Impostor

After reading Kathi Maio's recent review of various movies based on Philip K. Dick stories, I rented the DVD of Impostor, based on Dick's 1953 short story of the same title. She laments the quality of such PKD-inspired films as Minority Report and Paycheck and calls Imposter "the genuine article".

Methinks Ms. Maio is a tiny bit desperate for a good PKD film, and therefore her critical judgment has suffered. Imposter is not a good movie, unless you find an interminable series of chases and unlikely escapes to be entertaining. Almost every other reviewer in the world panned it, the studio buried it, and viewers didn't view it.

Of course, good -- even great -- films sometimes get badly reviewed, thrown down the drain by the studio or distributor, and shunned by audiences. Impostor, though, deserves its fate.

I would not have any issue with Ms. Maio if she didn't claim that this was a good adaptation of Philip K. Dick. I don't mind people liking movies I loathe. But to say this film does justice to PKD, that this is "the genuine article" is ignorant wishfulness. Let's look at one of her paragraphs in depth:
With Sinise and D’Onofrio in the principal leads, you should already be heading for the video store.
Yes, because Mission to Mars and Bark were such great movies. (Both Sinise and D'Onofrio are capable of excellent work, but actors have very little control over whether a film is good.)
But this movie has more than solid acting to recommend it. It actually seems more interested in Dickian ruminations into the nature of reality and human identity than it does in blowing things up.
A few people saying, "Who am I?" and "I thought I knew him," do not add up to "Dickian ruminations". And, since everything blows up in the end, that does seem to be what the movie is interested in. Everything moves toward that. Lots of chases and gun battles, too -- at least 50% of Impostor is made up of badly-staged and horribly-photographed chases and fights, none of which have anything to do with PKD.
Although guns are fired and explosions do occur, Impostor isn’t afraid to slow things down a bit and substitute a bit of old-fashioned suspense for some of the standard-issue Hollywood violence.
If you consider Gary Sinise running through dark alleys and corridors for ten minutes at a time to be suspenseful, then this movie was made for you. Some of us call it "filler", but if you want to call it "suspense", go ahead.
This movie is even brave enough to end on a very disquieting note.
Brave is making a movie that will get you villified or killed; having a downbeat ending just means you're not being produced by a major studio (or you're being produced by a major studio desperate for an Oscar).

What's disturbing about the ending is its political implications. The original story was, of course, produced during some of the lovelier, livelier years of the Cold War, and certain elements are similar, but the movie makes D'Onofrio's character far more bloodthirsty than he is in Dick's story, and he utters a few lines which sound like John Ashcroft talking about gay Iraqis. The ending, though, shows D'Onofrio and the government (led by "Big Sister") to be correct in all their fears, and so a movie which started out seeming like a critique of governmental paranoia and xenophobia ultimately reinforces and supports it.

What has happened to Philip K. Dick in Hollywood is quite sad. Even Blade Runner simplified the original book so much as to make it nearly unrecognizable, and though the film (still) looks great, it is hollow at its core.

One of the problems may be that Hollywood has made more movies from Dick's short stories than from his novels. While some PKD short stories are quite good -- "Colony", "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" (all the more reason to loathe Total Recall), "The Electric Ant", "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", and some others -- most of them are minor and gimmicky, especially compared to the best of his novels. Filmmakers love the short stories because they usually center around one basic idea, allowing the screenwriter to use the idea and pad it with action sequences and hundreds of millions of dollars of special effects. Yawn.

What makes Dick's best work so good is not only that it contains a provocative central idea, unsettling atmosphere, and surprising twists and turns, but that it explores the ideas. The best work feels, if anything, too short. It doesn't stop with the common questions of "What is reality?" and "What is human?", but rather starts with them and examines every possible path they lead to.

Being a devout PKD fan, perhaps I will never be satisfied with a movie from his stories or novels, because much of the effect of his books comes from the way the language used to describe the characters' perceptions unhinges from the established reality of the narrative. The last pages of Ubik, for example, deliver an effect that would be extremely difficult to replicate through a visual medium (though Dick did write a screenplay of the book).

I may never be satisfied with a movie from PKD material, but I would still prefer to see better films made from them than Impostor, which is not "the genuine article", but rather a desperate and meretricious fake.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more