It's 2114, and Al Gore's vision has come to fruition: All art is sanitized for your protection; everything is bland and environmentally, ergonomically and politically correct. Yuppie-of-the-future Allen Purcell is set to take over as director of Telemedia, a giant edutainment conglomerate responsible for producing a steady diet of pap programming to keep the population from thinking too hard (sort of like Fox). Things are definitely looking up for Purcell and his heavily tranquilized wife, Janet. So why does he subconsciously commit subversive pranks against society, such as defacing (beheading, rather) a venerated statue of a military leader? I wonder if Terry Gilliam ever read Philip K. Dick. Parts of "The Man Who Japed" are reminiscent of "Brazil." PKD pulls off the odd feat of being simultaneously ahead of his time and goofily dated. He remains in print and continues to be read and critically appreciated because his writing was more psychologically and philosophically complex than much of the science fiction by his contemporaries in the '50s and '60s. But Dick's novels remain firmly rooted in the martinis-n-cigarettes aesthetic of the Esquivel Space Age Lounge. Which is part of their charm to me.
