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Madison.

For some reason, I can't stop thinking about Philip K. Dick today. In particular, my mind keeps returning to an early short story of his called "The Defenders". I've never read it, because I haven't been able to find a copy, but I recall him referencing it in one of his later stories. It fascinated me, and stumbles back from memory every once in a while.

"The Defenders" strikes me as a Kilgore Trout kind of story, primarily because I only know it through a very brief summary. It goes like this:

Mankind lives deep underground, following a massive war. Rather than fight the war themselves, the humans built armies of robots to battle each other. Isolated from the surface, the humans eagerly follow war reports from above, waiting for the day when they can go home.

The robots, however, have this whole system figured. Rather than kill themselves fighting a war they can't really win - after all, it's not like they'll have much purpose when the humans reclaim the earth's surface - they've settled down into a fairly comfortable life. They build homes for themselves, tend their gardens, and do all of the sort of idyllic 1950's suburbia stuff, all the while sending bogus reports of continuing battles down to the subterranean colonies.

The story itself unfolds when someone discovers the ruse, but I don't know any details on it. It's a Kilgore Trout story, the short story equivalent of a B-movie. Just think of any old B-movie poster, say, for a sci-fi flick, a hard-boiled noir thriller, or a kung fu action film. If it's a good poster, it grabs you, draws you in with promises (usually in big, bold text, with exclamation points, and sometimes even in a brightly-colored, spiky bubble) that there's no way it can keep. Movie trailers are really good at this, too. If the idea's too good to be true, it probably is, and you're probably best off sticking with the fragmented version living in your imagination.

I have a lot of those sorts of films in mental storage. Every time I stop into Four Star Video Heaven, something - probably in the "Foreign" section, but "Horror" has its charms, too - calls out to me. It almost always has highly suspect production values or a title that suggests the producers included plenty of gratuitous nudity in order to get someone, anyone to see the film. (Example: that masterpiece of the Italian cinema, Nude For Satan.) I have no intention of renting any of these until I've managed to exhaust all other DVD-rental opportunities, but they're still impossible to forget.

Also in the "mental film" category: Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. The novel is deeply fascinating, and characteristically bizarre. I've enjoyed Linklater's stuff - especially Waking Life and the perfectly matched pair of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I even love the rotoscoping effect that Linklater used so effectively in Waking Life, and, judging from the previews, expect it to match the dreamlike, paranoid quality of Dick's writing. I just wonder if my expectations have already gotten too high.