Department of English and American Studies English

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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Lucie Slováčková

Dystopian Society vs. the Individual: A Comparative Analysis of Selected Works of Philip K. Dick and Their Film Adaptations

Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph. D.

2019

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

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Author’s signature

Acknowledgements In the first place, I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph.D., for his valuable advice and guidance through the process of writing this thesis. Also, I would like to thank Radoušek Kopečný for the continual, kind help throughout my studies at the department. I thank my friends and my family for all the trust and support they gave me, and my beloved teacher, Mgr. Iva Toiflová, who thought me the basics of the English language. Finally, the biggest THANK YOU goes to my soulmate and fan Tom Malina for making my days better, brighter and bearable.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 1. Dystopian Society vs. the Individual ...... 5 2. ... on the Page ...... 11 2.1 Philip Kindred Dick ...... 11 2.2 A Scanner Darkly, written by Philip K. Dick ...... 17 2.3 “Minority Report”, written by Philip K. Dick ...... 22 3. ... on the Screen ...... 26 3.1 From the Page to the Screen: The Basics of Film Adaptation ...... 26 3.2 A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater ...... 32 3.3 Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg ...... 38 Conclusion ...... 43 Bibliography ...... 47 Summary ...... 52 Resumé ...... 53

Introduction

“In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising

things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him

constantly; he could count on nothing.”

– Philip Kindred Dick

This quote from the fourth chapter of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 science fiction novel A

Scanner Darkly offers an insight into the mindset of its protagonist, Bob Arctor – a man who lives a double life within a drug subculture in a dystopian society which takes place in the then-future of 1994. Even though a specific character of a novel is discussed here, despair, insecurity and unreliability on things and people around him are typical feelings of any individual living inside a dystopian society.

The present thesis primarily focuses on the relationship between individuals and societies in dystopian futures presented in four different works – in two science fiction writings of Philip K. Dick, the above-mentioned 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly and the 1956 short story “Minority Report”, as well as their two film adaptations, the 2006 independent thriller A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater, and Steven Spielberg’s 2002 tech- noir blockbuster Minority Report.

Jennifer Rhee, in her essay “Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance in Philip K. Dick’s

A Scanner Darkly”, connects the theme of the unjust surveillance of the citizens present not only in Dick’s 1977 novel, but in all three remaining works analyzed in the present thesis, with the scandal that still resonates in the contemporary society, even six years after its break out: the disclosure of global surveillance program PRISM, secretly run by the US National

Security Agency (Rhee 133). The now well-known whistleblower Edward Snowden, who informed the whole world about the US government’s illegal activities in 2013, was then

1 followed by Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and others. The ordinary people, therefore, learned about the disturbance of their privacy and about the fact that their activity on the

Internet is monitored not only by the government of the United States but also by the governments of other countries and by corporations such as Google, Facebook, YouTube,

Yahoo! and others (Gellman and Poitras).

The reason for mentioning the 2013 scandal and its consequences is that the topic of illegal surveillance of citizens is still an ongoing issue that must be discussed and addressed.

As Edward Snowden himself said in the 2014 TEDTalk, “your rights matter, because you never know when you are going to need them” (“How we take back the internet | Edward

Snowden”). The topic of illegal surveillance and violation of basic human rights appears in all four works of dystopian fiction that are analyzed in the following chapters of the present thesis. This thesis aims to find out how the relationship between the individual and a dystopian society works. The results of the following analyses might serve as examples (or deterrents) of what could happen if our real society continued tolerating illegal activities of the ruling class and other features that usually appear in dystopian fiction. The scope of the present thesis is too narrow to go deeper into the topic of non-fictional surveillance of today’s world’s population, but it definitely needs the attention of future researchers.

The present thesis is divided into three main parts. In the first chapter, the main topic of the relationship of the individual and a dystopian society is discussed. Firstly, the term dystopia is explained, and several examples of other similar dystopian novels and films are provided. The main part of this chapter focuses on features that are typical for dystopian fiction in general. These features serve as the basis for all four subsequent analyses of Dick’s texts and their film adaptations.

In the second chapter, the author of both analyzed works of literature, Philip K. Dick, is introduced, as well as the main ideas and topics with which he dealt in his oeuvre. After a short introduction of the author, both his works, A Scanner Darkly and “Minority Report”

2 are analyzed and compared, focusing chiefly on the works’ characters (mainly on the protagonists) and their connection to the dystopian society they live in. Through the analysis of characters, it is also possible to analyze the environment and the society that surrounds them – therefore, the relationship between the individual and a dystopian society is revealed and discussed.

The third chapter offers an introduction to the basics of the theory of adaptation, focusing mainly on film adaptation of literature. Besides general theoretical background needed for an understanding of subsequent subchapters that deal with film adaptations of

Dick’s texts, this subchapter also contains the main ideas presented by Linda Hutcheon and

Thomas Leitch, the leading experts in the field. After the introduction of the essential principles of the theory of adaptation, the rudiments of novel and short story adaptation are explained. The subchapter centers on the idea that an adaptation must be treated as a completely new piece of art, meaning that the analyses of the aforementioned adaptations will not provide judgements such as “the book is better than the film”, a frequent assessment of laymen. The theoretical background in this subchapter is an indispensable guide to the other sections that follow.

The following subchapters aim to analyze the film adaptations of both Dick’s novel and the short story. Just as in the analyses of Dick’s texts, the characters and the environment they inhabit are primarily examined. In this part, not only are the two adaptations compared and contrasted between each other, but they are also compared with their respective sources.

These analyses, however, do not aim to provide any assessment based on the differences found between the two texts and their adaptations. They rather aim to notice them and explain them, if possible.

So, by the analysis and comparison of the film adaptations and the original literary works on which the adaptations are based, the present thesis provides a pattern of the relationships between the individuals and dystopian societies. Therefore, this thesis does not

3 only contribute to the field of the theory of adaptation – its main contribution lies in the revelation of how dystopian societies and the individuals within them coexist, and in uncovering the features that appear in dystopian fiction. This is reached especially by the analyses of the characters and the communities they exist in. As already stated above, the observed features of dystopian fiction serve as a warning of what might happen if some bad aspects or trends present in contemporary society preserved. This is why the research on such a topic is still relevant and important at the same time.

1. Dystopian Society vs. the Individual

Since all the works (both literary and cinematographic) discussed in this thesis are labeled as dystopian fiction, it is first necessary to explain what exactly the term “dystopian” stands for and what the basic features of the dystopian fiction are.

Dystopian fiction is a specific subcategory of the science fiction genre. The word

“dystopia” is an antonym of “utopia”, a term originally used by its author, Sir Thomas More, in the title of his 1516 work Utopia. The term is based on Greek “ou-” which translates as

“not”, and “topos”, meaning “place”. This suggests that utopia is just imaginative and thus inapplicable to the real world. The simplest definition of utopia is “[an] imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect” (“Utopia”). In his narrative, Sir Thomas More depicts an ideal society of the island of Utopia – an ideal in the matter of its laws and customs of its citizens. In contrast, dystopia is the exact opposite of utopia: the prefix “dys-” stands for “bad”. The “bad” aspects of dystopia are either its culture, legal system or government, which is unjust and corrupt in its core.

The origin of the term “dystopia” dates back to the eighteenth century, but dystopian fiction as a subgenre of science fiction thrived mainly in the twentieth, “dystopian century”

(“Do Dystopias Matter?” 10). The thrive of the subgenre was possible at the time because the whole society was experiencing dystopian features firsthand – Lyman Tower Sargent, in his essay “Do Dystopias Matter?”, namely mentions the experience of World Wars I and II,

Korean War, Vietnam War, several revolutions and struggles against colonialism, the rise of racism, sexism and homophobia (“Do Dystopias Matter?” 10). The frustration of such terrific experience left an imprint in the whole sphere of art – in the first half of the twentieth century, the well-known dystopian literary works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and

Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley and many more were written. Most of the dystopian literary classics were also later adapted to acclaimed feature films.

George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is the foremost representative of dystopian fiction, which responded to the dangers of totalitarian regimes of both Nazi

Germany and its communist counterpart, the Soviet Union. Also, this novel is significant for

Orwell’s depiction of the surveillance of citizens carried out by the totalitarian government, which is an essential feature of dystopian fiction.

Dystopian fiction, however, has not by far become a forgotten genre of the twentieth century – on the contrary, the number of contemporary authors writing dystopian texts has increased by large numbers and dystopian literature is now very popular even among teenagers: the young adult dystopian trilogy The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was, at the time of its publication, a great success and the trilogy was adapted into three feature films right after.

