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Reviewed by:
  • The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
  • Neil Easterbrook (bio)
The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick. (Mark Steensland and Andy Massagli UK 2000). First Run Features, 2001. NTSC region 1. Aspect ratio 1.33:1. US$ 19.95.

In the past several years, a good deal has happened of note for those who share a passion for the fiction of Philip K. Dick. Most significantly, Dick entered the canon of capital L American Literature when in the spring of 2007 the Library [End Page 352] of America (which since 1982 has been publishing a comprehensive library of the great works of American literature) issued an omnibus volume containing four of his best novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ubik (1969).

More widely appreciated is the fact that Dick’s fiction has been, and will continue to be, the source of many commercial films, including such examples as Blade Runner (Scott US/Singapore 1982), Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990), Confessions d’un Barjo (Boivin France 1992), Minority Report (Spielberg US 2002), Paycheck (Woo US 2003), A Scanner Darkly (Linklater US 2006) and Next (Tamahori US 2007). New films are in various stages of production, including Ubik and a biopic interweaving Dick’s life and his unpublished, unfinished final novel, The Owl in Daylight, both of which are being produced by Electric Shepherd, the company run by Dick’s daughters Isa Dick Hackett and Laura Leslie. Even the older films show a remarkable afterlife. In the summer of 2007, another ‘new’ edit of Blade Runner, subtitled The Final Cut, opened in commercial theatres. It turned out merely to be the old ‘new director’s cut’ of 1993, with some digital tweaking of the image and another 8–10 seconds of restored footage, but as with all versions of films inspired by Dick’s fiction, it produced controversy. In promotional interview after promotional interview, Scott took the opportunity to embarrass himself by repeatedly declaring that he could not read Dick’s fiction (‘I quit after about 17 pages’, he said), that every critic who had ever offered an interpretation of the film was wrong, and that he now had a new aesthetic ideal in – ready? – the English painter George Stubbs. George Stubbs?

Sadly, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick is not something to note or to praise. It is rather more like the gap, the absence produced by the missing head of the PKD android. Perhaps you recall the story. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a team of roboticists built an android that looked and talked like Dick. It had life-like skin and camera eyes; with a vocoder and an AI brain sufficient to recognise Dick’s personal acquaintances, it could open conversations simply when someone entered the room. Photographs and stories were widely disseminated, and the android became something of touchstone among both fans of the writer and commentators on emerging technologies. In 2005, when the android was being transported by air to Santa Ana, California, the city where Dick died in 1982, its head mysteriously vanished and is missing until this day. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick is strangely like that missing head: it runs for 95 minutes but has no substance and leaves the impression only of loss and of absence. It is a film that will make you yearn for exhibits of the canvases of George Stubbs. [End Page 353]

I have no idea as to who or what might constitute the film’s target audience. The DVD box cover, and presumably the advertising materials that accompanied the initial commercial release, boldly proclaims ‘THE ULTIMATE TRIP INTO THE MIND BEHIND BLADE RUNNER AND TOTAL RECALL’. Setting aside the hyperbole of ‘ultimate’, the target audience must be conceived as kids who thought Blade Runner and Total Recall were ‘trippy’, and want to know something of the ‘cool dude’ who wrote them. PKD, of course, did not write the films. In the director’s interview that appears in the DVD extras, Steensland says he wanted Dick’s readers to learn something...

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