Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: Ubik, KW Jeter Blade Runner & Formations of the Unconscious pontos fathom podcast EP09
welcome back everyone to pontos fathom press this is our pontos fathom podcast episode 9 continuing our month-long exploration of the exegesis of philip k dick front and center this week we're going to talk about the exegesis as it applies to some of dick's works like ubik and also kw jetters blade runner sequels he wrote blade runner two replica number of sequels of blade runner and also we'll talk we'll do a little bit of reading from android's electronic sheep we'll talk about formations of the unconscious and we'll talk a little bit about freud's butcher's wife in the movies as well while we're at it yeah so this week we'll we'll talk about ubik and the blade runner sequel books and then next week we'll focus on dystopia in scanner darkly shout out to loud sound epicenter for was looking to do dystopian it's one of the topics we were going to talk about so we'll do a dystopia there and also shout out to dustin pickering he's also a publisher so thanks a lot guys for your support okay so let's jump right into the exegesis quick shout out to flowing the tears of the flesh android the curiously short occupancy over biden definitely dick inspired and william s burrows inspired a lot of death dwarf check those out in the links you can support us that way also growing the channel so your subscription shares likes subscribes all help and would love to get into the conversation with you in the comments so please join in and let's get into it so first of all exegesis in our podcast eight we kind of gave an overview of the 2374 event but maybe we'll just hear from dick himself with a quick reference out to kw here so i'm just reading here since in my six and a half years of working on my exegesis i have often said i have found it i don't want to do that one more time one in an endless series of failure it seems almost as if saying it causes it to permutate into some other explanation explanation but i do think that night i was on talking on the phone to kw and realized that in 374 i experienced medieval vertical which is to say gothic space medieval vertical space which is to say gothic and this meant that i had ontologized reality in terms of medieval use of space time and causality and hence valus was god or christ it is the same i think i had it that the vast volume of vertical space that i experienced in 374 as well as the transformations in time as if i were seeing down a time axis extending thousands of years meant that i had app reacted to the medieval worldview and within that theophany was logical are you possible so here's a quick shout out to kw quick shout out to that vertical time that medieval time you know the the vaulted cathedrals cants of the monks hilda hildegard von binyon kind of things i want to kind of go into that ubik space.
so let's talk a little bit about yubik first of all another shout out here where dick mentions ubik in the exegesis so you know as you know while he was writing the exegesis he was sort of looking back through his writings and and noticing very interesting things that he came up with there's another shout out to kw as well but he says i totally missed the point nature of how and how much the axe message was degraded as an input signal message what did i expect the word gobble here is the verbal degrading delineating exactly how the situation had deteriorated it was not just noise on the line but specific meaningful re-contouring and this condition called imperial uniformity by kwme is entropy which for the brain means a literal but localized death of a part of itself and so it took immediate steps to rectify the situation by breaking the work factor of the complex the bip the black iron prison just as it gave me a new life personality a la ubic it gave our world new life so this is just really interesting you know then he jumps to say it probably is the once man we knew as christ the once man we knew as christ but he but here he says this very interesting things he says he says this idea of the degraded input signal message the at the degraded input signal message now this just let's hold that in place so this idea of coming up with that degraded message right and let's kind of jump into ubik for a second here so by the way these fantastic copies of the collected novels of dick and i want to kind of go into so in chapter two of ubik in spoilers if you haven't read it but go and read it stop the video go read it then come back so in in ubik there's a scene where runcider is visiting his wife ella in cold pack okay so so you have here upright in her transparent casket cased in an effluvium of icy mist ello runs it or lay with her eyes shut her hands lifted permanently towards her impassive face it had been three years since he had seen ella and of course she had not changed she never would now at least not in the outward physical way but with each resurrection into active life into return of cerebral activity however short ella died somewhat the remaining time left to her pulse phased out and ebbed so the idea here is ella's in cold pack which is sort of this device that's in ubik it's a it's a way that you can suspend your dead loved ones or near dead loved ones and then you can wake them up spin them up and talk to them right so so here he says so he hadn't talked to her for three years and runsera had had this kind of packed with his wife that if there was ever a big moment he would he would