The Matrix . This article is about the film The Matrix, for other usages of the term, see Matrix . ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Matrix DVD case cover The Matrix is a film first released in the USA on March 31 , 1999 , written and directed by the Wachowski brothers (Andy and Larry). It stars Keanu Reeves , Laurence Fishburne , Carrie-Anne Moss , and Hugo Weaving . The story is about a young computer hacker who learns about the true nature of his reality and gets involved with a band of rebels fighting against the masters of it, sentient computer programs called agents. The Matrix earned $171 million in the US and $456 million worldwide. The movie's unexpected success spawned its expansion into a series (see Matrix series ) of three films (The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded , and The Matrix Revolutions ), a computer/video game (Enter the Matrix ), and a collection of nine animated shorts (the Animatrix ). All of the ideas were written by the Wachowski brothers, although five of the nine animated shorts count among their authors noted figures from the world of Japanese animation (Anime ). Also, the movie's official website provides free comics, set in the world of The Matrix. Some of these comics are now available in printed form (on 120 pages), although the creators claim that free comics will be available on the site in the future. Contents [showhide ] 1 Awards and nominations 2 Synopsis 3 Influences 3.1 Literature 3.2 Cinematic 3.3 Philosophy 3.4 Science 4 Principal cast 5 Similarities with Neuromancer 6 Related articles 7 External links [edit ] Awards and nominations The Matrix received Oscars for film editing , sound effects editing , visual effects , and sound . Furthermore, the film won these awards over Star Wars: The Phantom Menace , making it the first film to win the special effects Oscars over a film of the Star Wars series. The film is known for its innovative special effects, including the "bullet-time " effect, a combination of slow motion and camera orbiting around a given subject. * Won 4 Academy Awards , for Best Editing , Sound Effects Editing , Visual Effects , and Best Sound . [edit ] Synopsis Spoiler warning : Plot or ending details follow. Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix Enlarge Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix A computer software programmer named Thomas A. Anderson , who prefers his hacker name "Neo," is contacted by a group of humans who resist the Matrix. Morpheus, their leader and a practitioner of critical pedagogy , explains to Neo that the Matrix is a false reality and invites him to enter the "real world." There Neo discovers that the year is not 1999, but about 2199 and that humanity is fighting a war against intelligent machines. Morpheus has rescued Neo from the Matrix because he believes that Neo is "The One," who will destroy the Matrix and save humankind. It turns out that the world which Neo has inhabited since birth, the Matrix, is an illusory simulated reality construct of the world of 1999 , developed by the machines to keep the human population docile whilst they are used as power plants to keep the computers running. Morpheus believes that Neo has the power to free humankind from its enslavement through complete mastery over the Matrix. Neo is initially skeptical, but learns how he can "bend the rules" of the Matrix. He also forms a close personal relationship with a female member of the group, Trinity. Inside the Matrix, the humans are pursued by a group of self-aware programs, called Agents, capable of punching through walls and dodging bullets, as well as having incredible martial arts skills. Their most powerful skill is their ability to "jump" between bodies, enabling them to take over any person who has not been disconnected from the Matrix. When one member of the resistance (code named Cypher, who is subsequently killed off) betrays them and allows Agents to capture Morpheus, Neo goes back into The Matrix with Trinity to save their leader. After Morpheus and Trinity exit the Matrix, Agent Smith, the leader of the Agents, destroys the phone booth from which the escape signal was being broadcasted. Subsequently, Neo engages in a final duel with the program, killing the agent's current body. He then flees as a new Agent Smith arrives, having just taken over a new person. Upon reaching the second location of a hard line (a hijacked phoneline which carries the escape sequence necessary for exit from the Matrix), Neo is shot in the chest by Agent Smith. Neo slumps over, apparently dead. However, in the real world, Trinity refuses to accept Neo's death, and whispers into his ear that she now believes what the prophecy has fortold. Neo, who is seemingly awakened by the power of her love, realizes the fabricated nature of the Matrix, and it is only then that he is able to transcend the world around him. Empowered by this newfound notion of disbelief, Neo effortlessly defeats Agent Smith, thereby "deleting" him from the Matrix. He returns to the real world and is greeted by Trinity and Morpheus. [edit ] Influences [edit ] Literature The story makes numerous references to historical and literary myths, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , Judeo-Catholic imagery about Messianism and the novels of William Gibson , especially Neuromancer . Gibson popularized the concept of a world wide computer network with a virtual reality interface, which was named "the matrix" in his Sprawl Trilogy . However the concept and name apparently originated even earlier in the 1976 serial The Deadly Assassin on the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who , which featured a virtual reality known as the Matrix . The first writer about a virtual reality, populated with unsuspecting victims, was Daniel F. Galouye with Simulacron Three 1964 . The concept of artificial intelligence overthrowing or enslaving mankind had previously been touched on by hundreds of science fiction stories, cinematically most notably in James Cameron 's 1984 film, The Terminator . The idea of a world controlled by machines and all of humanity living underground goes back to the 1909 short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster . Note: The Matrix was often mistakenly considered by critics and public to be a sequel to Johnny Mnemonic which also stars Keanu Reeves and belongs to the Cyberpunk genre. [edit ] Cinematic The Matrix has many cinematic influences, ranging from explicit homage to stylistic nuances. Its action scenes, with a physics-defying style also drawn directly from martial arts films , are notable. They integrate Hong Kong style kung fu hand-to-hand combat (under the skilled guidance of Yuen Wo Ping ) and wire work, the hyper-active gun fights of directors such as John Woo and Ringo Lam , and classic American action movie tropes, including a rooftop chase. It could also be argued that The Matrix was originally based on or inspired by the concept of Ghost hacking , which is taken from Ghost in the Shell . Additionally, there are notable influences from Japanese animation (anime ). Both a scene near the end of the movie, where Neo's breathing seems to buckle the fabric of reality in the corridor where he is standing, as well as the "psychic children" scene in the Oracle 's waiting room are evocative of similar scenes from the 1980s anime classic Akira . The title sequence, the rooftop chase scene where an agent breaks a concrete tile on the roof when landing after a jump, the scene late in the movie where a character hides behind a column while pieces of it are blown away by bullets, and a chase scene in a fruit market where shots hit watermelons, are practically identical to shots in another anime science fiction classic, Ghost in the Shell . [edit ] Philosophy The Matrix follows all phases of the Campbellian heroic myth arc with near-literal precision, including even minor details like the circular journey, the crucial battle happening underground, and even the three-headed immortal enemy (the three agents). Elements of theology and philosophy are heavily present in The Matrix. Also, students of Gnosticism will notice many of its themes touched upon. There are also many references to Hinduism , Buddhism and Taoism , with concepts of Enlightenment/Nirvana and rebirth. Further references to Buddhism /Hinduism include the free will versus fate debate and the nature of reality , perception , enlightenment , Karma and existence. In many ways The Matrix is about a kind of reality enforcement , or similarly, hyperreality . There have been several books and websites written about the philosophy of The Matrix. One of the major issues in the film is the question of the validity of the world around us, i.e., what is reality, or whether what is happening is merely sensory information fed to us, is also raised in other science fiction films including eXistenZ , Total Recall , and peripherally in the film Abre los ojos (remade into Vanilla Sky ). The ideas behind The Matrix have been explored in old philosophical texts on epistemology , such as Plato's allegory of the cave and Descartes ' Meditations on First Philosophy . Postmodern thought plays a tangible role in the movie. In an opening scene, Neo hides a diskette in a false copy of Jean Baudrillard 's Simulacra and Simulation , a work that describes modern life as a hyperreal experience of simulation based upon simulation. Interpretations of The Matrix often reference Baudrillard's philosophy to demonstrate that the movie is an allegory for contemporary experience in a heavily commercialized, media-driven society. See also: the Philosophy (http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_category.html) section of the official matrix website (http://www.thematrix.com/). [edit ] Science It should be noted that the reason given in the movie for computers enslaving humans is implausible from a thermodynamic point of view. The chemical energy required to keep a human being alive is vastly greater than the bio-electric energy that could be harvested. It would be vastly more effective to burn the organic matter then to power a conventional electrical generator . Some people have pointed out the possibility that the laws of thermodynamics work differently in real life than in the matrix to make it harder for people to suspect they are being used as a power source, or that the machines have technology not yet imaginable by humans, and thus the known laws of science are impossible to apply in this situation. On the other hand, Morpheus speaks of physical laws like gravity applying both to the real world and within its simulation, and the scenes we see within the real world are certainly consistent with basic physics. (It is difficult to imagine how the "real world" would look if entropy were the machines' invention, for example.) Critical fans have speculated that the machines were actually using the humans' brains as components in a massively parallel neural network computer, and that the characters were simply mistaken about the purpose. This error would then be reflected in the "Zion Historical Archive" of The Second Renaissance . In fact, this was very close to the original explanation. Because they felt that non-technical viewers would have trouble understanding it, the writers abandoned it in favor of the "human power source" explanation. The neural-network explanation, however, is presented in the film's novelization, and the short story "Goliath", featured on the Matrix website and in the first volume of The Matrix Comics. [edit ] Principal cast * Keanu Reeves as Neo * Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus * Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity * Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith * Julian Arahanga as Apoc * Marcus Chong as Tank * Matt Doran as Mouse * Gloria Foster as the Oracle * Paul Goddard as Agent Brown * Belinda McClory as Switch * Joe Pantoliano as Cypher * Anthony Ray Parker as Dozer * Robert Taylor (actor II) as Agent Jones Trivia buffs should also be interested to learn that Carrie-Anne Moss also appeared in a short-lived science fiction television series called Matrix[1] (http://imdb.com/title/tt0106062/) in 1993 . [edit ] Similarities with Neuromancer The plot of The Matrix bears some resemblance to the basic plot of the book Neuromancer . In both a computer hacker is recruited to perform a particularly difficult task. This is not particularly surprising, since both The Matrix and Neuromancer are in the same genre: cyberpunk . One could argue (perhaps facetiously) that once a writer sets out to create a cyberpunk fiction, certain elements are expected, e.g., the tough-guy hacker/cracker hero, his optional female sidekick, the more-or-less malevolent artificial intelligences, and so forth. It has been noted that Neo is similar to Case , while Trinity may resemble Molly . (The extent of these resemblances can be debated: Trinity does not have retractable claws, and we know the color of her eyes.) On the other hand, Neo's "recruiter", Morpheus, does not have a close Neuromancer counterpart. The nearest match would most likely be Armitage, yet Morpheus's personality was not constructed by an AI, nor did he ever threaten Neo with neurotoxin sacs in Neo's bloodstream. Indeed, Morpheus is a respected member high in the hierarchy of a human resistance movement, whereas Armitage is largely a lone wolf, employed and manipulated by an AI. Other differences are also illuminating. Consider, for example, Gibson's Turing Police, as compared to the Wachowski brothers' agent programs. In Neuromancer, we have human police, tasked to limit the growth of artificial intelligences. The Matrix world, by contrast, gives us AIs who curtail human development. Gibson shows humans working alongside the AI Wintermute; their eventual triumph is presented as a victory for the "good guys". Again in contrast, the human-AI collaboration in The Matrix?Cypher defecting to the agents?appears to undermine all that good and right stand for. From this standpoint, The Matrix can be seen as an antithesis to Gibson's Neuromancer. [edit ] Related articles * The Matrix Reloaded * The Matrix Revolutions * The Matrix Online * Enter The Matrix * Virtual reality * Martial arts film * Bullet-time * Digitalism [edit ] External links * The Matrix official website (http://www.thematrix.com/) * IMDb entry on The Matrix (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/) * Matrixfans.net (http://matrixfans.net/) * The Many Meanings of The Matrix (http://www.integralnaked.org/talk.aspx?id=205), Larry Wachowski in a dialogue with Ken Wilber . * Thumbnailed DMOZ Matrix category (http://open.thumbshots.org/Arts/Movies/Titles/M/Matrix_Series/Matrix_Reloaded,_The/) * Matrix Wiki Encyclopedia (dictionary-of-matrix.com) (http://www.dictionary-of-matrix.com/) * Matrix-Explained.com: Explanations, photos, discussion board, links (http://www.matrix-explained.com) * Technology - The Shadow of the Matrix (http://japanvisitor.com/jc/shadow-of-the-matrix.html) * X-matrix.net - Home of The Final Matrix Exegesis (http://X-matrix.net) * MATRIX² Wired Magazine May 2003 (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/matrix2_pr.html) * MatrixTheories (http://thematrix.talkinbout.us/) * Unplugging The Matrix (http://slate.msn.com/id/2090943/), an article on Slate . * Man as the World-Builder (http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/world-builders.html), one of many philosophical articles inspired by the move. * Philosophy of The Matrix (http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_category.html) (official Warner Brothers Site, mentioned previously). * PlayTheMatrix.net , role-playing game based on The Matrix universe (in Spanish) Wolf Files Laurence Fishburn as Morpheus in The Matrix Reloaded. (Reuters/Warner Bros.) My God Morpheus When Entertainment Mixes With Religion By Buck Wolf ABCNEWS.com May 13? What is The Matrix? Moreover, what's Plan 9 From Outer Space? And can Elvis lead us to salvation if he quotes from the Bible in Klingon? The opening of The Matrix Reloaded on Thursday is a reminder of just how serious some of us can be about what others regard as mindless entertainment. The nexus between pop culture and religion is nothing new. In Britain's last census, 390,000 people gave their religion as "Jedi." Still others take freedom of religion as a fight for your right to party, embracing Elvis-impersonating ministers or getting married by ministers of the Church of Beer. But The Matrix series might provide serious insight into the Bible, at least according to the Rev. Chris Seay, who thinks the sci-fi adventure can be viewed as a retelling of the story of Christ, with Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne representing Jesus and John the Baptist. In the film, of course, Reeves and Fishburne portray Neo and Morpheus, who join forces to liberate humanity from its own creation ? a society of evil robots. "The Matrix is a point of intersection where all of our stories collide: Buddhism meets Christianity and Homer's Odyssey meets the childhood epic Alice in Wonderland," write Seay and co-author Greg Garrett in The Gospel Reloaded (Pinon Press). ?You Are the One? Any hero in an action-adventure film is bound to feel it's his or her destiny to save the day ? the question is, how much should we read into it? "You are the One," Morpheus tells Neo in the first film, 1999's The Matrix. "You see, you may have spent the last few years looking for me, but I have spent my entire life looking for you." No matter what your faith, you can't doubt the movie's box-office clout ? bringing in more than $450 million. "The first film is about Neo learning and accepting his calling," says Seay. "The second film asks, 'What does it mean to walk the path? What does it mean to respond to belief?' " A third installment, The Matrix Revolutions, is slated to open Nov. 5 and the reverend predicts an "apocalyptic battle that will end with good winning over evil." Seay ? a pastor of Ecclesia, a progressive Christian church in Houston ? has taken some hits from colleagues for integrating pop culture into faith. In an earlier book, The Gospel According to Tony Soprano, he gleaned Christian lessons from the Bada Bing crew, comparing Tony Soprano to King Solomon ? a man of great wealth who inwardly feels weak and empty. Seay refers to Soprano family turncoat Big Pussy as "the Judas Iscariot of the New Jersey mob" for betraying Tony and becoming an FBI informant. But if you lack faith in The Matrix or The Sopranos, here are some other diversions that have inspired worshipful devotion. Entertaining Spiritual Thoughts Force Strong in Britain: Was it the dark side of The Force that led some 390,000 Britons to declare Jedi as their religion in the 2001 United Kingdom census? Actually, it was the Internet. An Internet campaign urged folks to help get the spiritual practice that guides Luke Skywalker listed by the British government as an official religion. A widely circulated e-mail mistakenly claimed that officials would be obligated to recognize Jedi if 10,000 British citizens identified it as their religion. Even the most gullible science-fiction fan wouldn't have bet on the overwhelming response. In any event, 0.7 of the population embraced Star Wars ? which would make Jedi the United Kingdom's fourth-largest religion, ahead of Judaism or Buddhism. However, the Bureau of National Statistics claimed that Jedi-ism still didn't meet the criteria to be considered a religion. Those who declared that on their census form were marked as having no religion. The president of the country's Star Wars fan club declared it persecution. The Final Frontier: As Capt. Kirk finds in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, "You can't appreciate Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon." Now, thanks to groups like the Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project, you can read the good book in a way that would shock even Dr. McCoy. Hop on over to the Internet's Universal Translator Assistant Project, and you can translate Psalms and key biblical passages into Klingon, Romulan and Vulcan. If you need a little lesson: "JoH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh." That's Klingon for, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Now, how about a nice evening of Klingon karaoke. Evangelical Elvis: Not only can you worship Elvis, there are several different denominations. The First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine advances the theology of Elvisivity. The 24-Hour Church of Elvis in Oregon isn't a church and it isn't even open around the clock. But does claim to be the world's first coin-operated art gallery ? and boasts a prayer wheel with alternating images of Jesus and Elvis. In Las Vegas, several wedding chapels offer Elvis clones to preside over nuptials. But perhaps the most inspirational is preacher Gary Stone, 54, of Indiana, who is better known to church groups as Evangelical Elvis. He spreads the Gospel and sings in a white rhinestone jumpsuit, cape and boots. "Elvis would be older than some of the nursing home people I've performed for," Stone says. "People forget, he was a charitable man who loved gospel music." Marriage on Tap: There's one good thing if you wake up with a hangover and find that you've been married by the Church of Beer. You don't have to wonder what you were drinking. Beer Church founder and "pilsner pope" Kendall Jones says his Internet institution boasts more than 2,600 priests. To perform a Beer Church wedding, you must also be legally ordained by Universal Life Church. Contrary to popular belief, Beer Church priests are not allowed to be drunk on duty. But, Jones warns, you must have "a devout love of beer." Hurray for Holy Wood: You can't have a debate over who's the worst filmmaker ever without mentioning Ed Wood, the director of such cult classics as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. The Wood opus so impressed Steve Galindo, a 24-year-old college student from Arizona, that he formed the Internet's Church of the Heavenly Wood, which claims more than 5,000 members. In case you're unfamiliar with Wood or the 1994 Tim Burton biopic starring Johnny Depp, in Plan 9, grave-robbing aliens raise an army of zombies to take over the Earth. The ultra-low-budget film featured cardboard tombstones, and when lead actor Bela Lugosi died four days into production, Wood replaced him with his wife's chiropractor. In Glen or Glenda, Wood explores transvestitism, a personal obsession. Some might doubt the Rev. Steve's credentials, but he's baptized more than 5,000 "Woodites" and has gone to elaborate lengths to show how Wood's alternative lifestyle and long list of failures should inspire us all to overcome our own shortcomings. Woodism is not for everyone, but it's helping to ensure Ed Wood's immortality, and that alone is a miracle. Buck Wolf is entertainment producer at ABCNEWS.com. The Wolf Files is published Tuesdays. If you want to receive weekly notice when a new column is published, join the e-mail list . My God Morpheus from the May 09, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0509/p16s01-almo.html The Gospel according to Neo Theologians and pop-culture experts see 'The Matrix' as a phenomenon shaping public opinion about religion By Josh Burek | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor In a film era long gone, the Bible was a major player. Charlton Heston and Jimmy Stewart starred in movies that directly drew on themes of Bible history and Christian redemption. Hollywood treats religion a bit differently these days. Mel Gibson's "The Passion," aside, most A-list stars aren't lining up to play the carpenter from Nazareth. But some of Hollywood's most enduring science-fiction films have borrowed greatly from his story. Casting Keanu Reeves as a Christlike figure in "The Matrix" trilogy may seem blasphemous, but it's not new. "Star Wars" didn't push the idea of a Jedi Jesus, but many fans felt that it freely mixed myth and religion. And some critics said "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" relied heavily on the account of Christ's passion - a suggestion that director Steven Spielberg, who is Jewish, rejected. More recent films, from "Signs" to "Contact" have used a sci-fi setting to discuss serious questions of faith. But where previous films made vague references to the Christian story, "The Matrix," some theologians argue, appeals directly to the heart of Christian identity. Its script, however, draws on Platonic philosophy, Greek mythology, Buddhism, and postmodernism, religious experts say. Its high-octane blend of comic-book action and lofty metaphysics fueled box-office sales in 1999 to more than $450 million worldwide. But it also created theological tension about the movie's symbolism. And with "The Matrix Reloaded" due out next week, the debate is likely to intensify over different interpretations of the trilogy. "There's two ways to look at this from a Christian perspective," says Glenn Yeffeth, editor of the book "Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix." "One is that it's retelling the story of Christ," he says. "The other way to look at it is a very violent film filled with garden-variety blasphemy that exploits people's resonance with the Christian narrative to fool people into a story that is fundamentally atheistic." Both sides see a movie phenomenon that, for better or worse, is shaping public thought about religion. "The Matrix" is compelling people to examine the plurality of religions versus the unity of truth, says cultural critic Read Mercer Schuchardt. Like the movie's characters, who strive to understand what is real, Matrix fans are hoping the trilogy's second installment will help them unravel the film's tangled symbolism, say film experts. Earnest effort to deconstruct the movie began with a question. On Superbowl Sunday 1999, "Matrix" filmmakers tantalized TV viewers with a commercial trailer that asked, "What is the Matrix?" After the film made its auspicious Easter debut, "Matrix" viewers began answering the clever marketing query in personal terms. Sci-fi fans, philosophers, Buddhists, and even evangelical Christians have found resonant themes in the story. "There are hundreds of Matrix [websites] out there, and they're not about how cute Keanu Reeves looks," says Mr. Yeffeth. "The Christian parallels, the philosophical underpinnings - this is a movie that ... captures people's intellectual imagination." Some