A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

I don't, personally, know a lot about drugs. Yes, and without commenting on whether I ever indulged or not, like every forty-something I've been in circles where hash and weed were a thing, but beyond that I've never knowingly interacted with actual drug culture beyond, well, popular culture. I've read some William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, I've read and seen Trainspotting, that sort of thing.

But, well, I drink, so at least I have that experience of altered states of conscience as recreation. I consume caffeine too. Beyond that I cannot go, because that way potentially lies madness, death or worse, and I want to live a long and happy life. But such experiences are fascinating to read about, this extraordinary novel especially.

This novel really shows the lived reality of a junkie, the hopelessness, the squalor, yet also the philosophical musings. It shows the fickle and double-crossing nature of human relations in a world always defined by one's next fix. It's a truly compelling glimpse into a fascinating nightmare. 

Yet this is also a novel of ideas... and of irony. The irony of the novel's final twist, and the irony of protagonist Bob Arctor's situation: a narc who is forced by the circumstances of his job to himself become an addict. The result is tragedy, yet perhaps with an ambiguous note of hope. But this novel will linger in the mind for a good while. Philip K. Dick, whose own life was blighted and no doubt shortened by addiction, poured his soul into it. More so even than Infinite Jest, this is one of the truly great novels about addiction.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

 I’ve never read a novel by Philip K. Dick before, despite having knowingly seen at least three films based on his work. This is a highly impressive introduction to his work, a novel as thoughtful as it is imaginative.

The fact that one should not perhaps look to closely at the realism of the alternative history presented here in no way harms the nov: sleight of hand is an honourable technique. And the world presented here, where the Axis won the war and split the former USA between them, is compelling and three dimensional.

Germany and Japan are slowly slipping into a rivalry, inevitable with the Nazis’ fundamental and horrifying racism, with the Holocaust having been extended to an African genocide, with others implied. The Japanese are presented sympathetically, despite the awkwardly contemporary hints that they merely imitate others’ cultural products, rather than create. They have culture, feeling, and that nebulous thing called creativity. The Nazis, by contrast, are a society with no culture or humanity whatsoever, a dark and empty dead end. They have put a man on Mars, joylessly, yet television is only now being rolled out. And now, it is implied, they are slowly gaining the upper hand which may result in nuclear Holocaust of Japan.

Yet this is told through real, human characters such as a Jewish craftsman, a German spy and a Japanese businessmen, with an oddly fascinating sting subplot about the forgery of antiques. There is a lot of thoughtful musing on the nature of art and morality through the medium of Eastern religious philosophy, most of which is lost on this godless reader. But the novel is full of wonderful little touches, with the mental universe of this world feeling thoroughly thought through.

Best of all is Dick’s nicely self-abnegating articulation of the death of the author, as his counterpart within the novel, the creator of the novel within the novel, explains that he was simply the medium for a novel that wrote itself. It’s a clever, challenging, perfect ending to a novel which deliberately resists the concept of arbitrary endings. A superb novel.

Blade Runner (1982)

“Aren’t you the ‘good’ man?”

I should probably say at the start that I watched the Director’s Cut, on one of those old DVD’s with the anti-piracy trailers that you’re forced to sit through. Grr. Also, I’m afraid I haven’t read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Anyway, this is well good.

We get a quick blurb with the backstory; there are replicants, the Tyrell Corporation have an apparent monopoly on manufacturing them. They’re stronger, and at least as intelligent as humans. They’re used as slaves on off-world colonies, but have revolted. They’re banned on Earth, and “blade runner” units exist to track them down. All this by 2019. That’s this decade!

The film has a distinctive look (and sound, all by Vangelis; it works very well). It’s always night, it’s always raining. The architecture in large scale looks like something Sauron might have designed. There’s loads of neon. It’s all stylised, not realistic; while looking impressive, there’s no real attempt to not make the street scenes look like sets, and this works, adding to the claustrophobic and alienating feel. It’s always dark indoors, too, and the lighting is never natural.

This doesn’t at all resemble the pre-existing sci-fi clichés of what the futuristic is supposed to look like. The fashions, and the interior design, reflect the 1930s and 1940s and this, alongside the presence of a hero who basically is Philip Marlowe, gives this a strong noir feel.

We begin with a rather Orwellian test to see if a nervous man is a replicant. His life depends on getting the questions right; the air-conditioning in the ceiling reminds us very much of guillotine blades. Hanging in the air is the question of whether a true human could fail this test.

The interrogator is wearing a 1930s suit and smoking a cigar. It’s the cigar that unfortunately dates this. Off-world colonies and humanoid robots by 2019 I can believe, but smoking in the workplace? Never!

Suddenly, the chap being tested shoots his inquisitor, and we switch to Deckard, played superbly by Harrison Ford, he who yields to no one in his repertoire of angst-ridden facial expressions. He’s reading a newspaper, another activity which seems likely to be archaic by 2019.

Deckard is “arrested”, but it’s soon clear that this is just his old boss’ way of getting his attention. As the hoary old cliché goes, he’s retired from the force but is being forced back because no one else is as good as him, dammit.

The following exposition scene is necessary but a bit awkward; if Deckard is an experienced blade runner then he wouldn’t need telling about the replicants’ four year lifespan. Still, we learn that there are five replicants. Roy is their leader, and we also have Zhora, Leon (whom we’ve already met) and Pris, a “pleasure model” (apparently “standard issue”).

