Blade Runner, and my Conversion to being a Philip K Dick Fan
If you know me, it is no secret I am a huge fan of the film Blade Runner, and of course by extension a huge Philip K Dick (PKD) fan, he who wrote the book it is based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (I highly recommend that you read it even if you have seen Blade Runner a million times, it is very different story-wise than the film, that said I feel each is brilliant in its own way). It can't be overstated how much PKD influenced all modern sci-fi, written and filmed. After Blade Runner/DADOES, sci-fi would never be the same again. Minority Report, Total Recall, Man in the High Castle, and pretty much all sci-fi to follow his work is based in some way on the PKD, including, loosely based, the iconic sci-fi cult classic Scanners (which also plays into this narrative later, and coincides with my birthday experience, all detailed below) and films groundbreaking in their own right, like Alien (especially in the fact that it focuses on working class anti heroes - save of course Ripley, but that is out of need in the first film - the working stiff was something PKD had been most of his life, and he always spoke to that and had since the '50s - I digress with the best...).
Before I lived here in Portland, Oregon, I lived in Boston, but before that, I lived Seattle for 14 years playing music, and before that, I grew up in Boise playing music, and Portland was basically my back yard state wise, and thus I was in Portland often. Never liked Portland much (it was a much different town then, when first I came here, in the early to late '80s, and really, it was much cooler, raw, DYI, but areas I played and hung out were crime-ridden then - it was my only lens on P Town for years) until the mid '90s when my friend James, a friend from the early days of State of Confusion (an Idaho hardcore punk band I played in that morphed into Treepeople) and Treepeople, and who is my current roommate, lived in Portland at that time, and I would take time off work and come couch surf at his place. He is a pretty well read cat, mostly in the classics and obscure stuff, but is a fan of PKD, and is largely responsible for my 'conversion.' He had many of PKD's books laying around, and I would spend hours reading on his couch, and would go to the famous Powells Books - and in the mid '90s (oh how I miss this) Powells had tons of different era printings of PKD's books. I was fortunate to have been in Portland when they were still available (good luck finding any now outside of eBay and Amazon for bank) and I still have them all, they are among my most prized possessions.
The film was released in 1982 after many battles and versions being up for use, and to little fanfare at the time. It was, and it sounds cliche, but fits this story/film more than most, ahead of its time. But PKD always was, had been since the '50s.
The release of the film Blade Runner was the year I turned 16 (and the day of my birthday itself does play a role in the synchronicity later) and also the year my father died of his third heart attack.
PKD's work has a through-line composed of the questions 'What is real?' and 'What is human?' but also it has a central theme of psychology, of seeing into the mind and motivations of what is always an anti-hero, and often a distressed one living in a world where the police have psychics who probe the minds of criminals and potential criminals, where drugs provide either a way out of the daily toil or conversely, are used to enhance psychic abilities or to control dissidents. In these worlds he writes of, generally neither the reader nor the characters ever know what is actually real, at least not at first.
The author Philip K. Dick, AKA, 'Weird With a Beard' to friends
The synchronicity
Philip K Dick died on my 16th birthday, as mentioned. I was a virgin, which you will see is relevant. A friend invited me to a party at a woman's house, whom I will call J. J was 21, as were a few of our mutual friends. She was tall and thin, pretty, with a blank expression most of the time that cracked occasionally with a sweet little crooked smile, as I remember it. She drove a yellow Ford Pinto. This car plus her bleach blonde hair, and her blood red nail polish and lipstick are mostly what I see when I think of J, 30 plus years later, like a caricature made of iconic details, one quintessential to Boise, Idaho and children of the '60s, which all the party-goers were.
We hung out and got wasted, like all good US teenagers do (though J was just beyond teenage hood age-wise and lifestyle-wise...she had an apartment after all!). I was a bit more fucked up than most. There was a group of people watching a wild sci-fi film on video, called Scanners. It was insane and I was so fucked up it was even more insane. I would watch it many more times in life, and come to love David Cronenberg's films. But wasted at age 16, I was just into the psychic warfare and the amazing exploding head scene. Later I would come to find out that this storyline was all but lifted from a few PKD stories. And as the evening progressed, I felt like I was living within one.
