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Radio Free Albemuth (2010)
It's Phil's world: we just live in it.
When Inception was first released, I was living in New York. I was more isolated than I've ever been in my life, utterly alone in a city of several million people. I was also broke, and not eating well, and it was the day after my birthday, and much of that time is a sort of haze of mild delirium. So when I navigated out of the labyrinthine theater, from that intensely multi-level movie about the synthetic nature of perception and ultimate questioning of reality straight into the neon hyperreality of Times Square at midnight, it was an intensely psychedelic experience that drove home whatever point the movie may have had like a spike to the forehead. The parallels between Inception and the greater works of Philip K. Dick are both too obvious and too personal to be belabored here, but when I walked out of Radio Free Albemuth, having once again not consumed more than a few coffees today (this time due to logistics rather than economics) it was into Berkeley, right at sunset, in the twilight where Dick spent much of his life writing. The experience was less like a spike to the head and more of being wrapped in a chilled blanket of acceptance. "This is Phil's world, we just live in it." Or, possibly, "I told you so." Because he did, over and over, of course, tell us so. Whether he was talking about angels or aliens, communists or fascists or republicans, the themes resonate through his work. There may, or may not, be a vast conspiracy to keep the human race enslaved and prevent us from fulfilling our potential. There may, or may not, be an even more vast conspiracy to liberate us from the Black Iron Prison. The thing about Phil is that he never assumed he was right, and he never let his readers fall into that trap, either. In that way, this movie is very true to his ideals. The primary characters all constantly debate theories of what's going on, and certainty is always viewed with a certain skepticism. In fact, and pardon the vagueness for not wanting to spoil, the only moments of certainty are the ones which are associated with the most peril.
I confess that it's been years since I read Radio Free Albemuth, so I can't really speak to the fastidiousness to the book. But as a long time Dick fan I certainly felt that the movie was true to the spirit of his work. Dick's character (who, if you don't know, is not the one receiving the visions) is played completely straight, the way out science fiction writer never giving in to the wackier theories without analysis, and in many ways he's played with the sort of stoicism that messing around with mad notions of reality engenders in order to maintain sanity. Welp. My best friend is receiving messages from an alien intelligence. Welp. The massive government security apparatus has decided to set me up. Welp. There are multiple scenes of Dick waking up or otherwise entering into a new and weird narrative event, and Shea Whigham always faces them with what I could only describe as a sort of steely-eyed wonder which resonated completely with me as someone who's walked similar edges.
Another striking thing about the movie is its sense of temporal ambiguity. It states, outright, that it takes place in the 80s, but it never feels dated. There's a kind of anachronistic sameness to everything that prevents it from being nailed down. The television is an old 70s model, the beer is a brand which I sometimes drink, the fascists look like fascists always look. The only thing that gave the movie a period, for me, was the inclusion of a lot of music by Robyn Hitchcock, but he was always ahead of his time, and I Wanna Destroy You, the first recognizable song in the film, was released in 1980 and re-released in 2001. Other than that, it could be yesterday or tomorrow, and it overjoyed me to see Phil hammering away on his typewriter to a soundtrack to which I've hammered away on a laptop.
If the movie has a weakness, it's the fact that it gets a tad monologue sounding at times, as is the danger when dealing with material this cerebral. The producers did not fall into the trap of Lynch's Dune and have lengthy internal voice-overs, instead presenting strange ideas mostly in conversation. This sometimes feels a bit awkward, but it's awkward in much the same way that Dick's book have the sense that the science fiction is so close to your periphery it's become normal. Ultimately the oddity of the conversation only pulled me out of the film in the way that Dick's reveal of himself as the protagonist a short way into Valis pulled me out of the book. It has the effect, for me at least, of saying "you're experiencing an unreal event, a movie, or a book. But how do you know that the thing you've gotten pulled out to is any more real?" And so I found myself standing on a Berkeley sidewalk at sunset, geographically close to the house where Dick first wrote some of the material referenced in the movie, and terrifyingly close to the encroaching fascist state dressed in the rags of democracy, where spirituality is potentially a method of both rebellion and control. As a writer of fiction, it inspired me to remain true to the constant balance between openness and skepticism that allows one to walk the edges of reality without falling in (or out), and to produce the sort of warning and wonderment Phil always did, to resonate with and amplify him in saying "I told you so." But even if I tell it too, the timelessness of this movie reminds me that this is, after all, Phil's world.
Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl (2014)
Brecht meets Beckett after a strange apocalypse
Here's the tl;dr: Die Gstettensaga is what would happen if Beckett and Brecht collaborated on a post-apocalyptic cautionary tale against the dangers of cargo culture in the modern world. If you liked most of the words in that sentence, just skip the rest of this review and go watch the movie.
The film has a quality of constant anachronism. It takes place in a sparsely populated and ambiguous Europe after a war between the last great superpowers has destroyed civilization. However, the last great superpowers here were China and Google, which gives an idea of the tone of the entire project. It's either constantly winking or possibly squinting against the glare of the postmodern spectacle, and it's impossible to tell which. This kind of ambiguity runs through the whole film, but it comes off not as ill-defined so much as a mirror to the ambiguity of the modern world. The chiptune-flavored soundtrack creates an atmosphere of retro-futuristic uncertainty in much the same way that Wendy Carlos' moog classical did for _A Clockwork Orange_, and it's never clear if the ridiculous outfits are due to post-collapse scarcity or the progress of fashion. Constant in-jokes to nerds of a certain age create a sense that society was rebuilt by a cargo cult who primarily had access to technical manuals of the 90s, which, if you think about the ways in which we archive things, may not be too far-fetched. Despite this, my movie watching partner, who is not nearly as steeped in that world as I, was in hysterics through most of the movie, so this quality isn't alienating to other viewers.
There's a print magnate (who claims to have invented typesetting) trying to come to grips with New Media (the "Tele-O-vision"). There's a musical number that could be straight out of Jesus Christ Superstar involving what happens when you try to recreate NASDAQ with broken household items. And, without giving spoilers, there is a scene which somehow manages to deconstruct both zombies and cat memes. With one foot firmly planted on critical theory, the other in the mire of internet culture, and a third, recently evolved pseudopod grasping for meaning in a post-meaning world, Die Gsettensaga is a darkly hilarious commentary on our culture from a perspective only allowed by it having been destroyed and rebuilt by nerds.