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Customer Reviews of The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick

Fun Glimpse into World of P. K. Dick
This is a very fun and informative documentary for aficionados of Philip Kindred Dick whose writings directly inspired such science fiction film classics as Total Recall (based on the short story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale"), Minority Report (based on the story "Minority Report"), and Blade Runner (loosely based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"). Nonetheless, Dick made only a little bit of money near the end of his life time before he died of massive heart attack in his early fifties. He had been married several times, may have been abused as a child, and seemingly experienced benzedrine- and sodium pentothal-potentiated schizophrenia that was also a form of mysticism as well as an inducement to his multiply interpretable science fiction plots. On February 3, 1974 he had an extremely realistic 24-hour hallucination that he raced to explain throughout the remaining years of his life with such questionable concepts as alien contact and the stopping of time. (A Google search should reveal the 52-point Appendix to VALIS which gives an overview of this bizarre cosmology.) Thus, as the filmmakers correctly realized, Dick's life is theoretically of as much epistemological and science fiction interest as the plots he derived from it. This will disappoint you if you want to see a state-of-the art science fiction movie, but it is quite fascinating if you are just looking to get closer to the wellspring of Dick's incredible productivity/creativity. The documentary features interviews with individuals such as Paul Williams, the Rolling Stone journalist who published an interview with him (whose audio tapes have been cleverly used to dub a tasteful cartoon rendition of Dick speaking to us from beyond the grave at his typewriter) and Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illuminatus Trilogy and a cult figure in his own right (he is a trip). There are also cool extras on the DVD such as a "Dicktionary" of explanations of some of his overarching concepts'e.g., the "zebra"'an alien intelligence that disguises itself among ordinary objects, "kipple"'a kind of spatial counterpart to entropy manifesting (again, as ordinary objects, see his novel Ubik), VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System; considered by some his greatest novel), and the "black iron prison" (a Gnostic concept of Earth and our life here as a kind of spiritual holding tank).

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Good Introduction to the Subject
For those who are only familiar with Philip K. Dick's writings, this collage of interviews is a good introduction to the bizarre and controversial events of the author's later life. The film combines interview clips of Dick's friends with selections from tape recordings of PKD, shown with a cartoon figure of Phil miming the words.

For those who have read the Lawrence Sutin biography (Divine Invasions) or any of the extensive biographical material that has been published since Dick's death, there isn't much that's new in this film. However, Robert Anton Wilson (author of the Illuminati Trilogy), Ray Nelson (SF author, best known for the story on which "They Live" is based) and Paul Williams, former Rolling Stone writer and literary executor of Dick's estate, are especially fascinating to listen to, and the material is compelling even though it may be familiar.

For those interested in more details of Dick's life, the Lawrence Sutin biography is by far the best resource, but this film is an excellent place to start.

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Might have made a good undergrad film thesis project.
It's difficult to imagine for whom this film was intended. Focusing as it does exclusively on the last decade of Philip K. Dick's life, and with virtually no discussion of his fiction, it would be incomprehensible to a newcomer. But since it contains nothing that hasn't been widely known about PKD's life for many years, longtime fans will find most of it boring. But besides this, the entire film is hindered by amateurish production values. As many have already pointed out, the film is padded by repetetive, crude animations which serve no real purpose, and features an electronic soundtrack that sounds like it was lifted from a PBS special, circa 1985. While watching it, I finally lost all hope of improvement during the sequence when the librarian at California State University (where many of PKD's manuscripts are kept) painstakingly explains the procedures for checking out materials from Special Collections. (And then, ironically, not a single page of any of PKD's manuscripts is displayed in the film.) The people who are interviewed (with the exception of the librarian) all have something interesting to say, but due to the filmmakers' total lack of editing skills, the film is painfully slow to watch. And most of the audio clips of PKD himself speaking were from the cassette issued fifteen years earlier by the PKD Society and widely available. I actually felt the deleted scenes section of the DVD contained more interesting material than anything that was left in the film, such as Ray Nelson discussing PKD's friendship with Bishop Pike. One wonders what led the filmmakers to conclude that watching their little animation of PKD at a typewriter for the sixth time made for better cinema than this material. Spend your time wisely and read (or reread) one of PKD's books instead of watching this.