Philip K. Dick’s ‘Flow My Tears’ to be filmed

14 May 2009

John Howell

Philip K. Dick's 1974 novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, is to be turned into a big budget feature film.

Set in a futuristic dystopia where America has become a police state after a Second Civil War, the novel tells the story of a celebrity entertainer, Jason Taverner, who wakes up one morning to find himself a complete unknown. Even his friends and former fans have never heard of him. His existence appears to have been wiped from everyone’s memories. To make matters worse, he has no identification, and there is no record of him in the police government’s extensive databases. Taverner is also a "Six", a genetically enhanced human. No longer a celebrity, and without identification, he faces an uncertain future in a world that treats him like a stranger.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Halcyon, the company behind the upcoming Terminator Salvation movie, owns first-look rights to Philip K. Dick's estate and decided that Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said would be the first adaptation under that agreement.

I hope they’re prepared to give the novel the quality treatment it deserves. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is one of the first Philip K. Dick books I read, and is a magic story, Dick at his best: a tale of altered reality, drug use, the meaning of identity, and the pitfalls of celebrity. There are enough ideas jammed inside for a dozen feature films.

The novel won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel in 1975. It was also nominated for a Nebula Award in 1974 and a Hugo Award in 1975. The title is a reference to Flow my tears, a piece by the 16th century composer John Dowland. Dowland set a poem by an anonymous poet to music. The poem begins:

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs,
Exiled for ever, let me mourn
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

Hollywood has certainly taken a shine to Philip K. Dick’s work: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, Imposter, Screamers and Next have all been based on Dick’s short stories or novels. In some cases, as with Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner, the adaptation is very loose. I wonder how closely they’ll follow the book this time? Like the upcoming movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, Ubik, Flow my tears, The Policeman Said is one to look out for.

"I want to write about people I love and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind,” Philip K. Dick wrote, “not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.”