The Grass is Always Greener When It’s Fertilized with Self-Loathing

[This was first published on January 20, 2018]

This is the first in a weekly-ish (bit optimistic!) series on the adapted works of Philip K Dick. First up is Amazon’s ten-episode anthology series “Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams,” episode by episode.

Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, episode one -- Real Life. Adapted from the 1954 short story “Exhibit Piece.” You can read the 5000-word short story here, guilt free--it’s public domain!--or buy the PKD collection Second Variety over on Amazon for just a couple of bucks.

I have a recurring dream--one that I had many times as a child and that has reappeared throughout my life and that I had as recently as this past December--that is a sort of half-waking nightmare that I have always struggled to make other people understand. (The best way to start off an internet essay collection of dubious interest to the overwhelming majority of potential readers is to attempt to recount impenetrable dreams, right? And then directly into the rhetorical asides. Top-tier essaying, this.) The dream itself is more a feeling of utter helplessness and dislocation than it is any sort of traditional narrative, so I can spare you the endless “...and then...” of typical dream-recounting. Once, a few years ago, while still in the clutches of what I can only assure you is a wholly debilitating terror, I was able to scratch out the following onto a notebook next to my bed: BECOMING THE UNFOLDING OF TIME INTO SPACE. I’m not sure what that means, but it’s probably whatever you’re thinking and also *really fucking scary.*

The dream is an experience of being impossibly small in a universe of unknowably large and ever-expanding size, but being both of these things--the impossibly small thing and the ever-expanding thing--at the same time. It is also a feeling of muted loudness--or loud muted-ness, a sort of crushing silence--and of chase, and of paralysis in the face of that chase. The unifying flavor of the dream is the dread--it is just dread, in every possible moment and the space between those moments and the whole unfolding universe around that dread is just the growing of that dread, and I wake up.

The waking part of the dream is worse. I am still experiencing everything above, except for a small, now-awakened part of my mind that is just bisected enough to be witnessing myself still having the experience. After a few minutes of being unable to move, I am usually able to stand up and walk around. I try to do normal things, to ground myself in the real world, the world in which I am myself and awake. I might go turn on some lights in the living room, or see what’s in the fridge, or just open the front door and look outside, trying to find a way fully back into this reality, all while most of my mind is continuing to experience the dread dream. I might look at the kids as they sleep, or pet a cat--anything to remind my brain that what is real is this place, this place with other conscious beings, that the other thing is the imagined, false world.

But the terror compounds because I am awake and totally unable to will it to stop, and I know that I will *absolutely* return to the dream when I fall back to sleep, because it never actually ended--I have not stopped experiencing it. It is in the hours after waking, unable or unwilling to sleep again, that I am at my most paranoid. I lie there, unsure of my brain’s ability to properly interpret reality, unsure that reality is itself a thing upon which I can lay a comprehensible framework. It is a feeling of absolute uncontrol, of being lost within one’s own body, a fracturing of physical and mental identity and will and experience into incommunicado fragments of the self.

The next day, clear of the dream, my rational, unterrified mind is perfectly willing to write off the experience as the weird detritus of a consciousness that I’ll never fully understand. Philip K Dick, on the other hand, I think would see a potential tear in the seams of reality itself and seek to exploit it--where my instinct is to patch the seam in order to rejoin the shared hallucination that is the real world, full of other real and hallucinating minds, PKD sticks his hands in and rips, seemingly of the belief that there is truth, or at least something more real underneath. Whether reading his work is a trip into a more true shared crumbling reality or just an exploration of his own fractured, amphetamine-kicked mind doesn’t matter--wherever they exist, I too have seen the seams, and PKD’s stories are always compelling ways through.

~ ~ ~

Exhibit Piece’s George Miller is an historian living in the mid-twenty-second century, about 200 years after the period of his research specialty--1950s middle class America. He works for the monolithic corporate/government concern that everyone else works for--a Global Directorate that enforces the usual Big Brother standards of conformity to standards of dress and behavior and mindless adherence to the Rules. Art and individuality are anachronistic concepts, and running afoul of the Board can result in euthanasia. Not much fun!

Miller’s job is to build a perfect replica of a 1950s suburban house in the Government-run history museum. He is considered (of course) a bit of a weirdo by the standards of his time--unusually immersed in and obsessed with his work, and he has already roused the attention of colleagues and supervisors for his dangerous eccentricities. Miller is unrepentant--and kind of a dick--about his appreciation for life in a better time.

