Dark City Directed by Alex Proyas

 Dark City

Directed by Alex Proyas

Alex Proyas was born on the 23rd of September 1963 in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Ethnically Greek, his father's family had lived in Egypt for generations, while his mother and her family were from Cyprus. He was raised in Australia because his family moved to Sydney when he was three years old (Well lucky he’s ethnically greek, because at that point in time, as I recall, Australia had a white’s only immigration policy.  Now they just lock the brown immigrants in offshore gulags.). When he was seventeen he started attending the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School and was soon directing music videos. He headed to Los Angeles where he worked on MTV music videos and TV commercials. In 1988, however, he released his first feature film Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, a small-scale science fiction film set in a post-apocalyptic Australia about a man fleeing north and his interactions with a pair of adult siblings. While the film received mixed reviews and it is still uncertain how much it earned at the box office due to an uneven release, the film stood out and impressed enough people that Mr. Proyas was given a shot to direct the 1994 film The Crow, a film about a young man resurrected to avenge the rape and murder of his fiancee. It's also known as the movie that killed Brandon Lee. Despite the tragedy or maybe because of it, the Crow was a critical and commercial success and gave Mr. Proyas enough leverage to create Dark City. After Dark City, he directed movies such as Garage Days, I Robot, Knowing, and... Gods of Egypt (Which was a whitewashed abomination.). So let's just focus on Dark City. Just a note, I'm gonna do my best to avoid spoilers but there are going to be some spoilers, go watch the film and then read this review or skip to the final paragraph to see my argument on why you should watch this movie and how it ties into our theme month.

Dark City is a mystery in more than one way. First, there is the mystery of our main character, John Murdoch, who wakes up with no memory of his past or who he is. John isn't given much time to grapple with that, however, as he finds the mutilated body of an unknown woman in the bedroom of the hostel apartment he wakes up in (Really awkward way to wake up with no memory…). He isn't given much time to grapple with that mystery either as he receives a phone call warning him that people are coming for him and he cannot afford to let himself be caught. Fleeing the scene (because what else can he do at this point?) John finds himself trying to work out from a series of clues and interactions with people around him just who he was, who was that woman, what was she doing in that room, who killed her, and why and who the hell is chasing him besides the police? Every answer he gets leads to bigger questions, especially as he tracks down the voice on the phone, the half-mad psychologist Dr. Daniel Schreber played amazingly by Kiefer Sunderland (Who manages half-insane creeper really well.). This leads John to ask questions like what is the nature of the city he is in, why is he being chased, why is it that no one can answer simple questions like how to get to the small nearby coastal village of Shell Beach? (Where is the sun?  Why don’t people have detailed episodic memory?) What's so important about Shell Beach anyways? As a fun fact, Dr. Daniel Schreber is named after a German Judge who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to an asylum.  He wrote about it in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which he wrote during and after his bouts of madness (That must be fascinating…). Also involved in this ever-widening mystery is Mr. Murdoch's estranged wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connolly) and the meticulous Police Inspector Bumstead, who takes over the police case when the last inspector was driven mad by the great implications of it. Emma's biggest role seems to be to force John to decide what is real and what isn't. Is her relationship with John real, even though all the events in it may have never happened? Are their feelings for one another real and does it matter if their relationship never happened?  Do those feelings exist independently of their memories? Bumstead's job in the narrative is to clearly show us the clues and put them together as well as show us the effect that these revelations have on a normal, honest man (Because he is one.  See, he might be a cop, but this is just the Nth time his memories have been reshaped and he never got a say in the matter so…). There's also a series of escalating confrontations with a group of bald, pale men all dressed in black, who seem determined to catch John and are willing to wreak utter havoc in their wake.  Havoc that no one else seems to notice. As John is led to questions about what his life actually is and the very nature of reality, he also becomes increasingly aware of the second more real reality underlying the city and not just his life but everyone's life, Emma's, Bumstead, everyone. While Dr. Schreber offers him answers, John will have to place a great deal of faith in a man who doesn't really inspire it but it might be John's only shot at not just finding answers but preserving his life, autonomy, and very humanity in the face of powers that are actively malicious to those very concepts and might be running everything.