Dystopian subgenre is certainly not only literature’s concern. A wide range of other media also use dystopian features or the whole concept of the subgenre. The most visible kind is audiovisual works such as movies and TV series – the well-known representatives of dystopian cinematography are, for example, The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowskis, which took some of the features of Philip K. Dick’s texts, or Equilibrium (2002), dir. by Kurt

Wimmer. The reason for mentioning the latter film in particular is its resemblance with both movies, A Scanner Darkly (2006) and Minority Report (2002), which are subjects of the analyses in subsequent chapters. Equilibrium’s protagonist turns from the high-positioned representative of the oppressive system to the system’s adversary, just as the protagonist of

Minority Report. Also, drug culture is important feature of Equilibrium, just as it is in A Scanner

Darkly, although each film works with this motif differently. Cinema is followed by other media, including computer games, graphic novels and even music.

Dystopia is basically a fictional society in an alternate, mostly futuristic reality, although there are significant examples of alternate history fiction, too – one of them is Philip

K. Dick’s acclaimed novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), a thought experiment on the

6 subject of the end of the second World War, in which the United States lost and are then occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan. According to Lyman Tower Sargent, who is one of the leading utopian studies experts, dystopian society is “located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (“The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” 9). The main task of dystopian fiction is to show the worst possible example of what might happen if contemporary, real society continued in its behavior or in a trend which the author hereby criticizes. Great examples of this claim are the contemporary post-apocalyptic novels showing the world after an ecological catastrophe, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, published in 2006, or the previously mentioned post-apocalyptic dystopian trilogy The Hunger

Games.

A dystopian alternate reality is always unfavorable and horrifying – something in the world went wrong and the population has to cope with it somehow. In many cases, it is the tyranny of the ruling class, whether it is a totalitarian government, a dominating corporate, artificial intelligence or even aliens, that dominates the whole population of the given dystopia. The four main types of control over dystopian society are the corporate, bureaucratic, technological and philosophical or religious control (Chung). The very important means of any kind of such control is the surveillance of the population, which was mentioned in the introduction of the present thesis. This surveillance can be achieved by modern technology, undercover agents, biometrics, infiltration, corporate data monitoring and so on. To be under constant surveillance feels unnatural and uncomfortable – however, trying to escape it can result in a punishment. The individuals rebelling against this type of control usually tend to succumb to the illusion that they can escape or evade it, but they always fail and realize that they are trapped.

Logically, where there is this kind of depraved society or system, there must be a counterculture trying to fight it as well. The protagonists of dystopian fiction are usually

7 members of this counterculture: they are the margins of society fighting against the wicked and morally corrupt norms. Sometimes they even have to fight for their own lives. Philip K.

Dick’s protagonists are just the same: they do not represent or fulfill the usual image of a hero typical of the science fiction genre in general. They mostly struggle to defeat the forces that make their lives unbearable instead of simply beating them straight away.

In dystopian fiction, the world is always seen from the protagonist’s point of view, hence the seemingly perfect image of the society created by the government, corporate or other type of control, is shattered in the reader’s eyes and things are shown in the true light.

The individuals within a dystopian society are tilting at windmills because they do not have the power to conquer the ruling system or to change the hopeless situation of the world they inhabit. Although they try to fight the system and rebel against the uniformity, which is desirable in the eyes of the control, these rebels usually fail to achieve their goal and become a part of the tamed, obedient sheep-like mainstream society – the example of it is 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith, who, absolutely broken by the system, becomes a part of mainstream society worshiping its totalitarian leader.

But the rebelling individuals do not stand alone – since even these seemingly lonesome people are the part of the counterculture, there are usually others who belong to this counterculture, too. One of the basic features of human nature is the need to socialize, and although the phenomenon of dehumanization is frequent in dystopias, this is one of the features that remain, in spite of the outer efforts to change it. The rebels then tend to find an ally or a group of allies, often secretly, to gather strength to resist the system.

One of the important, and always present, features of dystopian society is the strict stratification of society either by class, race, gender, ability, intellect et cetera. The protagonists of dystopian texts are typically in a high position (Dystopian Elements and

Characteristics) and hence have a better insight into the corruption of the system than the mainstream civilian population which is under control of that system.

In a dystopian society, the concept of family is disrupted. The protagonists often lose their families (or their families are taken away from them as a punishment, or because the member/s of this family offended against the system or law), leave it for some reason, or there is no mention of their family at all. The concept of disrupted family, however, does not concern only the protagonist – for example, other than natural forms of reproduction might be present in the given society (Dystopian Elements and Characteristics).

A dystopian alternate reality follows the pattern of an internally divided society with a counterculture on the one side and the seemingly perfect, but also controlled, population on the other. A third side is, of course, also present – it is the system against which the counterculture fights and the mainstream population obeys (it is also important to note that the citizens might obey it out of fear or because of their genuine persuasion that the system is right). Because of this setting, the mainstream population looks down on the counterculture. The frictions between these two groups of divided society are formed since the members of the counterculture rebel against the laws, customs and concepts of the system which the mainstream population follows. The individual who stands against the system therefore stands against the mainstream part of society as well, to the delight of the dominating system, because it is in its interest to destroy the counterculture.

Another frequent phenomenon in dystopian fiction is the specific depiction of the antagonist. Although there is an evident arch enemy in the form of the spoiled system, the antagonist is usually a single individual who acts like an ally of the rebelling protagonist and tries to befriend them. The protagonist believes this concealed antagonist and assumes that they share the same values. However, the antagonist, who is actually the prominent representative of the system, betrays the protagonist and thus turns out to be the exact opposite of what he pretended to be. A typical example of such an antagonist is the character of O’Brien in above-mentioned novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The antagonist’s true identity is sometimes uncovered only to the reader and not to the betrayed protagonist.

The description of the typical features of dystopian societies in this chapter serves as a theoretical background for the subsequent analyses of the four different examples of dystopian fiction.

2. ... on the Page

2.1 Philip Kindred Dick

When Philip K. Dick, who is now considered a key author and a prophet of the modern science fiction genre, died in 1982, Fredric Jameson, an esteemed literary critic, postmodernist theorist and one of the most influential critics of the science fiction genre

(Duda 1245), claimed Dick to be “the Shakespeare of science fiction” (Heer 181). At the time, the literary work of Philip K. Dick was famous among quite a narrow group of science fiction fans rather than a wider audience of readers (Heer 181). But the situation had changed soon after his death, and up to date, Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre is considered the peak of modern science fiction. During his lifetime, Dick had written forty-four novels and over one hundred short stories. Some of these works were adapted into films and TV series, which made his fiction even more famous and more accessible to a wide audience. To understand Philip K.

Dick’s works and their main ideas, it is fundamental to explore the writer’s interesting, yet twisted life and mind first. This chapter provides a brief biography of Philip K Dick, focusing on the details of his life and thinking that were essential for his literature.

Although this chapter starts with the death of Philip K. Dick, his arrival to this world played a significant role in his development and had a huge impact on his mental health. He was born on 16 December 1928 in Chicago, together with his twin sister, Jane Charlotte. The twins were born prematurely and their mother, Dorothy Kindred, did not expect to give birth to two children. Unfortunately, Dick’s sister died one month after her birth, which tragically affected not only Dick alone, but his entire family. His mother made Dick feel guilty for his sister’s death (Robb 14), although he did not have anything to do with it – they were both born prematurely and malnourished. As an infant, Dick himself spent a long time in a hospital, but he did survive. Naturally, he did not have any conscious memories of his sister, but his mother talked about her over and over again, so the image of her was preserved in his mind until his death. Brian J. Robb, in his biographical part of Counterfeit Worlds, a book

11 focusing on the film adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s texts, admits, that in some of his written works, Dick imprinted the loss of his sister into the stories by the “notions of twinning, such as the real/unreal or human/android dichotomies” (14). He then mentions the three examples of “the feature twins or twinned characters” from Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got

Along After the Bomb (1965), Valis (1981) and A Scanner Darkly (1977). Robb suggests that the twin character in the last mentioned work is Bob Arctor/Fred, the protagonist of the novel.

As previously mentioned, the death of Dick’s newborn sister affected the entire family – the then-strong relationship between Dick’s mother and his father, Edgar Dick, had suffered irreparable damage and Dick’s father thus left him and his mother, who, again, made

Dick feel responsible for the family tragedy. In A Scanner Darkly, the twinning of the protagonist is not the only link to the author’s childhood – Arctor also used to have two little daughters and a wife, whom he left, so that he could gain “a new and somber life” (A Scanner

Darkly 48). By the time that Dick’s father left his family, they were already settled in Berkeley,

California after a series of moving from one city to another.

Due to his troubled childhood, Dick developed several mental disorders and illnesses that affected him for the rest of his life. He first suffered from agoraphobia (anxious fear of open or public places), strong vertigo, tachycardia, later also schizophrenia, manic depression and many more conditions. Dick also used to self-diagnose himself a lot, so it is hard to identify which concrete conditions were actually diagnosed by professionals. According to

Lawrence Sutin’s official online biography of Philip K. Dick, one of the professional diagnoses was that Dick was actually “quite sane” (Sutin).

When he was twelve, Dick fell for science fiction genre and later started to publish his own texts. During the 1950s and 60s, he produced an immense number of short stories and novels. He talked about his career as an author in a 1977 interview in France (“Philip K.