J had her eye on me from the minute I walked into the house. I was a handsome young man, tall and naive, ripe for the pickin'. At one point I ended up with her and another friend of hers, a guy about her age, I will call him D, in her basement bedroom, away from the party goers, smoking weed. Oh yeah and I had been talked into doing a hit of LSD; "C'mon, Wayne, it's your 16th birthday!" So, there's that.
And things started looking very weird. I looked up at D once and he looked like a projected, microdot image in the darkness of the room (I had no idea what a pixel was then, so it was 'microdot' like the then state-of-the-art printer), what in retrospect was exactly like things in PKD's stories and the films based on them. I was wondering if D was even real ('What is real?') or human anymore ('What is human?'). We were all sitting on a waterbed, so I was warbling back and forth, J on one side, D on the other. D was messing with me (what good 20 something wouldn't?) but eventually J shooed him out of the room and focused on me. We began to make out. And then she looked like a microdot projection, too. This combined with the sloshing noises of the waterbed (those things were SO LOUD) was taking me further away from reality. Soon, I was fading away, and we fell asleep. In the morning we had sex. Apparently I played it pretty cool (probably hung over) because she said after that she had no idea I was a virgin. The poor woman had me knocking at her door after that for a week or so until she finally got rid of me.
1982 was also, as mentioned, the year of my father's passing as well as PKD's. Father was buried outside of Spokane, Washington, where some of my relatives still live, and where I spent a summer or two visiting him over different years when he moved back (but he generally ended up in the desert sates until he settled in Reno, Nevada, where he passed).
My older sister B had the unenviable role of keeping the kids together and distracted, the kids being me and my nieces, who, to go along with the WTF? nature of PKD, were older than I. Yes, this is true, because I was the accident of a 2nd generation Irish Catholic woman who didn't believe in contraception. My parents were in their 40s and each of them had prior families - so my siblings are much older than I, and thus, their kids were often around my age). What B chose to distract my nieces and I with was to take us to see Blade Runner. My life was changed forever.
I had never heard of Philip K. Dick, let alone read any of his books when I was 16. I am certain my aforementioned friend James was reading him already, and he was about age 13 or 14 then (but hell, he was reading Proust then!). I am a Star Wars kid, was 11 when it came out, stood in line to see it. That film also changed my life, but not like Blade Runner. It was so realistic, so compelling, so dark. Maybe sometime I will write an entry and expand on that, but it isn't the focus here.
For one, and this is more of a personal connection seen in retrospect, I had a completely false memory of my father's funeral, which I didn't even know was false until about 20 years ago, when I discussed the funeral with my sister. It blew me away how my mind constructed an entirely different, more pleasant scene, complete with a beautiful ceramic urn for my father's ashes and a moving eulogy by a priest, rather than the truth of a simple wooden box collected at an airport freight hangar and quickly buried before my religious aunt arrived, and a priest hastily hired to appease said aunt (my dad was in no way religious and had refused to let me be baptized, and would not have given a shit how he was buried.) This is another theme in PKD's work (there are many layered ones) which shows up in the source book and the film Blade Runner, that is, the idea of falsely planted memories, such as those planted in the 'Replicants' of BR. This particular synchronicity just came to me writing about all of this. It is not a strong synchronicity, as this memory glossing over happens to all of us, it is a psychological coping mechanism hard-wired into us, but one nonetheless.
One day not too long ago, I was looking at my copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and looked at the publication date. It was in 1966, the year of my birth.
In summary:
- PKD dies on March 2nd, 1982, my birthday
- On my birthday I randomly ended up at a party, got wasted and talked into doing LSD, a drug that many of PKD's fictional drugs are based on, watched a film loosely based on PKD's work, and saw things as projected virtual reality, a heavy theme in the writing, and incidentally was devirginized
- My father dies in 1982 and in the town of his funeral, my older sister randomly takes me and my nieces to see Blade Runner
- My memories of the funeral turn out to be false, the form of which resemble very closely the false, implanted memories of the Replicants in BR
- The book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was published in 1966, the year of my birth
During different time periods in my life, I have actively tracked synchronicity (more often inaccurately referred to as 'coincidence') and what I have found is that when you do this, you notice that it is very common. I tend to look at it as more the fabric of the Universe than some big, mystical, magical thing. Either way, there is something there. As to what this means for these Blade Runner examples, I have no idea, but it is indeed worth the raise of an eyebrow.
