A lesser known work by the science fiction author Philip K Dick is a short story entitled ‘Pigs Might Fly’. It is a thinly veiled and scathing account of the Ascension, re-imagined as evidence of alien intervention in the development of the human species. An invasion of the spirit rather than the Earth. Due to the prevailing psycho-pathology of the early 1960’s and the ghetto status of SF in the wider creative community, it did not provoke the reaction we might expect in these more fundamentalist times.
Thirty years earlier, the actress Myrna Loy played a scene made particularly ethereal by the flicker of black and white cinematography. Her dress of parachute white silk billows in a mechanically produced breeze. (Her cold nipples air-brushed out of official publicity stills.) She glances back over a graceful shoulder, bare but for a single thin strap, her face almost blank with its lack of lines. “Pigs might fly”, she enunciates with all the acuity of a Brooklyn accented wisecrack. Each word is outlined with lipstick as it emerges from her gin sling glistening pout.
Thirty years later, the re-make starred Madonna in this role. She enters the scene dishevelled, with her fake blonde curls plastered down with equally fake rain. Her jaw-line juts as she chews some qabbalistic gum to calm her nerves, while a soft focus lens attempts to recreate the muted hues of the original. There is a continuity error, as her hair is suddenly dry and immaculately styled. (The director has no budget for a re-shoot and realises this is a straight-to-video project.) “PMF”, she drawls. These are the early days of mobile phone text messaging and the audience is expected to congratulate itself on being hip enough to understand.
Both films were released together in a boxed set DVD, which can still be found occasionally on E-Bay. The original was colourised and enhanced with Dolby stereo sound. There is a bonus commentary by the costume designer and chief lighting engineer, who bicker amiably about the film’s iconic status in the gay community. There is a rumour about a deliberately obscene mistranslation in one of the foreign language alternative soundtracks, but this is apocryphal.
In the artwork of Michael Sowa, we see that Pigs Might Fly indeed. The lovingly rendered hues of porcine flesh reflect the luminosity and silk sheathed smoothness of Myrna Loy. The strangely human expressions in little piggy eyes reflect the blank intensity of Madonna’s mascara masked gaze. We inhabit Dick’s world of literal minded Rapture, where the animus is artificially raised to transcend and supplant humanity.
Perform a Google image search of the phrase ‘Pigs Might Fly’ and you will see thumbnails of surreal art, film extracts and lurid paperback covers. The connections make themselves in the collective meta-consciousness of the internet; the chaotic hyper-reality of near infinite information, shaped only by the keywords we supply. Since this motif has recurred in the 1930’s, 1960’s and 1990’s, we can only speculate what a similar search will reveal in the 2020’s.
