Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans(bostonreview.net) |
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans(bostonreview.net) |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY5KTVA_2ys
I was astounded at the number of product placements in that film!
And that there were obvious placements for competing products, like Coke and Pepsi.
Some of them were hilariously anachronistic, like advertisements for Fuji Film.
I can't remember any other movie that was quite so frequent and obvious about product placement, and I definitely didn't get the impression they were trying to be ironic and channeling PKD's social commentary on the advertising industry. It just seemed like good old fashioned shameless marketing.
I googled around and apparently I'm not the only person who noticed it. ;)
TOTAL RECALL and the psychology of product placement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSt2Xbiypsk
He mentions that the book "Product Placement in Hollywood Films" estimates there are 55 appearances of 28 brands in Total Recall.
Best Western wasn't happy with the how their logo was used in the Martian Red Light District next to a pink neon ADULT MOVIES store sign, and how they only got 2.5 seconds instead of their expected 5 seconds of exposure.
I always thought the Total Recall product placement was intentional and looking around our present future it was spot on.
In this universe, maybe Fuji Film instead of Kodak is in still business and on your desk today, if only because of that shrewd giant blinking billboard of a product placement, that made them seem "futuristic" to generations of Schwarzenegger fans. (Not exactly the butterfly effect, but the stockholders will take it.)
Here are some Blade Runner product placements:
https://productplacementblog.com/tag/blade-runner-1982/
I love the Atari placements:
https://productplacementblog.com/movies/atari-in-blade-runne...
Apparently product placement in Blade Runner is a curse:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/67956/10-fascinating-facts-ab...
10. IT’S CURSED.
It might not be quite as hardcore-cursed as Poltergeist or The Omen, but Blade Runner has a curse of its own … on the businesses whose logos appear in the film. Atari, Pan Am, RCA, Cuisinart, and Bell Phones all suffered severe business problems in the years shortly after Blade Runner’s release, as did Coca-Cola, whose 1985 “New Coke” experiment was less than successful. Members of the Blade Runner production team refer to this as the “product-placement Blade Runner curse.”
not sure why you think that. It's a Paul Verhoeven movie and Robocop had similar themes.
What Dick really got his fingernails under was the idea that our subjective reality, our semantic map of the real, has become more real to us than any objective reality. He probes this at many levels, from that of our individual perceptron driving our subjective reality (eg. Dr Bloodmoney, A Scanner Darkly) or even the perceptron of others or another being so overwhelmingly powerful that it drives our reality (eg. Flow my Tears, Our Friends from Frolix 8). He also explores more directly manufactured realities, as in Ubik and The Simulacra, where forces actively set out to deceive, both out of compassion and cruelty - and sometimes just because.
Jean Baudrillard formulated much of PKD’s weltanschauung in his Simulacra and Simulation, which is as mind-bending a collection of essays as one is ever likely to read.
A particular recurrent topic for both is the idea that “The Empire Never Ended” - that we live in the latter-day Roman Empire, having inherited our fundamental western Judeo-Christian semantic symbol set from the commingling of Roman culture (Mithratic cult, god co-option, etc.) with first century Palestinian culture. Our map of reality is that which was last substantially updated then, and everything we have done since is on the map, rather than the underlying reality.
It all gets very gnostic (another favourite theme of PKD’s), but I do think that there’s a fundamental and valid observation that is made and expounded upon about the malleable nature of human reality.
In today’s world of ubiquitous hyperreality, sensationalised and manufactured narratives, instantaneous and often wildly speculative coverage of ambiguous events so far removed from us yet seemingly right on our doorstep, this philosophy becomes deeply compelling.
That reminds me - Hypernormalisation, an Adam Curtis documentary, provides a light introduction to many of these ideas, if a bit of Baudrillard is a steep start.
It's not even proper to say it's constrained to fascism as the unreality springs from non-authoritarian sources like flat-earth memes, wikipedia wars and distraction leading to an amnesia of how to actually live properly and we're doing to ourselves.
FTA: Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.”
FTA: Most notoriously, the current U.S. president recently retweeted a flattering message that appears to have come from a bot densely connected to a network of other bots, which some believe to be controlled by the Russian government and used for propaganda purposes.
I mean I guess we did, by a different kind of SoMa...
So, yes?
[Warning, will discuss spoilers about a PKD story]
He does this well in his short story Total Recall. The objective reality is written over by memory implementations. However, he still feels the desire to go to Mars because no memory implantation can override his inherit nature. The Grand Truth is so bizarre that during it's first uncovering everyone believes it is a fantasy. When objective truth is proven true it terrifies those that know it.