Week 8 - How does Dick’s essay (1999; 1964) illuminate his use of Nazism as a motif in High Castle?

Nazi America

“Phobia is phobia; it springs, as Freud and Jung and H.S.Sullivan showed, from the depths of the self unknown to the self” (Dick, 1964).
This is how Phillip K. Dick describes the Germans view of the Jewish people. A phobia that led to a war. Dick wrote this after seeing some comments about a review of his novel The Man in the High Castle. People were commenting on his use of Naziism throughout the novel.
After reading this article, I get the feeling that Dick used Naziism just because everything it alludes to should not still be deemed relevant in this day in age, (or even in the days of original publication). By having an alternate world in which the allies were defeated by the Nazi’s, Dick was able to put stereotypes into play, with what I now see as a tongue-in-cheek attitude. He ends with saying that ‘let’s live in the present and for the future, not dwelling neurotically on the outrages of the past’ (Dick, 1964).

References

Dick, P.K. (2001;1962). The Man in the High Castle. London: Penguin

Dick, P.K. (1995). Nazism and the High Castly. In Sutin L. (Ed), The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick (pp.112-117). New York: Vintage

References

Dick, P.K. (2001;1962). The Man in the High Castle. London: Penguin

Dick, P.K. (1995). Nazism and the High Castly. In Sutin L. (Ed), The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick (pp.112-117). New York: Vintage.

 

Week 5 Is it a high or low cultural genre, according to Napier (2005)? What are some of its subgenres?

Napier (2005) suggests that Anime would be considered as a high cultural genre as he goes on to say - The culture to which anime belongs, is at present a popular or mass culture in Japan and in America is exists as a sub culture. Indeed in Japan over the last decade, anime has been increasingly seen as an intellectually challenging art form, as the number of scholarly writings on the subject attest.

Furthermore, anime is a popular culture form that clearly builds on previous high culture traditions. Its is widely influenced by not only the medium shows from Japanese traditional art, but also makes use of the worldwide artistic traditions of the twentieth century cinema and photography. Napier (2005)

He goes on to say; due to its popular reach they affect a wider verity of audiences in more ways then some less accessible types of high culture exchange have been able to do. So animepretty much clearly appears to be a cultural phenomenon worthy of being taken seriously, both sociologically and aesthetically

Sub genres would include the ‘Mecha’ genre and cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a genre focusing on dystopian features in which humans struggle in an overpoweringly technological world where the difference between human and machine is increasingly amorphous. ‘Mecha’ or otherwise known as Mechanical genre privileges a favourite form from Japanese popular culture, the robot. Classics like Tezuka and Astro boy.

references:

Napier, S. (2005). Why anime? In

Anime: from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle (pp.3-14). Hampshire: Palgrave/ Macmillan.

Napier, S. (2005). Anime and Local/Global Identity. In Anime: from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle (pp.15-34). Hampshire: Palgrave/Macmillan.

Belinda Week 8

Firstly I will need to apologize for my apparent tardiness in regards to posting. It's been a rough few weeks and have now begun to see somewhat of a light piercing through the fog that is my personal life...argh! Onwards and forwards as they say (or something to that effect)

Research the films that have been adapted from Philip K. Dick novels or short
stories. Which have generally been acclaimed as the most successful? Why?

Admittedly I am not (nor do I think I will ever be) a 'hardcore' fan/avid follower of the whole SF genre. However I did as a child on a few occasions watch Battlestar Galactica (circa early to mid 80s) and remember eagerly anticipating the demise of the Cybernetic race the Cylons; even if they were rather badass creations of coloured wire and polished white metal. I have never actually read anything written by PKD, but I have seen the occasional movie adapted from his work. To date I have seen only 5 PKD movies listed and personally I really enjoyed Total Recall (1990) with Arnie. One of my fave Arnie movies happens to be Total Recall, (and no it wasn't due to his Hollywood status as an action hero) an adaptation of PKD's novel "We can remember it for you wholesale" (1966), which stems from the SF genre.

