The Owl in Daylight: biopic about Philip K. Dick

30 September 2007

Gerard Wood

Anyone even passingly familiar with the life and work of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) will know that his real life was quite as bizarre as anything he imagined for his characters. His paranoia about sinister government (US and Soviet) conspiracies, and his firm belief that he was in contact with alien / supernatural beings are notorious.

You’d also know that using a phrase like “real life” in the context of Dick is just plain asking for trouble! The same holds for such notions as “truth”. In Dick’s universes – those he wrote about and the one in which he lived

– truth was a moving target.

Which clearly has serious implications for anyone attempting to capture the life of Philip K. Dick on film.

Nonetheless, Paul Giamatti (Sideways, American Splendour, The Illusionist, Next) has risen to the challenge. Giamatti’s company, Touchy Feely Films, has announced plans to produce a biopic about Dick, titled The Owl in Daylight, also the title of the novel Dick was working on at the time of his death. With a screen play by Tony Grisoni we can be fairly certain that the strangeness of Dick's life will be done justice: Grisoni worked with Terry Gilliam on that most bizarre of movies, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Jason Koornick, executive producer on Next and associate producer of the 2001 documentary The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, will also be an executive producer on The Owl in Daylight.

How they go about making this film is going to be very interesting indeed.

In his own words, Dick was a fictionalising-philosopher. He was obsessed by questions about truth and reality and he used fiction - specifically science fiction because of the opportunities it offers for deconstructing reality - as a full frontal attack on our perceptions of reality. In that context many of Dick’s bizarre pronouncements about his experiences must be viewed in the same way that we view his fiction. What I'm suggesting is that Dick's often very peculiar comments about his life, experiences, his beliefs in this or that "True Reality", should be understood as part of the same deliberate attack on our perceptions of reality that he pursued relentlessly in his fiction. In other words, we shouldn't accept anything he said about his life at face value.

Which is not to suggest that he was lying, but rather that he was quite deliberately messing with our minds!

Early in his career Dick staked a claim to the philosophical investigation in SF into the nature of reality and to say that he went about dissecting reality with a surgeon’s skill is no exaggeration. His other key theme is what is an authentic human being? and in his fiction this involved subjecting his protagonists to nightmarish realities and dehumanising conditions and then observing how they behaved. Some of his protagonists (not all of them flesh and blood) demonstrate what it is to be authentically human in their resistance to and rejection of externally imposed codes (programming for the android or machine / socio-historical conditioning for the rest of us). Which is why in Dick’s universes even a machine can be authentically human if it resists its programming.

So, why make a film about Philip K. Dick? There are many good reasons, but one suffices: Dick is quite probably the most influential late twentieth century writer of science fiction bar none. And if anything his influence has grown in the twenty five years since his death, most notably in Hollywood. More so than any other SF writer, Dick’s work has been mined and plundered for film with at least eight direct adaptations from his novels and short stories (Blade Runner, Paycheck, Screamers, Minority Report, Total Recall, Imposter, A Scanner Darkly and Next) and many more movies heavily influenced by his work, including: Matrix, Vanilla Sky (a remake of the Spanish Abres los ojos), eXistenZ, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Truman Show (the latter so significantly influenced by Dick’s 1959 novel Time out of Joint that he really warranted a credit!).

Given Dick's constant questioning of reality and truth I hope that Giamatti and Grisoni will not present us with a straightforward biography that attempts to represent the facts of Dick's life. Given their previous work, I have high hopes that this won't be the case. Dick's life and work were a challenge to our perceptions of reality and truth and a movie about his life can only do him justice if it continues to pursue that challenge.

A 2009 release has been slated.

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