Review – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Part III, Mercerism

Part I: Simulated / Real Dichotomy

Part II: Human / Inhuman Dichotomy

In Roger Ebert’s Walk of Fame remarks in 2005, he talks about film in a way that makes me think of Mercerism:

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I’m not just stuck being myself, day after day.

This is the crux of the Mercerism divide between humans and androids.

Mercerism is an amalgam of religious signs. Notably, he has an element of Sisyphus. His struggle is to walk an uphill path while being pelted by stones. He is part Jesus, in the victim of rock-throwing and his sacrificial nature. He is part Buddha, emphasizing the falseness of the separation of people through the shared emotions when connected to the empathy box. The construction of Mercer becomes more obvious as the book goes on, and turns out to be very much the point.

The big reveal of Buster Friendly, his anticipated expose, proves that Mercer is just a third-tier actor on a stage. The androids celebrate at this deicide of the human’s god. Without this idol of empathy, the androids believe they’ve brought humans down to their level. Society constructed Mercer to cultivate particular human traits and tendencies to create a cohesive society after natural disaster and mass exodus. But society didn’t manufacture the spiritual hole that Mercer filled. That’s an inborn human trait according to PKD, and that need for a connection to a world or entity beyond the self is a quality the androids don’t have. The androids think they’ve won by using their android-buddy Buster Friendly to debunk the existence of god, but PKD shows that it does not matter. Mercer gets proved to be a movie, but as Ebert presents above, that movie delivers an empathetic experience.

In fact, the deconstruction of Mercer appears to strengthen his presence for Deckard. In the climax of the book, Deckard must overcome his emotional attachment to Rachel to retire her double, Pris. Mercer appears to him before the moment of action, telling him that though he is being asked to do a bad thing, it is a job he must do for the greater good. Mercer gives Deckard the moral permission he needs to overcome the empathy telling him not to kill the android. Paradoxically, Mercer, who appears alone against the elements and rock throwers, makes Deckard feel not alone through empathy. The fact that Mercer appears visually to Deckard suggests a supernatural aspect to be sure. He might have been depicted for the empathy box by a mere human actor, but Mercer now lives beyond those origins.

After Deckard retires the Baty gang, he drives into a wasted Oregon in his exhaustion. He becomes detached from his worldly responsibilities to the police force and bounty hunting, his wife, his physical self. He parks at the start of a sandy path and begins to walk. The setting morphs into the supernatural or fantastic. He starts to feel rocks hitting him. He is walking Mercer’s path. He is becoming Mercer. Or he is discovering the Mercer in him. No, Mercer is him. And to punctuate this realization, he finds a toad when he returns to his car. Like Isidore finding the spider, this is a miraculous moment. Deckard feels blessed by Mercer. And he feels at one with him.

Through the empathy box, the remaining humans on Earth have poured their emotions, shared their feelings through empathy. Together they have infused themselves into what they experience as Mercer. Mercer is them. Each of them. Deckard has now had an experiential epiphany of this fact.

But, again, PKD offers no easy answers. Though the epiphany feels authentic and changes Deckard at his core, when he returns to home and shares the toad with his wife, she discovers the toad is artificial. Deckard is disappointed but ultimately values knowing the truth of the toad’s nature. He goes to bed in exhaustion, and his wife makes a phone call to order supplies for keeping the toad as a pet.

So once again PKD gives us the paradox. The toad is a symbol of god, a symbol of the oneness the humans have with god through empathy, but the toad is manufactured, constructed, just as the androids have shown Mercer is. But the experience humans have with god through the empathy box is authentic. Empathy, PKD seems to say, is always authentic, even in response to manufactured things. The spiritual connection to god is an act of empathy, so even if the god is constructed, the experience of the god is authentic.

Consider the ramifications: Any human construction of god, if it engages the human trait of empathy, is an authentic, real god. Thus all gods are true, even if all gods are false. Human empathetic experiencing of a being that fills the spiritual hole makes that god real. Deckard voices this at the end of the novel: ““Everything is true…Everything anybody has ever thought…’I’ll be all right,’ he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.”

Bam. Hey, PKD, thanks for the philosophical shake-up.

Review – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Part II, the Human / Inhuman Dichotomy

Read Part I, wherein I give an overview of my reading experience and explore the classification of simulated and real in the novel.

During the first part of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, while I was still disoriented by how not-noir the novel was compared to Blade Runner, there was one scene where I got my bearings and found the two versions in sync – when Rick Deckard performs the Voight-Kampff test on Rachel Rosen. This may be the only scene in the book that the film delivers without much adjustment.