So spoilers, much like Adjustment Tale, the city is being adjusted by a shadowy force that changes not just the layout of the city but in the very memories and lives of the people who live there (And they are super fucking creepy, and needs must be destroyed.  Not because they’re creepy, but because they treat human beings as playthings.{Seriously, the idea of simply asking humanity for help doesn’t even occur to them}). This is done to such a depth that most people don't even realize that they haven't seen actual sunlight in years nor do they realize that they all pass out at midnight without fail. Also, like our last three stories, the mystical elements are stripped away in favor of corporate or pseudo-scientific trappings. In Dark City, this means using exaggerated medical and industrial equipment to affect the actual changes (It amplifies the beings’ psychic abilities.). However, the creatures do have certain powers that while not supernatural are at least preternatural, that is to say, powers that are beyond our understanding but aren't presented as supernatural in nature.  Much like Ed, David, or Gabe, John is drawn into this by getting caught in the gears of the underlying, more real, reality. Unlike our past protagonists who whatever their social status were normal men, John is decidedly not normal as his mind holds the potential for the same abilities as the creatures who are dictating these changes on an unaware and helpless population. Additionally, his getting caught in the gears is no accident, but a play by Dr. Schreber who is outright enslaved by those same creatures. Dr. Schreber is forced to rewrite the minds of his fellow humans by these creatures and was forced to destroy his own memories of his past (Imagine erasing every aspect of yourself but your profession.  Literally Alienated from your life.  I feel like there is a marxist read of this film…{Do you even have a life in this situation?  Or do you just have an oversized role?  A part you play for an audience who has no idea if you’re even doing it well...} For a second I thought you were asking if I have a life.  The answer is no of course.  But then I realized that you were referring to people in this film.  The answer is the same.). So unlike our past stories where the beings doing the adjustment could make an argument of benevolence or indifference, in Dark City there no argument to had, the powers that be are malevolent and harmful to the average person (Even after people die!). The stakes here are also both grand and personal. For David and Gabe, their goals were intensely personal and somewhat small in scope, both revolved around keeping their free will which is by most measures incredibly important but the immediate reasons - David being able to maintain a relationship with the woman he loved and Gabe being able to decide his own fate - were rather small in effect. For John, the stakes are his very existence as well as his free will and the freedom of every person he knows from having their very lives rewritten on the whim of hidden masters. So the stakes are honestly grander here.

Dark City also features two Initiate's Journeys here for the price of one! The first being poor Dr. Schreber, forced to submit to what are basically powers of darkness but scheming to win his freedom and revenge for his own destroyed life and being forced to conduct atrocities on his fellow human beings. Dr. Schreber gives us an example of basically being kidnapped into that secret reality against your will, like the old stories of people taken by faeries or spirits or modern ones of alien abduction. Unlike Ed, whose submission was of his own will and given out of awe, Dr. Schreber's submission is enslavement and forced through brutality and punishment (Poor bastard…). Like in real life, forced submission or enslavement leads to resentment and covert resistance which in the story leads us to John. John's own journey is in a lot of ways the product of Dr. Schreber's actions. Having found a man with the gifts to destroy his enslavers, Dr. Schreber affects John's contact with the underlying reality of Dark City and covertly mentors and encourages John's resistance until such time that John is strong enough to destroy the beings that have tormented him. Meanwhile, because of his greater abilities, John can reach a better level of understanding of that underlying level of reality than Dr. Schreber and as such, takes over it. Which is a greater level of interaction than we've seen so far. Of course, we're left with the question of what should John do with his new power and understanding? The film doesn't answer these questions because it's more interested in answering the question of how we become who we are and if our memories are the only way to get there. The movie answers this through the relationship of Emma and John. Where John decides that it doesn't matter if his relationship with Emma never actually happened or that his memories are false. His feelings for Emma the person, whoever she happens to be, are real and he is going to pursue them. Everything else is left to the audience to decide. Which I found wise because the question of how much should John reveal to the average person and what he should do with his newfound power is honestly too big and complex to deal with in the five to ten minutes of the film close.

So my argument for reviewing Dark City, is that it shares much of the same themes as Adjustment Tale. That there is a second underlying reality that is more real than the day-to-day experience and thus can overwrite it. That there are powers who run this reality who can be resisted, reasoned, or bargained with and that our protagonist must make the decision of how he will relate to those powers and what his goals are. I'll admit there's also some shared ground with We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, with the malleability of memory and the question of whether your memories make you who you are as well, but I think Adjustment Team has more in common with Dark City. Now there are powerful differences in the nature of those powers and their goals between Dark City and Adjustment Tale and I am not saying that Dark City should be considered an adaptation of Adjustment Tale but rather an example of how the story elements and themes of Adjustment Tale have spread and influenced other stories. As a film, Dark City is a fantastic watch, well-acted by a strong cast, well written and visually interesting if incredibly dark (by which I am referring to light level here, the movie is set exclusively at night and most of the sets are very dimly lit. Watching in a dark room would be a bit of a mistake I think). I strongly encourage everyone to seek out the director's cut however because the theater release spoils the greater mystery in the first two minutes. That was an incredibly dumb idea and was forced on Mr. Proyas by the studios. If your story is a mystery that peels apart gradually, don't tell us the central layer upfront, let us take the journey with your characters. If it has to be explained, explain it at the end. Anyways I'm giving Dark City the Director's Cut an A. I hope you watch it.

