Essay: Moon is more Philip K. Dick than Blade Runner by David Agranoff

 

 

Moon is a better Philip K. Dick movie than Blade Runner by David Agranoff

 Today Philip K. Dick is considered one of the most important voices of 20^th century Science Fiction. That is a position Phil himself would not have believed possible in his life. In 1966, when Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published, he was a struggling pulp writer on his fourth marriage trying to manage a $350 dollar a day amphetamine addiction. Dick was already a Hugo Award-winning author for his classic novel The Man in the High Castle, but the Doubleday hardcover of Androids didn’t seem likely to redefine the genre.

The greatest impact of the novel came with the 1982 adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner. Fittingly DADES was the first of Dick’s novels to get serious consideration for film. Still, the process took a decade and went through various hands before getting made. Over the years Philip K. Dick became one of the most adapted speculative authors of the 20^th century with more than a dozen films loosely based on his work.

Dick worried about this in his lifetime as studios and filmmakers circled his novels and stories. “As a writer, though, I’d sort of like to see some of my ideas, not just special effects of my ideas, used.”[i]

 Dick’s ideas were used, however, beyond A Scanner Darkly, the major Hollywood productions mostly eject much of Dick’s signature styles, themes, and underlying messages. At the same time, his work has influenced the entire genre and film in general. It is clear there is a second and third-generation influence in now-classic films ranging from Dark City, The Truman Show, and of course The Matrix.   Two films just released in 2020 feel like PKD concepts. Oxygen from French director Alexander Aje was directly inspired by Philip K. Dick (the novel UBIK) and the director often said as much in multiple interviews.[ii] The film Synchronic by Benson and Moorhead had time travel drugs and a “what is reality?” narrative despite the duo not directly citing PKD as an influence.

It can be second- or third-hand influence but Dick’s impact on the genre can sometimes end up in movies that feel more Dickian than some of the movies based on his work. One of the best examples of this is 2009 British independent film Moon directed by Duncan Jones. Before we get into that we have to first talk about why Blade Runner is not the best example of Philip K. Dick’s themes on film.

 

The Novel Ridley Scott Found Difficult

The first time Philip K. Dick read a screenplay based on his novel DADES he threatened to beat-up the screenwriter. It was a start to a combative relationship that the author had with the various writers, producers, and directors of the film that ended up being released shortly after his death in 1982. His opinions of his own novels tended to change as often as his marriages. So who could guess what Dick’s final opinion on Blade Runner would have been?

 That first screenwriter was Robert Jaffe, who is most famous for producing Motel Hell and Fright Night. Dick was prone to exaggeration for sure, but he told the story of threatening him more than once, and that Jaffe had given him a script that was a screwball comedy.  Dick said in an interview "I said that I'd honestly prefer to buy back the property than let them make a film based on that screenplay and he was real nice about it. I gave him suggestions and he took notes and then I noticed that he wasn't actually writing, but rather he was just moving the pen about a quarter of an inch from a piece of paper that already had printing on it so that he was only pretending to take notes.” [iii]

Dick claimed that Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks were both interested in the book, but they didn't option it. Shortly after he sold a few other options in 1975, Hampton Fancher got the option from one of the producers of The Deer Hunter. It wasn’t until 1980 when Fancher produced a serious script that it started making the rounds with a serious interest in Hollywood.

The script was good enough to get the attention of Ridley Scott who was hot off the success of Alien and looking to do a follow-up Science Fiction film that made use of his talent for visuals and design. The Fancher script added the Noir elements including the detective-style voice-over narration. The weirdest elements of DADES such as the mood organ machines that people use to implant emotions, The Mercerism religion based on empathy, and the artificial animals were gone. What elements of the novel remain in the movie are taken word for word from this first Fancher draft. [iv]

We know that is true because in the fall of 1980 Ridley Scott failed to read Dick’s novel as he famously told Omni magazine before the release of the film. [v] He went on to explain that he found the novel difficult to read to a thousand other interviewers. More importantly, he told Screenwriter David Peoples, whose unproduced (at the time) script for The Unforgiven was hot around town, not to read it. In fact, actor after actor in the cast has referred to the novel over the years as something they didn’t bother with except star Harrison Ford, who didn’t find it helpful when the movie seemed to stray so far from the source. David Peoples managed to leave huge chunks of the Fancher draft untouched but crafted it into the script for Blade Runner you would recognize around Feb. 1981.