After that there were many divergences, especially in the portrayal of the androids.

What a disappointment the Nexus-6’s are as antagonists for Deckard, especially Roy Baty, who is a major badass in the film – and iconic – Rutger Hauer’s “Tears in Rain” speech is unforgettable. As far as the book is concerned, Deckard seems to be far too worried about this job considering how easy they all go down. Baty especially needed to be fiercer as the culminating retiree. He sets up an alarm and trap for Deckard that will chemically induce anxiety, giving the androids a chance to escape or kill him. But Deckard never trips the alarm, missing a great storytelling opportunity for PKD and making the androids look like chumps.

Getting past that, what’s important about the androids is how they are similar and different from human beings. They define humanity through their lack of it. So PKD starts by eliminating three of the major components most people associate with humanity: biology, intelligence, and emotion. Biologically they are nearly indistinguishable from the humans – and here is where the simulated / real question comes into play. They appear utterly realistic, like the electric animals. Only a DNA test can determine their artificiality. Intellectually, they are humanity’s superior. This is shown most starkly when the Baty gang interacts with Isidore, the “chickenhead.” Emotionally, they are in step with humans, acting on what seems to be authentic feelings. Presumably out of rage and a desire for revenge, Rachel decides to kill that which Deckard loves most – his new, authentic goat – when he goes ahead and retires the group of Nexus-6’s that she’s tried to protect by seducing him. But PKD establishes the simulation of emotions by humans through the mood organ and thus eliminates it as a defining human trait.

What diminishes the androids is their lack of empathy. Rachel is easily the most human of the androids. She nearly convinces Deckard to walk away from his mission, even bounty hunting in general. After having sex with her, he admits that he’d marry her if the situation were different, if he weren’t married and if human-android marriages weren’t illegal. He likewise admits he doesn’t know if he can retire the final three androids. She knows intellectually she’s got him on the hook, but her lack of empathy allows him to escape. She unempathetically gloats that she’s done this before, including to the heartless bounty hunter that disgusts and disturbs Deckard. Empathy would have told her not to reveal this information until Deckard had turned in his resignation and the Baty gang had escaped to safety. But now he realizes their love-making was merely utilitarian. His feelings are hurt. He’s going to retire her doppleganger right in the face.

This lack of empathy is most affectively demonstrated through the spider scene. All hail the effectiveness of PKD’s writing here! I don’t like spiders. But when Isidore finds the spider, a presumably real one, it is a joyous moment, a moment of freaking hope even. This place is such a wasteland, they don’t even have spiders. And when Pris takes it and starts cutting its legs off, it is devastating. I found it to be the most disturbing, gut-wrenching scene in the book. Isidore is traumatized by it, as was I. PKD takes a generally repulsive creature and makes it a symbol of blessing and life. That’s some good writing.

The other place where the lack of empathy in androids is made significant is in the melding with Mercer using the empathy box. I’m going to speak more to Mercerism in Part III.

Considering all of this, PKD is clearly saying that empathy is the lynchpin of humanity. The fascinating, keep-you-thinking bit is the paradox of this – both Isidore and Deckard end up empathizing with androids, though the androids cannot empathize back. Isidore doesn’t find much contradiction in this, though he is devastatingly betrayed by his android-empathizing in the spider-mutilation scene, leading to his emotional breakdown. Deckard, however, becomes nearly undone by his empathy. As a bounty hunter, he cannot empathize with his prey and get the job done. His empathy will likely cost him his life. So while each of these characters are held up as fully human beings, embracing their empathy, they are both vulnerable because of it.

 

Review: The Early Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick

The Early Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick (Dover: August 2013)

Philip K. Dick published more than 120 brief works during his lifetime.  This anthology presents twelve of his finest early short stories and novellas, which originally appeared in Space Science Fiction, Imagination: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and other pulp magazines of the early 1950s.

This is probably a book for afficionados only.  If you’re already a fan and haven’t encountered these stories before, you’ll find a lot to like.  If you have an interest in 50’s pulp, Dick delivers here.

These are cold war stories.  Golden Age America imagines the future.  And the future, in so many of these stories, is slag and ash, roiling clouds of particles, obscured suns and engines of war with more resilience and longevity than their creators.

Anyone who didn’t live through or grow up under the threat of nuclear winter could read this as anthropology or ethnography.