go talk consult her at the cold pack right so says in the earphone words slow and uncertain forms circular thoughts of no importance importance how does it feel how it wondered how did it feel how did how did it feel to be in half-life he could never fathom it from what ella told him the basis of it the experience of it could really be transmitted gravity she told she had told him once it began not to affect you and you float more and more when half life is over she said i think you float out of the system out to the stars but she didn't know either and she only wondered and conjectured unhappy or felt if she felt it hi ella he said clumsily into the microphone oh her answer came in his ear and yet of course her face remained stable nothing showed he looked away hello glenn she said the sort of childish wonder what she hesitated how much time has passed a couple of years tell me what's going on oh christ he said everything's going to pieces the whole organization so he starts going into what their problems are and he starts telling her while she's in a cold pack some of these complications that he has and he's asking her some questions and he's kind of going on and on she says and this one part that's very strange because he is talking to her
about this you know this thing is like oh yeah it's been some time since i've seen you yeah you want to avoid any clears listen no we got problems you feel up to hearing about it i mean i don't want to over tax you or anything just say if you're too tired if there's something else you want to hear about or discuss it's so weird i think i've been dreaming all this time since you last talked to me is it really two years do you know glenn what i think i think that other people who are around me we seem to be progressively growing together a lot of my dreams aren't about me at all sometimes i'm a man sometimes i'm a little boy sometimes i'm an old fat woman with varicose veins i'm in a place i've never seen doing things that make no sense well like i said you're heading for a new womb to be borne out that smokey red light that's a bad room you don't want to go there that's humiliating
hey you said changing this of it let me tell you what's happening what maybe come out here and bother you so del melapone has dropped out of sight a moment of silence and left who or what is s dole nellipone there can't be such a thing she laughed the unique and familiar warmth of the laugh maybe you had forgotten i hadn't forgotten i would have forgotten estol melapon is it like a hobbit it's raymond hollis top telepath with at least one inertial sticking close to him ever since gigi ashworth first scouted him a year and a half ago we never lose melapong
uh so they're starting to talk about telepaths and and she says uh and he's going on and he's like as i can tell melapon is bad money sigh does it make you feel better unless he waited ella he said in silence nervously said hey hello there ella can you hear me is something wrong oh god he thought she's gone a pause and then the thoughts materialized in his right ear my name is jory not ella's thoughts a different elan more vital and yet clumsier without her deft subtlety get off the line runster said in a panic i was talking to my wife ella where did you come from i am jory the thoughts came and no one talks to me i'd like to visit with you a while mister if that's okay with you what's your name stammering run sitter said i want my wife mrs ella runsetter i paid to talk to you talk to her that's who i want to talk to not you i know mrs runciter the thought clanged in his ear much stronger now she talks to me but it isn't the same somebody like you talking to me somebody in the world mrs runciter is here where we are it doesn't count because she doesn't know any more than we do what year is it mister did they send that big ship to proxima i'm very interested in that maybe you can tell me and if you want i can tell miss runciter on later okay once runsetter popped the plug from his ears hardly down the earphone to the rest of the gadgetry he left the stall dust saturated office and roamed among the chilling caskets looking for the number moratorium employees swam up before him and then vanished as he turned on searching for the honor is something that mattered mr rutziter the the von vogel saying person said observing him as he floundered about can i assist you i've got something coming over the wire once that are panted panted halting instead of ella damn you guys in your shoddy business practices this shouldn't happen what does it mean he followed over the moratorium officer who had already started the directions of office 2a if i ran my business this if i ran my business this way did the event individual identify himself yeah he called himself jory frowning with the obvious worry that would be jory miller i believe he's located next to your wife in the bin but i can't but i can see it's ella after prolonged proximity van vogelsen explained there are occasionally a mutual osmosis a seffusion between the mentalities of half-lifers jory miller's cephalic activity is particularly good your wife says not that makes for a unfortunately one-way passage of protofazons can you correct it run to ask hoarsely he found himself still spent still panting and shaking get that thing out of my wife's mind and get her back that's your job bon vogel sang said in a stilted voice if it's condition persists your money will be returned to you who cares about the money it's not the money they had reached office 28 now run center unsteadily receded himself if you don't get this jury person off the line he half gas to have snarled i'll sue you i'll close down this place facing the casper van vogel saying press the audio outlet to his ear and briskly spoken to the microphone phase out joy that's a good boy glancing at munster said jury passed at 15. that's why he has so much vitality actually this has happened before jory has shown up several times where he shouldn't be one more in the microphone he said this is very unfair of you jory missed it mr runciter has come a long way to talk to his wife don't dim her signal joy it's not nice i know her signal is weak again he listens psalm and frog like and you remove the earth what did he say ronson said will they get out of there and let me talk to ella there's nothing jory can do think of 2am radio transmitters one close but limited to 500 watts of operating power then another far off but has 5 000 watts when night comes and night runs or says has come at least for elven maybe for himself as well so anyway that's just a quick that that bit of half-life politics and the way dick pushes us into that space right he pushes us into that strange space i really wanted to call that out there and i think it's you could you can see where in his exegesis later where he's looking at his own visions in that medieval vaulted space you know he takes us down first there's the concept of the sleeping dead who are still awake and then there's down another layer and then as ubik goes on obviously you know who's really in cold pack and all the things that happened with the time shifts in in in ubik are even more profound but i wanted to call out that one space i believe that there's a another interesting part here we talked about yubik he says one fascinating aspect of ubik is disclosed when the question is asked where did you where did i get the idea the origin of the idea in contrast to virtually all other novels is evident from the text of the novel itself although one must extrapolate from run sitter to whatever runcider represents and the state of coldpack to whatever state we are in in the novel information spontaneously intrudes into the world of the characters indicating that their world is not what they think it is in fact it indicates that their world is not even there at all some kind of world is there but not the one they are experiencing that time regression is put forth in the novel and that time regression figured in my 374 experience this still baffles me the principle underlying the devotion reversion of the objects along the four maxis in the novel is explained by the references to plato's theory of ideal forms and i guess that applies to our world or my own
uh if runciter is god and joe chip and the other inertials are analogs to all men then the regression regressed world is the ham and the sandwich and as in ubik must be abolished as in gnosticism this is accomplished in yubik by the revelation of the esoteric knowledge about their condition by a deity like entity living behind even runciter i.e yubik it is this knowledge not just information but gnosis revealed to them especially joe chip which makes them aware of their real condition so we see this resemblance between ubik and the gnostic cosmology right but we're talking if you rule out soviet experiments with choosy or candy or forget the eucharist telosophy the gnosis slipping through reality of the world as illusion concealing another but real world what an aggregate message those three novels sum up which is you talk about ubik stigmata here so again so this is kind of you know ubic as logos ubic as you know some something that's impressive now at the same time dick's medieval layering that he talks about this medieval layering that he senses this weird vaulted axis of time and ubik continues the axis it keeps dropping us like we just drop and drop and drop and drop and drop in ubik and then you realize when you get back to the top again he's pulled some gnostic cosmology with us inside of the zubic universe but we have this same kind of dynamic at play psychologically in in blade runner i mean in blade runner it's made it's made the you know it's made very apparent in the films but in do androids dream of electric sheep i just wanted to call out this quick mention of voigt kampf well hey before we go to vote conf let me do this let's talk about blade runner 2 the edge of human by kw jetter so blade runner 2 is a sequel not related to blade runner 2049 so that we we all know blade runner film and blade runner 2049 but jenner wrote blade runner 2 before those movies were made and kind of brought together a lot of what was cool about dick and it's almost an homage to dick it's fan service to fans of the movie and it's fan service to fans of do androids dream of electric sheep i think it's a great set of books i think k.w jeter is a great writer i first found out about kw jetter when i was going to boston university was living with santiago and bike bike messengering and i think he was re he had the paperback of dr adder by k.w jetter in his career bag so shout out to santiago in minneapolis and okay so let's jump into this one so yeah so kw general always very fascinating writer on his own has done the works on more locks really cool stuff so in again i i i want you guys to read these he has blade runner two and blade runner replica knight are the two that i've read but in blade runner two it starts out where we're following up with deckard so you know at the end of blade runner deckard escapes with rachel but here we have a scene right in the beginning of the book which is kind of like cold pack with deckard and rachel as opposed with run sitter and ella so you see uh
honey i'm home okay okay so so he's talking about the coffin silence except for the smaller creatures that creep beneath the mat of dead leaves and pine needles beneath his feet he goes up to the cabin honey i'm home it was a bad joke the silence inside you said it was the same why don't you put the gun to your head just as funny he pushed the plank door open and there there it was the black coffin okay but instead he slept alone except for his own hand pressed against the machine's cold metal as though he could feel through the layers of micro circuitry
the glaciated pulse of her heart hearing the sighing breathes that took hours to complete once nearly a year ago he pulled he once during the year ago he pulled the cabin's rickety wooden chair beside the coffin sat and watched the imperceptible motion of her breast rising with the microscopic pace of her oxygen intake holding himself as still as possible there that's better she was still sleeping and drifting as he left her she would be until she woke up not with a kiss but my new adjustment inside the coffins control panel let's see how you're doing yeah you're a riot all right
all righty murderers though leaning to the absolute darkness to find a kiss i'll take care of them for you with one fingertip he brought the led numbers to what he thought they should be and close the panel on the wall above the coffin he hung a calendar that had been left behind by the cabin's previous occupants whoever had they'd been when he and rachel had come to this place there hadn't even been spiders in the ancient webs along the ceiling the calendar was way out of date two decades old a faded hollow shot of the millennium celebratory riots in new york time new york's times square it didn't matter all he used it for was to mark off the days the interval that this still rational part of his head had ordained until the next time you'd wake her up at first it had been every month her long sleep broken for a full day 24 hours of conscious life time together real time everything else was waiting for him even more than her at least she could sleep through her dying he didn't have that luxury then it was every two months for 12 hours a decision they both made the grim economy of her death no he thought mine he stood back up the calendar's numbers black beneath the ecstasy scroll of the half charred scrap from the wood stove stood in neat graveyard rose on the curling pages two and a half weeks until the next time restless he walked outside the cabin again
a voice spoke so so what happens next is i'll give you the spoiler but there's while his rachel the replicant rachel is asleep in this cold pack coffin the real rachel the real niece of tyrell comes in and they end up having an affair together so so what i what i love about this though is i love how it sets us up in the
stitching together i mean it's a fan service for sure but it's also it stitches us into that world you know when dick's talking about that horizontal axis it's very easy for us to fall into the world where yubik is real right and and jeter borrows this and i think it's really fascinating you know and i want to talk about our our reactions to this a bit by by just reading this passage from freud about the butcher's wife okay so so again um
uh this is lacan's formations of the unconscious and he's talking about the dream of the butcher's beautiful wife okay it is at this point that freud introduces the text of the dream that bears another interpretation one that enters into the dialectic dialectic of identification let's keep on reading and i want to pursue to the end this very important point it's a short one which first clearly articulates by freud what hysterical information signifies he spells out its meaning i will leave out several lines as to not go on too long the process of identification identification he says is a little more complicated than the common picture of hysterical imitation it consists in the unconscious drawing of an inference as an example we'll make clear supposing a physician is treating a woman patient who is a subject to a particular kind of spasm and a hospital ward among a number of other patients he will show no surprise if he finds one morning that his particular kind of hysterical attack has found imitators but the psychial infection has occurred along some such lines as these as a rule patients now you have to be aware of the importance that such a remark carries i'm not saying something that the time at which it was made but for us still more about one another than the doctor does of them and after the doctor's visit is over they turn their attention to one another like rory in the cold pack with ella right and now the doppelganger of rachel right and also the jetters work talking with ubik right because this is a sort of sort of a mimesis going on there right a memetic pneumatic theory going on there let us imagine that this patient had her heart attack on a particular day
um and it goes on talking about the the butcher's wife let's just go to the butcher's wife section here so the butcher's wife
okay so here is the explanation so freud continues i admit that first sight it seems sensible and coherent but it looked like the reverse of wish fulfillment
in the dream there's a woman which i'll call the butcher's beautiful wife here is the dream freud says i wanted to give a supper party but i had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon i thought i would go out and buy something but remember then that it was sunday afternoon and all the shops would be shut next i tried to ring up some caterers but the telephone was out of order so i had to abandon my wish to give a supper party that's the text of the dream freud scrupulously notes the manner in which the text of the dream is verbalized and it's on the basis of this verbalization a kind of written text of the dream that the analysis of the dream always and only seems conceivable to him i answered of course so this is lacan talking about freud talking about the dream to his patient i answered of course that analysis was the only way of deciding on the meaning of the dream in fact the patient had contradicted him with this dream saying you're always saying to me that a dream is a fulfilled desire here i have the greatest difficulty fulfilling my desire the khan tells us freud continues i admitted that at first sight it seemed sensible and coherent when it looked like the reverse of a wish fulfillment but that material that the dream arise from as you know the instigation to a dream is always to be found in the events of the previous day analysis my patient's husband an honest and capable wholesale butcher had remarked to her the day before that he was going to stout and therefore intended to start a course of weight reduction he proposed to rise early do physical exercise keep to a strict diet and above all accept no more invitations to supper she laughingly added that her husband at the place where he regularly launched had made the acquaintance of a painter who had pressed him to be allowed to paint his portrait as he had never seen such expressive features her husband however had replied in his blunt manner that he was obliged but he was sure the painter would prefer a piece of a pretty young girl's behind to the hole of his face and she was very much in love with her husband now and she teased him a lot she begged him not to give away her caviar what did it mean she had wished for a long time that she could have a caviar sandwich every morning but had grudged the expense or rather she didn't grant herself the license to have this caviar sandwich of course her husband would have let her have it at once if she had asked him but on the contrary she had asked him not to give her any caviar so that she could go on teasing him about it right so the idea is she wants the caviar sandwich but she asks not to get it so that she can keep on desiring having it right right so you see where this is going right this explanation struck me as unconvincing inadequate reasons like this usually conceal unconvexed motives they remind me of burnham's hypnotized patients when one of those carries out a post-hypnotic suggestion is asked why he's asking this way instead of saying that he has no idea he feels compelled to invent some kind of obviously unsatisfactory reason
uh it's true with my patient in the caviar i saw that she was obliged to create an unfulfilled wish for herself in her actual life and the dream represented this renunciation as having been put effect
but why was it that she stood in need of an unfulfilled dream why does why does so freud gets to us to the point with the butcher's wife why did her dream reflect the wish of an unfulfilled wish right so the further parenthetical remarks by fred mcconne tells us the associations which she had so far produced had not been sufficient to interpret the dream i pressed her for some more and from short pause such as would correspond to the overcoming of her resistance she went on to tell me that the day before she visited a friend whom she confessed she felt jealous because her my patient's husband was constantly singing her praises fortunately this friend of hers was skinny and thin and her husband admires a plumper figure and i asked her why she had talked about her thin friend naturally she applied that of the ladies wish to grow a little stouter when you're going to ask for when are you going to ask for us to another meal you always feed one so well the meaning of the dream was now clear and i was able to say to the patient it's just as though that she made the suggestion you said to yourself a likely thing i'm going to come and eat in my house so that you may get stout and attract my husband even more i'd rather never give another supper party when the dream was saying to you that it was unable to give supper parties this was fulfilling your wish not to help your friend to grow plumper the fact that what people eat at parties makes them stout and had brought home to your husband's decision not to accept any more invitations to suffer in the interest of the plant to reduce his weight the salmon in the dream had not yet been accounted for how i asked did you arrive at the salmon that came to your dream oh she replied smoked salmon is my friend's favorite dish it happened to be acquainted with the lady in question i could confirm the fact that she grudges herself salmon no less than my patient grudges herself caviar so here you have this strange idea of lack okay the idea of lacanian lack here is what the desire is the desire is the lack that space that's opened up and what i think is fascinating not only in the exegesis but the way ubik now you notice in that psychological story we've got lacan telling us about we have got lakhan telling us about freud freud telling us about the butcher's wife who's telling us about a dream who then we get down into her unconscious right and it's this again back to dick it's access to the gothic medieval vaulted ceiling the layers that one sees and again when when when dick calls out to the gnostic logos right that's that gnostic logos that's the descending down and here we see psychoanalytically when we're exploring the unconscious we find that but at the same time what do we reach when we get to the unconscious well the scary thing is in ubik we found rory was sort of doing some cross chatter with ella right and then we have in a weirder manifestation jetters blade runner two we have the copy
in cold pack and then the real so who's the real and who's the copy right deckard it ends up having an affair with the real rachel who's in sarah i believe and i think that's right let me know in the comments if i got that wrong but you know he's in love with rachel but here's a copy of rachel who's alive and she just and she seduces him and it's sort of like that that weird flipping out of the layers kind of comes comes here so jetter's work is like this though it's it's very rich in giving us all those components that we love from the movies and the books and he does it in a very very fantastic way i mean i want to call out quickly here to
do androids dream of electronic sheep and this is where we hear quickly about we hear quickly about voigt comp so we have deckard here reflecting i was talking to bryant at the headquarters harry still wants the nexus 6 brain unit withdrawn from the market he felt no surprise since the initial release of its specifications and performance charts back in august of 91 most police agencies which dealt with escaped andes had been protesting the soviet police can't do any more than we can he said legally the manufacturers of the nexus 6 brain unit operated under colonial law their parent auto factory being on mars we better just accept the new unit as a fact of life so again we have the we have this cross into the mars aspect the off-world colonies but it says over 50 the t14 androids he recalled and made their way or one means or another to earth and had not been detected for a period of in some cases up to an entire year but then the voigt empathy test had been devised by the pavlov institute working in the soviet union and no t14 android insofar at least as was known had managed to pass that particular test
want to know what the russian police said i know that too her freckled orange face glowed i'll find out for brian deckard said and then it goes on to say a moment's reading vindicated miss marston's statement the nexus 6 did have two trillion constitute constituents plus a choice within a range of 10 million possible combinations of cerebral activity in 0.45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure could assume any one of the 14 basic reaction postures well no intelligence tests would trap an andy but then intelligence chests hadn't trapped an andy in years not since the primordial crude varieties of the 70s the nexus 6 android types record reflected surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intellect intelligence in other words androids equipped with a new nex66 brain unit had from a sort of rough pragmatic no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major but inferior segment of mankind more human than human right they've evolved for better or worse the servant had in some cases become more adroit than his master but new scales of achievement for example the void comp empathy had emerged as criteria by which to judge and android no matter how gifted as a pure intellectual capacity could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of mercurism and he experienced virtually everyone else including sub-normal chicken heads managed with no difficulty so basically just kind of talking about how voigt-kampf could route out the replicant mind okay so again just like in the yubic example and just like in freud pulling the truth out of the dream void comp is going in there and trying to you know even when the when the replicant is more human than human void comp somehow is able to do but what is voice really doing right what was it really doing is it in the unconscious back to the ubic space and back to the exegesis you know freud has that famous statement that the dreams are like the river archeron right so their dreams and you know a lot of psychology talks about surfacing the unconscious right so where the unconscious becomes this ripe field and you see in dick's exegesis itself that dick is having this except not with his unconscious but with the whole world it's like the whole world's come undone and when he looks back to his works like ubik he says this is what i was on about i was on about when the world for the run sitters employees you know who are actually in a cold pack it starts to disintegrate and then and time starts to reverse itself and you know and maybe in dick's exegesis he talks about when he starts to see or feel the vip right the black iron prison kind of thing i think it's a it's a it's a relevant to the same space as what the void conf is really doing so let's go into a jedi k.w jenner's other book replicate knight again another fantastic book i'd like to two better but this one is very bizarre it's very surreal it's almost dada-esque in that it pulls in more dick tropes into it there's they go to mars but the greatest trope of it is when they're actually filming a movie about blade runners so like so it's like a hollywood set in the blade runner universe okay where actors are playing deckard holden etc so we've got this great scene where the real david holden recovered from his shooting by leon in in in blade runner is on the movie set right so there's a movie set and they're filming a version of of blade runner right so and you have it quickly it's like
so dave holden he's out of the hospital he's been rebuilt
and he saw the buildings up ahead at least part of them the bottom sections of what were supposed to be la's canyon towers false fronted and propped into position by the cobble together framework behind them
uh not seeing again the city had left behind on earth or the views that it had in the partial disassembly it looked better this way thought hold and not fake at all that was the marvel of it as the people who were in these shadowy corporations and architects who built the outer hollywood station and constructed the la set inside it had caught some realer than real aspects of the city or at least a city that existed inside holden's mind which he barely became aware of until now i'd always thought about the other one was fake he realized now to see it this way two did two-dimensional so he's saying i always thought that the real city looked fake but seeing it this way the two-dimensional buildings with nothing behind their surfaces retrofitted ventilation ducts and wiring conduits with people in the streets finally exposed as actors and anonymous bit players with the monsoon rains shut off from above the rusting pipes leaking only a few scattered drops if only this were true it was an oddly comforting manifestation of his most paranoid dreamings okay so holden's on set when he got through past the doors which deckard advantage there's no sound of the footsteps holding could see the faint buzzing of the fluorescent panels lining the narrow corridors well he's got to be around here somewhere hold and look down the double row of frontless doorways a fine layer of dust had drifted in their sills the briefcase had its own version of them there's somebody coming in announced i could feel them but it's not the briefcase suddenly clammed up what are we doing here the so basically the briefcase is talking to kind of like in ubik again where the door is talking to him and he's trying to like he's joe chip trying to like argue with the door about the coin right he's going to put the coin in the door and he's out of money and he's trying to scam the door the door won't unlock for him so now we've got what are you doing here another voice not deckards warning from the briefcase had given holden the quarter second he needed to assemble the front he glanced over his shoulder and the figure standing in the just opened doorway behind him i got called over the set holding kept his voice modulated beats me what for the other man stepped forward appeared more closely okay the men took a slow knock they must be talking about the office setup the interview scene it's not on the list for today but what the hell the disregard is the disgusted shrug this whole shoot so screwed up he clamped the hand on holder's shoulder the guy was at least half a head taller and steered him up the hound down the hallway man i don't even know if they're trying to make a movie here his glance went down the briefcase dangling from holden's grip is that the is that supposed to be it the what you call it the vogue kafka or whatever voigt kampf it didn't even take a split second for him to respond sure lied holden you got it the other man was obviously operating on the assumption that holden was connected to the video production in some way one of the actors he wondered if there was some support that holden was as well as declared as in this thing is there a scene where holder as well as deckard is in this thing whatever he wasn't about to contradict the guy and get his cover blown that's what it is all right it doesn't look the way i thought it would the other man frowned at the briefcase in holland so holden's holding a real void comp machine in his briefcase and the the guy on the set says it doesn't look like what i thought it would the other man frowned at the briefcase and holden's hands but it'd be typical of them to tell the props people just to throw something together on the cheap he's buying it thought holden that was necessary now is to keep the guy bullshitted then find a way of giving in the slip and continuing the search for deckard this was the security that he'd been so worried about running into the briefcase's voice would have skipped all the dire forebodings in here the other man pushed open the hallway and hold and walk through this is the set you're down for they wouldn't need you out on the big one as his eyes adjusted to the dim space holden found himself standing in the middle of what looked like a small office with a couple of high back chairs facing each other across the table something fluttered above his head he looked up and saw the blades of a ceiling fan turning lazily in the room's air beyond the fan in the narrow plank which was fastened there was nothing but the studio's empty reaches started with gantries and walkways lights extinguish as blind eyes stay put the other man said i'll go get the rest of the crew maybe i should go a long holding left in the briefcase with both hands instead of just waiting here suddenly the irrational panic had sped up the biomech heart in his chest so holden's got a replacement harm he could feel his pulse bouncing off the briefcase's leather at flank forget that the other man's voice harsher i don't want you wandering off while we're trying to round up everybody just sit and relax just wait a minute when the other man man had left the briefcase spoke up way to go the voice was tenuous familiar sarcasm door is locked isn't it holden gave the knob a futile twist but didn't bother to get an answer hefting the briefcase onto the table he pulled back one of the chairs and lowered himself into it across from the tears they spelled out tyrell corporation a memory stirred uneasily in the darker space inside his head and from a long time ago back when he had a real flesh and blood heart ticking and lungs ticking and sighing under his best bone most likely the memory status stenciling his skull two chairs that said tyrell core and slowly resolving revolving ceiling fan there was smoke holden remembered cigarette smoke drifting blue hanging like some transparent snake skin in the air from the cigarette that had been given his own he had been smoking then he had given up time after he had given it up after the time he got new heart and lungs the doctors told him that his system had reached its limit
and there he was sitting from the table in front of him not a briefcase but an actual voigt count machine regulated lapd issue just like the big black guns that blade runners carried around with them the void comp had been opened and activated its batwing bellows compressing and expanding
so and it goes on right so what's great about this is so we've got a scene where holden is undercover kind of on the set of the blade runner movie and he's actually sitting back down in the place where he had been shot except now he doesn't have a real heart he's a fake heart you just gotta love kw jetters twisting like just kind of just twisting of the reality right just it's like it's definitely replicating replicating right it's replicating but it does it with such a twist and all of the it hits all the right notes right he he does it he does it on and on like each paragraph hits the note where he says l.a seemed fake but this weird off-world martian movie set of la with its fake you know like a western facades with the fake backdrop seemed more real to him and he's questioned about the void comp suitcase that he has and the the production employee kind of makes a comment like oh it looks like a cheap knockoff when it's actually the real one and then he sits down in the scene where leon would shoot him and and and so on and so on but you can kind of see again this is great stuff for jetter really in tune with those topics that dick was talking about with that medieval vaulted ceiling right and these i i guess this might be a good enough place to leave it but the idea here is you know you get to build that anxiety a bit you get to build that volume like they're building this volume and dip calls and again that medieval sense of gothic space which is space-time you know and it crosses from not only the unconscious to the dream space but from the narrative space it crosses authors and it crosses into the weird corners of paranoia where where exegesis talks a lot about you know right as in ubik we don't know what the world is right what's going on in cold pack like what kind of experience is cold pack and then as he as he jumps out of this and comes to the exegesis he says isn't that what's happening in the real world you know the vip right this is what the gnostics were on about and and i find that this turning of the problem this turning of the problem this vaulting the ceilings this finding ways that you can keep finding more space fractally pouring inside of it you know let's end up with that with the opening statement where dick was talking about he doesn't want to say i've got it and then find out that there's more well there's always more because it's fractal right and it's i think this is where surfacing it and experiencing it is one thing right flowing the flowing the tears of it is one thing like the flowing part of it is what's really happening right it's it's passing through the senses right the real rachel shows up while the replicant rachel is in cold pack right jetter writes about cold pack and there's cold pack jetter brings in mars as the off world and the martian aspects of dick right and then you know the the butcher's wife's caviar the wanting of black right it's almost as if the closer dick says the closer we get to naming it the further it is so the butcher's wife she doesn't want him to ever give her the caviar sandwich she wants the long for having it and i think that's maybe a good place to leave us with the exegesis where you know you can't it's a case of where you can't summarize something you have to just experience it maybe right so anyway i hope you enjoyed this week's episode please give a comment below and we will talk to you next week well we will continue our exegesis of philip k dick and we'll talk about a scanner darkly dystopia anxiety and the and this idea of history where dystopian history again kind of gets into that confusion space is it just anxiety about history is anxiety about the future really an anxiety about history hasn't been told to me the correct way and if that's the case then the future is uncertain and the past is uncertain and that kind of anxiety space is really what dystopia is about but it's also in a way how history is almost dystopian as well and there's a bit of hegel in there i think for next week so thanks a lot join the conversation in the comments below or on our patreon and thank you for making it this far we'll talk to you next week bye
Comments
Post a Comment