ABSTRACT
It seems the family resemblance among so many of the films we label mind-games or puzzle films is no accident. 1 Insofar as they have one common father, his name is unquestionably Philip K. Dick (PKD). Not only are some of the most absorbing cult films of the past three decades adaptations of Dick’s fiction (predominately short stories)—for example, Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006) 2 —several other films revealing to their heroes that they are in fact living fake or manipulated lives, such as The Matrix (1999) or The Truman Show (1998), 3 are like PKD clones, just as The Sixth Sense (1999), Vanilla Sky (2001), The Others (2001), Inception (2010), Dark City (1998), eXistenZ (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Looper (2012), to name a few, also have distinct PKD DNA: they all share his ‘what if’ thought experiment premises, are variations on his obsessions, or play riffs on his themes and motifs, such as “repressed memories, false pasts, strange doubles and simulated realities” (Lambie 2012).
