A Scanner Darkly

dir: Richard Linklater
[img_assist|nid=882|title=Through decades of bad acting, darkly|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=420|height=652]
It’s hard to make the case for why I enjoyed this flick so much, but I did. It wasn’t because of the quality of the animation, I can tell you that much. It wasn’t necessarily that I’m a fan of the source material, which I am, being a big fan of Philip K. Dick and all his Dickian works.

I think Linklater and the actors, and the animators managed to get the tone right. It even has Keanu Reeves in it, for Jeebus’s sake, and it still manages to work.

Not only Neo-Dude-Kanooie, but also former drug addict and occasional actor Robert Downey Jnr, occasional drug addict and occasional actor Woody Harrelson and rare addict and even rarer actress these days Winona Ryder.

From such humble materials comes a modest yet successfully shambolic story about a group of paranoid drug addicts and an undercover operative whose job is to monitor them, who becomes a drug addict himself.

Even thought the original novel was set in a somewhat futuristic time, the book mostly comprised an elaboration on PKD’s own experiences in the drug scene in the early 70s, and his subsequent mental illness. The story also elaborates on his ideas on the War on Drugs in its earlier form.

In A Scanner Darkly, the drug of choice is called Substance D. One use is enough to render someone an addict, and its continued use results in severe psychiatric damage, irreversible and unclaimable on private health care rebates. Despite its known properties, the drug is very popular with the attractive and cool set, as well as the down and outs.

Bob Arctor (Reeves) works undercover for the LA Sheriff’s Department in an attempt to track down the source of Substance D in his area. Not even his handlers know who he is, since he wears a scramble suit to shield his identity whenever he reports to his superiors. The scramble suit randomly displays pieces of images from thousands of people, thus rendering the wearer incognito.

Away from the office, he usually slouches around his home, which serves as the crashpad / lunatic soap box street corner for a number of other addicts, including Barris (Downey Jnr), Luckman (Harrelson), Freck (Rory Cochrane), in between spending time with his pseudo-girlfriend and dealer Donna (Winona Ryder). All of them display different levels of mental dysfunction, ranging from bug hallucinations to compulsive behaviour to advanced conspiracy theory-lunacy. Except for Donna, who is wonderful and pure, and so lovely that she won’t even put out for poor Bob.

In a way, Arctor is meant to be betraying his friends as part of his job, but the thing about drug addicts with unstable personalities is, their propensity for betrayal seems to exceed the benefits they derive from it. Bob doesn’t have any desire to betray these people that are his drug buddies (which means they’re not really friends, because they’re so idiotic or annoying), but it’s not like he is fully in control of his actions or the investigation anyway. His handlers elect to install holographic surveillance equipment throughout Arctor’s house, which leads to even more confusion on his part, since the recordings don’t match his memories.

Barris is a manic motor mouth who is constantly talking, and talking shit most of the time. He encourages the delusions and paranoiac fantasies of those around him whilst racing ahead with his own. He is the most articulate and probably the most dangerous. Luckman is a harmless moron, and Freck is too far gone to be a threat to anyone but himself.

Bob struggles the entire film with the idea that he can no longer trust his perceptions or even his memories as the plot progresses, under the influence of Substance D. As such, given the already surreal state of the animated visuals, he has his reality shift and mutate before his eyes, unsure of what is really going on.

It is explained to him early on by two convenient doctors that the impact of D on people’s brains is such that the two hemispheres become separated and begin competing against each other, and essentially start making shit up.

Coupled with all of this, on top of his and everyone else’s paranoia, it seems like there really is someone out to get him.

As a drug story goes, it’s no Requiem for a Dream, but then again, it’s not trying to be. Scanner Darkly isn’t really trying to be an expose of the drug scene, or a cautionary after-school special either. If anything, there’s too much surreality and humour for the story to be confronting. It does give a pretty good approximation of what schizophrenia must be like for some people, drug users or not.

Everything in the movie was filmed over a couple of weeks. Linklater then mostly walked away and let the animators work on it for two years. They overlaid computer graphics over everything, in a technique still called rotoscoping, even though they need to come up with a new word for it soon.

But they did a cheap, half-assed job. In a Wired article about the film, it is indicated that the animators who worked on it first were fired and replaced with less animators given less resources and less time to complete it. This is the kind of brilliant management thinking that gets excellent results in some alternate bizarro universe.

The thing is: I actually think it worked out better this way. As distracting as it gets, and as flat (2 dimensional) as some scenes unintentionally become, I think the overall production benefits from the crappiness of the animation. That’s not a sarcastic comment, I’m being genuine.

The murkiness of the main character’s mind and the world he and his buddies live in is reflected well in the world as we get to see it. Better quality, Pixar state of the art bleeding edge graphics would have undermined the story, which is sufficiently decent enough to poke through the amateurish visuals.

As a consequence, depth of field, the illusion of distance, even the ever-shifting planes of people’s faces are ill-defined and constantly moving. It gives the flick a living, organic, diseased kind of feel, and I liked it.

It’s not overly profound, it’s not especially meaningful, and the plot seems to peter out towards the end (despite having a more coherent ending than the book itself). It seems like pretty simplistic science fiction if taken literally, and it’s not enough of a drugged-up headfuck to warrant saying to people ‘Wow, man, that flick was such a headfuck.”

The drugged up idiotic conversations been Arctor, Barris and Luckman range from amusing to downright hilarious, and for a flick that’s not meant to be a comedy, I got a fair few laughs out of it. Reeves succeeds in a difficult part by not overdoing things, which is wonderfully appropriate to the part. Of course Downey Jnr and Woody go absolutely berserk, and seem to have fun in their roles.

This is not Yellow Submarine or Naked Lunch. Thankfully. But doubtless it will become another film for bong bitches and bowl smokers to say stuff like, “Hey, let’s have a smoke and watch A Scanner Darkly for the millionth time, dude.”

It is probably one of the better PKD adaptations out there, but that says more about the crappiness of most of them rather than the excellence of this entry in the genre

It was entertaining in a modest way, and as such I found it one of the more enjoyable flicks at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year.

I thought about a friend of mine who I haven’t seen in a while whilst watching this flick. She’s lived with schizophrenia for several years, and I would imagine a flick like this would send her screaming back into the depths of her delusions and hallucinations, in the way the strongest skunkweed would as well. She probably shouldn’t see this film.

But the rest of you, with your certainty, with your concrete conception of reality and firm grasp on the real versus the imagined, why, a film like this is unlikely to be right up your collective alleys.

I, on the other hand, have only ever had a loose grip on this carnival ride we call reality, and as such, there were times where I could barely tell it wasn’t real. Maybe that’s the problem…

8 times – so reality doesn’t usually look like a cross between a Daniel Clowes comic and Get Smart to the rest of you? out of 10

--
“What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? Does it see into me? Clearly? Or darkly?” – A Scanner Darkly