Arena: S19E14. Um documentário que faz uma viagem imaginativa do túmulo de Dick no Colorado, onde ele está enterrado, aos subúrbios da Califórnia, onde ele viveu e trabalhou. Conversa com suas ex-esposas, amigos e biógrafos.
00:00E Total Recall, we present a day in the afterlife of Philip K. Dick.
00:30My stories are attempts at reception, at listening to voices from another place, far away.
00:48They only come out at night, when the background din and gavel of our world have faded out.
00:54Then, faintly, I hear voices from another star.
01:00Oh, hello.
01:04Hello, I'm Terry Gilliam, and welcome to my drab little world.
01:09I've used PKD for years, and it's brought brightness, sparkle, flare to my life, and to my place.
01:14It can do to you as well.
01:17One thing today I'd like to share with you, though, is a secret.
01:19Despite manufacturer's warnings, I use PKD, washing up liquid, to unclog my brains.
01:26Why don't you?
01:30Well, the police once told me that I was a crusader, and they had no use for crusaders.
01:52But, unfortunately, they didn't tell me what I was crusading for.
01:57I was afraid to ask what it was I was a crusader for.
02:02And they told me that if I did not get out of the county, I would be shot in the back, or worse, some night.
02:09It may have had something to do with my writing.
02:11It may have had something to do with my lifestyle, or a combination of both.
02:16But I was too afraid of the police to ask what it was I was doing.
02:24Philip K. Dick is considered by many to be the single most significant science fiction author of recent times.
02:31For most of his life, Dick's 42 novels were filed away under cult author, and rarely taken seriously.
02:38But since his death, the film's Blade Runner and Total Recall have brought him mainstream attention.
02:47Dick's vision was formed by the changing landscape of California, a rural paradise that he saw bulldozed into urban submission.
02:55From a trash world ever more dependent on consumer disposables, Philip K. Dick created a fictional universe in which the line between human and machine becomes blurred.
03:08Your toaster might just have an opinion of its own.
03:12Your telephone might be plotting against you.
03:14And your video camera might be keeping an eye on you before filing its own report.
03:20Phil was one of the last people to actually write predictive science fiction in the sense that he saw a new world coming before it was there.
03:33He saw the consequences of a media-soaked world.
03:50He's one of the few writers who has the satisfaction of having got it right.
04:20In a complicated way.
04:22The one book about the, um, everybody's down in bunkers, and they're having a false war broadcast down to them.
04:32And actually, there's no war going on at all.
04:34It's just a media event.
04:36Well, everybody felt that way during, you know, like the Korean War and Vietnam.
04:42In some ways, it was just a media event.
04:46And people got excited about it, and it was political.
04:49But, you know, you became a connoisseur of the footage.
04:54And Phil knew that.
04:55And his heroes in the book are the people who are perpetrating the fraud.
05:02He enjoys their cleverness.
05:04There's no culture in California, only trash.
05:15I do seem attracted to trash as if the clue, the clue lies there.
05:20One must work with trash, pit it against itself.
05:23If God manifested himself to us, he would do so in the form of a product advertised on TV.
05:29Hello, I'm Elvis Costello, and I want to tell you about this PKD collection.
05:38Featuring such classics as Lies, Inc.
05:42The man in the high castle, Ubik.
05:45Who can forget the immortal, the man whose teeth were all exactly alike.
05:50And, of course, do androids dream of electric sheep?
05:54Order now using this toll-free number.
05:57Not available in any store.
06:09What you would notice if you were Phil L.K. Dick is that there's nothing natural in the world anymore.
06:15Everything that I see is plastic and glass and gaudy colors and strangely made.
06:20The human beings begin to take on an odd look.
06:24Our clothes are the same sort of plastic oddness.
06:27And, therefore, our eyeballs begin to take on a kind of a glassy look.
06:31The entire world begins to take on a kind of a fake, artificial, made quality.
06:37And the question then naturally jumps to your mind, well, who made it?
06:40Why is it so crummy?
06:42Why is it so degraded and falling apart?
06:44Life in California was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed.
06:55Nothing changed.
06:57It just spread further and further in the form of neon ooze.
07:02How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale, how the sea became salt.
07:09The truck drove on past gas stations, tawdry cafes, and motels.
07:15Nothing is so alien, bleak, and unfriendly as the strip of gas stations, cut-rate gas stations, on the rim of your own city.
07:24I was his second wife.
07:43We were both very young.
07:47I adored him.
07:48He was wonderful and funny and a very nice man.
07:58This is 1126 Francisco Street, where Philip and I lived from 1950 to 1958.
08:10We both felt that his writing was the focus of our life for, what, seven, eight years.
08:24His work life was involved with salesmen on a small scale,
08:32and repairmen, and small business owners.
08:37So, of course, that's what he wrote about when he wrote.
08:43But, usually, the occupation is not the important thing.
08:50It's the, you know, the relationships with other people,
08:54and the internal workings of the...
08:59I didn't think I'd ever say this, but of the soul.
09:02He wrote about people's souls.
09:03Not a word I use lightly.
09:12I'm not so sure my universes are such fine places.
09:16But I do hope the people in them are fine people.
09:21In the ruins of Earth's cities,
09:23this minor man is busily constructing imitation artifacts that say,
09:27Welcome to Miami, the pleasure center of the world.
09:32The positive little figure outlined against the universal rubble is gnat-sized,
09:38and yet, in some sense, great.
09:41I like to take employers that I've had,
09:44and make them rulers of entire galaxies.
09:46He wrote mostly at night, like any sane human being, according to me.
