A Scanner Darkly (a combination book/film review)
Philip K. Dick once said that real paranoia is not just thinking that everyone is out to get you, but that everything is out to get you. Yes everything, from your mailman to your friends, from your television to your toaster – this is how a truly paranoid person lives, and in many ways, this is how Dick lived much of his life. Dick, ever the jester and target of his own pranks, the butt of his own jokes - Dick the rat they used to call him - lived a life of self-inflicted near-insanity and confusion, never trusting himself, his loved ones or his so-called friends, let alone his very possessions. Prescription drugs and addicted peers helped pave the road he traveled towards suspicion and obsession, contempt and depression. However, even though he lived a life enveloped by the drug culture, he did not exalt the lifestyle like some hippy-dippy acid guru such as Timothy Leary – if anything, he spoke out in opposition to drugs, and used his life as en example of what could happen as he saw his friends fall, one by one, to the evils of narcotics.
A Scanner Darkly is the story based on Dick’s experiences with drugs, and it is perhaps his most personal work – the last portion of the book is dedicated to the many friends he lost because of drugs, and he includes himself on the list as a casualty of the war fought in a society controlled by poisonous substances. In this world, there is not a war on drugs, but a war on drug users: they are the assailants and the victims, the spies and the subjects, and the pawns in a game played by the government, law enforcement, and nefarious corporations.
It is going to be hard for me to separate my total adoration for Philip K. Dick the author, and his book A Scanner Darkly, from my criticism of the film. A Scanner Darkly is one of the only books I have read more than a handful of times, and I consider it to be one of the best books I have ever read. I don’t just read PKD – I study him, his work, his ideas, his words and his themes. His prose sucks me in like no other, and I often find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with his characters as they begin to peel away the shifting layers of reality only to discover more layers and a deeper conspiracy.
Where most stories end, “the big reveal” you might say, Dick’s stories begin. His narratives are never concerned with a simple sleight of hand, or a single layer of non-truth – they are never as black and white as The Matrix. No, Dick’s stories are like onions, only the more layers peeled away the bigger the onion becomes. And ultimately, his books are about real human characters caught in the turmoil of situations totally beyond their control and reasoning - their realities exist just out of reach, lurking ghost-like behind the next shadow.
When I first heard that Linklater would be helming Scanner, I believed the film would be in good hands. Up until now, Linklater’s A Waking Life was, in regards to theme, the closest thing to a truly Phildickian film we’ve had. I then heard that the film would be made using a new breakthrough in Rotoscoping to create the imagery, and again I thought the decision was a brilliant one - to depict Dick’s hyper-realistic world through animation may be the only way to do it justice.
Dick’s books are never really “dark,” nor are they overly gritty, his worlds are much like our own, only slightly removed. His narratives are full of colorful settings, and vibrant characters, and as the images from the film started leaking onto the Internet I smiled with uncontrollable glee. There is something hauntingly ironic about Dick’s world being hyped-up online and created with real actors who are then manipulated by a computer - an irony that I am sure is not lost on good old Phil wherever he may be.
A Scanner Darkly is without a doubt the most faithful adaptation of Dick’s work ever filmed. In terms of tone and atmosphere, and of theme and character, Linklater and company hammered the proverbial nail on the head. PKD’s energy and creative prose ooze from every inch of the screen while the cast delivers spot-on representations of the characters lifted from the pages of the book. Scanner is simply a story about characters – the narrative is not action packed, and all of the tension and drama is derived from the personalities of the characters. The narrative’s focus is on the interaction between the characters, and how they relate to one another, detailing how each follows their own path towards self-destruction.
Keanu Reeves plays a perfectly confused Fred/Bob Arctor – the undercover drug dealer who suffers a complete mental breakdown because of the heinous side effects of Substance D, a new designer drug. Reeves plays the part without a need for much of a stretch, his dry and somewhat apathetic personality perfectly matches that of his on screen persona.
Backing him up is Winona Ryder, who, as Donna, a coked-out woman afraid of physical contact, plays Fred/Bob like a cheap piano. Among the other supporting characters is Woody Harrelson, who turns in a somewhat exaggerated performance (easily the worst of the bunch) as Luckman, and Rory Cochran as the schizophrenic Charles Freck, whose performance is delivered with twitch-like precision. However, amongst all of these actors, Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, as James Barris, is the stand out aspect of the entire film (no surprise here).
Downey, quite simply, is James Barris - it’s as if he was born to play this part. Or perhaps by some strange universal anomaly, PKD was able to see into the future and wrote the part with Downey specifically in mind, as the two seem to occupy the same mind and body. His mumbled and deadpan delivery offer up many of the film’s funniest moments – deliberating as to the whereabouts of his bicycle’s missing gears is a great example – and Downey’s performance also provides one of the saddest moments in the film. As Barris watches with superhuman-apathy while his friend dies on a kitchen floor, it is Downey’s great presence that exemplifies the devil’s own selfishness present in the character - a trait that motivates the characters and steers the narrative of the film along until it reaches its browbeaten conclusion.
A Scanner Darkly is not a film that glorifies drug use, or tries to bestow sympathy upon its characters. These players are volunteers in the war they are fighting, and in this war they know the outcome – they are all losers, there is no hope. The film expertly captures this tone. Even while the banter and verbal melee transpires between the characters, it is easy to see the sadness in their eyes, and the sadness made all the more tragic by their dire surroundings.
This tone and atmosphere is complemented by the bright colors and otherworldly feel made possible because of the finely crafted animation used to bring the world to life. While it would have been much easier to present the narrative using traditional live action footage, with a dark and grainy look to conjure the tone, Linklater and Richard Gordoa (director of animation) chose instead to represent the world with surreal images to create a state of hyper-realism coupled with nightmarish visions and dream-like surroundings.
However, not everything here can easily be defined as dream-like. Although the film is a true and wonderfully made adaptation of an amazing book, the question still remains: is it a good movie? This question is hard to answer, and I am afraid the inevitable answer is even harder for me to give.
As a film, and not an adaptation, I felt that there were too many moments that seemed to exist as little episodes without a connection to the overall narrative. Linklater deftly extracted the “best” bits and peices from PKD’s narrative, but he failed to connect many of these moments with a thread of cohesiveness. All too often I wondered if I would be enjoying the experience nearly as much if I had not already devoured every last word of prose from the book. Realistically I cannot answer this question, but I can make an educated guess and say, “no, I would not.”
Yes, I do believe there are many moments of brilliance scattered throughout this film, and the good does far outweigh the bad. However, these moments are just that – moments. Had Linklater worked on his script just a bit more and focused on the transitions between the great set pieces, we would have had a real winner – an awesome adaptation and an equally amazing film. We are, however, left with a mixed bag, a bag that is full of more positive than negative.
As an unwavering admirer of PKD, and of A Scanner Darkly, I was utterly blown away by the film, but my emotions were tainted with hindsight and a desire to see a truly great PKD adaptation on the silver screen. This side of my brain, the PKD hemisphere, is pleased beyond belief – I went in with high expectations, and left thoroughly satisfied. However, the other side of me easily realizes that as a stand alone film the experience could have been more cohesive and more engaging, with more attention paid to the transitions and not just to the individual moments.
I like to think that in some other dimension, in some other universe, Phil Dick is quietly smiling, saying to himself, “Someone finally got it right; they finally captured my prose on screen.” God knows that filmmakers have been trying, with various degrees of success and failure, to bring a truly Phildickian world to the silver screen for quite some time. I am thankful that Linklater finally did so with my personal favorite Dick work, and that everyone involved obviously had a great deal of respect for the original volume.