Much of the set decoration and direction of later Dick is on display.  From our 21st century perspective, lighting up a cigarette aboard a spaceship, in a time machine, or on an extraterrestrial colony is as jarring as a telepathic pig.  Broken or breaking marriages form the emotional core for paranoid subterrans, magical realist cuckoo clocks, and living ships.

You can see a bright arc of evolution running through these visions of the end of the world.  Technology is both the enemy and the savior.  Weapons of mass destruction merely outlive their makers, turn on them, become them; eventually evolving beyond conflict and directing the future of humanity.  Is it any wonder he wrote himself into worlds where individuals couldn’t trust even themselves?

An objective standout is “The Second Variety.”  If you’re familiar with the Terminator franchise, you already know  some of the plot.  Killing machines disguise themselves as human.  Empathy is dangerous.  This is the core of Philip K. Dick.  As is the truth that empathy is also inevitable.

The writing itself is sometimes awkward and often repetitive.  The ideas are old ones, now.  You’ve probably seen them before. Taken as the germ of later writing or as a cultural artifact, they’re interesting.  But their execution is brutal and obvious.  These were stories bought by the word that paid the bills.

Recommended for fans of Ragged Robin, The Silver Agent, and Farscape.

Book Review – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Part I, the Simulated-Real Dichotomy

To keep my geek cred, I recently read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the Philip K. Dick classic that inspired the Ridley Scott classic, Blade Runner. It was a mixed, but interesting experience, and I’m still working out how exactly I feel about it. But any book that leaves you thinking about it long after it’s done, earns its keep in my opinion.

This is a review that’s going to assume I’m the last person in the world to have finally read Do Androids and will not shy from spoilers. You’ve been warned.

Disclosure: I had already seen Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut twice, and while I’m no fangirl, it certainly made an impression. No one can say Ridley Scott’s vision isn’t, well, totally visionary, and his slant on the story definitely shaped how I read Philip K. Dick’s novel.

Disclosure: This was my absolute first experience reading PKD. Once I realized that the book was vastly different than the film based on it, I was completely without an anchor of expectation.

So it is no surprise that my response at the end was: “Huhn.”

Cassandra, who was sitting nearby, asked for clarification. “Weird ending,” I replied. She offered this gem: “If you enjoy that feeling, please read more Philip K. Dick!”

I’m not quite sold on that prospect…yet. On the one hand, reading PKD was a roller coaster. During the first third of the book, I was repeatedly disappointed that the book wasn’t more noirish, more like Blade Runner in its genre and imagery. And yet, as the book continued, I saw the genius of Scott to use the film noir genre to structure the story for the screen. Because Deckard does get pulled into a world of corruption of a sort–his ability to retire androids is corrupted by his interaction with them. Heck, Rachel’s more of a femme fatale in the book than in the movie. But the atmosphere just isn’t noir, and the literary stylings certainly aren’t.

Once I got past that, I fell deep into the mindf**k that is the doppleganger police station. Suddenly I was all in, completely grabbed by the story and under PKD’s powers. If the rest of the novel had been that mind-blowingly exciting, I would have become a PKD fangirl right there. But it doesn’t maintain it, dialing it back down in the action before a finale that’s about defining and seeing God.

Hence “weird ending.” PKD is not the procurer of clear answers. He’s a questions man. I’m not sure I expected so many hanging questions at the end, so I felt less than satisfied. But the more I’ve considered the book, the more those questions have rattled around in my skull, the more my respect for the novel has grown.

The first of these: What is PKD saying about the blurred distinction between simulation and real? He opens with the ways that humans have given up authenticity, namely through dialing up desired emotions on the mood organ. Like machines, they can just code a number to elicit the feeling they want or need, perhaps the desire to watch TV no matter what’s on or the feeling of hopefulness. Are the emotions real if not created by an authentic experiential stimuli, if they are just simulated by the mood organ? They feel real enough to the characters. It seems pretty clear that PKD sees the mood organ emotions as simulated and thus inauthentic. The scenes in which Deckard or his wife discuss their day’s emotional choices are pathetic to the point of laughable. On this point, PKD is clearly anti-simulation.

And like all great sci-fi, the stuff of fiction here is merely a reflection of fact. Most people manipulate their emotions throughout a day, we’re just less exact in our methods. We might drink a beverage with either stimulating or relaxing effects. We might listen to a particular music to amplify or nullify a mood. We might watch a sitcom to alleviate the despair of a bad day or a Nick Sparks movie to get a good cry out. And that’s just the normal over-the-counter stuff. 1 in 5 Americans take some sort of psychiatric medication, antidepressants being the most prevalent.