I also really liked it.  I last saw this movie twenty years ago, and admittedly I was too young - and at that moment attempting (unsuccessfully) to mate - to appreciate it fully.  However, now that I am older and not addled by my limbic system, it was a fantastic film and I would recommend it to anyone who likes cerebral science fiction.  As such my grade is an A.

Thus ends 2021's Philip K Dick month, I hope you enjoyed it! Next week our ever-wise patrons have chosen GI Joe Vol VIII after that we'll likely be doing Conventions of War by Walter Jon Williams assuming there aren't any last-minute changes in the vote. If you like to have a vote on what we review, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for as little as a dollar a month! Until next week folks, stay safe and Keep Reading!

Twilight Zone: Gabe's Story Directed by Allan Kroker

 Twilight Zone: Gabe's Story

Directed by Allan Kroker

Rod Serling first created The Twilight Zone, and it first aired from 1959 to 1964. It was an anthology show, meaning that every episode had different characters and plots that were unconnected to one another (I really hope the readers know what an anthology is…{They do now!}). The show often used science fiction and fantasy elements as a cover to discuss, sometimes in rather threadbare metaphor, various social and political issues of the day. This stands as another reminder that science fiction and fantasy stories are often political in their intent and anyone who screams about getting politics out of science fiction or fantasy, is either pushing their own political agenda or isn't that well-read in the genre (Or for that matter, the concept of art.  Art is always trying to invoke thought or feeling, and this is often political thought or feeling.  Even when not addressing current events, speculative fiction almost always touches on our status or values as human beings, and that is inherently political.  Or, to put it another way:  Fuck off Chuds, Star Trek is Communist. {I don’t see TOS as communist, NextGen maybe(By NextGen yes)}  X-Men is about Civil Rights, and Star Wars is Anti-Fascist.). While it never achieved more than moderate ratings in its first run, its impact on popular culture and its critical success remain massive. Its impact is big enough that odds are you can recite the Twilight opening and you'll hear it in Rod's voice... Even if you've never actually seen a full episode of the Twilight Zone. This is why the series was revived no less than 3 times. The first revival ran from 1985 to 1989, the second ran for a single season, 2002 to 2003. The latest one premiered in April of 2019 and is still running as of this writing.

Gabe's Story was the 22nd episode of the second revival, which was narrated by actor Forest Whitaker. The episode clocked in at about 20 minutes and is about an electronics delivery and installation man named Gabe who can't catch a break. In fact, the story opens with him leaning back in a daze as he was just in a car accident (Poor guy.  Those suck.). It gets worse when he gets home and he finds out his wife hasn't paid the car insurance for three months, because of a lack of funds due to a new baby in the house (You’d think that such a thing would be talked about…{You’d think… I mean I take this as a sign that the trouble in the relationships isn’t all one way(Clearly)}). Gabe is dealing with this when he walks outside and sees a guy in a jumpsuit spraying his yard. This turns out to be a field agent of some mysterious company who runs everyone's lives, who Gabe shouldn't be able to see. Well, this goes into overdrive when Gabe's shifty buddy Luke talks him into letting Luke steal a bunch of electronics from the company truck. This swiftly goes bad as Gabe catches the same jumpsuited man letting air out of Luke's tires and forces him to take him to the company office. There he meets the writer of his life, Roxanne, who is horrified that he isn't being chased down a highway by the cops for theft right now. It's here that I think the episode's short run time acts against the story as Gabe and Roxanne argue here. Roxanne mentions that she's not in charge of the big decisions, and seems to be implying that Gabe made a lot of his own decisions with Roxanne just writing the consequences (Even so, you’ve got a private company writing his life and someone else writing the big decisions. {That’s just it, I’m not sure where they were going with this}). We don't get to delve into that however because there simply isn't time in the 20 minutes run time. Considering that each episode of the show was an hour-long with two different stories I kind of wondered if they might have done better with longer stories. But back to our story here, Gabe decides he's going to hijack his life come hell or high water and simply refuses to leave the office until he talks to someone in charge. At first, the middle manager he ends up with won't hear of it, citing company policy as holy writ. This does make me wonder who the customer is though? It certainly isn't Gabe after all! But Gabe doesn't give up, instead, he offers a bargain, let him take charge of his own life, and it'll reduce everyone's workload, he'll keep his mouth shut. He points out that Roxanne is writing 6000 daily lives, surely she has enough to do already! This certainly sways Roxanne, who is likely thinking that another couple hundred like Gabe and she could even get a coffee break before the end of the century! The manager agrees to try it out, after all, it might reduce his overhead and he can still take credit for anything Gabe does. So the episode closes with Gabe and Luke huddled at his kitchen table where Gabe points out with some hard work and elbow grease they can undercut his old boss by 30% and still turn a profit. I got to point out that between this and the bargaining, this makes Gabe the best capitalist we've had on the review series this year (Ugh.  Though he did steal the initial stock from his boss so whatever.  I’ll take what I can get.{Actually, I think they decided not to steal anything, not sure where they’re getting the start-up capital, maybe Luke has some savings?}). Gabe also manages to talk his wife into not leaving him, pointing out that she stuck with him through all the terrible crap so why not stick around and enjoy the good times to? Which is honestly a pretty good sell.

