Philip K. Dick has enjoyed a strange kind of afterlife. The public first discovered him through the films Blade Runner (1982) and Total Recall (1990). Major publishing houses reprinted his books. Cultural theorists invoked his name, during the postmodern 1990s, when discussing truth claims about realities and cyborg consciousness. The Gnostic rebel gradually eclipsed the truth-seeking human.

Filmmakers Andy Massagli and Mark Steensland have chronicled why many people consider Dick to be the seminal science fiction author of the late 21st century. Their feature-length documentary The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick (2000) combines animation, interviews and visits to key locales: offering viewers insight into Dick's life and motivations. The core of Massagli and Steensland's film are interviews with collaborators Robert Anton Wilson and Ray Nelson, biographer Paul Williams, critics D. Scott Apel and Jay Kinney, friend Miriam Lloyd, fans Jason Koornick and Duncan Watson, and librarian Sharon Perry. Their anecdotes give firsthand accounts of Dick as a human being (not just as a media celebrity or counterculture hero). Their narratives offer multiple interpretations of Dick's 1974 encounter with a Vast Active Living Intelligent System (VALIS) and its philosophical aftermath.

Strange Loops and Weird Truths

Dick was intrigued by three questions: Is the universe benign? What denotes humanity? What is reality? For Gnosis Magazine editor and scholar Jay Kinney, the pivotal moment in Dick's fiction was a moment in Time Out of Joint when a character riding the bus realizes that everyone else is a prop. "It seemed to sum up a weird truth," says Kinney, "I couldn't quite put my finger on." When he met Dick in the late 1970s, Robert Anton Wilson recalls with joie de vivre, the two writers questioned each-other's sanity. Wilson later describes the 1994 Internet posting of his death as a very Phil Dickian situation. These weird truths were being propagated from Dick's fiction into the everyday lives of Dick's friends and readers. Dick's exploration of these three questions sensitized his readers to strange loops in the multiverse.

When journalist Paul Williams interviewed him for a 1975 Rolling Stone profile, Dick recounted a key event that induced a strange loop that led to self-questioning his personal identity. Dick's house was broken into on 17 November 1971, his safe blown open and his personal papers stolen. The Californian police wondered if Dick had destroyed the safe in an act of crypto-amnesia. Williams recalls that Dick was living on the fringes of Marin County's drug trade and that a dealer code-named "Mr. Connection" may have used him as an intermediary. Dick took Benzedrine and phoned the FBI. He was also scared, says Ray Nelson, that his story The Penultimate Truth might have been close to the secret government research. Jay Kinney believes that the story's context was influenced by the Watergate incident and COINTELPRO against political dissidents. Soon afterwards, Dick travelled to Canada for drug rehabilitation and attempted suicide in Vancouver on 23 March 1972. This period became the basis for Dick's poignant anti-drug novel A Scanner Darkly. And it showed how one event could have multiple interpretations.

"Like a Flashbulb Going Off . . ."

After visiting his dentist for ortho-molecular treatment, Dick experienced anamnesis on 20 February 1974. Maybe it was a mystical experience triggered by the dentist's sodium pentathol. Or maybe it was an early stroke. D. Scott Appel cites Jacob Boehme's visions as a historical precursor. Jay Kinney finds a parallel with Mormon founder Joseph Smith. But Boehme and Smith never considered the possibility, Miriam Lloyd recounts, that being hit by a "pink beam" was the result of Russian experiments in covert psychological warfare.

The weirdness accelerated. Dick received an unsigned letter on 30 March 1974, which he called "the Xerox Missive". He diagnosed a life-threatening illness in his son. Dick sought to discuss his spiritual awakening with other writers (notably Ursula Le Guin and Harlan Ellison) but faced criticism and denunciation. He channelled his analysis into the Exegesis, an 8000-page discussion of these experiences, influenced by Gnostic Christian and Neoplatonic themes.

The VALIS encounter has become the synecdoche of Dick's life: a cryptic and oblique legacy that still eludes dogmatic explanations. Robert Anton Wilson likens Dick's experience to H.P. Lovecraft's warnings about the Elder Gods. Wilson also observes Voltaire's test of spiritual breakthroughs: judge people by how sane they are afterwards. Jay Kinney also offers a penetrating synthesis of VALIS in the context of Western mystical transformation. Like earlier precursors, Dick's encounter was "disruptive of life, destabilizing of personality." The rational mind takes hold of noesis, Kinney warns, and interprets the experience in reductionist terms. Dick was lucky, claims Wilson, because he wasn't dogmatic: ". . . he doesn't offer one explanation." Dick's spiritual transfiguration occurred, Wilson observes, in the era of MK-Ultra mind control experiments, LSD suicides and fears of Russian ESP research. Dick's fiction had foreshadowed some dark truths, indeed.

The Surrealism of Everyday Life

Most of Dick's Exegesis commentaries and papers are archived at the California State University in Fullerton. Librarian Sharon Perry takes us through the library stack to show the archival boxes of critical commentary, essays, biographical notes and letters. Duncan Watson tours several of Dick's haunts in Berkeley, including a police station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. PhilipKDick.com Web site founder Jason Koornick explains how Dick's influence has thrived on the Internet.

These sections highlight Dick's humanity. Like the heroes of his novels--repairmen, alcoholics, drug addicts, obscure people--Dick was an underdog. Mainstream recognition eluded him. This documentary's revelations are audio excerpts of Dick talking about mind-swapping, taking a driving test, how to tell who is insane and on what he learned as a writer. These excerpts convey that Dick was a humanist who perceived the surrealism of everyday life.

Dick was found unconscious on 18 February 1982 in his apartment. He died of a heart attack on 2 March 1982. The film closes with poignant eulogies from those interviewed. For Jay Kinney, Dick's fiction was a testament that the unseen forces encountered were benign and that everything would eventually work itself out. While Dick's life was filled with negative paranoia, he struggled for states of positive paranoia and hope.

Andy Massagli and Mark Steensland have created a compelling film. They use creative animation during the audio excerpts and their interviews capture Dick's life and cultural impact. Dick has now infiltrated mainstream culture: the films Pi (1998), The Matrix (1999) and Minority Report (2002) were auteur homages to his prolific literary output. View this informative documentary and start waiting for last century.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.