 
Completed PKD movies:  

Blade Runner (1982) based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" 

Screamers (1995) based on "Second Variety 

Total Recall (1990) based on "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" 

Confessions d'un Barjo (French, 1992) based on "Confessions of a Crap Artist" 

Impostor (2001) based on "Impostor" 

Minority Report (2002) based on "The Minority Report" 

Paycheck (December25, 2003) based on "Paycheck" 

A Scanner Darkly (July 7, 2006) based on "A Scanner Darkly" 

Next (April 27, 2007) based on "The Golden Man" 

The Adjustment Bureau (2010) based on The Adjustment Team" 
 

Films in Production: 

King of Elves (coming 2012) based on "King of the Elves"

 

There seems to be much widespread opinion as to which of PKD adaptations fans deem to be more successful. This of course can be attributed to things such as personal opinion and to whether people were able to overcome the stigmata of 'the movie never does the book any justice' assumption. The later I find myself identifying with, simply because I find the literary works of the authors are more often than not mercilessly 'massacred' by Hollywood.

 Blade Runner (1982) adapted from 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?' (1968) appears to be a lead favorite since having reached cult classic status, and there are a plethora of rather pivotal elements to the plotline which only served to amplify the popularity of the film.

There is the religious connotation; in how a human subjects memory is implanted into that of a replicant, thereby executing an act of god by the 'creation of man'. Running with the religious context, Schloss (n.d) also discusses the parallels between science and technology, and how it becomes evident in the film that viewers are to presume that science is the work of God and the affore mentioned created the world, as both are considered important in their society. He goes on to further imply that one of the underlying themes of the movie is the notion that science is something that is feared, "the maker and destroyer of worlds, an all-powerful beast, a God, and Tyrell is the head of it". I think that is a pretty strong statement to make. The more I read the text books and articles relating to the movie you really can't help but conclude that (post nuclear holocaust) people would want to seek out a saviour.

There is also the question of humanity, as Vest & Lopate (2007) stress that viewers need "multiple exposures to understand how evocatively it questions the nature of humanity" (p.g 2). For example the question arises as to whether man has made a mistake by 'creating' (in a sense) a replicant which was supposedly not to equal man. However it becomes apparent that they are just a susceptible to sensitivity, if not more, than man. And then of course there are the typical elements of a detective film noir (or neo-noir) i.e. the detective, femme fatale and the bad guys etc. So therein lies the action element.

The popularity of Blade Runner (even now almost 30 years after the premiere) resonates with the broader audience simply because it is a story that is all too clearly ahead of it's time in terms of a visionary future.  Imagine yourself in 1968, and try to fantasize what 2019 would like given what little knowledge one would have of the technology. It would probably be close to what Dick had penned. As Kerman (cited in Brooker, 2005) suggests, during the premiere of Blade Runner in 1982, the millennia would've seemed just that. A millenium away, and in the movie itself the ' post holocaust of 2019' from the 1982 release does not differ to the original publication of 1968, if anything in her opinion, it is better (p.g. 31). PKD had a vision, and he portrayed that vision through the book, and Scott ever so effortlessly emulated that vision onto film captivating the minds of audiences. 

I have to confess to wanting to watch the movie now given what I have found, so that I may draw an opinion of my own, compared to that of the fans on Rottentomatoes who as one fan quotes "A quintessential film noir of the 1980s, much underestimated at the time of release", and "For all it's armor of brutalizing urban dystopia (and, boy, is there alot of that--you could fund a war on terror with the fog-and rain-machine budgets alone), Blade Runner has a gooey center".

References

Sutin, L. (2003).The official Phillip K. dick Website. Retrieved September 21, 2011, from

http://www.philipkdick.com/works_stories.html

Blade Runner. (2007). Retrieved September 23, 2011, from Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blade_runner/

Brooker, W. (2005). The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic. London: Wallflower.

Schloss, T. (n.d). How Science Became God In Blade Runner. Retrieved September 24, 2011, from http://www.wesleyan.edu/synthesis/culture-cubed/schloss/maintemp.htm

Vest, J. P., & Lopate, P. (2007). Future Imperfect: Phillip K. Dick at the Movies. Westport, CT: Greenwood.