Speaking of sales, let me talk about another thing that links all of our reviews so far together. I've been bringing up the concept of the Initiate's Journey, which I admit is a phrase you likely won't find elsewhere, is a sorta rip on Joseph Campbell's monomyth theory. Joseph Campbell, a literary professor at Sarah Lawerence College known for his work on comparative mythology and religion helped popularize the idea that there was a single-story structure that could be found in every culture and set of mythologies. Some would go further and say that there's only one story structure in every myth but that's clearly going too far in my opinion. I should note that this is heavily debated and criticized so you shouldn't embrace the Hero's Journey or the Monomyth idea as the whole truth and nothing but the truth but as a possible tool for understanding common themes that pop up cross-culturally. For example, what I call the Initiate's Journey is the story of a person who purposely or accidentally comes into contact with another reality that underlies ours. This other reality can be argued to be more “real” than our own and is often a strange and scary place (Imagine what the Dresden Files would be like from the point of view of say… Butters.). Here the Initiate learns secret knowledge about the world or universe itself (in this case that our lives are mapped out and controlled by outside agencies) and must navigate their way home with this knowledge as well as survive contact with a profound power of this underlying reality. So far we've seen the three basic strategies that the Initiate can employ to get home intact. Ed in Adjustment Tale chose submission, which is usually done in a religious context, although not always. I will note that submission is not a popular modern option, so if you go with it, good luck (Because Fuck That Shit. {As my editor just proved}). David chose resistance and with the help of a mentor figure from that underlying reality stole power from it and used it to win concessions (Much Better.). Resistance usually works best if your Initiate has a mentor or some means of learning the rules of the other reality and can use those rules against the power they are fighting. Last is bargaining, which is what Gabe did. This is often used in classical examples of the Initiate's Journey and can be the focal point of shamanistic or magical traditions, although I should note this isn't universal. Bargaining often has a dark reputation in these stories in the modern-day, possibly due to the overtones of making a deal with the Devil (<Melody of Shaft> Who’s a foolish German man, deals with the devil went real bad?  Faust!  Yeah that’s right). We'll talk more about this next week when we look at Dark City but let's wrap this bad boy up, shall we?

So while as far as I can tell, no there's no admitted influence from Adjustment Team, I think a very clear line can be drawn back to it here. Gabe and Ed parallel each other pretty closely both being Americans working away at jobs until they come into contact with something they shouldn't and how it affects their lives. On top of that, there's the bureaucratic and technological flavoring of this other reality that strips away the traditional mystical elements that would be expected from such an underlying reality. The biggest difference is that Ed from Adjustment Team is rather happy with his life and living a fairly stable and secure one, while Gabe isn't and this frankly is more a sad reflection of the times the stories were created in. The average American is honestly less secure in his livelihood than he used to be and that shows up in our fiction (Capitalists have taken the American Dream from us, and rent it back through debt at interest rates that would make the Medici blush. They force us into precarity and make us compete for the crumbs of our own labor they cast down from their tables.). Interestingly enough though, Gabe is much more ambitious and driven than Ed, willing to strike out for his own well-being and bargain with higher powers for the chance to do so. So to grade Gabe's Story, well as an adaptation, it's actually better than Adjustment Bureau having a lot more in common with Adjustment Team in terms of protagonists and setting, even if the stakes and relationship with the other reality have been changed. That said there are some changes here, most noticeably in how the company is no longer benevolent but just straight out indifferent to humanity and individuals as a whole. Instead of adjusting reality to prevent WWIII for example, people's lives are written because... That's company policy (In much the same way as it is often policy to “write” your life by denying your health insurance claims reflexively to avoid payouts.). So as an adaptation I would give it a C-. As a stand-alone, it's not bad, Gabe makes for a fairly good everyman protagonist, if one who is prone to terrible decisions, and the story and plot are sound they just need more time to explore the implications and ideas presented. So I'm giving Gabe's Story a C as a stand-alone.

