KultureDrome

My Love Is A Liquid

There is a third K. W. Jeter sequel to the movie Blade Runner. BR 4: Eye and Talon came out in 2001, but for some strange reason the book has, as yet, only been distributed in the UK. You have to work a little to scrounge a copy here in the States. Jeter and his friends were lucky enough to have hung out with Phil Dick during his VALIS / Exegesis period when he was really giving up on the distinction between fact and fiction, and started to inhabit his books as a character. The same went for many of the folks that just happened to be around him. Jeter was the inspiration for the Kevin character. Not surprisingly, Dick’s Kevin is every bit as morbid and saturnine, possessing the same black sense of humor, as the real Kevin. For Dick’s Kevin, God is “evil, dumb, and weak,” the universe created by it consisting of nothing but “misery and hostility.” Jeter had already written his first novel while at Cal State, Fullerton: Dr. Adder. The older writer championed the book as best he could, but they wouldn’t even publish it in France where, according to Dick, they published just about anything. It’s not clear why it wasn’t printed sooner. Dick predictably blamed the prudishness of US censors. In the not so distant future Los Angeles and Orange County are pitched for battle. The city is a cemetery of the living, a freak show of drug dealers, pimps and amputee hookers. Orange County is a repressive middle class world where everyone has air conditioning. They are lorded over by an evangelical-style figure that wants to destroy his northern neighbor at any cost, and wipe the blight of Rattown from the face of the planet once and for all time. It’s easy to read Jeter. The books are never didactic. He isn’t much of an explainer. Jeter is more of a describer. It’s the freaks against the pervs. He’s all about constructing a dynamic action-filled world that positively drips and oozes mood, usually menacing, desperate, and pregnant with danger. Dr. Adder had the added benefit of also taking on the subject of middle class taste. It seems the evangelical salvation peddlers from Orange County cannot satisfy their lust for amputee sex. At one point they show the protagonist, who has unwittingly been sucked into the whole mess, their great vision for the future of the southland. Jeter can’t help but take a playful swipe at Disneyland. Once L.A. has been raised to the ground, the New Agers plan to open a theme park of their own, their brainchild: Fuckland! Equipped with what else but the latest in robot amputee sex. Jeter even has a character based on Dick. KCID delivers his morose radio sermons to his fellow Rattowners between playing sentimental German ditties. Dick is not famous for promoting other writers. In the “Afterward” he wrote for Dr. Adder, finally published over a dozen years after it was written, Dick only mentioned three other contemporary books he could stomach: Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration; Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream; and Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. Being the anointed son has not always served Jeter well, especially considering how different the two are as writers. Since Dr. Adder came out in 1984, Jeter’s books have been a mixed bag, a work in progress. His hyper-detail oriented style and predilection for gothic imagery doesn’t lend itself equally well to every subject the way Dick’s brand of satire can skewer emblems of authority and power equally well no matter the period setting or anything else for that matter. It would be another dozen years after the Ridley Scott movie until the first two Blade Runner sequels came out. Whatever you think about the books, they clearly gave Jeter license to go back to his favorite stomping ground, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. He hit a bit of a stride. The excellent, if badly titled Noir, which came out a couple of years later, in 1998, is similarly set in the Deco necropolis suspended like a spidery memory in the black amber of Film Noir movies that ranks high as one of Jeter’s greatest inventions. Jeter is pretty prolific. Besides his own books he has also written a number of Star Wars paperbacks and he has even done a Star Trek adventure. It’s just that he never seems more turned on, more in his element, than when the capital of the known universe is LA. Jeter is at his best when the LAPD are inter-galactic cops, shooting first and asking questions later all across the Milky Way. One of the things about the Blade Runner sequels you notice right away is that they are definitely not the continuation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. They follow up the Scott movie starting exactly where the film ends. In the first one, The Edge of Human, Jeter seems committed to trying to tie up some of the loose ends between the book and the film, but it is hopeless. The important task is to re-animate the corpse of the original movie. There are some expected awkward twitches and spasms. But, all in all, Jeter manages to rev up the old story and get a little more mileage out of it. The main plot device is that the replicants are based on human originals. It’s an easy way to bring dead and dying characters back to life and confuse the difference between real and artificial even more so than it already is. The main legacy of the Scott movie is that it is all about confusing the issue. In Dick there is no mistaken identification. Robots are robots and people are people. They may look the same but they are not. Dick is an old-school humanist. There is right and wrong; and there is a genuine person trying to get out from under all that cultural coding. One of the most profound understandings of his generation is that our great intellectual and mechanical discoveries have driven men crazy. The unavoidable conclusion that the Nazi Death Factory was the result of a mental sickness produced by the advent of the Industrial Revolution is never too far from the kinds of thoughts Dick liked to entertain. And in that sense, at least, he is a pretty died-in-the-wool lefty. Scott and Jeter definitely are not, at least not by the same yardstick. They revel in the sick uncertainty of it all. I wonder what Jeter made of the story that Dave Hansen lost his Phil Dick robot? The bulletin appeared on the AFP newswire last February. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be easy to track the writer’s double down either. According to the robot’s makers, lifelike skin material makes the cyborg look real, the machine is programmed to mimic the author’s surly personality and everything he ever wrote was downloaded to his memory drive. So, to make matters more complicated -- not unlike your run of the mill, aging writer -- the Dick robot apparently loves to quote itself. One can only imagine the robot wandering around loose somewhere out there boring the shit out of some poor person at a bus stop or a park bench with never-ending, untiring references to itself. What makes the anecdote so good is that Dick could have written it himself. Scott and Jeter lack exactly the necessary sense of humor about the human condition to poke fun at themselves like that. For them the full irony of their deadly seriousness is that it ends up painting the hero and all the other characters in a dark comic style. The difference between Dick and Scott’s outlook could not be more clearly spelled out than in the Tyrell Corporation’s slogan. Their replicants, they advertise, are: “More human than human.” In Dick’s story what Rick Deckard is told by the Christlike Mercer in his religious epiphany is: “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.” For Jeter there is no personal identity worthy of desecration. We are nothing but disappointing copies of our prefered version of ourselves. The time has passed when we thought that progress was more than just illusion. Jeter’s point makes for its own brand of optimism. His Blade Runner sequels are all about the idea that we are no longer the basis of our own ideals. It is a little scary to consider that we are freed from the demands of past history. One is required to come to terms with the meaninglessness of it all and simply go on with life. Dick is curious about the bare minimum we need to feel human. In Jeter, feeling human is no longer what's important.