A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater's adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly employs the latest in computer animation technology to tell a story about the invasive and pernicious effects of technology. That's just the first contradiction in a film filled with many such connundrums. An exploration of control, both in the mind of an individual and of a society by a corporation, Linklater's film repeatedly and intentionally walks into such inconsistancies and ambiguities, as if attempting to study the nature of reality by breaking it down or ignoring its rules.

The rotoscoping animation effects, used previously in Linklater's experimental indie Waking Life, create an environment something like that in a lucid dream. First, digital cameras record the actors and the sets as in a regular film. These images are then fed into computers, where arists essentially illustrate over the filmed footage, creating a new kind of animation halfway between live action and a cartoon.



We recognize the faces of certain actors, the shape of familiar objects and even some of the primary locations, but they are blurred and other-worldly and the laws of physics binding them together can be violated without warning. Thus Linklater prepares us to question the very nature of the universe in which his story takes place, to wonder what mysteries are poking around the edges of our perception.

Like the protagonist of the story, played by Keanu Reeves and referenced by different names, the viewer's mind becomes divided between two hemispheres; what we see closely approximates The Real, yet it can not possibly represent The Real in any sort of complete way. There is a reality behind the one with which we're presented (in this case, another film that blandly presents what we're seeing as it would actually appear to a camera).

It's this same dilemma that confronts the Narcotics Detective known only as Fred (Reeves). Part of a squad known as "scanners" because of their favored method of surveillance, Fred has infiltrated a group of drug addicts to investigate the source of a killer drug called Substance D. Calling himself Bob Arctor, he hangs out in a suburban Anaheim house with fellow addict Donna (Winona Ryder), who may or may not be his girlfriend, and their junkie pals. Or maybe he was recruited after already befriending this ragtag bunch of weirdos and drop-outs. Maybe they're not even his friends at all. Fred/Bob doesn't seem to know a lot about what's happening to him, what he's doing or what effect all these little red pills might be having on his brain.

Linklater allows this material to play out slowly, deliberately, over the course of the film's first hour, grounding the audience in a surreal world of drug abuse that's at least somewhat recognizable before reality begins to collapse on the characters. We get to know chatty oddball Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), high-strung stoner Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and Freck (Rory Cochrane, best known as Slater in Linklater's Dazed and Confused), over the course of some very funny and non-sequiteur scenes at home, including a dialogue about an 18-speed bicycle that's a match for any banter in Before Sunrise or Slacker in terms of sheer inventiveness, creativity and humor.

Likewise we see scenes where Fred views and analyzes these same meaningless conversations from behind a bank of monitors. Could he be imaginging this reality, in which he's a cop watching himself waste away from drug use? Or is the world of the Orange County Sheriff's Department, with its bizarre cloaks that mask your real appearance and its insistance on constant cognition tests for mental acuity, the only setting that can be considered objectively real? Perhaps most importantly to Linklater's purpose, is what he's watching altered by the fact that he's watching? As the movie might put it, "what does a scanner see?"

Okay, so I don't really know Linklater's "purpose." The film is vague enough to be taken in any number of ways. As a depiction of the hell of drug abuse and mental illness, never managing to get a hold on exactly who you are and what you're doing at any given time. As a statement about the media and how it has taken such a central place in all of our lives, governing our perceptions about one another and the outside world. As a rebellious piece of anti-government, subversive agit-prop on behalf of anyone tired of being monitored, probed, studied and then lied to about it.

Clearly, it's an indictment of the very idea of a "war on drugs," disturbed by the notion that the government should have a role in deciding what can occur within a person's mind. Just as the doctor's continuing observation of Fred's faculties begins to seem invasive over time, despite the fact that they don't ever touch him physically, so too the police choosing to intervene when someone takes Substance D feels like some sort of violation.