We see a blatant coca cola ad as Deckard is flown away, with the bloke chauffeuring him maintaining the retro look by dressing like a World War Two air pilot.

We’ve established that everyone is dressed like the 1930s, and that Decker is basically Philip Marlowe, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see a femme fatale at this point. Deckard pays a visit to the Tyrell Corporation, where he’s met firstly by an artificial owl and secondly by Rachel, with her ‘40s hairstyle, played icily by Sean Young. Interestingly and, as we shall soon discover, pertinently, she asks whether Deckard has ever accidentally “retired” a human by mistake.

Tyrell, her boss, insists that Deckard start by subjecting Rachel to the test. Deckard insists they more elsewhere because “it’s too bright in here”(!), and we discover, inevitably, that Rachel is a replicant, albeit a chain-smoking one. She’s an experiment of Tyrell’s, given a set of memories and unaware of what she is. Now she knows. Cue lots and lots of existential angst.

After a scene in which Roy shows us how badass he is by torturing a bloke for information (Rutger Hauer is infinitely better here than he will be in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Rachel pays Deckard a visit, insisting that she’s not a replicant. But Deckard insists that she is; those vivid childhood memories are not hers, but those of Tyrell’s niece. But then, as soon as he sees tears in his eyes, he takes it all back, insisting it’s a “bad joke”. This is very Marlowe.

We see a lady dressed in a way which, this being Hollywood, leads us to expect her to be a prostitute. She settles down to sleep rough, but runs into J.P. Sebastian, the very man Roy is looking for. J.P., rather than dressing in 1930s clothes like everyone else, is dressed like a civilian from Judge Dredd. He’s something of an innocent geek. He lives alone in a block of flats which seems otherwise deserted, and his only friends are eighteenth-century style automatons which he made himself. Pris is grateful for his hospitality, while she waits for her “friends”…

Deckard has a well weird dream about a white unicorn, I have no idea what this means. There follows a rather cool scene in which Deckard interrogates a piece of footage by zooming in and out, and finds a mysterious woman in a mirror. Pausing only to phone Rachel and ask her to go for a meal, he’s rebuffed, and follows the lead. The mysterious woman turns out to be Salome, and she’s a replicant.  Frankly, I could have done without her donning those pvc “angel wings” as he chases her across town and shoots her in beautifully realised slow motion. Ridley Scott may shoot this film beautifully, but this sort of symbolism is just pretentious.

Having killed the first of the replicants, Deckard is congratulated by Bryant again. He’s clearly been keeping an eye on Deckard, and makes it clear that he knows about Rachel and expects her to be “retired”. A couple of seconds later Leon turns up and starts to beat the crap out of Deckard. Just before he’s about to be killed, though, Rachel saves his life. How very convenient it is that replicants are vulnerable to bullets.

Rachel has clearly been having a long night of the soul. She knows she’s going to be hunted, and needs reassurance from Deckard that he won’t hurt her. She wants to know her incept date; suddenly she knows her life expectancy is very, very limited. And (the killer question!), she wonders whether Deckard has himself taken the Voight-Kampf test. She’s very sad, and very quiet; a long scene follows in which, while together, they are both shown to be very, very alone. Then Deckard rapes her. There’s no way round this; it’s quite blatant.

Sebastian, it seems, is only twenty-five years old, in spite of looking much older. He apparently suffers from Methuselah syndrome; he’s aging very quickly. There’s an obvious parallel here with the limited lifespan of the replicants.  It’s also heavily hinted that the reason he has no neighbours is that most other young people have gone to the off-world colonies. Surely this would have economic consequences?

Roy and Pris are now the only replicants left. Interestingly, though, they get what they want from J.P. through the use of charm rather than force, although admittedly there’s an implied physical threat.  J.P. assists Roy in getting in to meet his creator, Tyrell. The old man, surely knowing that Roy will kill him, meets his fate with calm dignity, expressing surprise that it took Roy so long. It is not possible, it seems, to extend the lifetime of a replicant, something which Roy finds impossible to accept (“It is difficult to meet your maker”). He has burned bright, but must die soon. Roy kills his “father”, horribly. It could hardly have been otherwise. Sebastian’s murder, at least, happens discreetly off-screen.

After a bizarre interlude in which his car is attacked by homeless dwarves, Deckard goes into the spider’s parlour. After shooting dead a screaming Pris, he encounters Roy, and there follows an extended sequence of cat-and-mouse. We get some extremely vertiginous scenes of Deckard climbing unaided and hanging on to the edges of cliffs for a long, long time. There’s absolutely no way a human would be capable of doing this; yes, I saw that episode of Mythbusters. These scenes convince me that he’s a replicant. Not that it matters, of course; the point is that the human / replicant division is arbitrary and meaningless, with even the test being of doubtful validity.

The end is surprising. Roy pulls Deckard up and delivers some poetic last words, before expiring gracefully at his appointed hour. He dies, and everything he has experienced is lost. But it eventually happens to all of us.

It seems the film ends with our rapist hero eloping with his victim. The pilot’s shout of “Too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” seems to make a certain implication about Deckard, the man with no apparent hinterland. I wonder which replicant will die first?