Along the way, Dick managed to read the various drafts of the script and a had a productive yet frustrating meeting with the director. Eventually, he and Scott had it out about how differently they saw the story. For one thing, Scott always viewed Deckard as a replicant. That is in part why we ended up with the huge gulf between the themes and messages of the book and the film. Perhaps if Scott had read the novel he might have felt differently. (i)

 

 How Philip K. Dick was Blade Runner?

It is too simplistic to say Blade Runner has nothing to do with the novel it is based on. If you read it you will recognize characters, events, and the skeleton of a world. That is why it is a common opinion with most science fiction movie fans that the simplified cyberpunk dystopian noir of Blade Runner is often considered a rare example of the film improving on the novel. DADES is so different it is almost hard to compare. The movie has been imitated over and over in the years after but the novel is such a strange singular work that there really is nothing like it.

As a novel, DADES is a warning about our future becoming post-human altogether. In his paper The Post Human Vision of Philip K. Dick, Gilbert McGinnis argues that Dick “attempted to warn society against becoming posthuman. He wrote about the notion of the schizoid and android as prototypes for the posthuman long before anyone else. He created androids to represent people "physiologically" while "psychologically" behaving in a non-human way, which is the same as a human without empathy - the schizoid. Androids become metaphors for schizoid humans, or posthumans.”  [vi]

Consider, for a moment, the many ways the elements not included in the film explore the theme of post-humanity. In the novel, the earth has become barely livable after the events of World War Terminus. While civilization moves off earth, the desire to bring back animals from extinction drives social behavior. The ability to take care of animals and keep them alive has become a symbol of status to the point that many collect electric animals in an attempt to appear to keep up with the Joneses. A key moment in the film takes from this. When Deckard has a hard time believing that Rachel’s pet owl is real. This highlights a difference in the novel that Deckard suspects she isn’t human just because she refers to the bird as it.

While bounty hunters in the story test androids for their humanity, people control their feeling and emotions through a device called a Mood Organ. Depression and feelings of hopelessness are scheduled and dialed into the machine. Couples preset their devices to match each other before arguments. Dick appears to be commenting on his own drug use as well as on how people interact with mass media. The power of Television is expressed in the popularity of Buster Friendly whose mindless programming is meant to inspire conformity. A new popular religion uses a technology called an Empathy Box which shows them a vision of Wilber Mercer, a man who consistently falls, and his struggle is supposed to help teach the user empathy.

Professor of Philosophy Michael E. Zimmerman wrote about this in his article Authenticity, Duty, and Empathy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? “People depend on three technical devices: the Penfield mood organ, the empathy box, and television. (Were Dick writing today, surely he would include the smartphone and social media.) The mood organ alters one‘s brain-mind so as to generate a wide variety of moods, thus offering a superior alternative to drugs. The second device is television, where, on one of the few remaining channels, talk show host Buster Friendly regales viewers with mindless banter for 23 hours a day. The third device is the empathy box, which lets users ―fuse empathically with the strange religious figure Wilbur Mercer and with everyone else simultaneously using the empathy box. Empathically fusing with Mercer reassures people that they are still human." [vii] Through the novel’s most sympathetic character J.R. Isodore, the message is clear: “I think Buster Friendly and Mercerism are fighting for control of our Psychic souls.” [viii]

While some of these moments in the novel provide for surreal humor and tongue-in-cheek satire, one should not mistake the novel as any less dark and gritty as the almost humorless film based on it. Philip K. Dick had very real fears of a post-human world. Noted science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this in his Ph.D. dissertation on Philip K. Dick.  “Definitions of humanity become more and more difficult, until in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? it takes a complex psychological test to determine who is human and who is a machine. The interpenetration of artificial and natural is complete. Cars and doors and stoves argue with or advise their owners, while artificial humans can love, and fight for their survival. The humans in these landscapes lose contact with reality in any number of ways, withdrawing into one-dimensional, mechanical relations to the world, or using machines to help them fight such reification. The larger role Dick assigns to artificial humans in the second half of the 1960s is, once again, the result of factors both artistic and social. The complications of this natural/artificial interpenetration give opportunities for a whole range of thought experiments exploring and displaying the motif. At the same time, every one of them is a dark image or representation of what Dick felt were dark times.” [ix]

Dick himself worried about the loss of these themes in the lead-up to the film. In an interview with James Van Hise for the February 1982 issue of Starlog magazine, he made this clear. "So, you have Deckard becoming more and more dehumanized, and the replicants become more and more human and at the end they meet and the distinction is gone. but the fusion of Deckard and the Replicants is a tragedy. This is not a victory where the replicants become humanized and there is some victory by humanity over inhumanity. This is horrifying because he is now as they are... The value of it shows that any one of us could be dehumanized." [x]

Ridley Scott and David Peoples having not read the novel were so detached from the source material that Deckard in their final analysis was a replicant. In fact this became crucial for the storyline of the sequel. While there are moments in the novel where Deckard questions himself, he is very much human.