The second way PKD explores the simulation/real issue is through the value of electric versus real animals. Deckard owns an electric sheep, a replacement for a real sheep that died. He covets his neighbor’s real horse. His electric sheep, although no one knows its a fake but Deckard and his wife, is a shameful aspect of his life. He spends entirely too much time, in my opinion, obsessing over the value of real animals. Of course, the world he lives in is a wasteland. Real animals are scarce. Owning a real one is not only a sign of wealth, it’s a sign of empathy. More on that in subsequent post about the human/inhuman dichotomy.

But here the fake animals are not so clearly lesser. Repeatedly electric animals are mistaken for real, even by extremely empathetic humans. Both Deckard and Isidore make this mistake, accepting either real animals as fake or electric animals as real. Each of them find an animal that makes him feel spiritually blessed. In one case, it seems the animal is a real one, and its mutilation at the hands of the androids is what shows them to be inhuman. In the other case, the animal turns out to be false, but it still led to what appears to be an authentic spiritual epiphany. This part of the simulacra-real question is left much more ambiguous. Certainly there is a despair over the wasteland Earth has become, and the value of real animals is a reflection of that. However, Deckard’s desire to own a real animal is pathetic. Once he gets one, it’s dead within 24 hours. The mockery of human being’s desire to own animals could ironically emphasize humanity’s role in the extinction of so many animals. Their continued efforts to control and “protect” animals is an insult to nature. Human beings might be better off simply accepting electric sheep and letting nature rebuild itself as best it can.

The android version of this question is much less ambiguous, probably because it has more to do with empathy and spirituality than a simple real/fake distinction. I’ll explore this and Mercerism in upcoming posts.

Part II: The human / inhuman dichotomy

Part III: Mercerism

Radio Free Albemuth opens Friday!

Radio Free Albemuth, the latest Philip K. Dick screen adaptation opens  this Friday, June 27th. Unfortunately, it will only premiere in ten theaters across the United States: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and New York.  International dates will follow and the film will be available on digital platforms. The project was initially shown at film festivals where it received enthusiastic accolades from science fiction fans.  Philip K. Dick aficionados embraced it as the most faithful reproduction of the source material yet.  Inspired by the positive response, the principals decided to Kickstart a limited theatrical release. Radio Free Albemuth began as a novel attempt to explore Dick’s gnostic theophany which was rejected by his publisher.  He later wrote the story into the VALIS trilogy, wherein a movie with a similar plot was planned.  The original book was published posthumously.  Now that’s a movie.  Sounds a bit like a Phil Dick novel, doesn’t it? I’d call myself a PKD fan, I guess.  But it’s complicated.  Most of what I like about his work is the stuff, the people, that it influenced.  William Gibson, Grant Morrison, Rudy Rucker, even Patrick Rothfuss.  With Dick’s own work, I tend to be enthusiastic through a couple books but find the third infuriating. He wrote dozens of novels and short stories.  I’ve been through that cycle many times.  For that reason, I came to Radio Free Albemuth fresh.  I found it tight and engaging despite a point of view switch about half way through.  There are echoes and germs of persistent themes in his other works, but I think it stands on its own. I’d recommend it as an introduction to Dick’s catalog.  Given the fan enthusiasm for the upcoming film, I’m willing to be reckless and recommend it, too.  Clarity and concision are rare descriptors for his work.  When people tell you to read the VALIS trilogy, they’re asking you to hurt yourself.  I’m not kidding. Dick’s books have proven difficult to translate to film.  I know this is a common refrain for all books, but there are exceptions.  The gearhead endorsement here is a plus. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is, on the whole, better than Blade Runner.  Now, before you indulge that knee jerk reaction, listen quietly.  I own five versions of that movie.  I’ve read several books on it in the dark corners of a university libraries.  I’ve read Burroughs’ Blade Runner, you know, for completeness’s sake.  And while the mood and some of the imagery from the film is fantastic, I’d say I think about Mercerism more often than tears in rain.  It sticks. The opposite is true for A Scanner Darkly.  The book will twist you inside out.  You’ll get a feeling for how being the protagonist feels.  That’s great.  And terrible.  The ending, in the book, is great; and terrible.  The rotoscoped movie gives you a better sense of who’s who and what’s what and the valuable distance.  You can evaluate the situation rather than the individual consciousness.  The movie was a triumph.  It sticks. This one seems like it’ll benefit from some detachment as well.  Here’s the trailer.  Check it out and let us know what you think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovH_-mQxCok