I think making my wife see 'Next' on her birthday just because it's a PKD movie would make me the bad kind of Dick-head, so I'm planning to see the film Saturday night. In preparation I just finished reading Dick's short story, "The Golden Man" which is quite good. The story feels almost like an old episode of "The Twilight Zone." Out of town stranger poking around seemingly-idyllic small-town America, looking for "deeves" to "euth." This story is part of a long Golden-Age SF tradition in which the ultimate outsider, outcast, or freak is demonstrated to be superior to the humans pursuing him.
Ultimately, Baines, the small-town DCA agent discovers an eighteen-year-old genetic mutant with startling abilities has been seen at the old Johnson farm. Cris, the deeve in question, looks like a gold statue and can see about half an hour into the future. The story centers around the intolerance of the norms, who despite having created the deeves as the result of a nuclear war are determined to hunt down and kill any person showing even the slightest genetic abnormality.
Obviously the producers of the film have decided to take this project in a different direction. Stay tuned for a thorough post-mortem.
6 comments:
Hi! Do you remember the title of the Twilight Zone episode?
Thanks a lot!
Ludovico, I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear; I wasn't referring to a specific episode but rather the general feel of an episode. However, I am sure there were Twilight Zone episodes where a strange genetic freak is hidden away in small-town America. Can any Twilight Zone geeks out there name specific episodes?
guy on the cover looks just like clint eastwood!
"the golden man" struck me as a remarquable story if somehow paradoxical. it tells us that evolution will go away from thinking and language. cris neither thinks nor speaks, and is however superior to the control freaks (norms) that we also are.
by the way, the guy on the cover IS clint eastwood. its an art work based on an inversed pic published in LIFE.
sebastrl@yahoo.com
to illustrate my point on the advantage of not thinking and not being trapped in language (which is based on directional time), the following quote from "the golden man":
"He can look ahead. See what's coming. He can - prethink. Let's call it that. He can see into the future. Probably he doesn't perceive it as the future."
"No," Anita said thoughtfully. "It would seem like the present. He has a broader present. But his present lies ahead, not back. Our present is related to the past Only the past is certain, to us. To him, the future is certain. And he probably doesn't remember the past, any more than any animal remembers what happened."
sebastrl@yahoo.com
Is Clint Eastwood an "Andi?"
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