Noted Philip K. Dick biographer Gregg Rickman points out in his book Philip K. Dick on Film the major differences “Dick always insisted, in his novels as well as his essays, that the original sin of the android is to pretend they are something it isn’t. Scott’s attitude is what’s in the film – “they’re more Human than Human.” (i)

There are contradictions in the novel. Kim Stanley Robinson pointed this out. “The cruel humans in the narrative do not deserve the label any more than the androids, we come to feel. There are four classes of beings in the text: Humane Humans (Isidore, and as the novel progresses, Rick Deckard); Cruel Humans (Phil Resch, Isidore's boss); Humane Androids (Luba Luft the singer); and Cruel Androids (the androids who torment Isidore).” (X)

 Scott’s film comes to a wildly different conclusion no matter which cut you see. Deckard the gun toting noir hero that, according to the direction of the sequel, is a replicant who is fine killing the other androids. This is close enough that Dick would have been happy with the movie but it is interesting to see films not based on his work get closer to the themes in his work than those adapted from his work. One of the best examples is Duncan Jones's 2009 debut film, Moon.

 

The Philip K. Dick elements in Moon

After watching Moon, it is no surprise to learn that director Duncan Jones was on track to get a Ph D in philosophy when the bug to make films struck him. His father was an actor, and he spent time on sets and developed the desire to make a film. His first attempt at a script would eventually become the underrated 2018 Netflix film Mute, which he cited as an homage to Blade Runner as early as 2011.  In the process of developing that movie, he developed a relationship with actor Sam Rockwell who turned down one of the roles. The duo wanted to work together and Jones created Moon as a small indie for him to play the lead role.

While many of the reviews of the film point to the theme being Philip K. Dick influenced I have yet to find an interview where Jones or the screenwriter Nathan Parker highlights the author as an influence. It wasn’t until he was doing press for Mute that Duncan Jones mentioned the author in an interview with Slashfilm. “…there was something that Phillip K. Dick said about Ridley Scott's Blade Runner when he first saw it: it wasn't a science fiction film that they had made, it was a futurist film, and that he loved that. What I took that to mean was they had made a noir thriller which, although science fiction was an element of it, it wasn't really about the science fiction. It was about the people, and it just happened to take place in a future environment.” [xi]

 Mute is a different article (one day) but both films take the Philip K. Dick approach to telling human-based stories in fantastic settings more seriously than even Blade Runner. In many ways, this is more interesting because of the influence Dick has had on the genre as a whole. This influence can be detected in storytellers with no direct experience with Dick’s prose or just the films based off of his work.

From the very beginning, Jones said in an interview with DP/30 the Hollywood oral history that they were inspired by working-class Sci-fi films like Silent Running, Outland, and Alien. [xii] Nothing is more Dickian than working-class heroes, his point of view characters are never starship captains or muscle men. Much like the moon miner Sam Bell in the film, the Dick characters have jobs like tire regroover (Our Friends From Frolix 8), Electric organ sales (We Can Build You) even ceramic pot repair, (Galactic Pot Healer)  Even Arnie Knott’s role in the Martian colony of Martian Time-Slip is as a Plumber. It is not to say that he doesn’t have spies or cops in his stories but the cops in Minority Report and DADES are described more like Emmitt Walsh than Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford.

Both Silent Running and Alien have Philip K. Dick connections as Silent Running’s director worked on the visual effects of Blade Runner and screenwriter Michel Camino’s producer on Deer Hunter owned the rights to DADES briefly in the 70s. Dan O’Bannon, co-screenwriter of Alien, was already developing two Philip K. Dick projects. The pulps of the 30s and 40s were all Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordan types, and PKD was at the forefront of putting working-class characters in Science Fiction.

Let’s look at some of the details and story elements and how they play into common Philip K Dick themes and elements. The film opens with a happy corporate-speak commercial that lays out the importance of the work that Sam does for harvesting Helium 3. This takes advantage of Director Duncan Jones's history of making commercials but also recalls the tongue-in-cheek commercials for UBIK throughout the novel of the same name. When we first meet Sam Bell he is wearing a shirt that reads “Wake me when it is quitting time.” Of course, the truth is quitting time means death for Sam in reality.

