Customer Reviews

The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Some day Philip K. Dick may get the documentary he deserves, one that gives us the life and the works; unfortunately, this isn't it. "The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick" is, at best, the first step. And while I appreciate the effort put into making this film, as well as the astute contributions by interviewees, this is a seriously flawed production, and does, indeed, seem like a college project hamstrung by a commensurate lack of funding.

For instance, as the director was unable to use any actual video of PKD, he hit upon the idea of using a cartoon version of PKD to segue from one "segment" to the next, but also to provide the "medium" to present a garbled, and at times, indiscernible PKD speaking in an interview, without, however, the benefit of subtitles. As Elvis Mitchell noted in his review of the movie for the NY Times, the "animated version of Dick behind the typewriter, which suggests a low budget version of the Cryptkeeper...underscores the minimal amount of money the filmmakers had (reportedly about $10,000) to finish the project, which was shot on videotape and feels even more cheaply done than an episode of "Biography" on A&E." (3/2/2001)

To note that mind-numbing repetitions of the same minimalist animation overlaid with an abysmally god-awful techno(?) soundtrack that no one in their right mind should be subjected to would be to belabor the obvious. Suffice it to say that before long I was muting the music, and then fast-forwarding through the un-animated animated segments to locate the next interesting "human" moment.

Insofar as the dvd bonus features package goes, forget about it. The dvd simply recycles the comments already presented in the film. So there is nothing new except for the interview with the director and the definitions of a half dozen key terms in the late oeuvre. Big deal.

Given the fact that some half dozen of PKD's stories have been made into movies (with more reputedly on the way), its high time for a full scale documentary. This "Gospel" may be a first attempt, but PKD deserves more and better. Seriously.

[As a side note: back in the day, when it lived up to its name, The Learning Channel aired a wonderful series (co-executive produced by Walter Cronkite and Goeffrey C. Ward) called "The Great Books." Imagine what they might have done with Philip K. Dick.]

It's difficult to imagine for whom this film was intended. Focusing as it does exclusively on the last decade of Philip K. Dick's life, and with virtually no discussion of his fiction, it would be incomprehensible to a newcomer. But since it contains nothing that hasn't been widely known about PKD's life for many years, longtime fans will find most of it boring. But besides this, the entire film is hindered by amateurish production values. As many have already pointed out, the film is padded by repetetive, crude animations which serve no real purpose, and features an electronic soundtrack that sounds like it was lifted from a PBS special, circa 1985. While watching it, I finally lost all hope of improvement during the sequence when the librarian at California State University (where many of PKD's manuscripts are kept) painstakingly explains the procedures for checking out materials from Special Collections. (And then, ironically, not a single page of any of PKD's manuscripts is displayed in the film.) The people who are interviewed (with the exception of the librarian) all have something interesting to say, but due to the filmmakers' total lack of editing skills, the film is painfully slow to watch. And most of the audio clips of PKD himself speaking were from the cassette issued fifteen years earlier by the PKD Society and widely available. I actually felt the deleted scenes section of the DVD contained more interesting material than anything that was left in the film, such as Ray Nelson discussing PKD's friendship with Bishop Pike. One wonders what led the filmmakers to conclude that watching their little animation of PKD at a typewriter for the sixth time made for better cinema than this material. Spend your time wisely and read (or reread) one of PKD's books instead of watching this.

Dick really deserves some first class documentaries exploring his remarkable life and personality- and this one just doesn't cut the mustard.

If you love Philip Dick, you already know these stories (which, the ones they get to, are very shallowly explored), and if you are unfamiliar with Dick, this, I can safely guess, will not make you very interested in looking deeper. The interviews are not very revealing, the audio clips out of context and thematically meaningless, his works are not explored, there was no access to persons, pictures, video footage that make documentaries worthwhile. There are animated clips that are annoying and last too long.

This film is not totally without redeeming qualities, just not enough to warrent a purchase; unless, of course, you would like to see extended footage of the librarian talking on and on about the Dick archives.

If you would like to get a deep look into Dick, I would recommend the intriguing book "Only Apparently Real" by Paul Williams. Once, Philip Dick had his house broken into and a filing cabinet/safe blown up. This book, which is a series of interviews, has Dick, in his own words, unspool theory after theory after theory about whom may have done it and why: the police, The CIA, drug dealers, Black Panthers, and even at one point, himself. It shows how his mind functioned, like a megacomputer on acid and amphetamines, staring straight into the void. Also recommended is "Divine Invasions" by Lawrence Sutin, a more traditional bio but very well written. Then there is "I am alive and you are dead" by Emmanuel Carrere which I have not read yet but is supposed to be very good.

We can respect the efforts and the intent of the filmakers, but the results just left me cold.

...

Just about a week before its release on video, I spotted an advertisement for "The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick" and pre-ordered it without having read anything about it. And I was not disappointed.

