of an automaton, in order to bring down New Path.

  While Deckard becomes more human, Arctor becomes more mechanical, illustrating Dick’s own observations in “The Android and the Human,”—written while writing A Scanner Darkly—where he defines becoming an android as “allowing oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one’s knowledge or consent.” Bob/Fred, suffering from what Barris suggests is “soul sickness,” becomes an android. While Blade Runner imagines that androids could become human, A Scanner Darkly shows how humans become androids.

  From Hover Cars to Substance D

  These two films depict technological artifacts differently as well. Blade Runner, like most other films based on Dick works, includes the usual sci-fi techno-tropes: hover cars, replicants, genetic- and bio-engineering, off-world colonies. Furthermore, Blade Runner foregrounds technology on the screen, its representation of technology a gaudy visual display of excess. A Scanner Darkly avoids many of these tropes and focuses on more mundane technologies: Substance D (a pharmaceutical technology), monitoring technologies, cell phones. When A Scanner Darkly does foreground technology, what we see are Barris’s harebrained Rube Goldberg contraptions that never work.

  Beyond these surface differences, the two films assess technology differently as well. Deckard’s Voight-Kampff machine, an analogue for the cameras of A Scanner Darkly and perhaps a stand-in for the director’s eye, discloses the truth and reveals the true nature of the replicants. Significantly, though, both Rachael and Roy Batty ultimately exceed this truth and achieve a level of humanity in their relationship to Deckard. Truth and humanity are not at odds with technology. A Scanner Darkly tells a decidedly less optimistic picture. The cameras of A Scanner Darkly don’t reveal the truth and don’t lead to an affirmation of Bob’s humanity. Rather, they further obscure Arctor’s tenuous hold on reality and finally play a role in the dissolution of his personality, illustrating Dick’s fear of technology leading to the mechanization of humanity.

  A Scanner Darkly’s technology is one with our own, and mirrors our increasing familiarity with filming, documenting, and surveilling ourselves in the age of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. While Blade Runner holds out some hope that Deckard and Rachael can find some space in the techno-culture to live out their human-replicant fantasy, A Scanner Darkly leaves us with a hollowed-out Bob/Fred/Bruce who through pharmaceuticals and media technologies has been left bereft of his humanity, transformed into an android in Dick’s terms, a dried husk perfectly at home in the decoy corn field in which we find him at the close of the movie.

  Through a Screen, Darkly

  Where so many of the films based on Dick’s work seemingly delight in visually representing the power and awe of technology and the role of the masculine hero who triumphs over it, all the while redeeming himself and winning over the girl, A Scanner Darkly presents a darker, more critical perspective on our relationship to technology and what it ultimately may be doing to our lives and relationships. In a way, this makes sense, for A Scanner Darkly is very consciously about the media itself, a philosophical film that uses the screen to comment on the media, especially our love affair of scanning and being scanned as we record our every thought and action on our Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube feeds.

  Linklater’s film visually represents the dangers of our media technology in the dissolution of Bob/Fred at the hands of both the police state and the corporation (New Path). Through its use of rotoscoping, it simultaneously calls attention to its own artifice as a film, distancing the viewer from the screen and creating a critical space in which to engage with some of Dick’s complex themes regarding our techno-cultural context and the androidization of humanity. It is entertainment with an edge and it’s this edge that is so often blunted in the more typical Hollywood take on Dick.

  Hollywood has an investment in the media and in media technology. We can understand it not wanting to call attention to the technology that entertains us. It just wants to entertain us. And we just want to be entertained. After all, we, the moviegoing public, have a responsibility here too. As we struggle with the shifting realities of our techno-cultural condition, we too seek escape from its harsher truths, embracing sci-fi blockbusters that promise us a rosy technological future in which we human beings triumph while maintaining our heroic stature, athletic figure, and a full head of hair.

  Dick wrote about nobodies, minor clerks, and simple bureaucrats, because that is where he saw the kind of heroism that actually exists. Dick’s hero is not a gun-toting vigilante but the ordinary Joe, flawed but quietly refusing to bow to the pressures of a society and a technology that attempt to flatten and control his existence. As Dick observed in “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,”

  This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

  Dick’s Bob Arctor and Rick Deckard end up in a similar place, beaten down by a dehumanizing system. As Deckard notes toward the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.” Yet suffering their “soul sickness,” having been androidized, they each do endure. That’s where their, and ultimately our, heroism lies.

  04

  Ewe, Robot

  ALF SEEGERT

  At the beginning of the movie Blade Runner, the camera zooms inside the vast arcology of the Tyrell Corporation, where—amid a swirl of cigarette smoke propelled by ceiling fans—Detective Holden is administering the Voight-Kampff (V-K) test to job applicant Leon Kowalski. Holden wants to find out if Leon is truly human, or a dreaded humanoid replicant instead—an android. He uses the test to register Leon’s eye dilations in response to questions about animals in distress. In this exchange, Leon Kowalski knows what a turtle (or tortoise) is, but—at least as far as we can tell—he doesn’t feel what it would be like to be one. And that’s the problem.

  HOLDEN: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t, not without your help, but you’re not helping.

  LEON: What do you mean I’m not helping?

  HOLDEN: I mean, you’re not helping. Why is that, Leon?

  Leon’s responses to these questions, as registered by involuntary changes in his pupils, become the litmus test for what will qualify him as human—or (in his case) not. Specifically, the test records the subject’s expression of empathy, the ability to experience the sufferings of another as if they are one’s own. The capacity for empathy, however, turns out to be a deliciously problematic basis for demonstrating human uniqueness. Empathy is rooted primarily in a subject’s ability to identify imaginatively with another being. Put another way, to demonstrate his humanity via empathy, Leon must be able to simulate the experience of someone or something else in his own consciousness by virtually “stepping into its shoes,” and then responding compassionately. Ironically enough, the very criterion required for human beings to demonstrate that they are not android simulations is their very ability to simulate in the first place! However, if you are a simulation yourself, like Leon, you can’t empathetically simulate the experiences of others as well as humans can.

  The V-K test is doubly ironic in that android replicants in Blade Runner do in fact show at least some significant empathy for each other (witnes
s Roy’s mourning for Pris after Deckard shoots her), whereas the grimly noir-ish setting of the film reveals that human empathy—even for fellow human beings—is in very short supply. And empathy proves altogether absent when it comes to a Blade Runner’s feelings for the replicants he brutally “retires” to keep Earth safely android-free: the audience winces as Deckard shoots Zhora in the back, but Deckard doesn’t. If one’s humanity inheres in one’s capacity for displaying empathy, then in crucial ways the android replicants of Blade Runner might just be (to use the Tyrell Corporation’s motto) “more human than human.”