Dick Interview (1977, France*) – Mirror”), in which he mentioned his first steps represented by writing stories for pulp magazines. He then produced many short stories, and, in the

12 interview, he described the cold attitude towards science fiction genre in America. He also mentioned the “anti-intellectual attitude” in the United States, which he observed from the position of a member of the Berkeley counterculture in 1960s.

The period of 1950s and 60s was most productive for him. He was able to produce seven short stories within one month, but this strenuous flow of creativity had its dark side, too. In an interview with Charles Platt, which was taken by Platt as a material for his book

Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, Dick talked about his drug abuse and about how, as a result of this addiction, he was able to finish more than sixty pages of text a day while on amphetamines (“Philip K Dick – Fascinating Rare Interview”), which were by far not the only substance he used. He also went through five marriages, from which his three children came. After the disintegration of his fourth marriage in 1970, his house was filled with drug-addicted people and drug dealers – this period inspired him to write A

Scanner Darkly (Purser-Hallard). This wild epoch of his life also led to the damage of his pancreas, as he admits indirectly in the author’s note at the end of A Scanner Darkly.

In the previously mentioned French interview, Dick openly talked about his relationship to the United States, which had been, in his own words, “very bad” (“Philip K.

Dick Interview (1977, France*) – Mirror”). The main reason for this attitude was his fear of being arrested by the police for a crime he would have not committed. This fantasy was eating up his mind since reading Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Also, it is necessary to clarify that

Dick suffered from severe paranoia, which only worsened his mental state. In the interview,

Dick talks about the incidents which allegedly happened during Nixon’s rule, for example that somebody broke into his house (his attorney and him thought it was someone from the government), and another incident in which he was, according to his claim, threatened by the policemen. Haunted by the dread for his life, Dick therefore moved to Canada and lived there for a while. The era of his anxious fear of being arrested by police, or being somehow attacked by the government, ended, according to Dick, when Nixon resigned and left the

13 office. Although Dick’s claims about the incidents might have been just his paranoid fantasies, the nervousness concerning the government and the surveillance was quite appropriate, taking the Watergate scandal into account (Rhee 134). The theme of the individuals being oppressed, arrested and possibly killed by the police apparatus due to unjust laws appears in numerous number of Dick’s texts, including A Scanner Darkly (1977) and

“Minority Report” (1956), which are analyzed in the chapters to follow.

Themes that appear in Philip K. Dick’s texts have been divided differently by various literary critics. The general themes of Dick’s writing are of social, political and philosophical nature. Apart from the police state and its control over its citizens, he includes a critique of authoritarianism, corporate capitalism and monopolies, as well as touching upon alternate realities and mind alteration, especially caused by the drug use. Artificial intelligence, human colonies on Mars, political conspiracies and other significant features typical of the science fiction genre appear in Dick’s novels and short stories. However, Dick distanced himself from other American science fiction writers (although many of them were Dick’s friends), explaining that he was, unlike them, influenced by French, English and Russian realism of the nineteenth century, namely authors such as Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal or Ivan

Sergeyevich Turgenev (“Philip K. Dick Interview (1977, France*) – Mirror”). The amount of philosophical thoughts and thought experiments, which are directly connected with the typical science fiction features in Dick’s novels and short stories, make the author’s style so unique and incomparable with the sort of shallow and archaic science fiction works of his contemporaries, such as Thomas M. Disch, Tim Powers, or Kevin W. Jeter, who wrote science fiction just because they read science fiction works and were fans of the genre.

Other topics that are present in Dick’s works include twisted realities, vicissitudes of the identities of the stories’ characters, mental disorders and illnesses (especially schizophrenia, which is actually a big topic in Dick’s whole life), and the previously mentioned drug abuse. Typical dystopian features present in his works (and some of them

14 are present in the two works this thesis analyzes) are the futuristic fictions with their characters living under continuous surveillance by the government or the police, an undemocratic, unjust legal system, capitalistic corporations determining the direction in which the civilization goes and, for example, the mainstream population conforming uniformity – any sign of individuality is undesirable. The protagonists always struggle with the system and the society; however, according to American author Ursula K. Le Guin,

“[t]here are no heroics in Dick’s books, but there are heroes. One is reminded of [Charles]

Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people”

(“Criticism and Analysis – Philip K Dick”), meaning that the characters stick up for themselves and their individuality although they are going through very tough times.

From this introduction of dystopian features of Dick’s works, it might appear that his works are all dark, murky and serious, but the truth is that Dick’s works contain plenty of jokes and humorous comments and situations. Even when he wrote A Scanner Darkly, he did not lose his humor – although this novel is a partly autobiographical confession of his drug addiction, which includes characters based on his real friends who died because of drug abuse or their organs were seriously damaged by it. Dick’s ability to contain humor even within such a hard topic makes the book even more enjoyable and readable for a wide audience.

Philip K. Dick came a long way from writing pulp science fiction stories for magazines to winning a Hugo Award for Best Novel (something like an Academy Award for science fiction writers) in 1963 for his dystopian alternate-history The Man in the High Castle.

Although he at first struggled to make money of writing science fiction, which was, as a genre, coldly received by the general US audience, he became very famous in Europe end especially in France. Even in the United States, Dick’s novels were sold by hundreds of thousands of copies, whereas an average science fiction novel in 1970s America was, according to Dick, sold by approximately fifty thousand copies (“Philip K. Dick Interview

(1977, France*) – Mirror”). Also, many of his works were adapted into feature films and TV series; however, Dick died several months before the release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

(1982), which is up to date probably the best-known film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s work.

The four subsequent analyses of Philip K. Dick’s texts and their successful adaptations focus not only on the main topic of the individual within a dystopian society, but also on the above-mentioned elements of Philip K. Dick’s life and work, which are present in both his texts and the analyzed adaptations of them.

2.2 A Scanner Darkly, written by Philip K. Dick

The plot of the 1977 novel which is the first example of dystopian fiction under discussion in this thesis, is set in the then-future of 1994 in Anaheim, the largest city of

Orange County in California. The novel not only tells the story of the Anaheim’s citizens that are addicted to drugs (particularly one special drug called Substance D, which is the center of the universe for the characters in the book), but also focuses on the fictional society as a whole, which goes through an age of ubiquitous drug addiction and illegal drug business.

The drug trade directly contaminates not only the lives of the addicted, but also the lives of the “straights” (the author’s term for the non-addicted mainstream population).

Furthermore, it affects the world behind the curtain, too – the police apparatus, which, alongside the government, tries to fight illegal drug trafficking, which is, as it is revealed at the end of the book, run by New Path, an organization which pretends to be an addiction treatment clinic.

This dystopian society is not exaggeratedly bad – Philip K. Dick once stated that

“[e]verything in A Scanner Darkly [he] actually saw” (Anton). It means that the dystopian features present in the novel intensify the critique of corporate capitalism and drug culture in the 1960s and 1970s America. One of the most visible dystopian elements in the novel is the continuous surveillance of the given society provided by the police and the government.

This surveillance is somewhat Orwellian, based on technology – not only are the telephones tapped, but also the apartments of the citizens are bugged by holo-scanners, which are similar to cameras, but the produced records are tridimensional. Also, there is the WE TIP organization for anonymous reporting on drug trafficking. Other types of surveillance are present as well – policemen patrolling on every corner, undercover narcotics agents who infiltrate groups of addicts et cetera.

Before the analysis of the characters and their relationship towards the given dystopian society, it is important to introduce the main “character” of the book and, as

17 already mentioned, the center of the universe for the other characters. Substance D is, as

Bob/Fred explains, “for Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other” (19-20). The drug and its described influence on the characters is the main motif of the book, and the motive for all actions of the characters – whether it is police’s and Fred’s continual hunt for drug addicts, the addict’s hunt for the drug, or the decay of the relationships between the characters, who start to suspect each other from being reported to the police by their friends. The name of the flower, which is a source material of this

Substance D, is mors ontologica, i. e., “Death of the spirit. The identity. The essential nature”

(202), as Mike, a New Path employee, who in fact cooperates with the government and tries to infiltrate into the corporate which dominates the whole society by the drug production, explains. The slow death of identity is present in all addicted characters – but it plays the main role in the life of Bob Arctor, the protagonist of the book.

Bob Arctor continually asks himself questions concerning identity: “What is identity?” (21), “What am I actually?” (21), “[W]ho am I? Which of them is me?” (75) – because Bob Arctor is just one of his three identities. Bob Arctor is his civil name. He can be best described as a drug addict sharing his house with his drug-addicted friends. His other, secret, identity is Fred, which is his cover name as a federal agent wearing scramble suit (a device manufactured for hiding identity of federal agents), who actually spies on people such as Bob, although he himself has to take drugs to be able to infiltrate the group. Thanks to his two identities, a unique insight to almost all layers of this dystopian society is provided to reader – counterculture represented by the addicts, the mainstream society (“straights”), and the police and the government. At first, the main character knows that he is both Bob and

Fred, but as his drug use continues, his brain hemispheres start to “cross-chat”, i.e., his hemispheres fight each other, and by the eleventh chapter, he absolutely forgets that he has two identities. By the end of the story, Bob/Fred loses both his identities and becomes Bruce

– after a total disintegration of his brain and death of his two identities, he finally becomes a puppet of the dominating corporate, New Path, which was the only layer of the society he did not have an insight to.

