Philip K Dick's stories don't work

I've posted this in the movie forum rather than the novels forum because specifically I want to deal with his stories which have been turned into movies.

Ok, firstly let's put Total Recall and Bladerunner to one side. They are outstanding, and not subject to the problem I have with another two of his stories/movies.


Specifically Minority Report and Paycheck and paradoxically impossible.

I'm referring to the concept of seeing your own future, and being able to change it to avoid something nasty that happens. It's worse in Paycheck than it is in Minority Report.

Can some explain how Minority Report works ? Specifically, the only reason that Anderton (Cruise) goes to the appartment block to shoot the guy is because he saw it in the future. That's paradoxically impossible - had he not seen his own future, he wouldn't have known where to go to find the guy with the photos of his son. So, explain that to me.


Worse still in Paycheck, Jennings (Affleck), manages to arm himself with an envelope of interest items which one-by-one get him out of sticky situations and enables him to escape the police time and time again. So, how is this possible ? I could (almost) imagine that he could see into the future and see himself getting caught (the first time), and hence be able to prevent that by having the correct item in the future. However, how can he predict the second item he requires, considering at anyone time he can only see one possible future?

So, to conclude, excluding Bladerunner and Total Recall (which has certain issues too) Philip K Dick's stories (turned into movies) don't work.

I predict similar for Next which is due out in 2007.

 

Any movie that has either a time travel or 'see the future' element has conflicts.

Minority Report based itself upon the possibility of using the abilities of those that can see the future for the prevention of crime. Based on the ending of that movie, basically even those that can are only seeing a certain part of it, glimpses, that can change and may change. Many movies use the line 'the future is never certain'.

Paycheck I've never seen, so I can't comment on that.

 

I agree. I have yet to see a good time travel movie. There is one Philip K. Dick story that I love (called The Skull) which is a time travel story without such conflicts.

Warrior_of_Mandalore Strikes Again!

 

Paycheck may have been a bit silly, but i enjoyed it. My first thought after seeing the movie though was "Man, i bet that would have been better to read as a book." I didn't realize it was Dick's work.

I suppose in pay check, he could set aside the envelope for himself intending to change it later, and just the actions of doing so would change the future, so he could check again. I suppose i kjust assumed sinc eit was his creation and his project, that he would be able to manipulate it better than anyone else, and could do things that sound impossible to others.

 

But, I'm not sure they "don't work".
More that, by confounding logic is how they do work.
That is the science fiction part, those paradoxes are exactly what the material is about - to me at least.
I don't see time-travel plotlines as impossible and worthless, just really thought provoking.

Lightsabers don't work, if we apply known physics to them.

We can say that, for example, the scenario in Minority Report is impossible.
But that is not what the story is about - it is about "what if this was possible?"

If you get really philosphical about it: we started off as single-celled creatures, eventually we crawled out of the sea, and evolved into the virus with shoes we are today.
At some point along that line, we became aware of ourselves, and what we are, and what other things are - at that point (more or less) everything "confounded logic".
What we have been doing since then, is trying to create order - trying to create rules to explain all of this illogical stuff, because we can't handle chaos.
Trying to make sense of everything.
What we understand today is merely based on the rules we have created so far.
Those rules are actually totally worthless in the grand scheme of things, they are just our way of interpreting the universe at any given time.
And let's face it, we haven't even seen much of it yet.
We have routinely proven the thinking of previous millennia to be flawed, and no doubt will continue to do so into countless millenia.

So all science-fiction writers like Phillip K Dick do, is challenge the current accepted beliefs of this planet full of monkeys stuck away in the corner of a galaxy nobody probably even cares or knows about.

Getting back to the Minority Report thing - it's just interesting to think about.
I think the classic example that gets used is the painting paradox.
If Monet is able to go back in time, and gives his younger self a copy of every painting he ever produced and says "look, all you have to do is recreate these stroke by stroke at these specific dates" and presuming that he obeys these commands, then something is lost.
But it is not something we can see or record - history is unchanged, and yet the inspiration and the creativity behind these works of art is gone.
But still the works of art exist.
So, you start to think "where did the first Monet, the one who did the real set of paintings get his inspiriation?"
The way I look at it - there was no "first Monet", there was only ever one who went back in time, and it always happened the way it did; and he always just copied the paintings from the future version of themselves.

So that is the problem - how can something be inspired by itself?
How can Tom Cruise's character go to a place and do something, purely because he saw a vision of his future self doing so?
What happened to the inspiration that took him to that place "originally"?
I thik the only answer is parallel timelines.
The point at which the future interrupts another timezone creates a branch which runs parallel to the original.
In our "real" timeline Monet lives and dies and painted pictures inbeteen inspired by lots of wonderful things. At some point in his Autumn years, he pops back and gives his past self the paintings, zips back to the present and carries on until his death.
This timeline remains the same - it has to.
But at the point in which Monet meets his future self, a new line branches off - in this one Monet always copied the works from exisiting images.
We don't need to worry "where the inspiration went", beacuse that still happens off in an alternate universe somewhere.

That's one way of looking at it, anyway...

What I'm trying to say is that, for me, the films "work", because they set out to be thought-provoking... and they achieve that, IMO.
I'm not sure how many of them I would say are "great" films, but Blade Runner certainly is...

 

I love PKD's short stories but his novels definitely start to go off on a rant half-way through. I just tried to read "A Scanner Darkly" recently and it really fell apart towards the end. I did however find on old out of print gem called "The Ganymede Takeover" that I really enjoyed.

 

Total Recall the film is just downright silly. Why is the glass so easily broken at that Mars Compound? How do someones eyeballs go back into the sockets when air gets back into their system? How does Arnold not have a brain hemmorage from using the mind altering device? How does he REALLY get that huge thing out of his nose without exploding his face?

 

Glass - good question. No doubt the Purchasing dept. overrode the Engineering dept. and they went with the low-cost material.
Eyeballs - it wouldn't be so much the air getting back into their systems, but the air pressure surrounding them once more that would push them back in (or allow them to resume their natural state as it were). That's my take anyway.

Brain - I don't know about the mind altering device, but going back to the vacuum scene where the eyes went all buggy - it seems like that would do things to the brain & your blood vessels in general, but I'm no doctor...I just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

Nose - I always wondered that myself.

 

I like PKD's stories, mainly because of the paradoxs that are in there. They don't make sense, and they're confusing, but that makes for an outstanding story, in my book. Minority Report is one of my favorites.

 

All movies that mess with time have problems. But they're still cool. They just require a bit of suspension of disbelief. Just take heart in the fact that you aren't like the n00b sitting next to you thinking, "Dude, that could totally happen. I'd better go write my congressman."