"Foster, You Are Dead" is one of my favorite PKD short stories. Its story background is the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States under the suspicion of nuclear war, and the fear of nuclear bombs in that era gave birth to many great works. Either ironic or dark, such as "Dr. Strangelove", "Watchmen". This one is also one of them, and was adapted into a play by "Philip Dick's Electronic Dreams", the ninth episode "Safe and Sound". Compared with the electronic dream, the original is the United States under the nuclear crisis of the Cold War. People need to buy underground bunkers and hoard food and water to survive the possible nuclear winter. The drama version is in the near future, in the post-9/11 era of the United States, a high-tech totalitarian society, and TV is full of reports of terrorist attacks. People need bracelets to monitor their vital signs at all times. At the same time, it will also record your every move. Give up privacy for security. First of all, the drama version changes the little boy in the original work into an adolescent high school girl. She is noncommittal about the authenticity of the terrorist attack. What really makes her care is that her maverick mother will make her embarrassed in front of outsiders, and her sense of insecurity In the play, it is more portrayed as the love between men and women, self-esteem and the vanity of wanting to be accepted. The little boy in the original work has multiple reasons for lack of sense of security, the school classmates ridiculed his father's identity as an anti-war preparationist, the neighbors in the small town acquaintance society pointed at him, the impoverished family, and as a little boy Absolutely underdog. In addition, the core of their conflict has also changed from buying an underground bunker to a monitoring bracelet. Compared with the little boy's fear of death - this is an irrefutable reason for wanting a bunker, the bracelet is only for the heroine during class. of providing courseware, tools for homework and acceptance by her classmates. The main creator said in the postscript of the adaptation that the nuclear crisis in the 1950s and 1960s was too far away for modern people, so he changed the background of the story, but this also undoubtedly weakened the dramatic tension brought by the original work. The drama version is more superfluous to join a creative motif of PKD: doubt about identity self. It was bluntly implanted in the episode, and a few dialogue scenes were inserted at the end to decipher it, telling us who the villain is by name, the one to be hated. Instead of the invisible fear in the original work, the clerks who sell the bomb shelter, the neighbors in the protagonist town, and the head teacher of Foster, they are not really malicious, they are just like people who are involuntarily caught up in the times, in the cold In the face of the money, he is powerless to the tragic fate of the little boy Foster. The writers are very ambitious, wanting to express the well-known side of Dick: doubts about the authenticity of the world, conspiracy theories, reverse endings. But the original work is a rare story in PKD, and it directly shows the care and compassion for the weak and the underprivileged. thing. In the postscript, he wrote: "In this work, I just want to show how cruel people in power can be when it comes to human life, how they can focus on money, and don't care about the lives of ordinary people.
This is not the PKD who narrates his marital pains to readers after a drug addiction, but rather a radical left-like sympathizer expressing an indictment of consumerism that sells anxiety and creates unease, when it really is The mental state of people when they are pushed to the extreme and given us the cruel option of "buy or die". The time of writing this novel was 1953, the most prolific year of PKD’s career, and there was no dialogue and monologue in the later stages of his career such as “Let’s Flow, My Tears” and “Sacred Secret”, and the madness after taking psychotropic drugs. The editor of the episode has undoubtedly made an attempt to integrate the characteristics of each stage of PKD's creation. Perhaps it would be more intuitive to make a comparison. As an American Jew born during World War II, American writer Philip Ross, when he consulted historical materials as an adult, found that the Republican Party really seriously considered selecting Lin Bai, who pursued anti-Semitism, as the 1940 Presidential candidate, he shuddered and wrote a probable historical novel "Anti-American Conspiracy", which imagined the world after Lin Bai became president from the perspective of his own child at the time. The image of a fragile and restless little boy, I flash back to Foster's PKD's writing again and again, and the two are quite similar in purpose. This episode's adaptation half-turns the mind of the original, just as Roaring Metal's bad review of Blade Runner thirty-eight years ago said that Leslie made "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The despicable, cruel and cold androids in the film were changed into moving monologues in the rain, full of human existence, and the adaptation was beyond recognition, "The Second Death of Philip K. Dick". Thirty-eight years later, a short story by PKD full of empathy and simple narrative was adapted into a "Total Recall"-style story. The comparison between the two is worth pondering.
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