ilmmakers Mark Steensland and Andy Massagi have collected recollections and observations about the late SF writer Philip K. Dick from people who knew Dick and also from people who have made a study of his work. Their documentary, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, is for the most part a very straightforward presentation--in the mode of 60 Minutes--of their interviews with personalities as diverse as Miriam Lloyd, a close friend of Dick's, to Paul Williams, author of a famous mid-'70s Rolling Stone interview with Dick. Anyone seeing The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, even those unfamiliar with Dick's life and work, can't help but be touched by the recollections of those who knew him, and also be impressed by the scope and profundity of his intellectual and literary legacies.
The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick provides a skeletal overview of the events of Dick's life that seem to have most directly influenced his fiction from the beginning of 1970s to the time of his death in 1982. We hear different, almost Rashomon-like interpretations of the infamous 1971 break-in of Dick's home in Marin County (complete with the blowing of his 1,100 pound fireproof safe!) that has in some SF circles passed from weird incident to legend. Greater detail is given to the religious experiences Dick had from February to March of 1974 that subsequently led to the creation of his 8,000-page exegesis--his philosophical, religious and epistemological self-examination that greatly informed the fiction he produced from '74 to his death.
Gospel's great, but less Phil-ing
The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick is punctuated by segments in which an animated Philip K. Dick "speaks" Dick's actual words as they have been preserved on audio tape. In effect, the filmmakers have created a two-dimensional android of a man whose most famous works, such
as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly and UBIK, deal with the terror of human automatons, duplicates and dopplegängers. In a strange way, they have made Dick into a version of the Buster Friendly character from Do Androids Dream? ... a scenario worthy of a Dick story. This may seem like reading too much into a clever filmic device, however, it's emblematic of the film's problems as a whole: the movie makes Philip K. Dick into a construct. Despite the deeply personal recollections of the interviewees, Dick exists in the movie as an incomplete figure.
Yes, there are examinations of Dick the person, the religious writer, and the SF iconoclast--but these examinations are not unified. They are a constellation. The points of the constellation are things anyone interested enough in Dick to see the movie would already know or be familiar with. Thus, when Dick's exegesis is mentioned, the content of the work is not discussed in any way that would give a Dick reader new insight, nor would it provide anyone unfamiliar with Dick's work adequate grasp of how important his exegesis was for the creation of his later works, such as VALIS.
The strength of The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick is that it's a work of remarkable passion and sincerity. Steensland and Massagi's love and admiration for Dick are evident in each second of the film, as are the love and admiration of those whom they interview.
