- Email: [email protected]
A mind trip for hipsters
Media Watch
Film A mind trip for hipsters A person who believes that his brain has been invaded by somebody else, that a foreign deity has touched him, and that he is simultaneously living a double life, one in the present and one in the times of Christ, is likely to be put on medication and locked away. Instead, Philip K Dick wrote science fiction and eventually became famous. For more than 30 years, Dick took advantage of his frail mental state to develop a string of novels and short stories that explored the limits of reality. Although he won several prizes and the critics’ admiration, he never had commercial success. It was not until Hollywood discovered him that he became a best-selling author. Sadly, this happened in 1982, shortly before he died. That year, his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was made into a movie called Blade Runner. The film quickly became a classic and his books were reprinted. This time, readers appreciated the unique perspective of a person with serious psychological problems who nevertheless managed to write extraordinary works of fiction. He believed he suffered schizophrenia and this fear permeated into some of his tales, but it was never corroborated. Still, most of the characteristic symptoms associated with the disease were present. He described frequent delusions and hallucinations, accompanied by certain social dysfunctions, although his communication skills seemed to be unaffected. His documented drug use probably exacerbated his psychological instability. Visions and recurrent dreams were common since early in his life and he learned to incorporate them in his books. Acute bouts of paranoia increased with age, to the point that he firmly believed that the government was conspiring against him. Once more, this became central in some of his stories. Dick was clearly interested in psychological illnesses and as a writer used his own experiences skillfully. Dick’s disease remained undiagnosed during his life. The latest of Dick’s works to be transferred to the big screen is A Scanner Darkly, by Texan writer and director Richard Linklater. Since the unexpected success of Blade Runner, movie producers have been mining the Dick corpus in search of potential screenplays. This proved difficult, given that his fantasies tend to be filled with long philosophical digressions and little action. Nevertheless, they found the way to turn them into blockbusters (Total Recall, Minority Report), decent B movies (Screamers, Impostor), and even serious disasters (Paycheck). A Scanner Darkly is an independent film that compellingly depicts the deterioration of a drug addict. It is clearly not the typical science-fiction summer movie. What distinguishes http://neurology.thelancet.com Vol 5 October 2006
A Scanner Darkly from all other adaptations is that the psychological component of the story remains the central theme, without added fight scenes to embellish the almost non-existent plot. The novel and the movie are set in the near future and describe an undercover cop, played by Keanu Reeves, who is trying to bring down a drug ring. He becomes addicted to the mysterious “substance D” and progressively confuses his roles as a false drug fiend and a real policeman. Hallucinations ensue and suspicions start to isolate him when he believes that everybody is plotting against him. It is easy to see parallels with Dick’s real-life experiences, which makes A Scanner Darkly a sort of a disguised autobiography of a schizophrenic. Doctors in the film explain the main character’s disease as an unlikely “competition between the left and right hemispheres of the brain”. Gratuitous psychobabble aside, the depiction of the mental collapse is quite convincing. An interesting story of conspiracies and deceit, however, gets lost in the delirious ramblings of the group of low-life bums, remarkably portrayed by Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane, and Winona Ryder. Experts in movies that deal with insanity, such as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) or director Terry Gilliam (Brazil), tried in vain to adapt this novel. Linklater eventually found the right way to do it. To achieve the distorted perspective of a mind under the influence of drugs, he decided to have the whole film rotoscoped. The technique, based on sketching on top of filmed images, has been around since the beginning of the 20th century and has appeared in Disney movies, music videos, and computer games. This is probably the first time that it is used to convey the emotions of a character who lives in an altered reality, and the effect is quite intriguing, although it can also be exhausting. In all, A Scanner Darkly is similar to other drug-centric disjointed movies based in famous books, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Naked Lunch. By staying close to the original, all of them provide an interesting insight on substance abuse and its effects on the human psyche, but tend to get entangled by an excess of meaningless dialogue. This movie is a good example of a faithful adaptation of a remarkable text that does not necessarily translate into a great film. Still, it certainly has interest for being an accurate portrayal of a breakdown, spiced here and there with some clever science-fiction themes. In the end, the slow pace of the movie is redeemed by a couple of ingenious twists that describe the exploitation of the
A Scanner Darkly Directed by Richard Linklater Warner Brothers, 2006, USA, 100 min
821
Media Watch
common man by government and corporations, another staple of Dick’s oeuvre. Linklater clearly deserves credit for adapting to the screen a difficult book. He certainly produced one of the most original and technically creative films of the year. Philip K Dick would have been proud of
this movie, but most people would probably enjoy the novel more.