One morning, Miller hears strange noises coming from within the exhibit. He goes to investigate, and finds himself in 1950s suburban San Francisco. He is still George Miller, but 1950s George has a wife and two sons and a job at United Electronic Supply and a Buick, all of it in keeping with future Miller’s very meticulous research some 200 years hence. He is slowly remembering this world and his whole life in it. He comes to believe that he has somehow stepped through a time bridge in his exhibit, and that both realities are equally real.

Miller heads back to the spot where he entered this world and finds a shimmering “weak spot”--the time bridge--through which he can see his desk in the history museum. He proceeds to get into an argument through the time bridge with his boss about whether or not he should return to the twenty-second century. Miller decides to stay, as the future very clearly sucked. This enrages the Director, who promises to disassemble the exhibit piece by piece, destroying it, Miller, and the new (old) world he inhabits in the process. Miller insists this will simply close the time bridge, leaving him to live happily ever after in 1950s America.

Miller heads back to his house, grabs a cold beer, and plops down on the couch, really quite pleased with himself and this rather surprisingly pleasant turn of events in his life, thoroughly excited to one day vote twice for Ronald Reagan. Happily opening the newspaper, he reads the headline--

He chose...poorly.

Exhibit Piece is an early work by PKD, and it’s not very...good. Were there really two equal realities linked by a time bridge with George Miller having equally real lives in both? Did he have a psychotic break in the true future reality that led to him hallucinating a Utopian 1950s reality? Was 1950s Miller the real Miller, the oppressive future the hallucination, the whole thing a reaction to living a dreary day-to-day life under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation? The answer to these questions is a resounding, “ahh, you know. Whatever, I guess.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s still a fun read, though. Dick’s criticism of the decade in which he’s writing, that it is a staid, bureaucratic, oppressive monoculture--a time ironically exalted by his main character as the zenith of individual freedom and artistic expression--has become the thumbnail sketch of the 1950s that we all carry around in our heads. That’s hard to do from right in the moment, and perhaps speaks to how profoundly our understanding of post-WWII America has been shaped by the counterculture that despised it. (“You’ll be vindicated, PKD,” I scream, deliriously, across the time bridge.) I also like that this haughty future historian with the fixation on the good ol’ days ends up sealing himself in a reality that will shortly be obliterated by a cobalt bomb. Make America Great Again, eh George? You mean back when we were living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust? At least you didn’t come back as Mrs. Miller, I guess.

Exhibit Piece’s unlikable characters and “who really cares” central conflict makes it a curious choice to adapt into an hour-long TV program, which is probably why Real Life shares almost nothing with its source material. It isn’t adapted from the short story so much as it is vaguely inspired by it, with only the two-century time bridge and the “which is really real” elements serving as connective tissue between the two works. This is for the best, as Real Life is good, and still feels like it belongs in the PKD universe, even if this isn’t really his story anymore.

Sarah, played by Anna Paquin, is a cop living two hundred years or so from now in a rather gorgeously realized future Chicago. She is haunted by having survived a mass casualty event in the not-too-distant past, a shootout with a criminal gang that took the lives of many of her fellow officers. She feels guilty for having survived, a guilt compounded by her otherwise wonderful life with a smoking hot libidinous girlfriend--her words, not mine!--and the fact that she hasn’t been able to bring the leader of the gang to justice.

Sarah’s girlfriend, Katie, recognizes that Sarah needs a break from her own inner turmoil. Katie works at some sort of software development company, and she brings home an advance copy of a piece of technology not yet quite ready for the mass market. It’s a little chip she can place on the side of her skull to interface with the tech implants already wired into her brain that will allow her to temporarily experience a whole new life.

KATIE: It's another life that you will accept as reality, just as firmly as you accept this one. You're not just gonna be somewhere else--you're gonna be *someone* else. ... It's a vacation from your life."

So Sarah plugs in and comes to two hundred years in the past as George--played by Terrence Howard--the CEO of a tech company developing a fancy new virtual reality rig that will (you guessed it) allow the wearer to temporarily experience a whole new life.

George isn’t just any tech billionaire, though--like Sarah, he’s haunted by recent trauma. His wife was kidnapped and held for ransom for access to George’s technology, and ultimately murdered when he wouldn’t put the security of the globe at risk by handing over the proprietary tech. George spends his nights going on vigilante missions trying to find and murder the man who killed his wife.

The longer Sarah inhabits George’s consciousness, the more he slowly remembers all of this and the other details of his life. We jump back and forth in time between Sarah and George, each one of them trying to come to terms with the memory of the other person’s life. George’s slowly returning memory works to convince him that his world is the false one, as it all lines up too neatly with the memories he has of Sarah’s life. Meanwhile, Sarah’s depressed experience of her life as “flat” and listless and too by-the-sci-fi-book perfect works to convince her that it’s her life that’s not real. Everything around her is too good--her beautiful girlfriend, her job, the flying cars--and she doesn’t think she deserves it.