In this opening scene, Sam has a PKD-style beard and is looking rough, being at the end of his three-year contract. He is tired, lonely, and frustrated. His only partner is Gerty, the robot who runs the station. Gerty as voiced by pre-canceled Kevin Spacey communicates in a neutral voice but has a display with emoji icons. I think Dick would have liked this aspect as Gerty has no emotions and has to choose icons to display based on what his programming expects Sam to feel. Gerty eventually goes against protocol to help Sam, although it could be argued that to Gerty helping Sam is in his programming.  It was an important distinction that Gerty was very machine-like and even its emotional reactions are clearly artificial. At no point could Gerty be mistaken for a living being. Even when Sam-1 asks Gerty if he is a clone, the robot responds by asking if Sam is hungry. While this could be mistaken for concern, the robot is programmed to help the Sam clones.

Gerty is also a source for a few of the many moments of dry and dark humor. The novels and stories of Philip K. Dick are underrated for their many laugh-out-loud satirical moments. Novels like The Man Who Japed and UBIK are more obvious in their use of satire. Blade Runner is a morose movie, but Moon shares the sometimes bleak, sometimes ridiculous moments of dark humor. Duncan Jones credited this to Sam Rockwell during a Screen rant interview: “Sam Rockwell told me something on Moon when we first did it, because it was much more smooth, was much more serious, the humor in Moon was brought about really because Sam kept on telling me in order for them, in order for the serious stuff to pay off you need the humor as well.”

The horror at the heart of Sam’s story is rooted in concepts that PKD began exploring often as far back as 1953 in the form of implanted memories. The implanted memories and the short lifespans of the clones/androids in both DADES and Moon are similar. It is important to remember that the Andys (Replicants in the film) are constructed biological beings like Sam, although he is a carbon copy of the original still living Sam bell. The implanted memories are key to the functioning of the clones. They are working towards the end of the contract believing that they will be going home to a wife and daughter he has never seen.

 The concept of fake or manipulated memories were all over Philip K. Dick’s short stories of 1953 including stories like Imposter, Paycheck, The Commuter, and of course We Can Remember it for You Wholesale the story that became Total Recall. [xiii] The latter of those stories the false memories are being sold to customers as superior and better than vague missing, or inaccurate natural memories. In Moon, once the two Sam Bells are together we get a view of this when the two Sam’s recall vividly and tell each other the pieces of the story of the first time they met their wife Tess. One of the ways this false narrative is constructed is each clone is woken up and being told there has been an accident. The false memories are not just of earth and growing up but the early days on the mission.

The hobby of building the wooden village is there to distract Sam, but also to sharpen the fake memories of home. The two Sams have different relationships to the memories. Sam-1 admits to not remembering making all of it, one of the first cracks in his memory. Also, it establishes that they are different beings, even though they share memories, they are different now.  Sam-2 responds saying “That is Fairfield, the town hall.” Showing that they have the same memories for the first time. These subtle tells are also very Phil Dickian, as he liked to make reveals in very tiny details. In DADES it is the android’s casual destruction of a spider by pulling its legs, not mass murder that reveals the artificial humans lack of empathy, in Man in the High Castle[xiv] Mister Tagomi goes to an alternate reality and does nothing but scrutinize a piece of modern abstract handmade jewelry, In Flow my Tears the Policeman Said[xv], Jason Tavener knows he has been removed from reality by objects like blank record albums he performed on.

Sam-1 is in the third year of his mission, he is tired, lonely and his body is breaking down. Sam-2 is quiet and more skeptical of the situation.  In DADES, Rachel is the only Android who doesn’t know what she is because of the implanted memories. Deckard doesn’t question himself until an Android asks him if he has been tested. He says he has, but she reminds him that could be false. Rachel Rosen learns she is an android only after Deckard gives her a second test. Eldon Rosen makes a point to tell her not to be afraid of Deckard because she is their property and therefore not illegal. Andys in the novel are products as expressed by Garland when an Andy who made it to earth and posed as a police officer: “Breaking free and coming here to earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and woodlouse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.” (viii)

Throughout Moon, Sam Bell comes to learn he is a tool of the mining operation just like any of the machines.  “It’s a company, right? They have investors and shareholders shit like that. What’s cheaper spending time and money training new personnel or having a couple of spares here to do the job. It’s the far side of the moon the cheap fucks haven’t fixed the communication satellite yet…You think they give a shit about us they are laughing all the way to the bank.”