I'm not sure this interpretation goes quite far enough, however, as Linklater seems concerned with ideas about surveillance more far-reaching than the Drug War. Of course, the film points out the inherent flaws in a system encouraging junkies and drug abusers to rat out one another to law enforcement. But the greater focus seems to be the invasion of privacy in general, as aided by modern technology and enforced by the federal government.

I don't want to give too much away, as the film does develop some twists and turns in the final half hour despite its relatively loose narrative structure, but I think Linklater has crafted Dick's story into a stern warning about the nature of corporate and governmental power, how monied interests use various systems of control in order to pacify and regulate their citizenry. The slowly-revealed saga of New Path, a company that "cures" the victims of Substance D, comes to dominate the story, explaining some elements of Fred's fate while probing more complex and far-reaching questions about others.

I say systems of control purposefully, as there are no villains actually provided by the film. I think it's important that Fred and Bob play such dual functions in the story - both observed citizen and observing authority. It speaks to the way that these faceless corporate and governmental entities play individuals against one another. It's never a corporation or a division of the federal government that strips someone of their inalienable rights - it's always an individual soldier or police officer or prison guard or other figure of authority. A specific person hired to do a job.

That describes everyone in A Scanner Darkly. Mere pawns in large-scale dramas of which they aren't aware, these characters don't know who they really are or what they're doing because they don't need to in order to fulfill their roles and satisfy their masters.



So successful is the film as simply a visual marvel, I think there's a good chance it will be dismissed by some as "a drug movie" or a "head trip." Like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the movie expresses great and enduring Truths in between wild leaps of imagination and innovative visual artistry. That's a heady combination of sensory experience to come whizzing at you all bunched up together on a single strip of celluloid.

I found the suicide sequence depicted above, in which an alien invites Freck to Hell by reading him a list of every sin he committed during his lifetime, paritcularly fascinating. It would be easy to dismiss this scene as silly LSD-inspired lunacy without considering, say, the significance of a creature composed solely of eyeballs who has recorded every action you have ever undertaken for all of posterity on a massive scroll of parchment.

The high quality of the performances likewise might get obscured by the ravishing technological wonders on display. I wondered after the screening if Downey Jr. as the unpredictable

Barris would be eligible for a Supporting Actor nomination. The performance, technically, is a collaborative effort between Downey Jr. and the various animators who worked on his character, so it would seemingly be fair only to nominate them both. But is it then fair to nominate the work of two or more different artists when most film performances are crafted by a single individual without any assistance during post-production?

In addition to Downey, Reeves and Harrelson do particularly notable work in the film's opening half hour. The effect of A Scanner Darkly can be highly disorienting, and I suspect that without providing the film with a few engaging, funny and likable characters early on, Linklater would have been in danger of overwhelming an audience with psychobabble and trippy spectacle. Reeves' turn as Fred grounds the film, provides some measure of sanity, even when he's wearing the shapeshifting suit that makes him look like 100 people at once (one of the film's most strange and successful bits of imagery). He performs much of the film in close-up, and manages to project sincerity and occasionally even terror in a way that's visible even through the interference of the animator. Which can't be an easy thing to do. Along with The Gift, I'd say this is probably his best work to date.

And, yes, it's also by far the best film I've seen so far this year (though it hasn't had a ton of competition). This is the real deal - science-fiction that's cerebral and relevant and entertaining, a film that takes the genre's usual trappings and uses them in a way that's daring and provocative and new. It opens on July 7th across the country and is absolutely worth a few of your hard-earned dollars. Give it a try, won't you?

[NOTE: I saw the film tonight at the LA Film Festival screening at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, with Keanu and Woody Harrelson and Richard Linklater in attendance. It was a lot of fun to see the movie on a huge screen outside with a big, enthusiastic crowd who all seemed to enjoy the movie. Well, all except these two guys in the men's room who told me they found it boring and thought it would only be good if you were on a lot of drugs. I insisted that I was enjoying it stone cold sober, but that drugs certainly wouldn't make the film worse.]