Through the character of Bob/Fred, many dystopian features are shown: the typical disrupted concept of a family is present here – Bob/Fred leaves his wife and daughters to gain a new, adventurous life as an undercover agent. Also, an illusion of the ability to fight the system is present in Bob’s character – although he is in a high position as a federal agent, he fails to beat the system because his hemispheres start to fight each other: therefore, he is unable to escape the system as Bob, a member of the counterculture, because not only the police, but also Bob as Fred “report[s] on [himself] all the time” (A Scanner Darkly 82).

Bob’s view on the mainstream society is negative, as well as Philip K. Dicks’ view on

American society was in the real life. Bob perpetually spoils on the “straights” and is disgusted by their attitude toward the counterculture: one example is an elderly pair of

“straights” that care about the dog droppings more than about an addicted girl’s terrific life situation (59). Also, Bob as Fred harshly judges the audience while he gives his speech by the beginning of the book: “Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none” (18).

Throughout the speech, he also mentions that if these people met him without his scramble suit, they would “feel aversion and walk away” (17) – this is a typical sheep-like behavior of the “straights”, who do not want to get their hands dirty by being associated with the drug addicted counterculture. This shows the internal division of the society and the war of each against all.

This war is also visible from the relationships between the characters who are supposed to be allies inside the counterculture, but the influence of Substance D on them makes them disintegrate from each other and suspect each other. This is most visible in the character of Jim Barris, who acts like a friend of both Bob and Ernie Luckman, but at the

19 same time, he does not hesitate to poison Bob, destroy his cephaloscope (a futuristic device that scans brain patterns of its users), cut the brake cable in his car and finally go and report on him to the police, as well as he waits for choking Ernie Luckman to die, without even calling an ambulance on time. This, indeed, is partly because of the impact of the drug abuse, but also because Barris is a conspirator and a bad person in his core.

Although Barris is, even by Bob, considered the main villain in the story, who is responsible for all the bad things that happen to Bob, the main antagonist of the book remains hidden almost until the end. Donna Hawthorne is Bob’s girlfriend and the love of his life. She represents the typical dark-eyed brunette femme fatale, with whom Philip K.

Dick was obsessed throughout his life because his deceased twin-sister Jane was dark too

(Robb 15). Donna represents the hidden antagonist, which is typical for dystopian fiction (as explained in the theoretical part of this thesis). Due to Bob’s love for Donna, and also due to his addiction, which slowly eats up his brain cells, he is unable to realize that the reason for Donna being “a pivot point of [his] reality” (79) is because she is always around him, and also that she is always sober (although she claims that she uses drugs, too). She is a federal agent who infiltrated his group, too, and what is more, she monitors Bob and supplies him with drugs, so that he can be destroyed by the drug use and subsequently sent to New Path to gather information for the police and government. Therefore, Donna is the secret antagonist, whose identity is never revealed to Bob/Fred, only to the reader. Also, it is highly probable that Donna is Hank, the undercover agent who is in charge of Fred, but this is never explicitly expressed in the book.

There are also two minor characters in which the features of dystopian society are shown: the first one is Jerry Fabin, a typical, though somewhat exaggerated demonstration of where the addiction can lead. He serves as a deterrent for all the addicted characters; nobody wants to end up like Fabin. Also, Fabin is the product of the New Path corporate, who returns to the same corporate to get a treatment for his addiction – this shows the cycle

20 of New Path’s profit (Hickman 154). This is also Dick’s critique of corporate capitalism and its exploitation of an everyman.

The other minor character is Charles Freck – he is an important source of views on police practices present in this dystopian society: Freck is the one who explains that the telephones are tapped and he also often talks negatively about “black-and-whites”, for example when he describes “a huge dumb cop . . . checking out everyone” (31). Freck also fantasizes about being caught up by police and being arrested by them – this is actually a reference to Dick’s everlasting fear of being unjustly arrested by police, which was mentioned in the previous chapter of this thesis.

2.3 “Minority Report”, written by Philip K. Dick

The 1956 short story “Minority Report”, originally published in Fantastic Universe magazine, is very different from the novel A Scanner Darkly. It is not semi-autobiographical like A Scanner Darkly and it was written twenty years earlier, in the period of Dick’s writing short fiction for pulp magazines. He started to create more complex and longer texts later – his abovementioned best-known novel The Man in The High Castle was published as late as

1962. However, this does not mean that Dick’s short stories, such as “Minority Report”, are not complex, or that they lack the quality of Dick’s later novels. One of the main differences between “Minority Report” and A Scanner Darkly is Dick’s use of many science fiction features, such as mutant prophets or intergalactic travel. The most remarkable idea in

“Minority Report” is its central philosophical point: the so-called system of “Precrime” used by the Police, due to which it is possible to see into the future and stop the “would-be criminals” who are predicted to commit a crime (“Minority Report” 63). But Precrime has its drawback, too.

The story is located in a very distant future, after a fictional Anglo-Chinese War, in

New York, which is now part of the Federated Westbloc Alliance. There are two big, corrupt systems fighting each other to win the rule over Westbloc – the Army, which ruled during the War and “ran the complete show, both military and domestic” (83), and the Police using the Precrime system, ruling now for over thirty years. The reason why the Army is wrong and dystopian lies in the fact that it would do anything to win back the military law and its overall power, not hesitating to conspire against the head of the Precrime system, John A.

Anderton, and the system itself. It incites the given mainstream society against the ruling system and its chief during an Army rally, where the Army leader, General Leopold Kaplan, tries to discredit Precrime.

On the other hand, Precrime system is morally corrupt too – firstly, it captures innocent people who are believed to commit a future crime, but they never do, just because

22 they get arrested and sent to detention camps (64). Precrime hence does not take people’s free will and presumption of innocence into account. Secondly (and more importantly), the system is fully dependent on the predictions of “precogs”, who are enslaved, disabled

“mutants” living imprisoned in “monkey blocks” and connected to the computers. They are thus sacrificed for the greater good of the whole society. This shows the ethical and moral drawback of the seemingly perfect system, which is typical for dystopian fiction.

The strong element of surveillance in this dystopian society is obviously present, too.

Not only is the population’s future monitored by the precogs, but the monitoring of citizens is also possible due to modern technology: for example, phones that enable audio as well as video calls, radio that informs citizens about Anderton who is on the run, or fingerprint and brain-wave pattern examinations mentioned by Anderton at one point (74).

Another dystopian feature of the short story lies in the characters of Donna, Jerry and Mike. They are precogs – human beings, who suffer from severe developmental defects, but at the same time have a talent for predicting the future. Despite their disability, the safety of the whole society lies on their shoulders. When describing Donna’s defect that affects her brain, Anderton shows no concern of the ethics (or the lack thereof) of the precogs’ enslavement: “But what do we care? We get their prophecies. They pass on what we need.

They understand any of it, but we do” (64). A minority must, therefore, succumb to the majority. Although the Westbloc is basically a police state, precogs and the Precrime system are not used only by the Police department – as Anderton explains, “[e]very important bureau has its cellar of treasured monkeys” (65), meaning the precogs, so there are not only Donna,

Jerry and Mike, but probably many more precogs imprisoned in other divisions, too. The precogs are thus deprived of their right to freedom, mentally remaining “dull, confused, lost in shadows” (64). The enslavement of precogs resembles the sacrifice of Bob Arctor in A

Scanner Darkly, where he also has to serve the greater good of the society (Rubin 191).

Unlike Bob Arctor, however, the protagonist of “Minority Report”, John A.

Anderton, is not sacrificed; on the contrary: he is highly praised for the foundations of the

Precrime system. Although he is also a policeman, just as Arctor in the novel, Anderton differs from Arctor very much. He is the head of police, therefore he is in charge of everything that happens – but only to the point when he has to face “the political consequences of predicting the future” (Vest 118), i. e., when the Army starts to conspire against him. Charged with the future murder of the head of the Army (whom he did not know until that point), Anderton experiences the same injustice as the people sent to detention camps by the Precrime system. This offers a unique insight into the rotten core of the system, which Anderton still defends. He even chooses to kill Leopold Kaplan to preserve it (85) – the system which is morally as corrupt as the system the Army would bring.

Unlike Bob Arctor, Anderton does not represent counterculture – on the contrary, he is the brain of the ruling oppressive system, although he is replaced by Witwer at the end of the short story. Also, the disrupted concept of family is not present here – although

Anderton first suspects his, how else than brown-eyed and dark-haired (Robb 15), wife Lisa of plotting against him with Witwer, he soon realizes that the conspiracy was prepared by the Army. After Anderton murders Kaplan, he is not imprisoned, but sent into off-planet exile, and together with Lisa, they fly to Centaurus X. Due to Anderton’s exile, it is possible to preserve the corrupt Precrime system.

