Als je "women with three breasts" in de inleiding van je scriptie kan verwerken zit je goed, niet?
The first contact I had with the work of Philip Kindred Dick happened unbeknown to me at the tender age of eight through Paul Verhoeven’s campy and bloody action movie Total Recall, staring Arnold Schwarzenegger and based (very loosely) on Dick’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Of course, by the time I had come of age, I could remember little more from the movie than eyes popping out of bloated heads and women with three breasts. It was only after watching it again a few years ago, that I noticed the “phildickian” elements in the story. Less than twenty minutes into the movie, our muscled protagonist is strapped into a memory implantation machine, effectively eliminating any certainty about whether or not what we see is true (within the reality of the film, naturally) or simply a result of the memory implantation. I still did not recognize it as phildickian, however, because I still had not had any direct contact with his work. I had seen his name crop up several times, and decided to at the very least watch the much lauded movie Blade Runner, based on another short story of Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Again there was uncertainty, this time not about whether what was shown was real or not, but whether the protagonist was real or an artifical “replicant” himself. Perhaps more importantly, just as in Total Recall, this uncertainty is not eliminated at the end of the film, but an important element of the narrative.
It would take four more films based on Dick’s stories – some of them very good (Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly), some of them rather bland (Paycheck and Next) – before I would pick up one of his novels.
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