Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

My column for Pop Syndicate is out, wherein I discuss Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

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.