The hidden antagonists in the story, who first seem to be Anderton’s allies, are

Leopold Kaplan and his subordinate Fleming, as well as Wally Page, Anderton’s subordinate who takes care of the precogs, but also brings the information to Kaplan and Fleming, who represent the Army. But although Anderton has to face the hidden enemies like Bob/Fred in A Scanner Darkly, he finally reveals the truth about all of them and is able to take an adequate action and save himself as well as his invention, the Precrime system. In addition,

Anderton is not worthy of compassion like the protagonist of A Scanner Darkly, because he

24 does not get sacrificed for the greater good of society, and what is more, he is responsible for the unethical treatment of precogs, whom he does not perceive as human beings.

The mainstream society is divided into the group of “would-be criminals” in detention camps, and the rest of the population, which is seemingly protected by Precrime – seemingly because they tremble with fear who will be arrested next. This is not visible from the point of Anderton, because he experiences an impact of his own invention only after he

“forfeits his rights to freedom and all its privileges” himself (“Minority Report” 71). The mainstream society is depicted as a sheep-like audience, listening to Leopold Kaplan’s speech during an Army rally: “The eyes of the crowd focused on Anderton. Avidly, they peered at the only potential killer they had ever been privileged to see at close range” (87). The audience watches Anderton “avidly” because they have never been in such situation before. Also, the same crowd finds the act of Kaplan’s murder “incomprehensible” (88), because, again, they have not seen anything alike in the past thirty years. After Kaplan’s murder, this crowd behaves herd-like, as a “chaotic mass”, because “[i]t would take time for acceptance to replace blind terror” (88). This representation of mainstream society shows these people’s blindness toward the corruption of the system (they believe that they are safe thanks to the system, and do not see what is behind the curtain), as well as their fulfillment with dread after the illusion of their safety is disrupted by Anderton right in front of their eyes.

3. ... on the Screen

3.1 From the Page to the Screen: The Basics of Film Adaptation

The main task of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the theory of adaptation, focusing on the theory of film adaptation in particular. For the analysis and comparison between an adaptation and its source work, it is crucial to understand that the faithfulness of the adaptation is not a criteria of the adaptation's quality. Comparison of an adaptation and an adapted work shows differences between the two works, but it should not provide any assessment based on such comparison. The faithfulness is therefore only a term which should serve for a description. This chapter serves as an outline for an understanding of the "what, why and how" concerning the theory of film adaptation.

The discussion on the theory of film adaptation starts with George Bluestone’s canonical work Novels into Film, published in 1962. From that year until today, the field has changed a lot. At the beginning and up until 1990s, film adaptations of texts were considered as something inferior to both literature and film in general. One of the loudest voices of such critique belonged to Kamilla Elliott, who, in her book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, labelled adaptation as “the bad boy of interart criticism” for “[blurring] categorization of the arts”, as well as for the two heresies, which she further explains in detail (Elliott 133). Many critics assumed that a film adaptation of books is parasitizing on the texts and they placed emphasis on describing the differences between the two media. The main problem for these critics was the fact that the inviolable relationship between the form and the content is actually “violated” by the change of form due to the translation of text into film.

Furthermore, they emphasized the multiple layers of literary texts, which were, according to them, degraded and devastated by the process of film adaptation – therefore, literature was perceived as a medium of higher quality and importance compared to its film adaptations.

Also, a big role in the perception of the film adaptation is played by its fidelity to the original text, which served as a basis for the film. It was believed in the past that the greater

26 the fidelity, the greater the quality of the adaptation. Nevertheless, in the middle of the 1990s, critics switched to a new approach, partly thanks to the contribution of the film theory. The focus moved to study of the process and the product of adaptation, and the concept of fidelity transformed, too – fidelity is now used as a descriptive term, not as a criteria for valuation (Desmond and Hawkes 2). Each person interprets the artworks differently, thus they interpret fidelity differently, too. Many film theorists tried to determine categories of adaptations on the basis of their fidelity toward the source texts. John Desmond and Peter

Hawkes in their book Adaptation: Studying Film & Literature use the terms “close”, “loose” and “intermediate” adaptation: a close adaptation keeps the elements from the source text and does not change them too much; a loose adaptation uses only some of those elements or features of the source text; and an intermediate adaptation is “the fluid” in the middle of the two previous categories – it does not “departure” from the source text as a loose adaptation, but does not strictly follow the source text as a close adaptation either (Brown

14).

Probably the largest merit on the change of the perception of the fidelity concept has the renowned scholar and author of The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Thomas Leitch.

In his 2007 monograph Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The

Passion of the Christ, there is an entire chapter entitled “Exceptional Fidelity”, in which he discusses the view of fidelity. The novelty that Leitch brings to the field is the suggestion to ask why some adaptations aim to be faithful, in lieu of why they are unfaithful to the much- glorified original works they are based on (127). The consequence of this contribution is that, while the adaptation is analyzed, it is always necessary to find out what the reason was for the author of an adaptation for choosing to be faithful to the source work (or choosing not to be), instead of trying to valuate qualitatively the outcome on the basis of its fidelity to the original text. Furthermore, Leitch sees the benefit of this approach in the consequential realization that “the main reason adaptations rarely achieve anything like fidelity is because

27 they rarely attempt it” (127). This is a very important thing to consider, because even though the authors of adaptations use a source text or its features as the basis for their own work, they, of course, want to make a whole new, authentic piece of art with their visible signature or imprint in it rather than a copy of somebody else’s work. This is also one of the reasons why both Richard Linklater and Steven Spielberg in their adaptations of Dick’s texts chose to depart from them – they wanted to create their own piece of art.

The same approach toward the topic of fidelity is present in one of the core works in the field of theory of adaptation, the monograph Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon, a Canadian expert not only in this particular field, but in many other fields, such as postmodernist culture, comparative literature, literary theory, literary criticism and many more. This complex work of hers provides a deep insight not only to the theory of adaptation in general, but it also explores different types of adaptation and the way in which they function in practice. In the preface to her monograph, Hutcheon argues that “an adaptation is likely to be greeted as minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘original’”

(XII). This is one of the major concerns of her text, in which she tries to refute this claim by explaining that the adaptation is a completely new piece of art (which is, of course, based on a model) and that it should be treated that way (Hutcheon 6).

In his 2008 essay “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads”, Thomas Leitch points out the same problem as Linda Hutcheon:

. . . any discussion of literature on screen, as opposed to journalism or comic books

or video games on screen, will begin willy-nilly with a bias in favour of literature as

both a privileged field (literary texts are what movies normally adapt) and an

aesthetically sanctified field (literary texts have already been approved by a jury whose

verdict on their film adaptations is still out). (“Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads”

64)

Leitch argues that this approach towards film adaptations is obsolete and wrong, and that it is unfortunately the standpoint of many of the critics researching in the field of the theory of film adaptation. This is, however, not a case of Linda Hutcheon, as he further notes: according to him, Hutcheon is “most forward looking” because she does not see adaptation as a production of counterfeits, but as a process of creation and reception as well

(74).

Hutcheon further suggests that an adaptation is basically anything that is re-told, the change of modus or genre is not always present in the process of adaptation. In a 2011 interview conducted by Eleanor Wachtel, Hutcheon explains that basically every story that can be imagined is a retelling (which is, actually, an adaptation, too) of something and that people are doing it over and over again. Also, she sees a perfect example of this in

Shakespeare’s works – as she says, only one of his plays was not an adaptation and even that play adapted some features of already existing works (“LINDA HUTCHEON on

Adaptation & Remakes”). In the interview, Hutcheon also claims that she sees an adaptation as a palimpsest and whenever she, for example, sees a film based on a text she knows, her mind oscillates between the adaptation and the adapted work – and although she compares the differences in her mind, she does not give them a qualitative value and does not bias the original. This is very important for the analysis of any adaptation, because again, according to Hutcheon, “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative – a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing.” (Hutcheon 9) In the above- mentioned interview, Hutcheon further extends this claim by saying that the fact that the text comes first does not mean that “it has any claim to any kind of authenticity”, therefore adaptations and the adapted source works exist rather vertically than horizontally, none of them is privileged (“LINDA HUTCHEON on Adaptation & Remakes”).

In Theory of Adaptation, Hutcheon describes three main modes between which the adaptation processes oscillate: telling, showing and interacting. Because this thesis concerns

29 only the process of film adaptations of literary texts, the focus is on the telling → showing transformation. In the case of moving literary texts to films, it means that the text that prompts the imagination is transformed into a film which offers direct perception, not leaving as much space for fantasy as a text. But this is not the only change: the process of adapting text into film entails challenges as well as threats. Probably the biggest problem that the filmmakers encounter is that they have to transform, for example, a several-hundred- page novel into a hundred-page script (“Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads” 69) – this is the case of Linklater’s adaptation of Dick’s two-hundred-page novel into a 100 minute footage of the film. It means that some passages must be cut out and the whole plot must be condensed, which poses a danger of discontinuity and incoherence – the film always must make sense, otherwise the adaptation fails.

