The Hoodmaker

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Now that I have decided to watch the remaining episodes of Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams in their broadcast / series order, I get to experience the rest of the stories that I have not yet read. As a result, these will all be new material to me, and I'm excited to get through more Philip K Dick as I slowly work my way through his novel, Ubik. I am savouring that book, I'm enjoying it a lot.

The Hoodmaker opens with a woman and her scarred face observing a crowd. A tiny riot breaks out, and among it there's a hooded figure, which, I imagine is where the story's title comes from. It appears that the woman observing the crowd is going to be a central character to this story, and the hooded one is going to be some sort of link to an antagonist. Little time is wasted here.

This is story about telepaths. I didn't realise that this was such a recurring theme in Philip K Dick's work, so perhaps what I thought was a framework for Ubik in the short story anthology I recently reviewed wasn't the foundation. Perhaps his work is all intertwined. This story also has shades of Minority Report, which now, seems an obvious comparison to this, and other works he's produced.

The way Philip K Dick depicts telepaths in his fiction reminds me of the way it is handled in Babylon 5. It turns out the woman with the scarred face is a telepath. She's interrogating the man, formerly wearing the hood, in order for the agency to understand motivations. Oh, and of course, to and to help solve the "crime" of the Riot - and to remove the threat of no surveillance allowed that the Hoods enable.

That's the central kick of this story.

The what is clearly demonstrated. Telepaths are used to help control the populace, identifying dissent before it breaks out into riot, but the titular hoods prevent a "Teep" from being able to read others. This is a little bit like controlling body armour. The "good guys" have telepaths, and they're controlled in a way, but so is the defence mechanism against them.

Therefore, The Hoodmaker is all about control, and the adaptation (bearing in mind I haven't read the story this is based on - yet!) weaves (pun totally intended) different layers of narrative interest into the fifty-five minutes of storytelling on offer.

The colour grading on this short film, is particularly interesting as a storytelling element, too. Colours are muted and slightly desaturated, giving the world a numbing feel, as though the noise of it all would otherwise be too much to present in full colour. This is an excellent storytelling element as the film also touches on the torment experienced by telepaths "just for existing" - the intense noise of an enormous din of thoughts.

There's a steam-punk and slightly 1930s / 1940s detective setting to this episode's costumes, but with more modern vehicles and weapons than you'd expect of the era - telephones and keyboards in the background of scenes like they're ordinary items making it hard to place the when.

At this stage, whether these adaptations are good or bad, they're all going to win my time, owing to the fact that Philip K Dick's storytelling always relates whatever speculative "what if" into a "now what", particularly for the human characters depicted. To go back into some puns, the ending of this tale is left with some unstitched threads at the end, to make thinking about this story a satisfying conclusion beyond the one presented.