Although the production values perhaps could have been better, considering the budget, they are not bad. This documentary is an endeavor of love, not profit, much as the entire writing career of PKD was. The interviews are poignant and heartfelt, and personable, which is something that reading transcripts of interviews is not. The care and admiration is evident in the faces and voices of those people remembering the author; from personal friends to fellow authors to notable guerilla ontologist Robert Anton Wilson (whose comments about himself possible being a perfect android created by the CIA alone made this film worth watching).

There are features available which include a "Dicktionary" of reoccurring words and phrases in PKD's writings (what is "kibble"?), and animated pieces showing Phil at his typewriter, as if speaking to us about key elements of his philosophy. The audio tracks to these sequences being culled from interviews with him over the years.

For a newcomer to PKD, this film may be an invaluable resource into the mindset of the author following a deeply personal experience he had in 1974. This experience dominated his last half dozen books and could be defined as a philosophical-religious epiphany, or the result of a complete mental breakdown. Phil himself never satisfactorily came to any firm conclusions about it. And this documentary, instead of attempting to be a biography of his life, focuses on his thoughts and endless theories about this experience. It provides a unique perspective on what lead up to this event and how much its profound influence on his later writings.

For a veteran reader of PKD, this documentary offers a glimpse behind the some of the realities of the master of creating unrealities. Some of those people interviewed include Ray Nelson (author of the story on which "They Live" was based),
Robert Anton Wilson, Paul Williams (journalist/writer and former literary executor of PKD), & Jay Kinney (former editor of Gnosis magazine).

In all, this low-budget documentary is much like the cheap paperbacks of the 1950s & 60s which Phil Dick wrote. The quality could be better, the production level could be flashier, the music could be more diversified, the animation could be smoother. But the subject matter could also be something more shallow than the mind-twisting beliefs of Philip K. Dick. What *is* this documentary? It is like sitting down and reminiscing about an author with his dear friends. It is a funny, tragic, hip, deranged, and darkly delightful film about one of the greatest writers and philosophers in any universe.

This is a very fun and informative documentary for aficionados of Philip Kindred Dick whose writings directly inspired such science fiction film classics as Total Recall (based on the short story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale"), Minority Report (based on the story "Minority Report"), and Blade Runner (loosely based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"). Nonetheless, Dick made only a little bit of money near the end of his life time before he died of massive heart attack in his early fifties. He had been married several times, may have been abused as a child, and seemingly experienced benzedrine- and sodium pentothal-potentiated schizophrenia that was also a form of mysticism as well as an inducement to his multiply interpretable science fiction plots. On February 3, 1974 he had an extremely realistic 24-hour hallucination that he raced to explain throughout the remaining years of his life with such questionable concepts as alien contact and the stopping of time. (A Google search should reveal the 52-point Appendix to VALIS which gives an overview of this bizarre cosmology.) Thus, as the filmmakers correctly realized, Dicks life is theoretically of as much epistemological and science fiction interest as the plots he derived from it. This will disappoint you if you want to see a state-of-the art science fiction movie, but it is quite fascinating if you are just looking to get closer to the wellspring of Dicks incredible productivity/creativity. The documentary features interviews with individuals such as Paul Williams, the Rolling Stone journalist who published an interview with him (whose audio tapes have been cleverly used to dub a tasteful cartoon rendition of Dick speaking to us from beyond the grave at his typewriter) and Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illuminatus Trilogy and a cult figure in his own right (he is a trip). There are also cool extras on the DVD such as a "Dicktionary" of explanations of some of his overarching conceptse.g., the "zebra"an alien intelligence that disguises itself among ordinary objects, "kipple"a kind of spatial counterpart to entropy manifesting (again, as ordinary objects, see his novel Ubik), VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System; considered by some his greatest novel), and the "black iron prison" (a Gnostic concept of Earth and our life here as a kind of spiritual holding tank).

Why don't other people appreciate this video? It's not as if the creaters had 10 million dollers to make expensive computer animations or anything. I like the minimilistic animations and I loved the music that went with them. I learned a lot from the documentary, and now I am going to go and buy the bookstore out of Philip K. Dick books.

There's nothing "charmingly minimalist" about this movie. Perhaps we can say it's "charmingly poorly edited" or "charmingly void of grounding", but even this is a stretch. The blaring and "low-fi" techno music, for instance, might be "charming" to me, were it not counterintuitive to the length of the single-shot interview scenes. The interviews themselves are only loosely structured to give an idea of the last years of PKD's life, but even that structure is muddled by overwrought anecdotes and non-sequitors. The human warmth that came across in some of these interviews are really the only valuable thing about this movie, but it seems like the filmmakers were trying their hardest to undermine that quality to turn this into some sort underground geek-punk documentary. Picture a woman relaying to the camera how much she misses Phil, or relaying a touching anecdote about his irreverend and conforting sense of humor,all while irritating fast-paced garage-techno blares in your ear. See the problem?

Static talking heads talk about PKD. Some of the talk is interesting, but fans know this stuff already. Read the books and Lawrence Sutin's bio of Dick (and Paul Williams' "Only Apparently Real" if you can find it)-- give this clunky homage a pass.