The “condensation” of the script can be achieved by many different procedures: for example, there can be a change concerning characters (usually, there are fewer of them in the film or multiple characters merge into just one as in Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly etc.), their dialogues are reduced as much as possible and their inner monologues can be expressed by voice-over (a voice of an unseen narrator or character) – this poses a danger of distracting the audience from the perception of the image. Also, the narration changes substantially because, apart from narrator (who does not have to be always present), there is another

“narrator” in the form of camera.

An adaptation of a short story to a film is a little different process than an adaptation of a novel: short story is naturally shorter than a novel (although it carries the same narrative elements), thus there is no need to shorten it as much as a novel – for example, it has fewer characters than the novel, so they do not have to be cut out in the script. But at the same time, these characters are originally usually shallow (just as briefly-outlined characters of

Dick’s “Minority Report”), and they thus need to be made more complex for a feature film

(as they are in Spielberg’s Minority Report). In a short story, there is just an outline of

30 surroundings. When adapting a short story to a film, the elements of it can be either dispersed across the whole footage, concentrated at the begging, at the end and in the middle, or they can be avoided completely and only the main theme remains (“Adaptation Studies at a

Crossroads” 69-70). The latter option is a case of Spielberg’s Minority Report, which will be discussed further in the analysis of the film.

This chapter serves as a theoretical framework for the next two chapters containing the analyses of film adaptations based on the two previously examined texts.

3.2 A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater

Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly waited quite a long time before it was finally adapted into 2006 feature film of the same title, directed by the American director and screenwriter Richard Linklater. According to Brian J. Robb, there were many ideas and attempts of various filmmakers to adapt this 1977 text, including, for example, Charlie

Kaufmann’s 1997 unused script, which was “very faithful to the novel” (Robb 271). One of the reasons why the film was not made into a Hollywood blockbuster just like Minority Report

(2002) or Blade Runner (1982) was the fact that Hollywood simply did not want to adapt such a complex and kind of “weird” text (Robb 275). When the realization of the novel’s adaptation into a feature film was finally imminent, Richard Linklater was given priority over

Steven Soderbergh by Warner Brothers, and started with pre-production. Although he first wanted to adapt Dick’s another novel, Ubik (1969), he finally decided to adapt A Scanner

Darkly. Linklater was greatly supported by Philip K. Dick’s two daughters, Laura and Isa, which was one of the reasons why he decided to make the adaptation very faithful to the novel – in the terminology of Desmond and Hawkes, his adaptation is somewhere between close and intermediate. Another reason for Linklater to make the adaptation this way was that he was disappointed with other adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s texts, because they always

“took [only] central ideas” and not “the whole thing” (Robb 274). Also, in one of the interviews, Linklater claimed that he felt the responsibility towards fans of Philip K. Dick’s writing (“A Scanner Darkly: Behind The Scenes”).

One of the reasons why the film could have been made, was the cast of Keanu Reeves to the role of Bob Arctor/Fred. Reeves was then considered a big film star thanks to his part of Neo in the 1999 science-fiction blockbuster The Matrix. As Robb reports, Philip K. Dick’s fans were not exactly happy about Linklater’s decision, but Dick’s daughters were enthusiastic and supported Linklater in casting Reeves, as well as other stars such as Robert

Downey Jr. as Jim Barris, Winona Ryder as Donna Hawthorne, Woody Harrelson as Ernie

Luckman and Rory Cochrane as Charles Freck (Robb 278).

There are many features that make Linklater’s adaptation very close to its source text, but there are also several differences, that make the adaptation rather intermediate. The most striking difference is the time location of the film’s diegesis: it is set in 2013’s late capitalistic post-9/11 era, although the novel was written by Dick in the second half of 1970s’ capitalistic, post-Vietnam War era (Ghandeharion 26). As Lance Rubin in his analysis of

Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly in “Cultural Anxiety, Moral Clarity, and Willful Amnesia: Filming

Philip K. Dick After 9/11” demonstrates, the war on drugs in the film resembles with post-

9/11 “War on Terror” led by American government against terrorist groups located in Iraq,

Afghanistan and other places: Rubin gives an example of Fred’s speech in the Brown Bear

Lodge club, where he claims that “our troops are fighting down there for us” (00:06:43), as well as the source flower of Substance D, which is a reference to poppy crop in Afghanistan

(Rubin 190). Also, the flower’s name here is Clerondedron Ugandens, which leads to the deliberate conviction of the given society that the drug is produced abroad, whereas the truth is that government thinks that the drug is produced by New Path inside the United States.

Another such example of a “War on Terror” and 9/11 reference in the film might be the poster on the fridge in Bob Arctor’s apartment that shows a building resembling one of the towers of World Trade Center (00:45:09). This reference can also lead to Philip K. Dick’s life, because he was also the one remaining twin after his sister’s tragic death.

Linklater used a specific animation technology called rotoscoping, which is a form of animation where first the film is shot by cameras and then redrawn by animators on the base of the camera records. He already used this technology before, in his other film Waking Life

(2001), but the animation there is not as hyper-realistic as it is in A Scanner Darkly. Thank to rotoscoping, it was possible for Linklater to depict the technology and the visual nature of the characters very accurately. Also, many details and references to Philip K. Dick were

33 possible to include in the film: the brand of Jim Barris’ watches is “Philip”, the brand of the headphones used by agents is “Phil D.”, the monitors in the police department show pieces of the script of Blade Runner (1982), Charles Freck passes around a “St. Ubik” wine in the shop and there is also a part of the author’s note from A Scanner Darkly novel in the closing credits.

The scramble suit is another perfect example of the excellent work of the animation studio – it is composed of various people’s fragments changing in a fast sequence. Because of the time shift to the future, Linklater put modern technology into the story instead of some of Dick’s ideas. The technology in the film is notably used as a device for the surveillance of the Anaheim’s citizens. Holo-scanners from the novel are replaced by cameras that monitor all people 24/7, which is visible in the Sheriff’s department, where operators track people using devices similar to CCTV cameras, holo-scanners and voice- and faceprint technology, which do not appear in the novel. Cell phones are used instead of classic telephones with handsets. The peak of the depiction of technological surveillance are web cameras placed on monitors in the safe apartment, so that the undercover agents in scramble suits can be monitored while monitoring the citizens, especially the suspected addicts and drug dealers.

Although the form of the film is almost perfect, Linklater used some ideas and moments from the novel without context. These details can be spotted only by a reader of the book, which is sometimes confusing for someone who did not read the novel before watching the film. This is not a downright mistake, but some parts of the film might seem incoherent to the viewer due to this. For example, the bike scene, in which the characters fail to comprehend the system of gears (00:20:38-00:23:40), has no deeper meaning; it only shows the “craziness” of the drug-addicted characters. Whereas in the novel, the bike incident is the reason why Bob/Fred undergoes the neurological test in Room 203. Another such example is when Barris, Luckman and Arctor talk about a character which only appears in

34 the book, but not in the film (00:35:15). Furthermore, there is almost no depiction of the

“straights”, who are essential for the novel. They are present during Fred’s speech in the beginning of the film, but Fred does not evaluate them anyhow.

Linklater’s work on the change of characters is most significant in the character of

Charles Freck – he is a fusion of Jerry Fabin and Charles Freck from the novel. Also, Jim

Barris in the film takes over some elements of the book-version Charles Freck. In the film,

Freck is the one who suffers from the aphid terror (like Fabin in the book) and has the police- brutality visions (like Freck in the book). Overall, Freck represents the addiction deterrent which is originally represented by Fabin. This is evident in the scene where he is bullied by

Arctor, Barris and Luckman (00:51:40-00:52:20) – they try to get rid of Freck, because he serves as a mirror image of their future-selves after the brain damage caused by drug abuse.

At the end of the film, Freck sits by the table with Bob/Fred, who is transformed to Bruce, in New Path.

Jim Barris is revealed to be an informant on Bob Arctor right in front of Bob/Fred at the beginning of the film (00:28:30). Therefore, he is not considered the enemy of

Bob/Fred as in the novel – he is rather seen as a ridiculous addict with very vivid imagination.

In the film, Barris reports on Bob Arctor mainly because he wants to get a job in government

(00:31:33).

Bob/Fred/Bruce remains almost the same as in the book, but through the visual side of the film, some details concerning him are depicted differently. As Jason P. Vest, in his book Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at Movies, suggests, in a flashback sequence where Arctor’s family and past-life are shown, music switches to a pleasant instrumental melody and the colors are brighter (00:33:30). But when he hits his head and realizes how much he actually hates his “perfect” life and family, everything changes back to the murky, dark-colored reality

(00:34:40). A similar change in colors is present in Donna’s apartment, where everything is vivid and colorful (01:05:21) because Arctor feels safe and is under the influence of drugs

(Vest 161). The disintegration of Bob/Fred’s mind is shown through his vision of Luckman and Barris metamorphosing into aphids (00:53:00), an episode not present in the book.

The third person narrator from the novel changes into voice-over two times during the film. Firstly, voice-over is used in the previously mentioned Arctor’s past-life sequence, where the narrator changes into Arctor’s voice in first person. Secondly, narrator talks about

Charles Freck’s suicide as a radio host, his utterance remaining in the third person. The application of voice-overs does not distract the audience, so the use of this technique pays off.

Although, as Jason P. Vest observes, Donna Hawthorne is less cold than in the novel

(Vest 165), the key difference between the Donna in the book and that in the film is the explicit revelation of her second identity as agent Hank, who is in charge of Fred (01:26:00).

This revelation leads to the comprehension of the story behind Bob/Fred’s addiction – the federals needed to sacrifice Bob to be able to infiltrate New Path’s drug production center.

This sacrifice is defended by Mike Westaway, a federal agent who pretends to be a counselor at New Path clinic – Lance Rubin suggests that this defense resembles with the one provided by the US government when the photographs of tormented Iraqis at Abu Ghraib were published (Rubin 191) – which makes another linkage to the post-9/11 “War on Terror”.

The representation of corporates differs from their description in the novel, where

Dick explicitly mocks Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Linklater, probably for financial reasons, changed McDonald’s name to General Burger (01:01:33). Also, the scene where Donna crashes deliberately into Coca-Cola truck, the symbol of capitalism, is completely omitted, as well as the label on the Coke bottle in the neurological test in Room 203 (00:24:38).

The representation of police brutality is, on the other hand, more ferocious in the film than in the book – in Charles Freck’s fantasy about being arrested while driving under the influence of Substance D, he is unmercifully executed by a police officer (00:10:05).

Whereas in the book, Freck in the same fantasy only begs the policeman not to shoot him,

36 the act of murder is not present in his fantasy (A Scanner Darkly 5). Another such example of police brutality is visible in Alex Jones’s cameo, where he is paralyzed and arrested by the federals for expressing his opinions publicly (01:01:42), which is a violation of the basic human right to freedom of speech. This kind of violation of someone’s freedom of speech is not present in the book, although other human rights are violated in the book, too.

Linklater’s adaptation closes not only with previously mentioned credits containing an excerpt from Dick’s “Author’s Note” from the novel, but also with a song “Black Swann” by Thom Yorke, which starts with these lyrics: “What will grow crooked you can’t make straight / It’s a price that you gotta pay.” This line perfectly captures not only

Bob/Fred/Bruce’s fate, but it is also a reference to the whole corrupted system the characters live in. Additionally, it highlights Dick’s message about him and his friends listed in the closing credits – because some of them had to pay the highest price.

3.3 Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg

A Scanner Darkly waited almost thirty years to be adapted – but “Minority Report” waited for more than half a century. One of the reasons for such a long waiting might have been the fact that the source text was, according to one of the screenwriters of its 2002 adaptation, Scott Frank, “virtually non-adaptable” (Robb 241). It is always difficult to adapt a short story, because it usually centers on a single idea, not paying much attention to the characters’ description or their development. Frank also said that the adaptation took the concept of Precrime and Anderton’s accusation of future murder, “[b]ut that’s it” (Robb

241). The fact that Spielberg’s film is inspired by Dick’s short story rather than based on it led to some negative responses from the critics; Richard Linklater also expressed his disappointment with the use of this method not only in Minority Report (2002), but in Blade

Runner (1982) and Total Recall (1990) as well (Robb 274). Minority Report (2002) is, in the terminology of Desmond and Hawkes, considered a loose adaptation, because it took only short story’s title, central idea and some other features. But it is important to emphasize that this is not a mistake – on the contrary, this approach to the adaptation of short stories is common, as already mentioned in the subchapter dealing with the theory of adaptation.

Some of the responses to the film also claimed that Spielberg constructed the film upon Tom Cruise’s stardom. But despite that, the film is often labeled as a “masterpiece”

(Vest 137). Vest insists that the adaptation is “not only the most successful cinematic adaptation since Blade Runner but also the longest, most expensive, and best reviewed of the eight movies inspired by Dick’s writing” (115). A similarly warm reaction came from Dick’s daughters, Laura and Isa (Koornick).

The story is set in 2054 America, more specifically in Washington, D. C., in contrast to the post-war New York in Dick’s short story. Although Spielberg’s film was created in the post-9/11 era just as Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, Jason P. Vest explains that the production

38 of the film had already started in 1999, therefore it “cannot be considered a direct reply to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks” (Vest 134).

There is no off-planet travel or post-war Westbloc in the film, but the system of

Precrime is preserved. The technology in the adaptation is modern and futuristic – the methods used for the surveillance of the citizens are on a higher level than in the short story or in A Scanner Darkly (both the novel and its adaptation) – there are eye-scanners on every corner (these are used not only for the identification of the citizens, but also for the personal setting of the omnipresent advertisement), the so-called “spyders” using the same technology of eye-scan (01:18:00), super-modern cars that can be automatically locked and sent to the

Precrime department, modern weapons, or, most importantly, the monitoring of citizens’ future by Precogs. The surveillance in Minority Report is explicit, people know that they are monitored and must “obey” the technology monitoring them. They endure these procedures because they believe it keeps their society safe, free from homicide.

Spielberg’s adaptation is a mixture of corporate, bureaucratical and philosophical dystopia, because Precrime itself is a corporate, not to mention widespread corporations such as Bulgari, Apple, Pepsi, Guinness, Burger King, Lego and many more, appearing throughout the film, and most visible in the scene of Agatha’s and Anderton’s escape

(01:45:00).

The character of John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is very different from the protagonist of Dick’s short story. In the film, he is not a founder of the Precrime system, although he is its chief. Anderton joined the experiment of Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), the co- founder of Precrime and its director, after the loss of his, Anderton’s, son Sean. This loss also led to Anderton’s divorce with his wife, Lara (Kathryn Morris). This is one of the central motifs of the film and also an example of the disrupted concept of family, which the short story lacks. Fueled by the family tragedy, Anderton hunts all the future murderers (the film

Precogs only see murders, not all the future crimes) with a team of special agents. Unlike the

39 protagonist of Dick’s short story, Anderton, after being set up not by Danny Witwer (Colin

Farrell), but Lamar Burgess, realizes that the system is wrong and chooses not to preserve it

– therefore, he starts to rebel against the system and beats it with help of Agatha, the most talented of the Precogs, and his ex-wife Lara. This is a happy ending that seldom occurs in dystopian fiction.

Another feature of Spielberg’s Anderton that Dick’s Anderton lacks is the compassion towards Precogs – but this twist in Anderton’s perception comes only after he meets Dr. Hineman (Lois Smith), the scientist who founded Precrime together with Lamar

Burgess. Precogs in the film are descendants of mothers addicted to neuroin (the drug which

Anderton also uses to overcome his trauma from the family tragedy) and, unlike Dick’s disabled “mutants”, they are humanized (Vest 123). The three unique Precogs, imprisoned in the Chamber/Temple at the Precrime department, dream about future murders of all people – they are male twins (possibly a reference to Philip K. Dick and his deceased twin

Jane), Arthur and Dashiell, and a female, Agatha (played by Samantha Morton), who is the most talented of the three – and also the only one who can produce minority reports, which exist due to alternate realities and can disprove the future murders (minority reports are all destroyed by Burgess so that the system can be preserved).

Unlike Dick’s “monkeys”, these Precogs are highly praised by society – they even have their sculpture in front of the Precrime department. Unfortunately, they are sacrificed for the well-being of the society just like the “monkeys” in the short story or Bob Arctor in

A Scanner Darkly. The Precogs’ fate, however, changes when Anderton kidnaps Agatha to help him when he is accused of Leo Crow’s murder (Anderton has never heard of Leo Crow, just like Dick’s Anderton never heard of Leopold Kaplan). Agatha is, as film critic Chris

Chang observes, “a being with a sixth sense who has lived her entire life without the other five” (Chang 45) – therefore, she is absolutely overwhelmed by the experience of seeing, touching, smelling the present world after being freed from the Chamber. The main contrast

40 between the short-story and film Precogs is that at the end of the film, Arthur, Dashiell and

Agatha are freed and sent to “live out their lives in peace” (02:16:55) after the fall of Precrime system, whereas Donna, Jerry and Mike in Dick’s short story remain imprisoned, because

Precrime won over the Army and preserved.

The typical dystopian hidden antagonist here is Lamar Burgess, who acts like

Anderton’s best friend. Burgess conspires against Anderton so that the latter would not be able to find out about Burgess’ murder of Agatha’s mother, Anne Lively. For the first half of the film, Danny Witwer, a Department of Justice agent, is considered the main enemy of

Anderton, but he is eventually murdered by Burgess upon revealing curiosity in Agatha’s vision which could prove Anderton’s innocence and thus discredit Precrime system

(01:53:38). But due to Burgess’s several mistakes, his secret is publicly revealed, and he chooses to kill himself instead of killing Anderton, which would make the system persist. His suicide then leads to the shut-down of Precrime. This is the exact opposite of what happens in the short story, where the hidden antagonist Kaplan gets killed by John Anderton, which ensures the preservation of Precrime.

The mainstream society is again depicted as an obedient group of people who are kept in an illusion of safety provided by Precrime. Because these people have not seen any murder in six years, they are absolutely appalled when they see the supposed murder of Leo

Crow (01:49:08). When spyders search for Anderton after his eye replacement operation, camera shows various situations in which people are eye-scanned and how they react: a mother with two children who fear spyders, a pair during an intercourse where a man complains against the practice, or a married couple during a fight who let spyders scan their eyes and then continue fighting as if nothing special had happened. These people comply with the system not only because they believe that Precrime protects them, but also out of fear of being punished for disobedience – this shows the oppressive side of Precrime and proves its dystopian nature.

These people are also portrayed as consumers surrounded by stores, corporates, advertisement and media – all of the listed representatives of consumerism are customized to suit each individual, for example when they come to a store, a virtual saleswoman asks whether the previously bought products “work[ed] out” for them (01:28:49). It is a reference to Philip K Dick’s continual critique of corporate capitalism, which is present in A Scanner

Darkly and many other of his texts as well.

The happy ending of the film triggered a debate about the possibility that the fall of

Precrime and all its consequences, such as Precogs’ release and Lara’s pregnancy, were just

Anderton’s dreams after his imprisonment in the Hall of Containment (Vest 135) – a futuristic prison for the potential criminals, where Anderton ends up after his arrest for the supposed murders of Leo Crow and Danny Witwer. This possibility leads to one of the most common features of Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre again, because the motif of alternate futures and delusions is frequent in his texts, including “Minority Report”. Vest argues, though, that

Anderton would probably rather dream about a “sunnier” future alongside his lost son Sean

(136). However, there is no definite answer to the question of the film’s ending – it depends on the interpretation of the viewer.

Conclusion

The present thesis aimed to find out how the relationship between the individual and a dystopian society functions in four different works of dystopian fiction, represented by two texts of Philip K. Dick and their two film adaptations. Also, Philip K. Dick’s life and the basics of the theory of adaptation were outlined in subchapters 2.1 and 3.1. These subchapters, however, served as a key to understand some of the features of the analyzed works, rather than as main topics of the present thesis. For example, the subchapter 3.1

“From the Page to the Screen: The Basics of Film Adaptation” helps the reader to understand that an adaptation is contemporarily considered equally important as its source work – the adaptation is thus “second without being secondary” (Hutcheon 9). Also, both analyses of film adaptations in the present thesis use terminology of Desmond and Hawkes to describe the faithfulness of each adaptation to its source text.

All four analyses in the present thesis focused mainly on characters and the environment surrounding them. The character analysis showed how the relationship between the individual (especially the protagonist) and a dystopian society works. The first chapter of this thesis provided an outline of the main themes and features that usually appear in dystopian fiction. The most important of these features were used as a basis for all present analyses: surveillance of citizens provided by a ruling system, a concept of disrupted family, a position of a protagonist (who is usually a member of a counterculture), an obedient mainstream society (which is in an opposition to counterculture), and a concept of a hidden antagonist.

All four analyses provided in the present thesis proved that the surveillance of the citizens is a frequent and very important phenomenon in dystopian fiction. In both A Scanner

Darkly (1977) and its 2006 film adaptation, the surveillance is provided mainly by undercover federal agents using modern technology as a means of monitoring people. This technology is, however, on a somewhat higher level in the film than it is in the novel. A very special

43 means of the surveillance in both “Minority Report” (1956) and its 2002 film adaptation are

Precogs, who can see the future crimes (only homicides in the film) so that the supposed

“would-be criminals” can be imprisoned before they commit any crime. Moreover, the technology used for monitoring citizens in Minority Report (2002) is on the highest level of all four works. This kind of oppressive surveillance, which feels unnatural and uncomfortable, as it is discussed in the first chapter, is an actual critique of the monitoring of the citizens by police, government and even corporations in the real world, both in Dick’s past and today as mentioned in the introduction.

A concept of a disrupted family appears in all analyzed works except for “Minority

Report” (1956). In both A Scanner Darkly novel and film, the protagonist leaves his family to gain a more adventurous life. This is a direct reference to Dick’s life, as argued in subchapter

2.1. In Minority Report (2002), a disrupted family caused by a tragedy is one of the main motifs of the film, as well as the fuel of the protagonist for his hunt of supposed criminals.

A position of a protagonist interestingly varies in the four analyzed works. In

“Minority Report” (1956), the protagonist is the head and the founder of the oppressive system, who does not hesitate to kill an innocent person to preserve the system, which is corrupt. Therefore, this protagonist is not a member of a counterculture (which is here represented by the opposing system of the Army), unlike Bob Arctor in both A Scanner

Darkly novel and the film, who is a drug addict, and John Anderton in Minority Report (2002), who, alongside with his wife and one of the Precogs, fights the corrupt Precrime system.

Whilst Bob/Fred is unable to fight the system and becomes its puppet at the end of both the novel and the film, Anderton in Minority Report successfully fights the corrupt system he once believed in and beats it. Thanks to this variety of different types of protagonists, the audience gets a complex picture of the position of these individuals within a dystopian society.

Interesting results were also achieved by the research of mainstream societies within the four analyzed works. The mainstream society in A Scanner Darkly (1977) is in the opposition to the counterculture of drug addicts. These two layers of society cannot bear each other – the protagonist, for example, harshly criticizes the mainstream population. This feature is almost entirely omitted in the film adaptation. The mainstream society is in both

“Minority Report” (1956) and its film adaptation depicted as an obedient crowd being kept in the illusion of safety. Moreover, the mainstream society is portrayed as a herd of consumers, which is a direct critique of corporative capitalism and consumerism in America

– a frequent feature in Philip K. Dick’s texts.

Another feature of dystopian fiction which appears in all four analyzed works is a concept of a hidden antagonist. Donna Hawthorne, who acts like the protagonist’s girlfriend in A Scanner Darkly novel and its adaptation, reveals herself as a federal agent responsible for

Bob/Fred’s disintegration of mind due to the drug abuse at the end of both stories. On top of that, Donna reveals herself as Hank, an undercover agent in charge of Fred, in the film adaptation. A concept of hidden antagonist is present in “Minority Report” (1956), too, represented by Leopold Kaplan, the head of the Army. The hidden antagonist of Minority

Report (2002) is Lamar Burgess, a co-founder of Precrime system, who wishes to preserve it and does not hesitate to kill people and conspire against the protagonist to achieve his goal.

Thanks to these results of the four analyses, I believe that the aim of the thesis, which was to find out how the relationship between the individual and a dystopian society works, was met. The reason for choosing such a topic is the importance of realization that all the features of dystopian fiction are actually just somewhat exaggerated features of our own, real society, which is hereby criticized by the authors of works of dystopian fiction. In other words, dystopias only reflect the real problems of the real world, and their main task is to point out these problems. As already mentioned in the introduction part of the present thesis, surveillance of the citizens is not only the concern of the past but one of the biggest concerns

45 of the present and the future, too. To conclude, dystopias are in fact somewhat exaggerated predictions of the possible future. We can learn a lesson from dystopian fiction, just as we can learn a lesson from our history, i.e., we can learn from our mistakes before we actually do them.

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Summary

The present thesis analyzes four different works of dystopian fiction – A Scanner

Darkly (1977) and "Minority Report" (1956), written by Philip K. Dick, and their two film adaptations, A Scanner Darkly (2006), directed by Richard Linklater, and Minority Report

(2002), directed by Steven Spielberg. Each analysis focuses on the relationship between the individual and a given dystopian society. This is achieved mainly by analyses of characters and the environments they inhabit. The present thesis also provides an explanation of references to the life and work of Philip K. Dick present in both original texts and their film adaptations. For a better understanding of the two film adaptations’ analyses, the thesis offers an introduction to the theory of adaptation as well.

Resumé

Cílem této bakalářské práce je komparativní analýza čtyř dystopických děl: románu

Temný obraz a povídky Minority Report amerického spisovatele science fiction Philipa K.

Dicka a adaptací těchto textů, filmů Temný obraz režiséra Richarda Linklatera a Minority

Report režiséra Stevena Spielberga. Cílem těchto analýz je zjistit a popsat, jak v daných dílech funguje vztah jedince a dané dystopické společnosti, čehož je dosaženo zejména analýzou postav a prostředí, ve kterém se pohybují. Práce také vysvětluje odkazy k životu a dílu Philipa

K Dicka, autora dvou původních textů, ve všech čtyřech analyzovaných dílech. V neposlední

řadě práce nabízí úvod do teorie adaptace pro lepší pochopení analýz dvou filmových adaptací.