I hope you enjoyed this week's review if you did and would like to see more consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little as a dollar a month you get a vote on upcoming reviews, themes, and other ideas. At higher tiers you get other benefits like seeing my editor's comments in full, so you can appreciate the depth of my struggle here. Next week, we've been reviewing the movie Dark City and I'll make my case that this is a Film influenced by Mr. Dick whether the creators are fully aware of it or not. Until then, stay safe and as always Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Adjustment Bureau Directed by George Nolfi

 Adjustment Bureau

Directed by George Nolfi

George Nolfi both directed this movie and wrote the adaptation from Mr. Dick's work, so let's take a brief look at him first. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on June 10th, 1968. He moved to Illinois in childhood and attended Homewood-Flossmoor High School in the southern suburbs of Chicago. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University with a bachelor's in public policy and was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford University, where he started graduate work in philosophy but switched to political science and headed out to UCLA. He sold his first script Pathfinder, which as of yet has not been made into a movie, before completing his Ph.D. and left UCLA with a master's degree. Before directing Adjustment Bureau, he wrote Ocean's Twelve, the screenplays for Timeline (which was terrible), and The Sentinel. He was also one of the co-writers for the Bourne Ultimatum (which was good). He also directed Birth of the Dragon, a film about Bruce Lee's time in San Francisco, and The Banker, a film about the first two African American Bankers in the US. He is currently working on a horror film entitled XOXO. Adjustment Bureau was released in 2011, but before I get into it, as always a film or adaptation receives two grades: the first being how faithful/good of an adaptation it is, and the second being how well it stands on its own as a film.

The story of Adjustment Bureau is mainly the story of young politician David Norris, unlike Ed Fletcher, Norris isn't a regular guy or married. Instead, he's an up-and-coming Senate candidate for New York which right away makes him an elite member of society. The film opens with him doing interviews on the Daily Show with then-host John Stewart and being shown with various movers and shakers of the political world. We quickly get a sense that David is an Obama or AOC-like figure; he generates a lot of excitement especially among young voters who feel he is different and more authentic than regular politicians. It helps that David can point to a rough past, he's from a working-class neighborhood and had a troubled childhood, complete with tragedy. He lost his mother and brother at a young age and those losses have left deep marks on him. Interestingly enough, we learn later in the movie that it's memories of his Father that actually goad him forward into politics and the rarified heights of national figures, because to be honest how many Senators can you remember off the top of your head? Don't feel too bad if you can't remember more than a dozen or so, because not even being a Senator is enough to capture national attention.  It takes a rare combination of luck, charisma, and the right message to grab attention on that scale. Of course, this being a film, we can't have David just cruise to victory; so his first Senate run is brought down in screaming flames in a scandal that... Honestly in a post-Trump world just feels too damn innocent to be believable. These days I can't imagine a politician being brought down by the revelation that before he went into politics he mooned his friends at a college reunion (Honestly, I can’t really buy it in 2011.  2001 maybe.{I feel like in late 2001 we would have been a bit too distracted to be scandalized by a bare ass.}  Fair. The election would have been in 2000 anyway.). I strain to remember if this would have been believable in 2011 but it's like I'm gazing at a completely different age. I mean, even ignoring the orange elephant in the room, we have Prime Ministers and Governors who have survived black face scandals, open adulterers, and governors brazenly siccing the police on scientists for daring to report the facts. Compared to all that, should I really care about a bare ass even if the New York Post posts a double-page picture of it? (The answer is no.)

Well moving on, David is composing his concession speech as the election night collapses into a full-out rout when he meets Elise played by the always welcome Emily Blunt, who is hiding from security in the men's room because she crashed a wedding. They have an instant connection and in that chemistry-soaked moment, she inspires something in him before she runs off laughing seconds ahead of security. I'll say this for Elise she knows how to make an entrance! This leads to David giving a heartfelt, honest speech that is so damn good that it makes an icon out of a damn shoe (And it honestly was very good.).

