A SCANNER DARKLY

by Kevin Koehler

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly...

- 1 Corinthians 13

Seven years in the future, Officer Fred (Keanu Reeves) spends most of his life on the front line of the drug war, undercover in what is known as a "scramble suit." His voice is disguised and his appearance transforms constantly; he describes himself as "the ultimate Everyman." Officer Fred is, quite literally, us. He is also a hypocrite, an impostor in his own changing skin, hunting down dealers while also indulging his habit for the era's narcotic of choice, Substance D (or Slow Death).

Not too long ago, Fred didn't have to pretend. He went to work in a normal suit, the three-piece kind, until a run-in with a open cabinet door took the lid off his life (as Hammett put it half a century earlier) and let him look at the works. What he saw, he hated: a predictable existence where nothing new would ever happen again. So Fred exchanged his unblemished life for something that wasn't so perfect: his power-mower and perfectly manicured lawn for a car on cinder blocks and garbage in the driveway, his two little girls for a coterie of fellow tweakers (Robert Downey Jr., Rory Cochrane, Woody Harrelson), and his wife for a drug dealer (Winona Ryder) who lost her libido in a pile of white powder. When you ride Substance D, sometimes you see bugs, or even worse (shades of Naked Lunch), people turning into bugs; it can be a nightmare, but at least you're still dreaming.

Like he did on Waking Life, filmmaker Richard Linklater employs the "Rotoshop" animation technique, similar to Ralph Bakshi-style rotoscoping - the final animated image is drawn over filmed movement. It's reality, painted; A Scanner Darkly did not give me a headache like Linklater's previous effort did, so either the director made a stylistic choice or significant advances have been made in the technology (or even more likely, a combination of both). It's an irony of sorts given that Linklater has been making a number of cartoons lately of the troubling live-action kind - School of Rock, the Bad New Bears remake, even his well-intentioned Fast Food Nation were all plagued by a depthless frivolity he used to avoid (the one outlier in all this is Before Sunset, perhaps the best film of 2004). Here, in his exploration of cultural/personal dualism, the artifice is applied to good effect; Linklater has created a liquid world so his polemic pill doesn't go down so rough. Then again, maybe our lives are more cartoonish than we realize; it's hard not to see existence through the prism of theater, of show, when someone is always watching.

Here's where things get political.

Obviously, Philip K. Dick's original science fiction novel was largely colored by his own substance addictions - the author was renowned for his prodigious output fueled by heavy amphetamine use (forty-four books in thirty years). It was also a response to Nixon-era police state paranoia, in particular untoward government surveillance and monitoring (Dick himself claimed his home was broken into by the CIA); these are Big Brother issues loudly echoed in our time of warrantless wiretaps, watch lists, and something else with a (ahem) dubya. A Scanner Darkly is unapologetically overt in its assessment of the War on Drugs: how can you win a war where the real enemy is the self, where society both trades addictions and trades on them? We all have habits; whether some of them are illegal is often arbitrary, even counterintuitive or backward. Perhaps we are sick only so someone can sell us the cure.

Linklater also lays subtle aim at our other vaguely-defined struggle exploited for illusory purpose: the War on Terror. "The most dangerous kind of person is the one who's afraid of his own shadow" Officer Fred says about the side effects of Substance (WM)D. Double meanings abound: "I kinda have to tip my hat to any entity that can bring so much integrity to evil" is another memorable proclamation, made by his friend Barris about the New Path Recovery Center (a monolithic rehabilitation program that plays a large role in the picture), the kind of unaccountable authority that drapes itself in Manichean virtue. Barris, the closest the picture has to a true character villain, isn't being ironic when he says it as he possesses the same amoral ethos of our nightly news: he doesn't kill anyone but likes to be around when they die. One of the central plot lines of the picture is his comical attempt to rat out Fred for "anti-American drug terrorism;" unbeknownst to him, Fred is already informing on himself to the police, having acquiesced to cameras in his home and even agreed to edit the footage for them. Watching himself is like observing someone else, a shadow, a faceless enemy - you see the person and his habits but you cannot see inside the man.

Interesting footnote: In addition to A Scanner Darkly, many works of Philip K. Dick have been adapted for the big screen. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, Screamers, Impostor, and the French-language picture Confessions d'un Barjo are all based on Dick novels or short stories.

© Pretentious Musings. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.