I can tell he's a good actor because that's the exact face I make every time someone reminds me I'm not one of those, either.

This leads to the very Dick-ian central conflict--which of these two lives is the “real” one? Who is using whose life as an escape from the other? Or have these two pieces of technology, combined with the searing pain they share, created a sort of time bridge, allowing the two of them to experience each other’s lives--could both lives be real?

George concludes, with some help, that he will stop putting on the virtual reality headset, deciding to stay in his time and face his pain, rather than try to escape to a new life two hundred years in the future. He smashes the headset to bits, and we cut to Sarah, strapped to a gurney, eyes wide, forever trapped in her experience of George’s life.

The episode ends with some very “The Twilight Zone” Serling-esque zoom-out dialogue, delivered by girlfriend Katie after Sarah seals herself inside her own mind, on permanent consciousness vacation in George’s world of pain and loss.

Katie: She wanted to be punished. For her sins--real and imagined. Surviving, being
       happy. (...) We’re all sinners, and we all think we need to be punished. Even if
       our sins don’t exist.

Sarah sentences herself to a life of constant pain and atonement for sins for which she ought not bear responsibility. (So does George, if you think his life might be real, too.) But whether or not she deserves this guilt, or deserves the otherwise perfect life she could be living, she is unable to will herself free of the constant shame. Which life is real? This is a meaningless question in the face of a far more answerable and important one--which life can I bear to live, and is there an amount of suffering I can endure that will smother the guilt of having lived at all?

~ ~ ~

Grades

Exhibit Piece, by Philip K Dick

C+. Great and immediate world building, but not very...good, especially graded against other PKD. Cute ending! Those old sci-fi short story writers always get you with that last sentence or two, eh?

Real Life, by the Amazon people

B+. A thoroughly enjoyable hour of TV with an appropriately bleak ending. Just a couple of awkward TV moments. Looking forward to the rest of the series.

The Adaptation

A-. As mentioned above, this wasn’t so much an adaptation as the short story served as a launching pad for developing a new story and ideas. A vast improvement on the source material, but still extremely true to PKD, and Exhibit Piece, at its heart.

~ ~ ~

Minority Reports (stray thoughts)

• Real Life commits the same sin that every adaptation of PKD’s work seems to perpetrate, save perhaps Bladerunner--the on-screen protagonists live at least a full class above their print-dwelling counterparts. (This is a problem in virtually all movies and TV, actually, but here, too.) Lesbian Supercop Sarah and her girlfriend live in a gorgeous glass and marble and steel studio apartment in a high-rise with shining surfaces and perfectly functioning future technology. It’s beautiful! But PKD’s characters were reliably blue-collar people living in dirty, blue-collar worlds. Even the supposed greasy-spoon diner of Real Life’s two timelines look like never-cooked-in Johnny Rockets redesigned to look like Apple Stores--shmear some grime on these worlds, production designers!
• Why does the evil, individuality-and-freedom-hating Global Directorate in Exhibit Piece have a building in which many, many people work to recreate idealized exhibits of life in the past? This seems distinctly at odds with their ends! With Director Times x Bob of the Global Directorate, rest assured there’d be no giant skyscrapers full of history-romanticizing exhibits opening up accidental time portals to greener pastures, what with all the handsome wives and crispy bacon and open roads. This is an unnecessary risk for any self-respecting authoritarian regime.
• Anna Paquin looks increasingly like Tracy Ullman.
• The quote in the lead image is from the short story. George Miller is speaking to a psychiatrist about his situation, who points out the solipsism necessary to sustain the possibility that Miller is the only real person inside this “not real” museum exhibit. “So you’re dreaming me. (...) I suppose I should thank you,” is just a wonderful little nod from Dick to the depth of the psychosis necessary to believe that you’re the only real conscious being walking about. To recognize this, and still struggle with the question “what is real” goes a long way to explaining how consuming and crazy-making these sorts of explorations can be.
• Terrence Howard was lucky to get his domestic violence incidents out of the way before the current cultural moment, eh? He’s very good in this, perhaps in part because it’s a little meta-disquieting to watch him yell menacingly at a female loved one in close quarters.
• “Okay, fine. It’s your choice. I’m not gonna stop you. You put that thing on, and you could end up in a permanent coma. Hey, at least you’ll be having hot lesbian sex in some sci-fi paradise. Or you can stay here with me, and we can face the pain and the horror of this in the real world together. No, I’m not really selling this, I know.” ... No, you’re really not! Bring on the supercop hot lesbian sex flying car Experience Machine!