As it turns out, this is all part of the plan. What isn't part of the plan is David running into Elise again on the bus on his way to a new job and getting her phone number. This is compounded by David walking into his buddy Charlie being “adjusted.” It's here that the curtain is peeled back and David is shown that humanity is being kept on a plan by shadowy figures that look like us but aren't us, blessed with abilities and technology that we can't fathom, working on behalf of the Chairmen (Read: Non-Denominational God {Could also be a goddess, one of them flat out says the Chairmen might be a lady} Point.  Change to Deity.). They tell David something he doesn't want to hear. He can't have Elise and they can't explain why. This right away tells us that they don't understand humans very well, most likely because they haven't had to; they’ve been able to nudge us through their technology and manipulate us through their strange powers for so long that they haven't really ever had to convince one of us of anything. Because if you want a human to want something? Tell them they can't have it. Then refuse to explain why making it feel unfair and arbitrary. At that point not only is it about getting what you want but sticking it to the man and his unfair rules. On top of all that, they do this to a guy who was raised a working-class American who has likely been told since he was knee-high to a house-pet that rebelling against unreasonable authority is the most virtuous and American act possible (Which is an attitude that I encourage.). So shockingly David rebels and thus we have our plot. (I’d have rebelled on principle too.  Even without the love of my life hanging in the balance, because fuck these people.  Thing is, they take credit for the plan’s good results, but not the bad results.  You don’t get to take credit for the enlightenment, and then not own Imperialism.)

David Norris, played by Matt Damon, is the driving force of this movie, everyone else is basically reacting to his choices, even Elise. Although in Elise's case that's because David has information she doesn't. The information he would share, except he's been bluntly told that our antagonist will burn out his brain and possibly hers if he tells. Thankfully Matt Damon is up to the task of being the main engine of this movie and Emily Blunt is up to the task of convincing us that she can match him. I feel like she doesn't get as much as she deserves in this movie, but what she does get she plays with gusto. Worth mentioning is the sheer physical effort she put in to learn dancing for this role, as Elise is supposed to be a professional ballerina. I can't claim to be an expert in dance but she convinced me that she could be a professional dancer and frankly, that's what a good actress is supposed to do. The chemistry between them is also pretty damn good and it's believable that there's an emotional investment between the characters. Playing a supporting role Anthony Mackie plays both antagonist and mentor to David, as his role is to actually explain the rules of the game he's playing and give David a fighting chance at victory. Mackie's character is an interesting one and I wish we had more of him as well.  He is someone who is increasingly disillusioned with the sheer cost of the plan even though he knows that the end goal is benevolent. However, considering that he played a hand in David's rough childhood, especially in the loss of his brother, he is finding himself in a position where he just can't accept the destruction and loss that the plan is built on. His decision to help David is both an act of penance and rebellion, as well as an act of protest from a person who has simply been pushed to damn far. There's an interesting story there.

The changes are interesting in and of themselves as the stakes are both bigger but intensely more personal. Where in Mr. Dick's story Ed's personal stake is to figure out what is going on and if he is going mad, the global stakes are the prevention of World War III. On the one thing, it's hard to get bigger than stopping WWIII from happening, but Ed's piece of that story is tiny and he doesn't really have much to do with it. David on the flip side is front and center, if he simply follows the plan, he's gonna become the most powerful man in the world. Instead, the stakes are personal: will David assert his free will and choose love, or obedience and power? By giving David a clear choice and the agency to make that choice, Adjustment Bureau becomes a much different and in a lot of ways a more interesting story. There is a clear conflict and agendas driving the plot as well as a win condition for our protagonists. Where in Adjustment Team, Ed is helpless in the face of his encounter with the profound forces that move a reality, David can assert his independence and push back for his own goals. That's honestly the more interesting story. The change from basically average guy Ed Fletcher to a member of the elite top of society David Norris is another change that serves to maintain a sense of there being actual stakes. If David was just some average guy, well he wouldn't be giving up much to chase after Elise, would he? By giving him something substantial to risk, however, David's choices have weight and impact. By choosing to be with Elise he could be giving up a chance to be President. Adjustment Bureau uses this to go deeper into the initiate's journey I mentioned in the last review, where Ed survives his brush with the profound, buying minor favor with submission. David resists and in his resistance wins secret knowledge from a hidden mentor who shows him how to navigate this hidden world to his goals. This is a riskier path than submission, but as David shows the bigger the risk often means the bigger the reward. There's also the change of introducing Elise and Mackie's characters as well, Elise takes on more of Ed's role here, in that she is pulled into this other world and has to adjust quickly and make a decision to submit or resist fast. Mackie's mentor archetype doesn't exist in Adjustment Team at all. This is in addition to the fact that the movie takes place in the 21 century and the story isn’t in the middle of the Cold War. So as an adaptation it shares very little outside the main concept that forces beyond our ken actively work to keep things moving according to plan.