Both Sams search for answers. Gerty allows Sam-1 to see the footage of the previous Sams getting into the sleep tubes and being recycled. In a very Dickian moment of black humor, a corporate spokesperson gives the dying Sams a final pep talk about how important their jobs are. The real evidence that the Sam clones are products like the Andys in the Dick novel comes when Sam-2 finds the room with dozens of still unborn fully grown Sams complete with their own plastic-wrapped ‘Wake me when it is quitting time” shirts.

This leads to Sam-1 driving out far enough to get a signal. There, he finally tries to call home. His grown daughter answers and gives us the final clue to know that at least 15 years and four generations of Sam Bell clones have been on the moon working. Sam-1 doesn’t give away his identity until his daughter tells him of his wife’s death. This heartbreaking moment Sam-1 asks “How did Mommy die?” leads to the real Sam Bell in the background on earth to ask “Who is this?” Sam-1 hangs up and the voice is the only real Sam Bell is seen or heard in the film.

Much is made of the film playing with what is real, but Moon is not a mystery. Anyone paying attention to details will find all the answers there. The Dickian mystery of what is real is not for the viewers of Moon but for the Sam Bell clones who refuse to accept their situation. They desperately desire to go home, but they learn that they were never real. It was implanted memories. Imagine the internal crisis of that realization. When Sam-2 comes up with a plan for escape, Sam-1 has accepted dying and wants him to be free.  Committing what Philip K. Dick considered the greatest sin of the android, wanting to be real.

In the most pivotal scene of the film, Sam-2 talks with Gerty, and they both realize for him to escape Gerty will have to erase its memories and reboot.  He asks Gerty if he will be OK? Gerty responds “Of course, the new Sam and I will return to our programming as soon as I finish rebooting.”  Sam is disturbed, walks back closer to Gerty, and tells it. “Gerty, we’re not programmed, we’re people. Understand?” Gerty says nothing just turns around so Sam can finish the job of rebooting him.

Sam-2’s escape to earth is only hinted in voice-over but in many ways, it could suggest a wider world and struggle. We know that Mute takes place in the same universe but we have no idea what legal rights these artificial humans have in this universe. Even if it is in the final moments, it is yet another theme it shares with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Moon is a haunting work of character-driven science fiction that does rely on spectacle. The strength of the film comes from the performances, the haunting score, and very Dickian themes throughout. Philip K. Dick would have likely been a fan of this film. Blade Runner is a great classic Science Fiction film, but as an adaptation of this novel, it is not as successful. In many ways, Moon represents the kind of Science Fiction Philip K. Dick wrote and feels more like one of his works than even Blade Runner.

 

David Agranoff is the award-nominated author of eight books and co-host of the popular Philip K. Dick-themed podcast Dickheads. His novels include the science fiction novel Goddamn Killing Machines (Clash Books) and the Splatterpunk award nominated CLI-FI horror novel Ring of Fire (Deadite Press). His non-fiction articles have appeared on Tor.com, Cemetery Dance and NeoText websites. His next novel Nightmare City (co-written with Anthony Trevino) is due out in October from Grand Mal press, and his next solo novel will be published by Clash books in May 2023.

 

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[i] Philip K. Dick on Film by Gregg Rickman, 2018 Arrow Books

[ii] Rotten Tomatoes Interview Alexander Aja https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/alexandre-ajas-five-favorite-films/

[iii] Mainstream that through the ghetto flows The Missouri Review University of Missouri Volume 7, Number 2, 1984

[iv] Blade Runner script by Hampton Fancher July 1980 draft

[v] Omni Magazine October 1980

[vi] The Post Human Vision of Philip K. Dick Gilbert McGinnis P.109 Hungarian Journal of English and American studies Spring 2018

[vii] Authenticity, Duty, and Empathy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Michael E. Zimmerman  University of Colorado at Boulder

[viii] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick Published 2008 by Ballantine Books (first published 1968)

[ix] The Novels of Philip K. Dick by Kim Stanley Robinson Published 1984 by UMI Research Press

[x] Starlog Magazine issue #55

[xi] 'Mute' Director Duncan Jones on His Strange And Deranged Sci-Fi Passion Project By Jack Giroux/Feb. 23, 2018 https://www.slashfilm.com/556443/duncan-jones-interview/?utm_campaign=clip

 

[xii]  DP/30: The Oral History Of Hollywood Interview with Duncan Jones 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbVOHnGRlYg

[xiii]  The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 2: We Can Remember it for You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick 2002 by Citadel (first published 1987)

[xiv] The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick Published 2012 by Mariner Books (first published October 1962)

[xv] Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K Dick Published 2012 by Mariner Books (first published February 1974)