The Last Syllable

The Shifting Unrealities and Permeable Constructs of Philip K Dick: A feature by myself taken from thelastsyllableblog.wordpress.com

 

The Man In The High Castle is nigh.

For those who haven’t seen any trailers, I can reveal with some anticipation that Amazon Studios and Ridley Scott are bringing us Philip K Dick’s chilling vision of what might have happened had the Nazi’s won world war two. Philip K Dick’s Hugo Award-winning novel, The Man In The High Castle, intricately blended the worlds of science-fiction and alternate history. Dick depicts a pseudo modern world where the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan emerged victorious from the Second World War and subsequently enter into a bitter Cold War of their own…

Immediately such a narrative, being a complete contrast to our own world where the Allies won, is alien and requires the power of Dick’s vision and skill with narrative to prop up within the minds of the reader. Dick accomplishes this through his faux-historical writing, weaving an entirely convincing historical chronicle as a backstory to a world we know to be in conflict with our own. It is the intensity and detail of Dick’s vision that establishes it as believable within the minds of his readers. Dick chronicles a world where Franklin Roosevelt never won election in 1934, where a weak republican United States government refused to re-arm or be drawn into a war alongside Britain and Russia, resulting in the Axis powers dominating the United States of ‘High Castle’. Dick populates his alternate America with relatively benevolent Japanese conquerors, who consider old examples of pre-war American culture highly valuable, and as such trashy items of Americana are considered by the Japanese as ‘antique’ as an original Chippendale cabinet would be to a collector in our reality…(‘Ah’ the man said, his dark eyes flashing. ‘And a Victrola cabinet of 1920 made into a liquor cabinet.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘And sir, listen; framed signed picture of Jean Harlow.’ The man goggled at him. ‘Shall we make arrangements?’ Childan said, seizing this correct psychological instant.) All of this renders Dick’s unreality that bit more realistic, and hopefully after a successful translation to TV, yields spectacular results.

Like many of the world’s greatest and most visionary artists, Philip Kindred Dick was not truly appreciated whilst he was alive. Dick died in 1982, a matter of months before Ridley Scott’s adaptation of his work, entitled Blade Runner, opened in cinemas. In a modern age of total digital immersion, where technology infuses itself throughout every aspect of our day-to-day lives, it is perhaps easier to see why Dick didn’t attain the level of critical and popular acclaim he so deserved… we weren’t ready for him.

I could bang on about him and his work until the sun flickers and dies… and I will.

But who was Phil K Dick?

Dick was the prescient, deeply resonant mind behind some of Hollywood’s most successful and most thought-provoking science-fiction films of the past thirty five years. Writing fiction throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies, Dick’s fiction asks metaphysical and philosophical questions, whilst reflecting themes of monopolistic corporate evil and altered states of consciousness. This combined to devastating effect with a vivid imagination that posthumously inspired several Hollywood science fiction blockbusters. Most people have never heard of the man, yet the catalogue of titanic films that took their inspiration or were directly sourced from his work is astonishing; Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), Minority Report, Paycheck and The Adjustment Bureau to name but some of the more renowned examples.

Dick was concerned with the endlessly replicating realities of modernity, something which, in an era of videogames, smartphones and the internet, strikes an even clearer chord, and it is no doubt this which lends his work a transcendent and cutting-edge modern quality. When reading what I regard as his Magnum Opus, Ubik (1969), you are transported to Dick’s vision of 1992 where you are introduced to the idea of ‘Prudence Organisations’, corporations whose duty it is to protect, or steal, a person’s thoughts for financial gain… In an age of personalised advertising based upon each individuals internet browsing history, in a world where the intellectual property and preferences of people using social media are worth billions of dollars behind closed doors, it is all the more remarkable to consider Dick was actually writing nearly half a century ago.

Ubik also introduces us to the idea of ‘cold-pac’ or ‘half-life; a technology enabling a state of suspended animation after death, which can, for a price, keep ones loved ones in a state of limbo, able to talk and communicate, halfway between life and death (“I’ll consult my dead wife” concludes main character Glen Runciter within the opening pages). This process is integral to Dick’s novel, yet to me it is eerily reminiscent of social media accounts functioning after a loved one’s death, and in a world where artificial intelligence is nigh-on impossible to separate from human, are we really that far away from robots operating social media accounts as a source of comfort, much like the ‘cold-pac’ that features so heavily in Ubik?

Dick’s fiction is one of questions asked, not answers provided. Indeed, Dick thought of himself less as a novelist, more as a philosopher who asked his questions through the medium of story-telling. Thus reality in Dick’s novels is never quite what it seems. This is a consequence of a driving conviction of Dick’s; that what we call a reality is subjective and cannot be qualified as ‘real’ by any measurable observation. Dick was an intensely philosophical thinker, and wrote extensive essays and papers on his beliefs, which were at the very least deeply spiritual and sometimes bordered on the futile and delusional. Regardless this conviction, that essentially there is no way to distinguish a collective reality from subjective unreality*, permeates Dick’s creative writing; in that his worlds are populated by robots indistinguishable from humans (Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream), artificially implanted memories (Total Recall/Remember It For You Wholesale) and even entire worlds that collapse in on themselves (Ubik & The Man In The High Castle). This is indicative of an author tortured by a combination of modernity and a genuine conviction that his surrounding reality was anything but real.

If reading these words has even slightly invoked your curiosity then I can sleep soundly at night knowing I at least have done my part to ensure that such a true visionary gets the recognition he deserves as a writer, and not just as the progenitor of the modern, critically worthwhile Sci-Fi blockbuster. However, do not just take my word for it, lose yourself in the shifting realities and permeable constructs of perhaps America’s most avant-garde writer of the 20th century. The genius of novels such as Ubik, The Man In The High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, (the list after all goes on) lies in Dick’s genuinely gripping narratives and endearingly human(??) characters, who are confronted with the very same existential concerns that formed such an integral part of Dick’s psyche as a philosopher and his far-reaching vision as the preeminent writer-prophet of credible science-fiction.

Believe me, there will be a twist in the tale.

J M Roche, October 2015

*You play or witness the immersive likes of Second Life and Grand Theft Auto and try tell me people aren’t beginning to choose their reality…

“So I ask, in my writing, what is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated electronic mechanisms… and it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…and I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.” – Philip K Dick, 1978

Recommended Works of Philip K Dick:

The Man In The High Castle (1962 Hugo Award Winner)
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Ubik (1969)
A Scanner Darkly (1977)
The Exegesis (1978)

The Last Syllable

Kurzel’s Macbeth; full of sound and fury

It is important, nay, essential, for a Hollywood director of Shakespeare, whom, benefitting from the inherent advantages his medium provides him, must read the play and draw forth that which isn’t necessarily on the page. It is what you can draw from the play that lends greatness to your representation of it, on stage or on screen. Kurzel does this, spectacularly so with the aid of cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, and thus successfully translates many of the subtextual themes that are so key to understanding Macbeth as one of Shakespeare’s darkest and most visceral tragedies.

I massively enjoyed Kurzel’s Macbeth, Fassbender is tortured and curious, murderous and mad in exactly the right quantities at exactly the right moments. Cotillard likewise is as insidiously ambitious as she is vulnerable and bereaved. Her child-like frame and vestal attire is at an intentional, stark contrast to her venomous plotting and viscous bating of her husband’s manhood, whose physical presence further emphasises this contrast.

Kurzel and Arkapaw fantastically capture the supernatural, otherworldly atmosphere of the Scottish play, utilising breath-taking highland scenery and evocative battle-scenes set against the fire and ash of Birnam wood to give the film an almost alien feel to it. This is intensified by Kurzel’s decision to retain the original Shakespearean dialogue, which in combination with authentic Scottish accents really conveys the feeling that what is happening before us is archaically savage, not of this world.
Kurzel heavily plays upon Macbeth’s subtextual theme of Children, specifically the child that he and his wife seem to be mourning. Kurzel manifests several of the ghostly visions that Macbeth sees as involving children, or child-soldiers onto whom he obviously projects his own lost son and heir. The iconic ‘is this a dagger I see before me’ line is infused with dramatic poignancy when carried by the ghost of Macbeth’s lost son and heir. Indeed Kurzel picks up on Macbeth’s own anxiety regarding his lack of heir, which is subsequently turned into murderous paranoia by the prophecy of the weird sisters, indeed this lack of a male heir is equated with a lack of potency, a lack of masculinity for Macbeth.

The fact that Kurzel picks up on this does not make his production unique, however it is refreshing to see a Hollywood director giving it the prominence he does. Children are everywhere in his Macbeth; be it on screen as child-soldiers and their ghosts or in the pained speech of Marion Cotillard as she mourns her babe. To reinforce the recurring theme, Kurzel even adds another child-witch to the ranks of the weird sisters, who as a non-speaking character silently drives home Kurzel’s overpowering point; Macbeth is as much a tragedy of children lost as it is about a crown won. This undoubtedly reflects the fact that Shakespeare himself lost his only son, young Hamnet, and it is this which lends true ferocity to the infanticide on screen, in that this tragedy is as much about an anxiety of progeny as it is about flawed ambition and the subsequent paranoia and madness that comes with it.

The play is a bloody miscarriage of nature, and this is translated well by the graphic violence in the film, reaching its raw height when Macbeth repeatedly stabs his King as he sleeps.

There are however, a few things which Kurzel does not get right. Kurzel’s retention of the original iambic pentameter, whilst admirable from a literary standpoint, nonetheless gets somewhat swept away by the pace the film moves at, and in combination with thick Scottish brogues amounts to an authentic feel at the expense of actually fully grasping the direction and rhythm of Shakespeare’s poetry. Many of Shakespeare’s weighted couplets are lost at the end of scenes, though it must be said this could well be down to the medium. It is a lot easier to appreciate (or even catch) the language of Shakespeare when listening to an actor enunciate live to an audience, than it is to hear Fassbender or Cotillard over the howl of highland winds.

The name of this proto-blog or literary feature (I’ve yet to decide which ha) is derived from Macbeth’s final soliloquy, his ‘To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow’ speech in act 5 scene 5, one of my favourite passages from the Shakespearean canon, a primal howl into the chasm of inescapable death and lonesome life. Without ruining endings for readers, and something for which I can’t forgive him for, Kurzel chooses to make this iconic scene about Fassbender and Cotillard, which adds a pained romantic tinge to what is essentially an existential rage, the cold realisation of a mad king that he stares into the void.

Macbeth deserves such an adult, visceral Hollywood rendition. For one of Shakespeare’s most accessible, yet no less complex or poetically significant tragedies, to finally have a worthy modern update of and successor to Roman Polanski’s 1971 effort is something to celebrate. Full of sound and fury, Kurzel’s Macbeth certainly signifies something.