So how am I going to grade this? As an adaptation it's frankly a D, having made incredibly dramatic changes and having pretty much nothing to do with the original story. That said, I liked Adjustment Bureau more than I liked Adjustment Team. It's an interesting spin on star-crossed romances and manages to create interesting, sympathetic characters struggling against both vast impersonal forces and frankly arbitrary and heavy-handed authorities for a chance to define their own lives and personal happiness. However, the sheer amount of focus on David means the other characters suffer. For example we don't get a sense of how Elise exists outside of David and we're told about what wears down Mackie's character, not shown. So while this is a good movie and one worth watching, I can't call it a great movie. So I'm giving it a B- as a stand-alone story.

Having not read the book, I cannot grade the adaptation.  However, having seen the film, I will give it a B+. I look at it like a first person narration in a lot of ways, just in a visual medium.  While we get the occasional cutaway to other characters, the primary focus is relentlessly from David’s point of view, and thus we wouldn’t necessarily get independent character development for the other parties.  We get the definite sense that Elise has a life outside of David’s existence, and she definitely has agency of her own.  However, we just don’t see that life, because she isn’t the viewpoint.  If it were a matter of the film being rushed or if she got short-shrift within the narrative style in question that would bring it down for me, but given the narrative format, it doesn’t.  

Hope you enjoyed this review.  If you did and you'd like to see more, for example, a version of the review with the editor's full comments on display and access to our first-hand impressions while we were watching the movie join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you'll also get a vote on what I review next month for as little as a dollar!  Next week we're heading into the Zone, the Twilight Zone for a look at Gabe's story and maybe I'll break down this Initiate's Journey thing I keep bringing up.  After that, we'll end February by looking at the film, Dark City.  Until then, stay safe and Keep Reading! 

Adjustment Team By Philip K Dick

 Adjustment Team

By Philip K Dick

Welcome to our 3rd annual month of Philip K Dick (The Third Month of Dick, if you will.   Unfortunately, it is not the sort of Dick that I prefer.{I remind everyone that I am not responsible for my editor}), a science fiction writer who has had so much of his work adapted to screen and television, that you've seen his work. You just don't know it yet. Every year our ever-wise patrons assemble and vote on which work we will bend the review to for February and I am pleased to announce that the Adjustment Team was a very narrow winner. Now, Adjustment Team was a short story published in 1954, so it's one of his first works to be published. First published in the September-October issue of the Orbit Science Fiction, a science fiction magazine that only published 5 issues (Mr. Dick's work appears in the 2nd to the last issue). It was reprinted just 4 years later in The Sands of Mars and Other Stories in 1958, and in collected works of Philip K Dick throughout the years; most recently in The Early Works of Philip K Dick, Volume One, The Variable Man & Other Stories in 2009. You can also buy an electronic copy of the story for your Kindle for about 99 cents or find a free copy through google if you look hard enough and are used to exercising more anarchist options for your entertainment (I do of course encourage the use of Anarchist options.). Adjustment Tale serves as a good entry point to various themes and hang-ups that would appear in future works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and We Can Remember It for you Wholesale, or Bladerunner and Total Recall to use the more popular names. Let me sum up the plot real quick so I can explain.

Ed Fletcher is a regular guy with a regular life. He works in an office that handles real estate as a salesman (If such a fate ever befalls me, I wish to die.{Hey! I’m technically a salesmen. Besides it can’t be worse than claims.} It’s not the selling.  It’s the real estate.{let people own a home bro}). His wife Ruth works for the government and together they afford a pretty good life with a house, picket fence, and a dog. Honestly, the brief look we get at his life is pretty good, his wife and he get along, he gets to have lazy mornings with a good breakfast and work a job he likes (There is something wrong with him.  Capitalism has addled his brain.{Just because someone likes their job doesn’t mean they’re addled.  I mean some people think you’re insane for loving jumping into swamps to play with bugs}  Yes, but I am objectively correct.). Unfortunately for him, he is about to have a brush with the profound, and that always changes things. Because the sector his office is in is up for ReAdjustment by the PowersThatBe. However, due to a slip up by the minions of the Almighty, Fletcher doesn't show up early to work but late. This means he walks right into reality being readjusted and as you can guess seeing the very fabric of the universe rewritten by men in white robes with strange machines that are unfathomable to the mortal mind is not a kind of relaxing experience (No!  I imagine not!). To be honest, the fact that he wandered around in a frozen grey surreal cityscape and everything and everyone he touched broke down into gray ashes that blew away on a non-existent wind likely didn't help. By the way, my gentle readers, a quick tip, if at your merest touch everyone falls apart? For Heaven's sake STOP TOUCHING PEOPLE! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?! (But what if they’re Bourgeois? {I said stop touching people, did I fucking stutter?}. Anyways, Ed however manages to give the slip to the henchmen of the eternal and escapes and goes running to the one person he thinks he can trust with this insane story. His wife, because if you can't trust her, why the hell did you marry her? (The same can be said for any spouse.  If you don’t trust them, don’t marry them.) So he meets her on her lunch break.