This documentary has received more than its fair share of criticisms, some warranted, some not. It would have been easier - and less risky - to present a `chronological portrait' of Philip K. Dick and his work, but since such a task would prove especially difficult in an 80-minute documentary, the people behind `Gospel' wisely chose to emphasize a specific period (mainly from the 70s to his death in 1982) and thematic line (the 1971 break-in; the 2-3-74 visions) and went along with it. As a whole, the various interviewees offer insights of uneven interest (the most notable contributions being arguably made by R. Nelson, D. Scott Apel, J. Kinney and P. Williams), and some anecdotes seem out of place, needlessly extending the film's running time while providing little in the way of intellectual substance. There's no doubt that it could have digged deeper - Dick's work is certainly complex enough to warrant a more meticulous treatment - and the best way to introduce oneself to Dick's world and ideas has always been and still is to read his books. But the fact that the filmmakers made visible efforts to examine the most troubling period of Dick's life, all the while putting him and his work back on the map, should be commended.

I have only read We Can Build You and a portion of Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick--I definitely plan to finish Dr. Bloodmoney very soon-but that was enough to arouse my interest in this documentary about the enigmatic science fiction author. Genius or madman, or both, Philip K. Dick possessed a visionary perception of this life, which he referred to as the "Black Barred Prison." He steeped himself in the sorts of philosophical questions that usually mark the end of sanity: What is real? Who is real? What if I swapped minds with a friend--would I find that we view the world in the same way?

The fact that Philip K. Dick stories have been the basis for immensely popular Hollywood films--Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report--are the least interesting details discussed in the fascinating, very low budget documentary, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick. The fact that Dick was married, much less four times during his life, is not even touched upon. For better or worse, the filmmaker, Mark Steensland, focuses on the truly bizarre aspects of Dick's life, and the bizarre aspects were legion.

The first episode of Dick's life examined is the time in 1971 when he returned to his house to find that someone had broken in and blown open his 1,100 pound safe with explosives. The vault contained all of Dick's personal papers, tax returns, as well as an unknown quantity of drugs. One friend suspected those drugs to be heroin. Although a frequent and fervent drug-user, Dick summoned the authorities, even calling the FBI to investigate the matter. It remains vague just how deeply the authorities investigated this break-in and theft, but they did take the time to inform Dick that they felt he was, in fact, responsible for the act. As writer Paul Williams--whose 1975 profile on Dick was partly responsible for launching Dick's modest fame during his lifetime--points out, Dick was charmed by this notion, and actually spent some time meditating on the possibility that he had breached his own safe with explosives somehow without consciously knowing about it. No conclusions are offered, though one friend and writer speculates that some of the transient youth who crashed and used drugs at Philip K. Dick's home had violated his safe and made off with a quantity of drugs. Not long after the incident, Dick made rapid plans to leave California, heading up to Vancouver, British Columbia where he entered a drug treatment facility.

The next period in Dick's life that's examined in the documentary centers on what Dick referred to "2-3-74", meaning February and March of 1974. Following a period of illness, sporadic drug use, and coming out of a vitamin experiment where Dick's body had been bombarded with mega doses of Vitamin B, Dick answered a knock at his door one day to find a delivery driver from the local pharmacy had arrived with his prescription. As the girl at the door handed Dick the bag containing his prescription, his eye fell upon a Christian fish symbol pendant that hung around the girl's neck. He was then overtaken by an intense flash of light that knocked him unconscious, or at least senseless, for a period of twenty-four hours. The experience was very profound, leaving Dick with the sense that he had had an encountered with God. He referred to the experience as arising from a "pink beam" of light, and spent the next several years of his life writing about the experience in a body of work he titled "Exegesis." This piece of writing ultimately came to span 8,000 pages, and obsessed him until his death.

Interviews with Dick's contemporaries and fans are intermingled with animations of Philip K. Dick sitting at his typewriter, knocking off typewritten introductions and brief explanations about his experiences. Dick speaks through these animations; there is copious audio recordings of Dick speaking, but apparently the only footage of him on television was taped for a French network. All reviewers on the Internet Movie Database slam these animated interludes, I actually felt they added an interesting, quirky layer to this already strange and fascinating film. There is something haunting and fitting about an animation speaking onscreen for Philip K. Dick.

Although the friends, acquaintances and fans of Dick are not particularly well-spoken--seeming at times to ramble and digress from the point at hand--this only serves to further inject the documentary with the surreal mood that must have pervaded Dick's life.

Whether it can ever been determined whether Philip K. Dick was a genius or a madman, there is no question that the man lived a strange and intriguing life. He was a man of deep thought, unafraid to ask himself staggering questions about his own existence. One compliment given to his "Exegesis" by the publisher of Gnosis magazine, is that although it arose from a mystical experience, the work was not at all dogmatic. Dick explored numerous paths and possibilities of the source of the experience, and expressed many varying ideas on its meaning. Dick wrote his "Exegesis" in order to help him understand exactly what his "pink beam" experience was all about, not to convince others that it happened, or had some particular meaning.

As a writer, I'm always inspired by seeing documentaries about famous and infamous writers. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick was an enjoyable surprise, and definitely a quirky piece of popular culture that is worth finding and viewing.