Tell Me What is You don't Like About Yourself?

[shadowkat]

This is the opening line of Nip/Tuck, where two attractive male plastic surgeons stare at a patient and state each episode: "Tell me what is it that you don't like about yourself?" Each beautiful or not so beautiful person comes in and finds something wrong with their body. Some external nip, some external tuck to be removed. The physical blemishes are merely metaphors for spiritual flaws the characters can't quite remove. And beauty it turns out may or may not be only skin deep. In a society that is increasingly obsessed with how we look, what material possessions we own, and seeks validation through others eyes - this show hits all marks.

This line could just as easily sum up Philip K. Dick's amazingly trippy and wryly entertaining satire : The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Actually let's extend that line a bit, "what is it you don't like about your life right now that you want to change or you feel is missing?" "Tell me what is about your life you don't like - so you have to escape?" Much truer to the mark. Don't worry, Dick isn't preachy or didactic. You have to read a little between the lines to get any of this.

I owe dherblay from the ATPO board for the discovery of this gem. A book he keeps suggesting people read and they keep ignoring him. Now that I am reading it, I am absurdly amused no one has selected it for a melee or book club. OF all the books online discussion boards or fan-related boards pick? This baby should *really* be at the top of the list. Why? Would involve giving far too much of the book away.

The book in a nutshell takes place in the distant future, an overly sunny/hot utopia, where people escape their mundane existence by chewing an illegal drug called Can-D. What Can-D does is literally translate their spirtual essence or at least appear to translate it into a male and female doll on a fantasy layout - created from a popular tv show or movie several years back. Into this world of consumer products and designer drugs and desire to evolve into something better, comes the distant traveler Palmer Eldritch who has brought back with him an even trippier substance called Chew-Z. This substance promises a bit more than mere escapism - it promises eternal life, or better yet a means of finding enlightenment with a price.

Dick unnervingly satirizes our modern obsessions with technology, escapism, evolving, spiritual enlightenment, and consumerism. Yes, like most Dick books, he's not that great with the female characters - it's heavily male centric, but it does play around with some very interesting concepts as well as a few frightening ones. By no means a perfect book, there are a few flaws here and there. But to me at least, a thought-provoking, humorous, and oddly frightening one. Why frightening? Is it horror? No not really. What scares me, is that I can see humanity going down the hellish road Dick paves in his novel. Heck, some of us are doing it already. Of course this view could have a little something to do with the fact that the Republican National Convention is still going strong nearby. And my fear that Kerry won't defeat Bush in the Fall.

Comments

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

Dr. Smile (to name just one example from Stigmata) is one of my favorite of Dick's comic creations, and I think Dick's sense of humor goes a long way towards explaining why I find his bleak and hopeless portrayals of the world so ultimately humane and touching.

Personally, I can't find Eldritch himself that scary anymore. There's this scene where he's talking to Meyerson (about when Meyerson decides that if he can be anything in the universe, he'd like to be a small flat stone by a creek) and I just get the impression that Eldritch is as trapped and unhappy in his role as the other characters. On the other hand, one of the Can-D escapist fantasies of my younger days involved my casting a movie of Stigmata, and I was torn for the role of Palmer between bringing out of retirement either Jimmy Stewart or Ronald Reagan, so I may have been looking for someone extremely terrifying.

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

Or the Ganymedan slime mold in Clans Of The Alphane Moon . . . or the animatronic Abe Lincoln in We Can Build You . . . or . . . he really made a habit of making his most humane characters automatons and aliens, didn't he?

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Personally, I can't find Eldritch himself that scary anymore. There's this scene where he's talking to Meyerson (about when Meyerson decides that if he can be anything in the universe, he'd like to be a small flat stone by a creek) and I just get the impression that Eldritch is as trapped and unhappy in his role as the other characters.

That was my impression as well. Palmer didn't scare me as much Leo actually does, ironically enough.
Or the Perky Pat Layouts. Hilarously funny when you think about them and frightening at the same time.

In some ways Palmer seemed a tragic character, or rather the entity that Palmer had become, someone who is trapped, horribly alone and can't get out and fears yet also craves release. Death. In other ways, he reminded me of Jasmine in ATS, who in retrospect makes me wonder if Whedon and Company had read this novel. There are a couple of themes Whedon explored with Jasmine that are strikingly similar to ones explored by Dick way back in 1964. The fact that these themes are still relevant, possibly even more relevant today...is a little unnerving.

Here's how Mayerson describes him (I love Mayerson):
"He stands with empty, open hands; he understands, he wants to help. He tries, but...it's just not that simple..." When I finished reading the novel, I loved the open-ended question Dick poses: is this God, or the Devil, or just an entity beyond our understanding and the fact we have to make it into one or the other or rather need the reassurance that one or both exist says as much about us as it? Again the need for external validation. Palmer needs it.
Everyone does. Even Mayerson at the end. Fascinating book. One of the best Sci-Fi novels I've ever read.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Isn't that also the book that has the great memo from Leo Bulero (sp?) at the beginning which is postdated from the events in the book?

Oh yes, it is. Good memory. Here:

I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" - From an interoffice audio-memo circulated to Pre-Fash level consultants at Perky Pat Layouts, Inc., dictated by Leo Bulero immediately on his return from Mars. (In short this little paragraph happens at least a few days after the book completes.)

LOL!

What scared me in the novel wasn't Palmer Eldritch per se, I tend to agree with D'H on Palmer, I felt sorry for him or it. What scared me - was the obsessions of the human characters on Terra. The
woman Emily and her husband who seek to evolve, only to have one evolve (somewhat grotesquely) and one to devolve. The Perky PAt Layouts. The obsession with Can-D. The vids. It reminded me too much of what I've seen online and in the world around me.
In some ways, I found Palmer to almost be a relief, albeit a frightening one. This is one book I'm not sure I could watch the movie version of - although I've heard rumors that the great Terry Gilliam has optioned it for one. Can see why. It has some of the same trippiness of the movie Brazil.

Curious - did Jasmine remind you a bit of Palmer?
After I finished the book today, I felt that in some respects the Jasmine story thread in S4 ATS mirrored Dick's novel. The idea that "he's" now a part of everyone.