Ruth, to her credit, doesn't burst out into laughter or go running off to call someone to deal with the madman in front of her when Ed tells her what he saw. Instead, she patiently talks him into taking her back to the office where he saw behind the fabric of reality, being sure that he needs to confront it to get over it. She succeeds in this but this might not have been the wisest idea as after they arrive and she excuses herself to get back to her job. It's then that Ed notices that his office and his co-workers have all been subtly changed and rewritten somehow (Oh No.). Confronting his boss is the biggest shock of all as his boss has been restored to relative youthfulness (Wouldn’t people notice this, eventually?  I mean, they don’t rewrite everyone, so what happens when someone’s brother from across town visits for Christmas and notices his sibling is five years younger? {I assume that their memories are adjusted beforehand.  I mean we are talking about supernatural forces that can alter history, time and persons as needed.  I mean who would know?}). This causes him to break and run, and that's when he is taken up to meet the Person In Charge. He's pretty quick to lay things out, reality was adjusted. It was necessary that Ed's boss buy a certain plot of Canadian forest and start developing it. In doing so he'll find artifacts that are culturally and scientifically important. This will attract scientists and specialists from the west and the east and slow certain more nationalist researches down. These people will find they have a lot in common and strike up cross factional friendships. This will lead to greater cooperation and an easing of tension between the nations of the west and the east. Ed is sternly told that this is for his and countless billions' benefit across the world and if he interferes with the process nothing good will come of it. After he frantically agrees to keep his mouth shut he is sent back with a mission to convince his wife that his story was the result of a nervous breakdown or some sort of episode. Ruth however is extremely upset that he's been missing all afternoon and is very strangely convinced he's having an affair (That is a very small threshold for “suspected affair”, but this is likely Dick’s “wife” hangups coming to the fore again.{I’d encourage people to look at our bio of Mr. Dick in 2017, he has an… Interesting relationship with marriage in general}). She's distracted from this by a door to door salesman and we end the story with Ed giving devout thanks.

Here we can see Mr. Dick starting to grapple with his themes of our perception of reality not being the truth of it and there being an unseen layer, a truer one beneath it. As well as the idea that reality is the result of someone's active manipulations (Yer a Wizard, Harry.). We also see Mr. Dick edging into the idea of the fallibility of memory and how unreliable our own memories might be and how easily edited they are (In this, he is correct.  Our memories are stored… compressed, and have to be reconstructed with each remembrance.  Each remembrance changes them subtly.  For instance, white people literally do tend to think black people look alike - even though they don’t, clearly - because relative lack of exposure means they have fewer components of black people’s faces for use in memory reconstruction.   So black people tend to get misidentified in lineups and “fit the description” fairly frequently.  And that is before structural and personal racism even gets involved, which it frequently does.). We also see early hints of Mr. Dick's hostility towards wives here, with Ruth strangely turning hostile and flipping out on Ed when he returns. Another thing I find interesting is how Mr. Dick takes what would normally be mystical or occult elements of the story (reality being rewritten by the command of the Almighty) and papers over it with technological veneer and bureaucracy. There are no angels or otherworldly spirits, only put upon clerks, techs, and field agents. The world is divided into numbered sectors with dry bureaucratic efficiency. The change is done using machines and devices that at least look manufactured instead of conjured. This story could have easily worked as an Urban Fantasy but Mr. Dick chose to give it at least a surface gloss of science fiction. There's also a bit of what you could call the initiate's journey here. Where Ed learns about a secret world and is granted secret knowledge before being sent back to the mundane world forever changed by his experience with the sacred and profound, but I think I'll wait a bit to examine that theme. It's clearly an early work that doesn't quite reach the strange multi-layerness of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale or the complexity of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. That said you can see a good number of the ideas and themes starting here and realize this is just the beginning of a decades-long grappling with these ideas for Mr. Dick. I'm giving Adjustment Team by Philip K Dick a C+ here. I think its age also pulls it down a bit but maybe that's just me. Next week we'll look at the Matt Damon movie inspired by this, Adjustment Bureau.

So this story as I mentioned was chosen by our ever-wise patrons if you'd like a vote for upcoming reviews in March, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for as little as a dollar a month! As I mentioned next week is the film and then we'll look at Gabe's Story a twilight episode with the same themes and basic story and end the month with a bonus look at Dark City and a discussion of what they all have in common and what sets them apart. Until then, stay safe gentle readers and as always Keep Reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders