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I recently rewatched The Gospel of Philip K. Dick after first seeing it about ten years ago and honestly it was a little worse than I remembered. The animation went on and was more difficult to watch than I remembered and when the animated Philip K. Dick spoke, it was really uncomfortable to watch. I’m not sure why because I usually don’t have that reaction to animated content. The credits at the beginning and the animated typed pages that gave written information instead of narration both seemed like padding to the film to meet some specific number of minutes. The lack of a narrator may have been a cost issue or thinking the animated PKD could compensate may have thought to have been a excellent idea but it wasn’t. Those parts plodded along.

What I liked was seeing the interview sections which were fascinated and the film was broken up into a number of topic areas related to the gospel of Dick, like the visions and the Xerox missive but there were only a few viewpoints given in each section with the interviews for extremely complicated topics. I think an entire movie could be made exploring the 1971 break-in or pink beam visions and related events. What could have been an interesting view that many fans may not have the resources to see is the visit to the collection at Fullerton but the detail there goes overboard including a librarian running through the process to view the collection pieces. Overall I was disappointed in this documentary and hoped for more content and less filler.

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It must be hard to write a memoir. I’ve never written one myself and what writing I’ve done has all been fiction. I repeatedly noticed that Ms. Dick would start down a narrative/memory path and then get far ahead of where she intends and then backtracks. This structure didn’t bother me because I have some familiarity with the events but someone who doesn’t might find it hard to follow.

In fiction you trust the reader to remember the details of the narrative later. It appears that Ms. Dick doesn’t trust the reader to recall and there are repetitions of events and explanations in this structure which leads to an absolutely clear discussion that can repeat itself. The memoir felt somewhat like you were having a conversation with Ms. Dick which suits the material that she covered in the book.

One of my favorite parts is the discussion of the infamous abscessed tooth/fish
necklace/pink beam experience at the beginning of Chapter Four which slightly changes the events as I knew them but they still retain the essence. That event has always fascinated me and to read a slightly different version makes me wonder what exactly happened. For example, Ms. Dick writes that the necklace didn’t cause the anamnesis but a piece of pink glass in their window with the sun shining through and the events remembered weren’t the events of Roman times but events that happened in Vancouver that I’d never read about.

The memoir has a structure more like put together a puzzle or creating a painting than a linear narrative and I think it suits the events that happened. Ms. Dick would describe an event fully chronologically even if it overlapped another event so that the reader has a better understanding of what happened and what she has put together in hindsight.

The book has parts which wander off the topic like the discussion of the movies made from Dick’s works but the discussion of the adaptation of A Scanner Darkly is fascinating because Ms. Dick helped work on the novel with him. Philip K. Dick would explain to her his intentions with that novel and all the novels after it so that she has an excellent understanding of Philip K. Dick’s purpose in writing the books.

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in this period in Philip K. Dick’s life. The memoir provides a second viewpoint on events that Philip K. Dick wrote about, a viewpoint of someone who was there to witness the events.

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The Cosmic Puppets issue of For Dickheads Only

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The Cosmic Puppets entry in PKDweb