Philip K. Dick biopic The Owl in Daylight: Tessa Dick speaks out

23 June 2008

Gerard Wood

For those of us who think of Philip K. Dick as the most important and influential writer of science fiction in the twentieth century, one of the more exciting movie projects announced last year was The Owl in Daylight, a biopic that promises to interweave an account of Dick’s life with elements of his fiction. Starring Paul Giamatti in the role of Phil Dick and with a screenplay by Tony Grisoni this project has a lot of credibility. Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) would seem to be a good choice to capture Dick’s complex life and ideas.

There is, of course, a quite different perspective on this project: how do Phil's family and friends feel about it? These are not distant spectators, and they aren’t characters in the story of his life, but participants with their own lives, and while some are clearly supportive, one at least has reservations. In an SFFMedia exclusive, Tessa Dick, Phil’s wife until 1977, revealed her concerns.

“This biopic promises to present another fantasy of drug-induced paranoia sprinkled with peppery females who drag the great author down into the gutter," she said.

"Philip K. Dick spent months working out the plots for his novels, and the fastest he ever typed one out was one week. The typing, however, is not the writing. He agonized over every detail of every character and the events through which his protagonist must struggle. Someone reminded me that I was interviewed for this film about a year ago, but that conversation was so brief and so directed that they learned very little. The interviewer simply wanted to confirm his own theories, not to gather facts. I shudder at the thought of such a complex personality, as Phil really was, being condensed and portrayed as a caricature of himself.”

We can take it for granted that Tessa's view is not shared by Dick’s daughters, Laura and Isa – their company, Electric Shepherd Productions, is co-producing the movie alongside Giamatti’s company, Touchy Feely Films. So, are Tessa’s Fear and Loathing justified? Phil Dick’s strangeness, the drugs and paranoia have become the stuff of legend, after all.

But here’s the thing: we accept without question that Dick undertook a full frontal attack on our perception of reality in his fiction. What if he was doing the same thing when making bizarre claims about his life and experiences or, in his non-fiction, when he professed a belief in this or that “True Reality”? What if these need to be understood as part of the same deliberate attack on our perception of reality that he pursued in his fiction?

Clearly the risk he ran is that talk of strange encounters, visitations and "True Reality" is taken at face value, or dismissed as the by-product of drug use. If we do dismiss it, however, we run the risk of misrepresenting the man and misunderstanding the complexity and sophisitication of his ideas: quite simply, his questioning of the nature of reality didn’t end with his fiction.

Only time will tell if Tessa’s fears are realised or whether Grisoni’s screenplay succeeds in capturing the true complexity of the man and his ideas. All I can say is that I really hope Tessa is wrong.

On a lighter note, it would seem that Tessa is willing and able to complete Phil's unfinished novel, The Owl in Daylight! This is the novel Phil was working on at the time of his death in 1982. With little committed to paper, speculation about the plot has been rife. Have the researchers and speculators overlooked a minefield of information? "I could write it myself, if anybody ever asked me," Tessa told us. She spent hours with Phil "discussing the situation of a man caught inside a computer-generated virtual reality. I have studied Goethe's Faust and Dante's Divine Comedy, and Phil explained to me in detail how they relate to the theme of his novel. It is simply a matter of sitting down and typing it, if anybody asks me to do so.”

Come on, somebody ask!

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