A Scanner Darkly

I rather expect some people will be left scratching their heads over this choice, but Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's cautionary tale on drug abuse in a near-future sci-fi setting has stuck with me to this day.

There's two major reasons for my enjoyment of this film.  Firstly, it is the most faithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story I have ever seen, and that includes ALL of these movies:
-  Minority Report
-  Paycheck
-  Blade Runner
-  Screamers
-  Total Recall

These movies naturally vary in quality, but not a one of them scarcely resembles the source material.  Linklater remamined incredibly devoted to the story, keeping in portions that I thought would never translate to the big screen and succeeding beautifully.  This is not to say that I think slavish devotion is key to successful movie adaptation; my previous post "Ruminations on Adaptation" expands on this.  I'm more impressed at how well Linklater communicates the concepts, the settings, and especially the characters.  When I initially heard this was going to be a movie, I thought it would never work.  Linklater proved me wrong.



The second major reason I think this film deserves special mention in the science fiction category is that the digital rotoscoping technique that Linklater pioneered with his trippy Waking Life film perfectly compliments the content of A Scanner Darkly.  Characters are sketchy, watercolour portraits brought to life, a reflection of psychidelic style and mental state.  They morph into different shapes, different people, even bugs.  It's creepy, it's slick, it's dazzling.  It's PERFECT.



As I mentioned before, I think the characters really come to life in this movie.  The casting here is dead on the money.  Now, I'm expecting that some people are already formulating a hilarious "Keanu Reeves = ideal stoner casting" joke, but the fact is he pulls off Bob Arctor as a police officer and Bob Arctor as a drug dealer equally well.

Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Rory Cochrane all chip in as Arctor's roommates and friends, who he is assigned to spy on as a police informant.  If that sounds like a flimsy set up for a plot, that's actually kind of the point.  The movie (and the book) is less about following a linear series of events than it is about exploring the perverse relationship that exists between society and drug addiction.  Dick's novel came out when the War on Drugs in the States was in full swing.  Modern reports now show how ineffective that battle really was in terms of actually combating addiction and trafficking.  Retrospectively, the War on Drugs was little more than a glorified publicity stunt; an opportunity for the government to convince people that the roots of society's ills could be stamped out as easily as one stamps out a cockroach.

The hyperbolic reveal that Dick's labyrinthine work takes us to seems extreme, like a wing-nut conspiracy theory.  What grounds it in a disturbing sense of reality is the reminder that literally everyone in this universe is either a drug addict or spying on the drug addicts.  It's the terrifying conclusion of an extremist "us vs. them" ideology, and that ideology is reflected every day in American politics (even in Canadian politics...echoes of Vic Toews can be heard in this movie's message).

A Scanner Darkly is a movie that gets passed over too easily by a cynical modern audience, steadfastly refusing to admit that our problems run deeper than a few potheads and their pushers.  It dares us to face the obscene notion that we are every day riding on the backs of these miserable individuals, ignoring the hard facts in favour of an easy scapegoat.

When the drug-addled Arctor is brought to a rehab facility, one of the orderlies sneers "It ate his head. Another loser."

“It’s easy to win. Anybody can win," replies Ryder's character.