observers, however, are skeptical about the film's ability to convey the profound. A number of critics panned the first "Matrix" for being too pretentious. And some viewers balked at the marriage of kung fu fight scenes with a "Philosophy for Dummies" script. The film's creators, brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, have been remarkably tight-lipped about their vision for the trilogy. But these comic-book aficionados have pulled back the curtain enough to reveal which levers they are pulling. "We're interested in mythology, theology, and, to a certain extent, higher-level mathematics," Larry told Time in 1999. In a Warner Bros. Web chat that year, they were asked to what extent their allusions to myths and philosophy were intentional. "All of it," they said. Like all myths, "The Matrix" is first and foremost a story. By day, Thomas Anderson (Reeves) is a cubicle-bound software programmer. By night, he's a computer hacker known as Neo with troubling questions about reality. A rebel group led by Morpheus recruits Neo and offers him a chance to discover the truth about the Matrix. Neo is unplugged from the Matrix and realizes that humans are slaves to an empire of man-made, intelligent machines. The Matrix is a virtual-reality program hard-wired into the human brain to deceive mankind about this truth. Neo reluctantly accepts his mission to free the human race. No one is seriously treating the script as a Neo-New Testament. But "The Matrix" story has stirred debate within the Christian community. Author and dedicated Christian Kristenea LaVelle hoped her scriptural exegesis of the film, "The Reality Within the Matrix," would inspire Christians to apply the movie's gospel message to their own lives. Reaction to her book, however, has been mixed. A Canadian pastor contacted her to ask if he could use "The Matrix" as a keynote for evangelical outreach to teenagers. But she also encountered negative feedback at a book signing - in a Christian bookstore. The film's bullet-laden violence and strong language, along with Eastern religious influences, she acknowledges, are unsettling to some Christians. But she has high hopes for the sequels. "If you can see a way through those things and really pick out the good stuff ... any Christian could apply those things to life and grow from it." Mrs. LaVelle says that "The Matrix" expresses the basic idea of Christian salvation. "The whole idea of being 'awakened' or 'un-plugged' is a reference to salvation." She recognizes, however, that her view is not universally accepted. David Frankfurter, for one, disagrees. "I'd resist the notion of [Neo] as having anything to do with Jesus," says the professor of history and religious studies at the University of New Hampshire. "He's the classic hero figure from early Jewish literature." Mr. Frankfurter and other religious experts say "The Matrix" does not represent orthodox Christianity nearly as much as Gnostic Christianity. Gnosticism never developed a well-defined theology, but it depicts Jesus as a hero figure who saves mankind through "gnosis," or esoteric knowledge. In the Gnostic philosophy, the physical world is not part of God's creation, but a manifestation of a lower god - a nightmarish reality that imprisons mankind, say religious experts. Gnostics believed they could achieve salvation, not by overcoming evil and sin with God's grace, but by learning the "higher knowledge" about reality. Gnostic threads are present in many religious traditions, including Sufism and Buddhism. As woven by "The Matrix," these threads tie together current concerns with an ancient knot. "All of this stuff has been bouncing around in the human brain for centuries. When it comes into this hip new iteration in the cyberworld, it all sounds familiar," says Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University in New York. Whereas the bestselling "Left Behind" book series about judgment day plays on orthodox Christian fears of an arrival of the Antichrist, some observers say "The Matrix" uses Gnostic concepts to convey an equally frightful - but perhaps more tangible - prospect: technology's domination over mankind. The success of both, however, may be due to the seductive power of conspiracy theories. "The 'Left Behind' series is working very neatly with deep cultural fears about organized conspiracy," Frankfurter says. "[In 'The Matrix'], you have the ultimate conspiracy. We are all battery cells that are imaging our lives. And it also just plugs in to the ultimate conspiracy fear: the fear of technology." Matrix Glossary Birth: When he is "unplugged" from the Matrix, Neo resembles a newborn. Once his "umbilical cords" are removed, we see that he is hairless, confused, and covered in a type of amniotic fluid. He falls down a long tube and into a pool of water. After this presumed baptism, he is carried up, with his limp body making a cross silhouette. Neo had to be "born again" before he could begin his mission. Buddhism: The chief problem faced by humanity, according to Buddhist thought, is not sin or evil: it's ignorance of the true reality. The lack of an explicit divine being and references to "focus," "path," and "free your mind" also smack of Buddhist influence. Matrix rebels download truth and reprogram their minds to achieve salvation. Cypher: The name of this traitor who excels at Matrix code means, according to Webster's Dictionary: Zero...a person or thing of no importance or identity...a system of secret writing based on a key. His character has many parallels to Judas. At one point he exclaims, "Whoa, Neo. You scared the bejeezus out of me." Evil: Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the original Matrix world was "designed to be a perfect human world." No one accepted the program, he explains, because "human beings define their reality through misery and suffering." By drawing on parts of Genesis and comparing humans to a virus, Smith establishes evil as a natural, intrinsic state of human nature. God: God does make a cameo in The Matrix only as an expletive from Trinity. Yet the word "miracle" is used in clear cases to signify the need - and reality - of divine intervention. But there's no implied sense of a covenant between God and man. Jesus Christ: The name Jesus is often used in association with Neo, most explicitly when Choi, a drug user, thanks Neo for providing him with illicit software. "Hallelujah. You're my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ." Matrix: Literally, a computer program used to imprison mankind. According to Webster's, "matrix" means: 1) orig., the womb; uterus 2) that within which, or within and from which, something originates, takes form, or develops. At its heart, The Matrix is a story about birth and creation. Morpheus: Neo's mentor. Some observers identity him with John the Baptist, since both men were appointed to prepare the way for a messiah. In Greek mythology, Morpheus, the son of Hypnos, was the god of dreams. Music: The final song, played by Rage Against The Machine, is "Wake Up." Neo: The messiah. This is Thomas Anderson's virtual name. Literally meaning "new," Neo is also referred to as the "One," which is an anagram for Neo. Nebuchadnezzar: Morpheus's ship. This figure referenced in the Book of Daniel was the powerful king of ancient Babylon who suffered from troubling dreams. The name literally means "Nebo, protect the crown." Numerology: Neo's apartment number is 101, suggesting that he's "the one." Neo is shot in apartment number 303, and after 72 seconds (72 hours = 3 days), he rises again. Phone calls: In keeping with prophetic tradition, Neo is "called" to his task, not by a burning bush, but a FedEx employee. Their brief exchange - "Thomas Anderson?" | "Yeah, that's me." - mirrors Bible language constructions used to signify special identity. Postmodernism: Neo hides his illicit software within a chapter titled "On Nihilism" within a volume called "Simulacra and Simulation," by Jean Baudrillard. This seminal work of postmodernism advances the idea of a copy without an original. The Wachowski brothers assigned Keanu Reeves to read this book before filming began. Thomas Anderson: The Apostle Thomas was also called Didymus, which in Greek means "twin" or "double." Anderson means "son of man," one of the titles Jesus uses for himself. The twin names suggest his dual nature. As "Mr. Anderson," he is vulnerable to the powers of the evil agents. As "Neo," he has dominion over them. Trinity: Her kiss restores Neo from death. The doctrine of the three modes of God is central to Christian orthodoxy, yet the word "trinity" never actually appears in the Bible. Neo deepens the mystery of who Trinity is when he says to her, "I just thought, um...you were a guy." Logos: The altered studio logo at the opening of the film may be highly significant. The Matrix-coded WB letters could simply be the Wachowski brothers thumbing their nose at the Warner Bros. But by altering the logo - from the Greek term "logos," for word - the film's opening does two things. First, it corrupts the Gospel of John, which begins with "In the beginning was the Word...". Second, it asserts that metaphysical meaning can be gleaned by mining deep into words, or code. Zion: The last human city. In the Old Testament, Zion refers to the royal capital of David. Matrix agents desire the codes to Zion above all else. Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links ------------------------------------------------------------------------ www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/republish this article, please email copyright@csps.com Reality's Hidden 'Minority Report' The Political Gnosis of Philip K. Dick By Jay Kinney It seems hard to imagine that it has been nearly twenty years since Bladerunner was released. That riveting and influential film was the first movie to be inspired by the writings of science-fiction author, Philip K. Dick. Other films, of varying success, have followed, including Total Recall and Screamers, but the until now the most Dickian movies have been those that copped his dystopian and paranoid sensibility without directly basing themselves on one of his books or short stories. The Truman Show, They Live!, Pleasantville, and most notably, The Matrix, were all Dick films at heart, despite his absence from their credits. The recently released Spielberg film, Minority Report, returns to directly dipping from PKD?s deep well of inspiration, and despite the inevitably Spielbergian ending, succeeds in evoking one of Dick?s favourite themes: how does one elude the suffocation of an encroaching police state? In Minority Report, this trope takes the form of the local Department of Precrime in Washington D.C., which has succeeded in eliminating murders by arresting and incarcerating the perpetrators before they commit their crimes. This is accomplished by drawing on the abilities of three precogs (for precognitives), who have the involuntary talent of seeing into the near future and glimpsing the murders-to-be in progress. As the film unfolds, in the year 2054, a national referendum is about to occur on whether to expand precrime prevention to a national policy. Given the recent moves by the Bush Administration in the US to indefinitely detain those who have committed no crimes, but who may have planned to, the timeliness of Minority Report is almost uncanny. Dick?s original short story appeared in 1956, and the script for the film was written well in advance of the shock of 9/11. But somehow, Dick?s intuitions of precrime enforcement have been brought to the big screen at just the moment when their analog is being enacted in real life. PKD, who died in 1982, would savour the irony, were he still with us. Gnosis Gnosticism is a name commonly applied to numerous early Christian sects who emphasised the necessity of receiving ?gnosis? (divine knowledge of true reality) in order to be saved. While they considered themselves to be Christian, the Gnostics diverged from both Judaism and Catholic Christianity in their belief that this world was a flawed and ensnaring creation of a despotic Demiurge who had usurped the position of God. Through the agency of a redeemer Christ and his bride, Sophia (Wisdom), the Gnostics hoped to return, upon death, to the most high realm of the Pleroma (Fullness) to unite with the true Unknown God. The Penultimate Truth (1964) ?Most humans live in tank cities far below the surface of the Earth, believing themselves to be safe from the ongoing nuclear war above their heads. In fact, the war has been over for ten years, and instead of a radioactive ruin, the planet is a vast park, ruled by feudal barons who are playing power politics with the buried masses of their fellow men.?1 Buy This Book Now! That, at least, is the standard potted summary of Gnosticism. If one takes a broader view, there have been many gnosticisms, and many ?gnosi? ? some predating the Christian Era and some quite independent of Christianity. Gnosis, as a synonym for illumination or mystical union, is equivalent to marifah (Arabic) or irfan (Persian) in esoteric Islam, for example. However, while we might assume that the state of consciousness signified by the term ?gnosis? is universally accessible (or at least potentially so), it is not at all certain that those using the term were always referring to the same thing. For instance, the gnosis of the Sufi mystics of Islam includes no admission of the existence of a Demiurge or false, lower God. Indeed, tawhid, the Unity of God and Creation, is such a fundamental assumption of Islam, that a spiritual realisation pointing to a Higher God than that of the Creator would be immediately rejected as a delusion. On the other hand, Hindu yogis might readily agree with many Gnostics that this world is a veil or delusion (maya in Sanskrit), and that there is an Absolute God behind or above lesser gods. But few yogis would share the Gnostic assessment that this indicates a moral flaw in the universe. What exactly is the nature of the divine knowledge that the Gnostics and other mystics have sought? It is impossible to describe precisely, because of the non-discursive nature of that knowledge. Frithjof Schuon refers to gnosis as ?our participation in the ?perspective? of the divine Subject which, in turn, is beyond the separative polarity, ?subject-object?....?3 G.E.H. Palmer refers to it as ?Wisdom made up of Knowledge and Sanctity,? and underscores the distinction ?between knowledge acquired by the ordinary discursive mind and the higher Knowledge which comes of intuition by the Intellect, the term Intellect having the same sense as in Plotinus or Eckhart.?4 In other words, gnosis, according to this definition, is an experiential ?knowing? that results from the expansion of the Gnostic?s consciousness to the level of the divine Intellect, where the illusion of the separate self (ego) is obliterated ? at least temporarily ? in the vast perspective of the higher Self. Such a state cannot, of course, be sustained indefinitely. What goes up must come down. But having risen to such heights, the ego that is reassembled upon its descent, is permanently affected. It now ?knows? its own place in the cosmic scheme of things. Such ?knowledge? is not easily communicated to others, in part because shared reference points are few, and because any attempt at describing the experience is bound to diminish and reify it. Thus, those who have been blessed with gnosis have used oblique strategies to impart the ineffable: poetry instead of prose; myths instead of clear-cut analysis; paradoxical statements instead of declarations. There is still another factor contributing to the proliferation of gnosi and gnosticisms: while the experience of gnosis may be ahistorical, i.e., beyond time and place, the gnostic himself is obviously not. A Tibetan Buddhist in the recesses of the Himalayas, who takes reincarnation for granted and believes in numerous gods, is not going to clothe his gnosis in the garments of a Muslim Sufi in Andalucia, who believes in one lifetime and one God. And vice versa. The Crack in Space (1966) ?Frozen sleep seems like a humane way to end unemployment and over-population pressures: Send the excess citizens to the future. The government warehouses are filled with bibs when a political fight erupts over whether or not to dispose of them through a space-warp. Then some unknown outside agency helps the sleepers to awake.?2 Buy This Book Now! A gnostic whose historical era and cultural milieu is one of war and persecution is likely to have his circumstances seep into his post-gnosis explication of reality. There may still be a higher Reality beyond conflict and violence that he experiences in gnosis, but his mythic version of the journey to the Truth may feature a harsher struggle to get there than would otherwise be the case. Finally, there is the personality and psychological condition of the gnostic to be considered. Contrary to contemporary holistic assumptions that assume that the combination of a good diet, a good life, and a good attitude are most likely to lead one to higher spiritual consciousness, this is not always so. Higher states may also be triggered by asceticism, psychoactive substances, disciplined practice, or sheer happenstance. True, an absence of cravings and obsessions may make meditative practice easier, but gnosis can also erupt in someone who is by no means a saint. In such a case, his post-gnosis understanding of the Real may well be tinged with his neurotic predisposition. The Divine Invasion Which brings us back to Philip K. Dick. In February, 1974, Dick was living in Fullerton, California, an undistinguished city in Orange County. He?d fled his long-time residency in Northern California out of fear for his life and his sanity. He?d been mixed up in long-time illicit drug use, tax refusal in protest against the Vietnam War, and chronic poverty. In 1971, his previous home in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, had been broken into by persons unknown, his safe blasted open, and things taken. He?d attempted suicide, checked himself into drug rehab in Vancouver, and in 1972 had flown from there to Fullerton.5 By 1974, he?d married his fifth wife, Tessa, and had a new child, Christopher. But most immediately, in February, he?d just had two impacted wisdom teeth removed and was awaiting the delivery of prescribed medicine from the drug store.6 The doorbell rang and Dick answered the door. The delivery girl from the drug store stood before him, wearing a delicate necklace from which hung a golden fish, a symbol of Christ often worn by evangelical Christians. As Dick later recounted it ? possibly in mythologised form ? a laser-like pink beam shot from the fish to Dick?s third eye. It had an extraordinary effect: I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis ? a Greek word meaning, literally, ?loss of forgetfulness.? I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate in cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.7 There was plenty more to follow. For the next year or so, Dick felt his psyche invaded by a ?transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life, and suddenly had become sane.?8 He experienced hypnagogic visions, auditions, tutelary dreams, and an eight hour all night vision of thousands of coloured graphics resembling ?the nonobjective paintings of Kandinsky and Klee.?9 Dick came to nickname the invasive rational mind as VALIS (for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), which became the name of his 1981 novel recounting his mind-boggling experience in fictional form. Perhaps most significantly, he perceived that ?real time had ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind....?10 PKD?s life-long preoccupation with the questions of ?what is reality?? and ?what is man?? wouldn?t allow him to resolve his 1974 experiences into a single easy explanation. He variously explained them to himself as communications from God or from a satellite orbiting Earth, or most baroquely as psychic invasions courtesy of Soviet Academy of Sciences psychotronic transmitters. They provided fodder for several more novels before his untimely death at age 53 in 1982. The question might be fairly asked whether Philip K. Dick?s 1974 experiences constituted a form of gnosis. Judging from his many stories and novels, Dick operated throughout his life from a gut feeling that reality, as we commonly perceive it, is a façade. He sensed that there was something morally wrong in a universe where a friend?s innocent cat could walk across the street and be blithely run over by a passing car. His novels returned, time and again, to the theme of the little man caught in the machinations of powers beyond his kin or control. Dick may have nominally been an Episcopalian, but he was constitutionally a gnostic. VALIS (1981) ?A coterie of religious seekers forms to explore the revelatory visions of one Horelover Fat; a semi-autobiographical analogue of PKD. The group?s hermeneutical research leads to a rock musician?s estate where they confront the Messiah; a two-year old named Sophia. She confirms their suspicions that an ancient, mechanical intelligence orbiting the Earth has been guiding their discoveries.?11 Buy This Book Now! But, here?s the paradox: not every gnostic receives complete gnosis. Some Gnostics, such as the Cathars of southern France, recognised this in dividing their members between mere believers and the elect (perfecti), and it is safe to assume that not every perfecti had achieved full mystical awareness.13 The Gnostics taught that there are several planes or spheres between our material world and the purely spiritual realm of the Pleroma, ?home? of the Unknown God. These planes were ruled by Archons, and part of the challenge for the Gnostic?s soul, at death, was to navigate past these cosmic authorities without becoming ensnared. The Gnostic who realised complete gnosis prior to his own death, (an awareness referred to in Sufi terminology as ?to die before you die,?) was blessed with the key to safely make that post-death journey. But not every gnosis is complete and some experiences might provide only a partial realisation ? perhaps of an intermediate Archonic realm that more resembles our veiled world than it does the Pleroma. Although incomplete, this Archonic gnosis could still be useful in shedding light on our present predicament ? as long as its insights were not taken as the final word or the total picture. Philip K. Dick?s gnosis, I?d suggest, was of this partial sort: troubling, compelling, ambiguous, and as political as it was spiritual. His predisposition towards paranoia ? exacerbated by amphetamine abuse, and the temper of the McCarthy era and the political upheaval of the ?60s ? led him to write dozens of novels prior to 1974 that were broadly gnostic in their exploration of hallucinogenic realities, the individual?s struggle with hostile higher authorities, and in their questioning of conventional morality. Dick?s February-March ?74 gnosis ? which he experienced in a dissociated manner as the intrusion of a higher rational mind into his consciousness ? came to be understood by him as a revelation of profound political implications. Given his political preoccupations, which were already in place, this is hardly a surprise. Human history might seem to be an endless series of recurring cycles: power held by the few consolidates itself, corruption ensues, the regime falls and is replaced, and so on. PKD, however, in the thralls of his pink beam gnosis, arrived at an urgently mythic conclusion: real time stopped in 70 C.E., a spurious dream-time was thrust upon us for nineteen centuries, and then, through external intervention, real time was begun again. Beneath the ordinary appearance of our modern world, Dick (and select others) were really early Christians in conflict with the Roman Empire, which was still in power. Is this really a grand cosmic truth? I think not. Even in the 1970s it had its trivial side, such as Dick?s notion that President Nixon?s resignation after Watergate was an event of cosmic significance. But in a metaphorical, and even archetypal, manner, PKD?s gnosis did unveil a politico-spiritual reality that is increasingly relevant to us, twenty years after his death. ?The Empire never ended,? wrote Dick, and who would argue with that, as we watch the reigning Superpower rattling its sabres at its minions and designated foes. The cultural collossi of the media conglomerates and Hollywood have spun a dreamlike fog that subsumes the past and future into an everlasting present of novelty and distraction. An effort to merely think clearly, free of clichés, cant, and consumables, takes a heroic effort, akin to dodging the Archons at every turn. The Divine Invasion (1981) ?An air collision jeopardized the successful conclusion of the Second Coming. Emmanuel?s Appolonian and Dionysian selves are divided by partial amnesia. Their reintegration is opposed by Belial?s forces of decay, which control the Earth. The Paraclete?s foster father, Herb Asher, faces problems with his own redemption. Herb finds allies in the prophet Elijah, his partner in a retail audio store; and in singer Linda Fox, his own true love, and a construct energized by VALIS.?12 Buy This Book Now! Dick thought that 1974 was a turning point ? a time when Truth was beginning anew to penetrate the veil of appearances. One wishes that this were really true, but the shock of 9/11 and the subsequent psyops war, lead one to conclude that there is plenty of veiling still in place ? perhaps more than ever. To the degree that it slightly parts the veil, Minority Report imparts a whiff of Philip K. Dick?s political gnosis. Despite all the hypnotic baffling in place, sometimes a liberating signal makes it through. But no movie ? and no book ? is a substitute for one?s own rendezvous with the Unknown God. Any genuine gnosis ? whether partial or complete, whether political or spiritual ? is more valuable than all the words that have been written about it. Above all, stay alert, and when that knock comes at the door, say a quick prayer that it?s the girl with the fish necklace and not the police from the Department of Precrime. Recommended Reading: Gospel of Thomas; The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. Footnotes: 1. Summary from Daniel J.H. Levack, PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography (San Francisco, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1981), p. 24. 2. Ibid, p. 53. 3. Frithjof Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom (Bedfont, Middlesex: Perennial Books, 1990) p. 76. 4. Ibid, G.E.H. Palmer, ?Translator?s Forward,? p. 8. 5. For a full account of Dick?s life, see: Larry Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York, NY: Harmony Books, 1989). 6. Dick?s own account has him eagerly awaiting pain medicine. His wife?s account suggests he was already on codeine and was awaiting medicine for his blood pressure. 7. From ?How to Build a Universe that Doesn?t Fall Apart Two Days Later,? published as an introduction to I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1985.) 8. From interview in Charles Platt, Editor, Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction (New York, NY: Berkeley Books, 1980) p. 155. 9. PKD letter to Peter Fitting, June 1974. 10. Philip K. Dick, VALIS (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1981) p. 228. 11. Levack, p. 70. 12. Ibid, p. 27. 13. Yuri Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe (London: Penguin/Arkana, 1994) p. 162. Consider the following from Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference , by Erik Davis: In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the "Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of information" that we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. "We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read." With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming "Matrix" of cosmic information. Instead, we are under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire," whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a "technology of power" was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, "The Empire never ended." I would like to assert the possibility that the prison has always been under construction, and it gets closer to view as it nears completion. While the current administration continues to play "The Grand Chessboard" under the Orwellian facade of peace through war and freedom through slavery, we must ask ourselves: to what end? While some have compared Bush's tactics to those of Adolf Hitler , others feverishly argue that this is necessary to protect America's self interests. The prison-builders have always strived to coerce the citizenry into sacrificing liberty for pseudo-security. As H.L. Mencken observed: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. So now as we embark on a lifelong irrational "War against Terrorism", which comedian David Cross concluded is as feasible to win as a "War against Jealousy", and the CIA-ridden oil-soaked media monopoly continues to parrot the current Administration's macro-management of reality, some of the true prison-builders begin to emerge. Prison-building with fear We, as humans, are scared of the unknown. The media frenzy of kidnappings a few months back, which served as a well-timed distraction to events that were conveniently sidelined, also served the prison guards and their prerogative: subdermal microchips. Shortly after 9-11, in the wake of irrational reactionism, Applied Digital Solutions , parent company of Verichip , went on a flurry of an advertising campaign, asking everyone the Simpson's tagline: "Won't somebody please think about the children?". Andy Rooney came out on 60 Minutes proclaiming; "I wouldn't mind having something planted permanently in my arm that would identify me.'' This market tactic was paired with their "Get Chipped!" promotion, and the "Chipmobile" , which is touring Florida Senior centers, prowling for Alzheimers patients who must get chipped "for their own safety". Soon deals were made with China , Mexico , and South Korea to perpetuate the meme that global slavery equals global safety. Just before the FDA ruled that Verichip is not a regulated medical device, Microsoft MapPoint announced a partnership with Verichip to "pinpoint the location of almost anything you want to track?in real time. You can even receive critical information about body temperature, pulse, and more." The FDA then charged : "ADS's conduct flagrantly disregards FDA's prior comprehensive advice." Then in November the tune changed, from a medical device back to a location and tracking device, as a Washington forum debated the benefits and hazards posed by a new way of identifying people with a microchip implanted under their skin to replace conventional paper identification. Privacy advocates argued the microchip could spell the end of anonymity in the United States, particularly if authorities began requiring people to wear them to meet conditions of parole, employment or border crossings. As the prison is beginning to emerge and the thoughts and nightmares of writers of the past are birthed into existence, we embark on a new millennium, a new day in America. "This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millenium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness." -Terence McKenna (1946-2000) I would agree that at the time of this quote, we may have had a few more options. I believe that we have surpassed that now and there may be no turning back, no changing the direction of the ball once it has been thrown, and individually we must decide, Das Experiment -style, as Americans: Do we want to be the prison guards, the prisoners, or do we want to find a way off of the island? It's not a prison if you never try the door. And Philip K. Dick wept. Many people have seen Dick as a unique figure in science fiction. I would argue that some of the themes in his writing anticipated the particular science fiction movement that so many people now call "cyberpunk." Not surprisingly, he is often not included in the canons of this genre, but if his writing were closely examined, there are many reasons why he should have been. Clearly, Dick frequently dealt with the theme "what is human?" by introducing characters that dealt with precisely that dilemma - the replicants of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - by beginning to question the difference between man and machine. If in the cyberpunk novel humans are beginning to cross the man/machine boundary by replacing more and more of their "meat" with cybernetic implants, then often Dick's characters - like Commander Data on Star Trek - are frequently seeking to become more human. PKD eventually answered this question (it was more easy for him than "what is real?") by suggesting that the hallmark of humanity was kindness. Palmer Eldritch did not lose his humanity by his artificial implants ('stigmata') or even by becoming consumed by an intelligent Fungus from the Prox system. Instead, PKD hints his humanity was lost when his compassion finally was also, which is why Leo Bulero triumphs over him. PKD never denied the possibility that machines might know kindness, and Deckard himself comes to this conclusion in DADES. All kinds of beings and races inhabit PKD's bizarre universe, from the insane inhabitants of the Alphane moon to the stunted survivors of a post-nuclear holocaust. PKD suggested that wherever compassion might still be found, humanity could be discovered. Machines became evil (like the Deus Irae) only when their creators failed to implant a sense of compassion within them. A frequent theme in cyberpunk fiction is also what Baudrillard calls hyperreality - how technology has left humans floating about in virtual worlds and 'consensual hallucinations,' cut off from the real. Virtual reality plays an important role in many cyberpunk novels as the theatre of action - but it is also recognized as an important escape from increasingly dystopian worlds. PKD anticipates the idea of VR in novels like Eye in the Sky , where the Bevatron forces the various protagonists to caroom through virtual worlds of their own making. In his novels, the characters are always struggling to find the real, which 'peeks' through always in the most unusual and inocuous of places. Unlike postmodern philosophers, who often try to conflate surface image with deep truth, PKD's characters are always seeking to unravel the virtual worlds in which they find themselves... they do not simply move about in their agreed "consensual hallucination," but instead search for ways out. PKD's novels are also about drugs and neuropolitics, a theme of deep concern in most cyberpunk writing. While many of his novels, especially Through a Scanner Darkly , point to the folly of his drugs, PKD in his own life frequently believed that neurochemicals made him more productive, although he denied using hallucinogens to come up with any of his stories. Interestingly, even before nootropics ("smart drugs") were hot stuff, PKD tried to take a "cocktail" of water-soluble vitamins to get his two brain hemispheres working in perfect synchrony. PKD in the end started pointing to some sort of drug as the answer for mankind's problems - not something escapist or mood-altering, like Can-D, but something of an altogether different kind. The anokhi mushroom - the drug that will open the mind to communion with the Divine - is a prototype of what Phil was looking for. Something that would "cleanse the doors of perception" as Blake, and Jim Morrison, would have it. In the final analysis, PKD saw drugs as mere instruments - the problem with many of his characters is that they began being used by the drugs themselves. This is not very far from the cyberpunk depiction of drugs in their stories. But perhaps the best proto-cyberpunk novel of PKD's is his most underappreciated - Radio Free Albemuth . It is full of metaphors and concepts derived from electronics, communication, and information theory, some of which Phil probably picked up from his stint in a record store. PKD conceived of the idea of a universal Matrix - something which Gibson was only beginning to hint at at the end of his first book, Neuromancer - an information "web" spanning entire galaxies and linking them in rational harmony. The problem was that this "Network's" links were broken and therefore the pure signal of the cosmos was being distorted on this planet by the noise of the smothering Black Iron Prison. The Firebrights previously travelled openly between their world and ours, descending on select humans; now the lines of communication had been cut off. Since the B.I.P arrives in 70 CE, it is clear that PKD considered the main "communication receiever" on this planet to be the Temple of Solomon. The three-eyed race of Albemuth took it upon themselves to heal the Matrix and to restore the Net through VALIS. Clearly, when one node in this cosmic Matrix is cut off from the rest, they are apparently all disturbed by it. "Nicholas Brady" (an alter ego of PKD) and Silvio Sadassa overcome the Empire and its tyrant "Ferris Fremont" through a clever manipulation of signal and noise. The noise of Fremont's lies will be cut into by the subliminal signal that they will put into musical recordings telling the American people he is really a Communist puppet. Similarly, a signal is sent out at the end of the novel VALIS: a juxtaposition of TV commercials for Food King and Felix the Cat gives the world the great words: "KING FELIX," the joyous king. The suggestion is that Zebra/VALIS is constantly projecting a small, subliminal signal in unsuspecting areas to penetrate the overwhelming noise of the Empire. Perhaps this "still small voice" can even be found in the din and confusion of a genre of trash writing known as "science fiction..." or the great provider of trash called TV. PKD often heard voices through his radio insulting him and telling him to die. Many schizophrenics experience the sensation of being "talked" to by electronic devices or being controlled by electronic beams. But what validated PKD's VALIS experience for him was the feeling that he was receiving pure, undistorted, rational information; not irrational urgings or unintelligible voices. He could not help but feel he was seeing the "invasion" of rationality and a pure signal into an increasingly cacophonous and dissonant world. To some extent, the role of these ideas in RFA and the novel VALIS cannot really be appreciated without a consideration of PKD's VALIS experiences. Though he often contradicted himself about the voice of VALIS, later calling it feminine or attributing it to various persons (Jim Pike, his sister Jane, a medieval Rabbi, Sophia, or a 1st century Christian named Thomas), PKD first indentified it as an "AI voice" which communicated through a "pink laser beam." Was PKD being jacked into the universal Matrix broadcast from RFA? He at first felt instinctively that this entity, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System , was a machine - at least it had to be, because its mind seemed so beyond human worries and concerns, so full of pure unimpeded rationality, that it must have been a computer. In both RFA and the novel VALIS, PKD goes to great pains to identify VALIS as an extraterrestrial sattelite, perhaps constructed by the three-eyed beings of Sirius. But it is more than a mechanism, because it has compassion - kindness enough to prevent Phil's son dying from a fatal disease. It does not provide just cold facts, but instead living information. The "Great Soviet Dictionary" defines it thusly: "A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterized by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth, and an armillary coherence." PKD stressed that too much information could rapidly overload the system; the little girl Sophia/Mini is overwhelmed because her parents try and directly implant information into her through a laser (much like VALIS was doing to Phil.) But in his definition he has stumbled onto one of the great discoveries of 20th century information theory: the link between information, energy, and entropy. Maxwell's Demon can reverse entropy (dispersal) by being given the information of the state of molecules in his little box; the problem is that every time information is acquired, the overall entropy of the system increases. Unless that information comes from outside the closed system. The negentropic vortex that PKD speaks of maybe similar to the "strange attractors" of chaos theory or the punctuated equilibria of thermodynamics - a whirlpool of order in the midst of increasing chaos. Working in a music store, PKD inevitably encountered the problems of distortion and bias - for music lovers, this refers to the extraneous information that cuts into music enjoyment. The source of distortion is not the musical recording itself, but instead the speakers or equipment it passes through. A good electrical engineer tries to increase the bias of a signal, while reducing noise. He also was probably aware of the problems of feedback, when minor sonic perturbations are amplified to where they overwhelm the music itself. Communication theorists have noted that the signal/noise ratio is fundamental to intelligibility, so their goal is also to try and eliminate distortion as well - linguistic distortion; "doublespeak" of politicians and tyrants, if you will. Cybernetic theorists like Norbert Weiner, in examining self-correcting electronic systems, also point out that one of the problems is that "bottlenecks" in the system arise, where the control mechanism becomes "frozen." PKD might have had some familiarity with cybernetics as well, especially its central importance in music amplification. It isn't known how much familiarity PKD had with computers. The PC revolution really followed shortly after his death. But the idea of binary information is an important theme in his work - so much so that he moves from analog to digital in the end, pointing to "Ditheon," the dual principle, as being of key importance to the whole universe. He clearly was convinced of the mathematical and rational foundations of aesthetics, becoming obsessed with the Golden Section as a harmonic function fundamental to the whole cosmos. And he continued to express the theory that the universe was a hologram in the Exegesis - echoing Pribram's theory that the brain stores information holographically, so that each sub-part contains the whole. Computers do not play a large role in PKD's work, but clearly important ideas from early communication and information theory, which he was probably exposed to during his stint in the music business, found their way into his work. The idea of the plasmate as living information and the homeoplasmate as such a being bonded to a human being is not altogether far from the so-called loa of Gibson's Matrix in the novel Count Zero. In that book, Gibson's Matrix has fractured (like PKD's cosmic Matrix) into several subprograms and AIs which "possess" people like his character Angie by entering through neural interfaces. Gibson and Dick are really dealing with the same thing - the vanishing trace of spirit in the Age of the Machine. And Gibson's characters live in a dystopian world where multinational corporations control all matters of governance and guard the flow of information with deadly defense programs - "ice" - a future not wholly dissimilar from the dystopias that Phil created in his novels. But Gibson's characters - the "console cowboys" - thrive in this environment; they exploit it, they take it as a given and do what they can to survive. PKD's characters never accept their reality; they are always searching for another underlying one, over which their bleak present has been superimposed. In the Exegesis, Phil became more theological, and insistent on identifying VALIS with the Divine Presence. In some ways, a vision he had in 1980 convinced him of the folly of his actions. A confrontation he had with God in this vision led him to a series of infinite stacks of punched cards being generated each time he attempted to rationalize the vision. The only thing that could save him from this infinite information regress was not to rationalize it. Like Aquinas, PKD came to the conclusion (despairingly) that all his attempts to rationalize his experiences were useless. Fortunately, unlike Aquinas, he did not burn his theological writings after his mystical vision. PKD was not the first science fiction writer to envision the possibility that the Divine might be a machine - this same notion appears in a story by the late Isaac Asimov ( The Final Question ) in which a series of increasingly powerful computers are asked how to reverse the entropic heat death of the universe. Each answers with the same complaint: "insufficient data." After the final heat death of the universe, the final computer - Cosmic AI - in hyperspace arrives at the answer after untold aeons, and it is "Let there be Light!" Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1) To find out more about Philip K. Dick, contact pkd-list-request@draco.mv.com and get on the PKD mailing list. Hollywood and Philip K. Dick The world according to Dick Apr 15th 2004 From The Economist print edition Hollywood's fascination with a long-dead writer of pulp science fiction I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick By Emmanuel Carrère Henry Holt; 352 pages; $26 Buy it at Amazon.com ACCORDING to the official website of Philip K. Dick, the films made from his books have generated nearly $700m in worldwide box-office receipts. Not bad for an author who died more than 20 years ago in relative obscurity. Half-a-dozen films have been made from his books, including ?Blade Runner?, ?Total Recall?, ?Minority Report? and, most recently, ?Paycheck?. Another of his novels seems likely to have inspired ?The Truman Show?, and, say some, his work may have influenced the ?Matrix? series of films. And that looks unlikely to be the end of it. Those responsible for his estate say that the film rights to six more of his novels and four of his short stories have either been bought or optioned. Dick yearned for literary acclaim, but in his lifetime he was known mainly as a prolific writer of pulp science fiction. He wrote more than 50 novels and over 100 short stories?work that was mostly fuelled by amphetamines and a cocktail of prescription drugs. He started psychoanalysis at the age of 14 and became so familiar with it that he used it to toy with his friends, his readers and even his shrinks, as a cat would with a mouse. Reading his work has been described as falling through a series of trap doors. Before the LSD revolution in California, his adopted home, Dick was writing books that explored how the brain is a filtering mechanism that enables reality to be seen from many different perspectives. He gained a cult reputation as an LSD author, but took the drug only once and hated it. Emmanuel Carrère's account of Dick's life focuses on the mind of a man who spent his time playing with other people's minds. Dick was obsessed with the unreal nature of reality, and the question of what is real. The sense of looking at something familiar and seeing it as if for the first time, or radically differently, was a central theme in his disturbed life. The book traces many of his influences, from the death of his twin sister shortly after she was born to a succession of failed relationships. Dick lashed himself to women like a drowning man to a rock in a storm. Successively, though, his paranoia, craziness and pill-popping sent them running. Mr Carrère shows how Dick's tumultuous life story leaked on to the pages of his science-fiction novels. But why is a strange, drugged-out and paranoid bygone of such interest to modern-day filmmakers? Partly because today's revolution in the biosciences, in particular in neuroscience, makes the questions he was asking particularly relevant. What is real if we can take drugs that alter our moods, or if we can tinker with our own memories? These issues were the flesh and bones of Dick's books, all those years ago. He anticipated the terrible attractions of a technology that erases memory. People would simply have their painful memories removed. In the most recent film of his work, ?Paycheck?, Ben Affleck rather unconvincingly plays a reverse engineer who routinely has his memory erased after he does a job of work, as part of commercial non-disclosure agreements. The character comes to believe that erasing the dull bits of his life is a good idea. All he is left with are the highlights. ?The stuff you erase doesn't matter,? says Mr Affleck's character. Of course, as the film progresses, we see how wrong he is: we are the sum of all our experiences?anything we erase makes us less than who we are. Although Dick's delight in twisting reality may be illuminating for us today, he paid a heavy price for his unique vision. Accepting no single personal version of reality, with all its incumbent flaws, he had little grip on any world whatsoever. I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick. By Emmanuel Carrère. Henry Holt; 352 pages; $26 Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. Monday, Jan. 12, 2004 That Old Feeling: You Know Dick Richard Corliss on on the fantastic life and astounding afterlife of SF writer Philip K. Dick By RICHARD CORLISS I. NOT BY ITS COVER ?I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities, but wild possibilities. It?s not just ?What if ? ?. It?s ?My God, what if ? ?. In frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.? ? Philip K. Dick, Introduction to ?The Golden Man,? 1980 Fifty years ago you could have found some of the most imaginative, rule- and mind-bending fiction, published at an insanely prolific rate. If only you knew where to look. Not in The New Yorker or Esquire or The Partisan Review ? at least, not for our immediate purposes ? but in tatty 35-cent magazines dedicated to science fiction. Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut and Doris Lessing would later put SF (that?s the short form, folks; never, ever sci-fi) between hard covers; they won prizes and peer plaudits. But in the 50s, mad gnomes were grinding out SF tales, faster and sometimes better than the upmarket folks, but always cheaper, for the pulps: Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Beyond Fantasy Fiction and two dozen others that clogged undiscriminating newsstands. In 1953, on the instantly-yellow pages of these infra-dig rags, one could often find the work of a 24-year-old Cal-Berkeley dropout, Philip K. Dick . When he tapped into his voluptuous unconscious to write SF, it was an instant love-hate relationship: he loved the fiction, hated the anonymity and ignominy of the SF writer?s status. As Karen Anderson, wife of author Poul Anderson, remarked about SF genre writing in the 50s: ?You knew you had the shitty end of the stick, but at least you had your hand on the stick.? Dick had the stick but recoiled from its stink. He wanted to be a mainstream novelist. Writing SF, he felt like a betrayer of his higher metier ? like a whore, and one who was underpaid and underappreciated. Most editors, critics and consumers of contemporary fiction didn?t know Dick, and the ones who did gave him the creeps: ?The early fans were just trolls and wackos ... terribly ignorant and weird people.? As Lawrence Sutin notes in his probing and trustworthy biography ?Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick? : ?What do you make of a genre that seldom attracts readers who are self-supporting?? But it is as true for writers as it is for race-car drivers and porn actors: you do what you?re good at. Dick could write fast and smart, and soon the young comer was everywhere: 28 stories published in 1953, another 35 in 1954. Consider just a fraction of this output. In the May 1953 issue of Space Science Fiction Dick had a story called ?Second Variety,? about a sophisticated line of robots that threaten to take over the earth at the end of a long war. In June, Astounding Science Fiction ran a Dick story called ?The Impostor?: a man is shocked to be told he?s a robot programmed to destroy the earth. The same month, in Imagination, Dick?s story ?Paycheck? told of an engineer whose memory is erased after two years? work on a secret project; he must reconstruct his lost time to save the earth. The following year Dick wrote, for Fantastic Universe, ?The Minority Report,? in which a society that has obliterated all murders, by reading the minds of people who might commit them, hunts down the man in charge of this ?pre-crime? program. II. DR. FUTURITY ?You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood.? ? PKD, 1980 Dick?s Mensa adventure tales usually had a surprise ending, but you have already deduced the twist to this account of the writer?s early years. All four of the stories mentioned in the last paragraph were made into medium or big budget movies ? respectively, ?Screamers? (1995), ?Impostor? (2002), ?Paycheck? (now in theaters) and ?Minority Report? (2002). His novel ?Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?? became ?Blade Runner? in 1982. The story ?We Can Remember It for You Wholesale? was adapted as ?Total Recall? in 1990, and two years later the French director Jérôme Boivin made the perverse bijou ?Confessions d?un Barjo? from Dick?s non-SF novel ?Confessions of a Crap Artist.? Besides adapting his stories, Hollywood plugged into Dick?s ideas. The Ian Holm character in ?Alien? ? the astronaut who discovers, too late, that he?s a robot ? is straight from ?Impostor.? Many other Dick tales probe our ignorance, or dawning awareness, of reality, whatever that is. (Vladimir Nabokov wrote that reality is ?one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.?) Spencer Olham in ?Impostor? and Garson Poole in ?The Electric Ant,? to name just two of Dick?s clueless heroes, have imagined they were human, only to be told they were androids. They are like Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), the mad scientist in David Cronenberg?s ?The Fly,? who, as he devolves from one species to another, has the very Dickian insight that ?I?m an insect who dreamt he was a man ? and loved it! But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.? Another, gentler phrase for fraudulent reality is virtual reality. What is ?The Matrix? but a Dick-ensian plot writ large? It tells us that we are all asleep, cocooned in ignorance, and the matrix dreams our dreams for us and calls it reality. Another SF film of 1999, Cronenberg?s ?eXistenZ,? spun Dickian conceits around a creepy video game. ?You don?t play the game,? says its creator (Jennifer Jason Leigh). ?The game plays you.? The difference between Dick and the concocters of these virtual reality thrillers: they were playing with ideas generated by the video-game cult; Dick conjured up these notions decades before Pong, let alone Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Dick says he invented the idea of a man who didn?t know he was a robot, and that he?d send his lawyers after anyone who used it. If he had patented another of his familiar plot devices ? the man whose memories are implanted (?We Can Remember It for You Wholesale?) or erased (?Paycheck?) ? he could have shut down production of ?Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,? co-written by Charlie Kaufman. directed by Michel Goudry and due out in March. In it Jim Carrey learns that girlfriend Kate Winslet has had her memories of their relationship erased. So he goes to her doctor to have her removed from his own memory. But during the process he falls in love with her again ? and has a mighty brain battle with the doctor to reclaim the memory of a love he can?t get out of his head. III. THE PRESERVING MACHINE "What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half." ? Art Spiegelman, author of ?Maus? The influence of Dick?s work is not only, or even mainly, on film. Philadicktion is everywhere. It would be lovely to invent a what-if, an alternative reality, in which the author somehow survived to see the flourishing of his reputation: cover-story tributes in the New York Times Book Review and The New Republic; the opera from his novel ?Valis?; the Mabou Mines? stage production of ?Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said?; the issuing of old novels (some published for the first time) in spiffy editions; a generation of readers avid for his synoptic, dystopic visions. Punk bands, for their own or their songs? names, have purloined PKD phrases; cyberpunk fiction copped his attitude. French philosophers offered lavish and indulgent exegeses of his visions ? in early 1974 Dick experienced glimpses, or delusions, of a godhead he called VALIS ? and R. Crumb illustrated them in ?The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.? College courses investigate at length the two crucial questions that sustained Dick?s writing and thinking. In a 1978 speech, titled ?How to Build a Universe That Doesn?t Fall Apart Two Days Later,? he posited these questions as: ?What are we? What is it that surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?? Year by year, readers have clued in to what Sutin calls ?the most intensely visionary fiction written by an American in this century.? Dick is the subject of a doting, amateurish documentary called ?The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick.? Sutin?s biography will soon be joined by French novelist Emmanuel Carrere?s ?I Am Alive and You Are Dead: The Strange Life and Times of Philip K. Dick.? Michael Bishop wrote a clever pastiche of the master?s themes in the novel ?The Secret Ascension,? retitled ?Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas.? And, huzzah, all Dick?s long and short fiction is in print. Start with ?The Philip K. Dick Reader,? which collects 24 of his best early short fiction, including most of the stories recently filmed. Then graduate to ?The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick? ? five glorious volumes, and not a lemon in the bunch. That leaves the novels, 36 of them, for your summer reading project. And oh, yes, there are more Dick film projects on the way: five of his novels have been optioned by such brahmin types as Joel Silver and Steven Soderbergh. Miramax has rights to the early story ?The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford.? Will they get made? Who knows? PKD imagined many futurist infernos, but Development Hell is Hollywood?s invention. The important thing is that the movie people are trying, and paying. One gauge of Dick?s increased worth: the rights to print ?Paycheck? in 1954 cost Imagination magazine $195; the rights to film it in 2003 cost Paramount 10,000 times as much ? about $2 million, according to the splendid PKD overview Frank Rose wrote for Wired. That money went to the Philip K. Dick estate. The author died, at 53, in 1982, three months before the premiere of ?Blade Runner.? He was one of those prophets whose wisdom is posthumously discovered in an attic of trash. Posterity has declared such artists immortal, and we are the richer for their bounty. Which is great if you?re us, not so fabulous if you?re Van Gogh, Kafka, Emily Dickinson or Phil Dick. IV. STRANGE MEMORIES OF DEATH?It is Jane-in-me now, the anima or female principle.... It is Jane trying to die. Or rather, it is a rerun of Jane who actually died... But if Jane-in-me dies, she will carry me (the male twin) with her, so I must not succumb.? ? PKD in 1975, quoted by Sutin On December 16, 1928, in Chicago, fraternal twins ? Philip Kindred Dick and his sister Jane Charlotte ? were born six weeks prematurely to Edgar Dick, an officer in the Department of Agriculture, and his wife Dorothy. Early in 1929, Dorothy accidentally burned Jane with a hot-water bottle. The infant was six weeks old when she died. Out of his loss, Phil was granted an invisible playmate and eternal soul-mate ? also, perhaps, someone against whose impossible ideal all other women, from his mother to his five wives to the cliché-ridden females in so many of his stories, would be measured and found wanting. ?She died of neglect and starvation,? Dick told Paul Williams for the 1975 Rolling Stone interview that put him finally in the mainstream. ?Injury, neglect and starvation.? Physically, Phil grew to be tall and robust; psychologically, he was frail, painfully shy (agoraphobic, he put it). But he took jobs in retail, including one at a record store, and struck up a few intimate relationships, one of which led to a quickie marriage in his teens; a divorce was soon granted on the grounds that she had threaten to smash his beloved record collection. (Another future movie reference: ?Diner?!) At 21, he married the vibrant Kleo Apostolides. One evening Dick accompanied Kleo to a writer?s workshop and met his first guru and enabler, William Anthony Parker White, whose primary pen name was Anthony Boucher. Boucher encouraged the young writer to pursue SF and bought his first attempt, ?Roog,? for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Boucher edited. Before that story came out, though, Dick had sold another piece, ?Beyond Lies the Wub,? and enjoyed a surge of pride at seeing his first published story ?in the most lurid of all the pulp magazines on the stands at the time, Planet Stories.? The euphoria didn?t last. ?As I carried four copies into the record store where I worked, a customer gazed at me and them, with dismay, and said, ?Phil, you read that kind of stuff?? I had to admit I not only read it, I wrote it.? The prolific young writer found another supporter in Ace Books? Don Wolheim, the Roger Corman of SF. Wolheim, who in 1943 had edited the first anthology with the words science fiction on the cover, was named Ace editor-in-chief in 1952. Adhering to pinchpenny rules laid down by his boss, pulp tycoon A.A. Wyn, he would pay $1200-1500 for a full novel, $500-750 for a shorter one that would be printed as half of an Ace Double. In an Ace Double, Wolheim published Dick?s first novel, the 1955 ?Solar Lottery? (and 19 other Dick novels and story collections thereafter). Karen Anderson quotes SF editor Terry Carr as saying, ?If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double, it would be cut down to two 20,00-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ?Master of Chaos? and the New Testament as ?The Thing With Three Heads?.? At any price, for any publisher, Dick typed furiously. By 1958, when he turned 30, he had written 13 novels and some 80 short stories that redefined SF. Not to get too nuts about Dick?s early output, but in quantity, and arguably in quality, this geyser of good work compares to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald a generation before (three novels, 41 stories and a play from 1920 to 1925, when he was 29). For this work, Fitzgerald won riches and renown. Dick would have to wait a while for that payback ? 20 years after his death. V. A SCANNER DARKLY ?Very few SF stories come true. Fortunately.? ? PKD, 1966 Science fiction writers of the 50s, in the first era of government schemes for space travel, imagined Martian colonies and transport from one planet or galaxy to another at the flip of a switch. Often their stories were set in the early 21st century: now. And they are about as accurate in the details of their-future our-present as the makers of ancient science fiction movies were about what became the future past. In the 1930 ?Just Imagine,? set in the New York of 1980, people?s names had evolved into license-plate jumbles of letters and numbers, and babies were delivered from slot machines. Granted, the tone was facetious; the film was a DeSylva, Brown and Henderson musical comedy. But even a serious SF writer?s view of the future was, typically, both expansive and presumptive. He took on faith that what was starting to happen now would continue to blossom, and rarely factored in the possibility that the people who ran the most powerful nations might shift gears, reverse the trajectory of progress. He had the imagination to predict a man on the moon, for example, but not that the moon walks would last little more than three years, from July 20, 1969, to December 14,1972. The SF writer was an optimist about science and a pessimist about humans. His stories were dreams of technological Utopias in which nightmares of personal and political dystopia were played out. Dick volunteered some of his notions about the real future for David Wallechinsky?s 1981 ?Book of Predictions?; the piece is reprinted in ?The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings.? He declared that by 1985 ?there will be a titanic nuclear accident in the USSR or in the United States, resulting in a shutting down of all nuclear power plants.? (The Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in April 1986.) He predicted that in 1993 ?an artificial life form will be produced in a lab.? (Dolly the cloned sheep was born, so to speak, in 1997.) By 1995, ?Computer use by ordinary citizens ... will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained information-processing experts.? (TIME went online that year.) He also foresaw that ?an alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth,? and that in 2010 the Soviet Union ... but who had the prognostic chops to see that the U.S.S.R. would disappear in 1989? The predictions were lighthearted, non-binding, irrelevant to his reputation. Dick knew that his job was not to handicap the future. It was to explain the present. He had big visions but didn?t sweat the details. ?Phil?s approach to technology,? Sutin notes, ?was, simply, to make up whatever gizmo he needed to keep his characters? realities in suitably extreme states.? For Dick, outer space was a metaphor for inner turmoil. As he wrote in 1977, ?I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.? VI. I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON ?I have written and sold 23 novels, and all are terrible except one. But I am not sure which one.? ? PKD, 1966 By 1954 Phil was the hot new kid. At an SF convention he was photographed by veteran writer A. E. VanVogt, whose 1948 novel ?The World of Null-A? dealt with ?implanted false memories,? a favorite Dick device. But even the most prolific author of speculative fiction could not easily support himself and his wife. Instead of steak, they bought horsemeat. ?Paycheck? could have been a parable of the SF writer?s economic lot: trading in a real fortune for the chance to control his destiny and extend his legacy. ?Movies were a little difficult,? Kleo told Sutin. ?The Roxy Theater near University and San Pablo was an artsy theater that showed strange foreign films we wanted to see, but we didn?t always have the money. So we would go into the lobby ? the manager ran the candy counter but went upstairs a few minutes into the second feature ? and we?d sneak in. But every once in a while our timing was off and Phil would be acutely embarrassed and make a big show of saying good-bye to me and buying my ticket and going home ? he didn?t think it would look right for me to go home too.? This at the time when he was writing many of the stories that Hollywood would option four or five decades later. It can be said that these stories were not science fiction to Dick; they were snapshots from the lives of people and other creatures he observed. (?Roog? was inspired by a noisy neighborhood dog who barked at trash collectors; Phil imagined the dog assuming these sanitation trucks were aliens who fed on the refuse in metal ?offering urns.?) As Dick put it in 1980: ?I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.? In the 70s, reality did not meet Dick?s standards. Drinking deeply of the drug culture in then Bay Area and then Orange County, he had severe hallucinations and attempted suicide. He eventually straightened out a bit, but the impact of the 1974 visitation and visions never left him. In a 1977 speech called ?If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,? he made this solemn announcement: ?Often people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different present life.... I rather suspect that my experience is not unique; what is perhaps unique is the fact that I am willing to talk about it.? By the late 70s he had achieved a measure of fame. Playboy finally published one of his stories, though, Sutin reveals, Dick expressed his disdain for the magazine?s editorial content by donating the four-figure check to Cambodian famine relief. Dick?s annual income had risen to $70,000 or so, but the money allowed him little financial security; a man with five marriages and three children has a sieve for a bank account. He also heard mortality knocking. He felt exhausted by the creation of his latest book, ?The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.? And in September 1981 he learned of the deaths or near-fatal heart attacks of several Berkeley-area writers. In a letter to Victoria Schochet, he described its literal impact on him: ?[I] drove to the grocery store, drove home and rammed a support column in our underground parking area. My unconscious was saying Enough. I knew I was going to hit the support column and even after I hit it I kept on moving. I wanted to hit it. I wanted to protest the two heart attacks.... I wanted to protest my enslavement to two decades of writing in order to pay spousal support, child support, send my older daughter to Stanford, my youngest boy to a private school, buy my ex-wife Tessa a $150,000 house ? meet deadlines, rent a tux for the gala premiere of ?Blade Runner,? all the long-distance phone calls, all the answering letters from readers who plan to commit suicide and want me to talk them out of it, because I wrote about my own suicide attempt in ?Valis? and they know I?d understand. I do understand. I understand that the payoff for writers ? and editors as well! ? who work day after day, 16 hours a day, seven days a week ... is not happiness but sudden death or total disability; they are, as Jesus said, like ?your ancestors who ate manna in the wilderness; they are all dead.?? Within six months he had suffered a stroke and died. March 2, 1982. VII. THE CAPTIVE MARKET ?It [the script for ?Blade Runner?] was terrific. It bore no relation to the book.... What my story will become is one titanic lurid collision of androids being blown up, androids killing humans, general confusion and murder, all very exciting to watch.... They?re not called movies for nothing. I have no complaints.? ? PKD, 1981 For most of his life, Hollywood showed as little interest in Dick as he did in it. The only pre-?Blade Runner? adaptation listed on IMDb is a 60 minute TV version of ?The Impostor? for the 1962 ABC series ?Out of This World,? hosted by Boris Karloff. ?We Can Remember It for You Wholesale? was optioned in 1979; it would become ?Total Recall? 11 years later. By 1981, when ?Blade Runner? was filmed, Dick had become a warm property. That year he attended a producers? party for ?Claw,? a project based on his short story ?Second Variety.? (It became ?Screamers? 14 years later. Everything takes too much time in Hollywood.) A 1968 biographical note had said Dick ?considers his best work to be ?Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep??... because it deals with the misfortunes of animals and imagines a society where a person?s dog or cat is worth more as a status symbol (and costs more) than a house or car.? When Dick managed to get a ?Blade Runner? script, he found that the animal motif was gone. (The title came from a novel by Alan Nourse that William S. Burroughs had adapted as a screenplay in 1979.) While ?Blade Runner? was in production, Dick wrote about it with the novelist?s standard wounded cynicism ? until he saw part of it and was wowed by the density of the world Ridley Scott?s team had created. ?You would literally have to go five times to see it before you could assimilate the information that is fired at you,? he said in a late 1981 interview published as ?What If Their World Is Our Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick.? ?The human brain craves stimulation. And this movie will stimulate the brain, the brain will not be lulled.... The book and the movie do not fight each other. They reinforce each other.? Scott and producer Bud Yorkin would fight over the final cut, with Yorkin winning. (Scott?s version appeared in 1999.) But the density was still there in the version that hit theaters in the summer of 1982. In TIME I wrote: Moviegoers seeking the smooth propulsion of story line look at these films and ask, ?What?s going on here?? Directors and effects specialists, plumbing the of a technology that can show what has never been seen before, answer: ?There here is what?s going on. The setting, the surroundings, the texture.? In ?Blade Runner,? the here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth?s inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. L.A. is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women in shoulder-pad jackets moving to the cadence of a keening alto sax. The filthy streets are clogged with Third World losers and carnivores, while 10 feet above them the police cars hover, monitoring the future as it molders into chaos. Like its setting and chief android Batty (Rutger Hauer), ?Blade Runner? is a beautiful deadly organism that devours life. Because this drastically cut movie has a plot that proceeds by fits and starts, "Blade Runner? is likely to disappoint viewers looking for sleek thrills and derring-do. But as a display terminal for design wizardry, the movie delivers. The pleasures of texture have rarely been so savory. That was me in 1982. Eight summers later, reviewing ?Total Recall,? I had the same impression of visual density. I wrote: It zaps out beguiling images so quickly that viewers may want to see the film over again right away, just to catch what they missed. Verhoeven seems to have assumed that today's moviegoers have a megabyte media intelligence; then he worked like crazy to overload it. When ?Total Recall? is cooking, it induces visual vertigo. Spinning its tale at warp speed, the movie creates a coherent world that is part prophecy, part satire. On future Earth, folks flick on the wall-screen TV to check out ESPN?s coverage of the Toronto-Tokyo game, then perfect their tennis stroke with the help of a teacher on hologram. Johnnycab, the robot taxi driver, chirps irrelevant pleasantries until passengers want to throttle him. A married couple debate whether to move to Mars ? as if it were the suburbs ? or to Saturn (''Everybody says it's gorgeous''). The film's Mars is Earth's cracked mirror image: a domed underworld of freak psychics and three-breasted prostitutes, ruled by a tyrant from whom the colonists must buy air, and he has just jacked up the price. It is on Mars, toward the end, that ?Total Recall? goes wussily misterioso in an encounter with a Yodaesque guru. ?Open your mind!'? says the mutant guru, and ?Total Recall? does just that. Looking at the film two years ago, I decided I?d overrated it. Compared to Scott?s direction of ?Blade Runner,? Paul Verhoeven?s is coarse and comic-bookish, and the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the original story?s nerdish Quail, renamed Quaid, tilts the move toward steroidal bulk. But PKD and ?Matrix? fans will enjoy a frisson when a doctor, doing his damnedest to convince Quaid that fantasy is reality, or the other way around, hisses, ?Take the red pill!? VIII. THE EXIT DOOR LEADS IN ?It?s very difficult to be true to Phil Dick and make a Hollywood movie. His thinking was subversive. He questioned everything Hollywood wanted to affirm.? ? Gary Goldman, co-writer of ?Total Recall? and an executive producer of ?Minority Report,? to Frank Rose ?Dick?s emergence in Hollywood seems oddly inevitable,? Rose writes. ?His career itself is a tale of alternate realities. In the flesh he was the ultimate outsider, pecking out paranoid visions that place the little guy at the mercy of the corporate machine. Yet posthumously he feeds the machine, his pseudoworlds the basis of ever more elaborate entertainments doled out by the megacorporations we pay to stuff our heads.? Can?t get much more mega than Steven Spielberg, who was in an SF frame of mind when he made ?AI? (from a Stanley Kubrick scenario) and ?Minority Report? back to back. ?AI? was set in 2051, in a bipolar world: sleek surfaces and a carnival-carnivore underbelly. In ?Minority Report,? it?s 2054, and the future is more recognizable: tomorrow, only more so. (A lot must have happened in three years.) Copies of USA Today flash instant headlines as readers hold them. Cars race down vertical freeways on the facades of mile-high office buildings. On a Washington skid row, eyeless bums peddle the newest nose candy. Like ?Blade Runner,? ?Minority Report? mixes future and retro. Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), who might be a more benign John Ashcroft, and his protégé John Anderton (Tom Cruise) run a system that prevents murders by arresting people before they commit them. Yet the Pre-crime apparatus is so goofily anach-ronistic ? three young mind readers floating in a tank and billiard balls rolling through plastic tubes ? that your brilliant, mad old uncle could have concocted it in his basement. This two-edged look fits with Spielberg?s (and, before him, Scott?s) idea of marrying science fiction with film noir; this is a 50-years-ago detective story set 50 years from now. In adapting the Dick story, Spielberg and screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen borrow Hitchcock's Catholic belief that we are not all criminals, but we are all guilty; our humanity is our original sin. Anderton ? on the run for a murder he hasn't thought of committing of a man he doesn't know ? is oppressed by guilt because his young son was kidnapped while they were at a public swimming pool. Water, as both symbol and character, is everywhere in this film: in its Christian sense of baptism and absolution, in its dramatic function as either a hiding place (that terrific bathtub rendezvous with the cyberspiders) or a scene of tragedy (an abduction and two murderous drownings). OK, so every modern action film seems to require that a member of the hero's family die to set the revenge machinery in motion. The genre also demands chases, to which Spielberg brings his inexhaustible ingenuity. But he is also keen to fold moral dilemmas into movie spectacle. Faced with irresistible impulse, he says, we can choose to resist it. Try to think of the last film in which the hero has the chance to kill a man he believes abducted and murdered his child and then, with an exertion of iron will, says no. IX. PAYCHECK Karen reached out, touching Jennings? head, just above the era. ?Feel there. That spot.? Jennings reached up. Above his ear, under the hair, was a tiny hard spot. ?What is it?? ?They burned through the skull there. Cut a tiny wedge from the brain. All your memories of the two years. They located them and burned them out. The SP [Security Police] couldn?t possibly make you remember. It?s gone. You don?t have it.? ? from PKD?s story ?Paycheck,? 1953 The latest Dick flick has Ben Affleck as Jennings, an engineer who agrees to go undercover for three years: to perform a top-secret industrial experiment, then have his memory erased. The paycheck: $92 million in Allcom stock, which will have soared in the interim because of his expertise. 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