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Halcyon Company, best known Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, announced last month a film adaption of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick.  A twist on the classic amnesia story, the novel recounts not a man who’s forgotten his identity, but a world that’s forgotten a man. The narrative serves as a dissertation on the meaning of identity and reality, set in a near-future police state and written in the noir tradition of hardened cops and paranoid prey fueled by cheap booze and sentimentality.

“Who are you really? You’re used to posing; I saw you, I saw you freeze with that glad smile in place and those lit-up eyes.”

“I told you. I’m Jason Taverner. The TV personality guest host. I’m on every Tuesday night.”

“No,” Kathy said; she shook her head. “But it’s none of my business—sorry—I shouldn’t have asked.” But she continued to eye him, as if with exasperation. “You’re doing it all wrong. You really are a celebrity—it was reflexive, the way you posed for your picture. But you’re not a celebrity. There’s no one named Jason Taverner who matters, who is anything. So what are you, then? A man who has his picture taken all the time that no one’s ever seen or heard of.”

Jason said, “I’m going about it the way any celebrity who no one has ever heard of would go about it.”

Published in 1974, Dick completed Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said shortly after writing the first draft of A Scanner Darkly. (The latter would simmer for another three years before seeing print.) Accordingly, the theme of identity carries heavily in both works. In A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist struggles to determine whether he is an undercover narcotics agent monitoring a group of addicts, or an addict who happens to work for the police. The dualism results in a slow uncoupling of the character’s mind, until both identity and self-identity are decayed by drugs and washed away by the state.

In Flow My Tears, Jason Taverner knows exactly who he is. He is a crooner in the Frank Sinatra mold, host to a variety show every Tuesday night with thirty million viewers. There is no club where he has no table, no one he encounters who is not fan. He is a man’s man and a ladies’ man. He adorns the cover of every tabloid and tops the sales on every record chart. He is adored and followed and fawned over, and he relishes it.

And then he wakes up one morning in a dirty hotel room, and no one has ever heard of him. He has vanished from every computer and database and every memory of everybody in the world. With no ID and only a fist of cash stuffed in the pocket of his rumpled suit, he is, to use Orwell’s term, an unperson. Yet throughout, he never doubts his version of reality. He is somebody. He is a celebrity. More notably, he is a Six, genetically enhanced for superior charisma and beauty and intellect. But for all his biological advantages, he is lost. What good is an identity if nobody recognizes it? What does it mean to be somebody if no one acknowledges it? Through Jason Taverner, the author asks whether we are defined from within, or whether identity is granted only through society and the state.

Taverner immediately seeks out counterfeit identification, lest the police catch him without papers and apprehend him as an undesirable. He meets Kathy, an ID card forger, who like the protagonist of A Scanner Darkly stands on the brink of a quiet madness. Enmeshed in an underworld where personas are destroyed and created from nothing more than a few specially tailored documents, her concept of identity and perception of reality is distorted. She has little trouble accepting Jason Taverner’s farfetched tale because, to her, identity is fluid and imagined. He is who he says he is; he is who she wants him to be.

Pursuing Taverner is a police detective named McNulty, and his superior, police general Buckman.

Inspector McNulty, of course. The ninety-day wonder of the academy. Busily dreaming up plots and remnants of treason… Buckman smiled, seated himself on the swivel chair, picked up the papers.

TAVERNER, JASON. CODE BLUE.

A Xeroxed file from police vaults. Summoned out of the void by the overly eager - and overweight - lnspector McNulty. A small note in pencil: “Taverner does not exist.”

Strange, he thought. And began to leaf through the papers.

“Good evening, Mr. Buckman.” His assistant, Herbert Maime, young and sharp, nattily dressed in a civilian suit: he rated that privilege, as did Buckman.

“McNulty seems to be working on the file of someone who does not exist,” Buckman said.

“In which precinct doesn’t he exist?” Maime said, and both of them laughed. They did not particularly like McNulty, but the gray police required his sort. Everything would be fine unless the McNultys of the academy rose to policy-making levels. Fortunately that rarely happened. Not, anyhow, if he could help it.

While McNulty, at best a bully in blue, investigates Taverner for the petty offense of forged documents, Buckman (the title policeman, incidentally, from whom the tears flow) considers a larger, more intriguing facet of the man claiming to be a celebrity. While most falsified documents are commissioned by criminals in order to escape the system, Jason Taverner wants in. His crime is not conspiring to purge, obfuscate or otherwise alter his identity. Rather, his goal is to have any identity at all.

The novel culminates by questioning the nature of reality itself. It asks the reader to decide whether the altered state of a small group – through drug use, for example –is any less valid an experience than the agreed upon reality in which the whole of society operates.
Far from a boilerplate science fiction noir, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is Philip K. Dick at his finest: provocative and breathless, paranoid and speculative. Halcyon Company has a tall order to fill if a motion picture is to do the book justice.

Philip K. Dick at the cinema

“I’m reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books ‘ruined’ by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They’re all fine. They’re fine. They’re not ruined. They’re still there.” – Alan Moore

The unique style and stark vision of Philip K. Dick’s stories lend themselves well to big-screen translations. Here are a few works that made the jump from page to screen:

Blade Runner, 1982 (published as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) – Bounty hunter Rick Deckard is commissioned to find and dispatch artificial humans walking among the living.

Total Recall, 1990 (published as “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) – More “inspired” by the short story than faithfully adapted, Total Recall follows a man whose artificially implanted memories of a Martian vacation take him to the planet once more.

Screamers, 1995 (published as “Second Variety”) – Machines designed to hunt down enemy life evolve to hunt down all the living.

Minority Report, 2002 – A policeman with the Department of Pre-Crime is pursued when psychics finger him for a slaying.

A Scanner Darkly, 2006 – Filmed in live-action and rotoscoped to eerie effect, A Scanner Darkly recounts an undercover narcotics agent who suffers an identity crisis.

Next, 2007 (published as “The Golden Man”) – A psychic magician is pursued by the police to prevent a terrorist attack.

D.B. Grady is a freelance writer and novelist. His debut novel, “Red Planet Noir,” is due in bookstores later this year. He currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and can be found at http://www.dbgrady.com.