Strange worlds collide
Philip K Dick’s dystopian futures are no more far-fetched than the real-life trade in knock-off oil paintings, finds James Belfield.
Today’s telly-addicts are used to inhabiting strange worlds – we slip easily into Katniss’ Panem, wander the odd lands with Dr Who, recognise our Winterfells from our Westeroses, or take intergalactic voyages between the universes of Star Wars, Star Trek and Stargate.
We’ve become adept at recognising the signs of evil empires and downtrodden rebels; the moral markers that divide heroes from villains; and the brief riffs on reality that reveal how humanity is eternal but humans awfully ephemeral.
And, for much of this, we can thank sci-fi novelist Philip K Dick, who spent 30 years forming the template for alternative fictional realms.
Dick started writing in the Reds-underthe-beds US of the 1950s and took his interest in authoritarian regimes, faith and belief structures and what it means to be human as inspiration for 44 novels and 121 short stories. Not a bad tally for a career cut short – he died in 1983 from a stroke, aged just 53.
Many of those tales have been translated on to the screen: most famously in Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. And the latest dip into Dick’s imagination is Philip K Dick’s
Electric Dreams – 10 hour-long stories that let us explore his dark worlds while being enlightened by an all-star cast that includes Bryan Cranston, Steve Buscemi and Anna Paquin.
The first outing is The Hood Maker which stars mean, moody Richard Madden as a cop who finds himself partnered with a telepathic Holliday Grainger as he roots out rebellion in a low-tech, post-apocalyptic land.
Madden is as familiarly sexy in the dusty future as he was as the leatherclad Robb Stark in Game of Thrones and Grainger, helpfully, has the same red facial scarring as her other “teeps”. But, when the writers have only an hour, they rely a great deal on our instant recognition of Dick’s dystopia.
Screenwriter Matthew Graham is best known for Life on Mars and Ashes to
Ashes, from which he has resurrected 70s and 80s English stylings such as battered old E-type Jaguar cars, paper-strewn police offices and long leather coats to show that this land is our land – only after something terrible has knocked out all our First World tech.
The plot, too, plays on familiar fixations of privacy and security (an Anti Immunity Bill allowing telepaths to read the general population has particular resonance in our Five-Eyes, CCTV times) to help us jump into Dick’s dreamland.
While Electric Dreams uses the ordinary as a bridge to escapism,
China’s Van Goghs uses our familiarity with some of the world’s best-known paintings as a window into a seriously bizarre, yet all-too real world.
In what could easily be a Philip K Dick plot setting, the “art village” of Dafen in China is home to 10,000 artists and, in 2015, had a turnover of $65 million – thanks to the global trade in knock-off oil paintings. This doco follows Zhao Xiaoyong – who has spent 20 years making more than 90,000 copies of Vincent van Gogh paintings – as he organises his cramped, in-home, family-run painting production line and then realises his dream to travel to Europe to see the original works he’s spent so long imitating.
As well as the powerful juxtaposition of a man who comes to realise that he’s spent a lifetime earning less than the value of one of Van Gogh’s paintings, stood right next to an artwork about which he knows every brushstroke, the beauty of this programme is in how we focus more on Zhao and his family than the mucked-up world he inhabits.
His honesty is entrancing. From being dumbfounded when he sees the price tags on his own work and realises the markup going to his dealers, to getting drunk to the point of hurling into a hotel room bin after seeing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Amsterdam, to recounting his dream in which he tells Van Gogh “I almost enter your world now”, Zhou is every inch an ordinary hero in a strange, strange world.