Salvador Macip [email protected]
Book Teaching computers to talk pretty
Send in the Idiots, Or How We Grew to Understand the World Kamran Nazeer Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006 £12·99, 231 pages ISBN 1 58234 619 4
822
Kamran Nazeer is 28 years old. He has undergraduate degrees in both philosophy and law, and a doctorate from Cambridge University. He has lived in five different countries on three continents, and currently works as a policy adviser for the UK government. I suppose I should also mention that Kamran is autistic, although his former teacher Ira would cheerily disagree with me. But certainly there was a time when he was autistic, and in the early 1980s he attended a small New York school specialising in the treatment of such children. Send in the Idiots is the tragic-comic story of what happened when, 20 years later, Kamran caught up with some of his classmates. The author’s disorder is difficult to pin down. He uses idioms such as “through the mill”, nuanced adjectives such as “fiercely” and “cautiously”, and even claims to have “the worst whistle in the history of whistling”. “Autistic people” Kamran writes “find it difficult to develop intuition or empathy”. But that’s not him; he becomes angry at injustice and is very careful not to give offence. Perhaps it is safest to say that Kamran continues to exhibit some forms of autistic behaviour—pinching himself with a crocodile clip, for instance, whenever he begins to feel overwhelmed—but is towards the normal end of the scale. And this, after all, is what is so fascinating about autism; it is only a matter of degree that separates the child repeating the same phrase for hours on end from the colleague allowing the door to slam in your face. At college Craig, now a speechwriter in Washington DC, kept himself to himself. When he was drawn into conversation “he asked as many supplementary questions as he could think of: ‘it sounds as if you had a really bad cold, are you taking some vitamins to build up your system?’, ‘I don’t know the conditions for getting an extension of the deadline—would you like me to find out?’”. Here Send in the Idiots is particularly strong, quietly detailing the day-to-day existence of its subjects, the valiant and affecting manner in which they attempt to negotiate an endlessly puzzling world. Kamran explains the idea of “local coherence”, a systemising strategy by which people with autism assert control over one part of their lives—he used to insist that his toy cars were all perfectly lined up against the skirting board. Later he examines notions of genius and references
Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Monk is prepared to forgive Wittgenstein for everything. His book is even subtitled ‘The Duty of Genius’. And while I have no interest in doing so, surely an alternative story could be told.” But he has no interest in doing so, and feels duty bound to inform us. This common desire for order and precision is the one factor that unites those who appear in Send in the Idiots. André, a computer scientist, resorts to using puppets to express difficult thoughts and won’t tolerate being interrupted; whereas Russell, a motorcycle courier, only leaves for work when the second hand hits 3, 6, 9, or 12. Elizabeth is a tragic example of those beyond help. In 2002, her depression became too much for her and she took her own life. She even included nutrition supplements in the fatal cocktail of drugs. As around half of all autistic adults do, she lived with her parents, but despite their best efforts she was unable to manage routine daily tasks—such as catching a bus or gardening—although she was an exceptionally talented pianist. For Elizabeth the world was a truly terrifying place, all the more so after she developed epilepsy. Kamran’s interview with the grieving parents lays bare the havoc that autism can wreak on the family. The dazed couple recount the events that preceded their daughter’s death, the years of worry, and the terrible culmination. “Did you all get better?” Henry, Elizabeth’s father asks Kamran, still stunned by the desperate senselessness of it all, “no sir” replies the sympathetic author. With his straightforward prose style and quirky interludes, Kamran proves an amiable narrator. The exposition tends to be dryly accurate—our guide is a civil servant after all— but he explores some intriguing theories on the nature of autism and the history of the condition—could autism account for medieval ideas of changelings? Using the elegant analogy of computer programming (“teaching computers to talk pretty”), he also outlines the tortured relationship autistic children tend to have with language. Send in the Idiots is warm-hearted and constantly engaging, a remarkable and inspirational book.
Talha Burki [email protected]
http://neurology.thelancet.com Vol 5 October 2006
Film A mind trip for hipsters A person who believes that his brain has been invaded by somebody else, that a foreign deity has touched him, and that he is simultaneously living a double life, one in the present and one in the times of Christ, is likely to be put on medication and locked away. Instead, Philip K Dick wrote science fiction and eventually became famous. For more than 30 years, Dick took advantage of his frail mental state to develop a string of novels and short stories that explored the limits of reality. Although he won several prizes and the critics’ admiration, he never had commercial success. It was not until Hollywood discovered him that he became a best-selling author. Sadly, this happened in 1982, shortly before he died. That year, his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was made into a movie called Blade Runner. The film quickly became a classic and his books were reprinted. This time, readers appreciated the unique perspective of a person with serious psychological problems who nevertheless managed to write extraordinary works of fiction. He believed he suffered schizophrenia and this fear permeated into some of his tales, but it was never corroborated. Still, most of the characteristic symptoms associated with the disease were present. He described frequent delusions and hallucinations, accompanied by certain social dysfunctions, although his communication skills seemed to be unaffected. His documented drug use probably exacerbated his psychological instability. Visions and recurrent dreams were common since early in his life and he learned to incorporate them in his books. Acute bouts of paranoia increased with age, to the point that he firmly believed that the government was conspiring against him. Once more, this became central in some of his stories. Dick was clearly interested in psychological illnesses and as a writer used his own experiences skillfully. Dick’s disease remained undiagnosed during his life. The latest of Dick’s works to be transferred to the big screen is A Scanner Darkly, by Texan writer and director Richard Linklater. Since the unexpected success of Blade Runner, movie producers have been mining the Dick corpus in search of potential screenplays. This proved difficult, given that his fantasies tend to be filled with long philosophical digressions and little action. Nevertheless, they found the way to turn them into blockbusters (Total Recall, Minority Report), decent B movies (Screamers, Impostor), and even serious disasters (Paycheck). A Scanner Darkly is an independent film that compellingly depicts the deterioration of a drug addict. It is clearly not the typical science-fiction summer movie. What distinguishes http://neurology.thelancet.com Vol 5 October 2006
A Scanner Darkly from all other adaptations is that the psychological component of the story remains the central theme, without added fight scenes to embellish the almost non-existent plot. The novel and the movie are set in the near future and describe an undercover cop, played by Keanu Reeves, who is trying to bring down a drug ring. He becomes addicted to the mysterious “substance D” and progressively confuses his roles as a false drug fiend and a real policeman. Hallucinations ensue and suspicions start to isolate him when he believes that everybody is plotting against him. It is easy to see parallels with Dick’s real-life experiences, which makes A Scanner Darkly a sort of a disguised autobiography of a schizophrenic. Doctors in the film explain the main character’s disease as an unlikely “competition between the left and right hemispheres of the brain”. Gratuitous psychobabble aside, the depiction of the mental collapse is quite convincing. An interesting story of conspiracies and deceit, however, gets lost in the delirious ramblings of the group of low-life bums, remarkably portrayed by Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane, and Winona Ryder. Experts in movies that deal with insanity, such as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) or director Terry Gilliam (Brazil), tried in vain to adapt this novel. Linklater eventually found the right way to do it. To achieve the distorted perspective of a mind under the influence of drugs, he decided to have the whole film rotoscoped. The technique, based on sketching on top of filmed images, has been around since the beginning of the 20th century and has appeared in Disney movies, music videos, and computer games. This is probably the first time that it is used to convey the emotions of a character who lives in an altered reality, and the effect is quite intriguing, although it can also be exhausting. In all, A Scanner Darkly is similar to other drug-centric disjointed movies based in famous books, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Naked Lunch. By staying close to the original, all of them provide an interesting insight on substance abuse and its effects on the human psyche, but tend to get entangled by an excess of meaningless dialogue. This movie is a good example of a faithful adaptation of a remarkable text that does not necessarily translate into a great film. Still, it certainly has interest for being an accurate portrayal of a breakdown, spiced here and there with some clever science-fiction themes. In the end, the slow pace of the movie is redeemed by a couple of ingenious twists that describe the exploitation of the
A Scanner Darkly Directed by Richard Linklater Warner Brothers, 2006, USA, 100 min
821
Media Watch
common man by government and corporations, another staple of Dick’s oeuvre. Linklater clearly deserves credit for adapting to the screen a difficult book. He certainly produced one of the most original and technically creative films of the year. Philip K Dick would have been proud of
this movie, but most people would probably enjoy the novel more.
Salvador Macip [email protected]
Book Teaching computers to talk pretty
Send in the Idiots, Or How We Grew to Understand the World Kamran Nazeer Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006 £12·99, 231 pages ISBN 1 58234 619 4
822
Kamran Nazeer is 28 years old. He has undergraduate degrees in both philosophy and law, and a doctorate from Cambridge University. He has lived in five different countries on three continents, and currently works as a policy adviser for the UK government. I suppose I should also mention that Kamran is autistic, although his former teacher Ira would cheerily disagree with me. But certainly there was a time when he was autistic, and in the early 1980s he attended a small New York school specialising in the treatment of such children. Send in the Idiots is the tragic-comic story of what happened when, 20 years later, Kamran caught up with some of his classmates. The author’s disorder is difficult to pin down. He uses idioms such as “through the mill”, nuanced adjectives such as “fiercely” and “cautiously”, and even claims to have “the worst whistle in the history of whistling”. “Autistic people” Kamran writes “find it difficult to develop intuition or empathy”. But that’s not him; he becomes angry at injustice and is very careful not to give offence. Perhaps it is safest to say that Kamran continues to exhibit some forms of autistic behaviour—pinching himself with a crocodile clip, for instance, whenever he begins to feel overwhelmed—but is towards the normal end of the scale. And this, after all, is what is so fascinating about autism; it is only a matter of degree that separates the child repeating the same phrase for hours on end from the colleague allowing the door to slam in your face. At college Craig, now a speechwriter in Washington DC, kept himself to himself. When he was drawn into conversation “he asked as many supplementary questions as he could think of: ‘it sounds as if you had a really bad cold, are you taking some vitamins to build up your system?’, ‘I don’t know the conditions for getting an extension of the deadline—would you like me to find out?’”. Here Send in the Idiots is particularly strong, quietly detailing the day-to-day existence of its subjects, the valiant and affecting manner in which they attempt to negotiate an endlessly puzzling world. Kamran explains the idea of “local coherence”, a systemising strategy by which people with autism assert control over one part of their lives—he used to insist that his toy cars were all perfectly lined up against the skirting board. Later he examines notions of genius and references
Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Monk is prepared to forgive Wittgenstein for everything. His book is even subtitled ‘The Duty of Genius’. And while I have no interest in doing so, surely an alternative story could be told.” But he has no interest in doing so, and feels duty bound to inform us. This common desire for order and precision is the one factor that unites those who appear in Send in the Idiots. André, a computer scientist, resorts to using puppets to express difficult thoughts and won’t tolerate being interrupted; whereas Russell, a motorcycle courier, only leaves for work when the second hand hits 3, 6, 9, or 12. Elizabeth is a tragic example of those beyond help. In 2002, her depression became too much for her and she took her own life. She even included nutrition supplements in the fatal cocktail of drugs. As around half of all autistic adults do, she lived with her parents, but despite their best efforts she was unable to manage routine daily tasks—such as catching a bus or gardening—although she was an exceptionally talented pianist. For Elizabeth the world was a truly terrifying place, all the more so after she developed epilepsy. Kamran’s interview with the grieving parents lays bare the havoc that autism can wreak on the family. The dazed couple recount the events that preceded their daughter’s death, the years of worry, and the terrible culmination. “Did you all get better?” Henry, Elizabeth’s father asks Kamran, still stunned by the desperate senselessness of it all, “no sir” replies the sympathetic author. With his straightforward prose style and quirky interludes, Kamran proves an amiable narrator. The exposition tends to be dryly accurate—our guide is a civil servant after all— but he explores some intriguing theories on the nature of autism and the history of the condition—could autism account for medieval ideas of changelings? Using the elegant analogy of computer programming (“teaching computers to talk pretty”), he also outlines the tortured relationship autistic children tend to have with language. Send in the Idiots is warm-hearted and constantly engaging, a remarkable and inspirational book.
Talha Burki [email protected]
http://neurology.thelancet.com Vol 5 October 2006