A Scanner Darkly (the film) Directed by Richard Linklater

 A Scanner Darkly (the film)

Directed by Richard Linklater

So imagine a movie starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr.(Doing his best Jeff Goldblum impersonation.), and Winona Ryder and it's produced by George Clooney because Hollywood is like that. Now consider that film is an adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel, that shows the destruction of drug addiction and sheer insanity of the War on Drugs. Now instead of just doing a live-action film, animate over everything and the actors using an advanced computer-driven rotoscope technique. This will give the film an air of unreality. Oh, there's also a brief cameo by Alex Jones being brutalized by the police and thrown in a black van (If only that happened in real life.  Join the communist revolution, and you can help make that dream a reality. {But I don’t want anyone brutalized or thrown into a black van}Not even Alex Jones? {I’ll settle for him having to admit on air that he was lying and being financially ruined.}). That's A Scanner Darkly, the 2006 film that only saw a limited release in the United States.

Let me recap the plot in case you missed last week's review of the novel. Unlike the book that takes place in a 1990s that never was, the movie is set seven years from now. America has lost the war on drugs and somehow failed to realize it (Kinda like now, only the drug in question is far from benign.). Over 20% of the population is addicted. Now in our world the reaction has been to grudgingly legalize the least harmful and most socially acceptable drugs; although that's happening with considerable push back. In the film, Law Enforcement and the government that it, in theory, works for, although we see zero civilian oversight, turns to increasingly sophisticated technology and surveillance (which our current government is working to obtain for other reasons) to try and stem the tide.

That tide has a name, Substance D, a highly addictive drug that causes brain damage through repeated use. To be honest, I have to wonder at a society where one out of five people are so riddled with despair and/or boredom that they turn to a drug that causes the hemispheres of your brain to be unable to communicate with each other (It probably isn’t that much different from a society in which 38% of adults have at one time or another met the clinical definition of having a substance abuse disorder of one sort or another…{Not quite the same as 1 out of 5 is hopelessly addicted to a drug we don’t even have a decent treatment for and will have their brains burnt out}True.  But it isn't that far.). Basically turning your mind into a chunky slurry incapable of really interacting with the outside world in a meaningful way. That said, there are drugs on the market today that literally eat your flesh and people voluntarily turn to them so maybe my grasp of human nature just isn't as tight as I thought.

Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, aka undercover police officer Fred, who has to wear an advanced piece of equipment, the scrambler suit, to hide his identity from his own superiors (Because the corruption is that rampant. {fending off infiltration can be difficult}). Bob/Fred is a man with many problems, one of his roommates is trying to frame him for a variety of crimes. His girlfriend won't be intimate with him and his boss just assigned him to build a case against himself. All of this while his addiction to Substance D is slowly destroying his grip on reality. Keanu plays Bob/Fred pretty well honestly, capturing his mood swings and confusion as he slowly loses his grip on the world, while we maintain an iron grip on our empathy for Bob/Fred's struggles. You honestly feel bad for the guy as you watch him being destroyed right before your eyes.

Robert Downey Jr plays Bob/Fred's roommate James Barris and I feel that he was slightly miscasted here. It's not that he does a bad job, in fact he does a pretty good job. It's just that Downey's native charisma makes Barris a lot more likable than he should be. In some ways, though it does feel like Downey is channeling some of Jeff Goldblum's mannerisms into the character who is an overly pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, drug addict. Which also strangely works, to be honest, but I find myself wondering if a less likable actor might have been a better choice. (I differ in my opinion of the character.  I suspect that Our Dear Reviewer read certain mannerisms into the character in the text, and Robert channeled Jeff to capture his.  The reality is unless such a person were personable, he likely would have gotten himself killed.  I’ve known some addicts, dated one for a bit, subset: booze.  They can be charming as fuck, even while being completely toxic.)

Our female lead, Donna is played by Winona Ryder (Almost unrecognizable, and praise be unto Her.) and she does a really great performance using mostly her body language in this role. Now in the novel, I didn't really feel that Donna was all that invested in Bob as a person and her empathy for Bob/Fred's fate was more driven by general compassion. This may be because of Dick's reoccurring issues with women honestly (Yes.). However, Winona, likely comfortable with Reeves because of their past work (they did accidentally marry each on the set of Dracula after all) is able to affect a sort of causal intimacy with him. I'll admit that this is more important for me, due to being a child of deaf parents, but body language is something I have to tell myself to pay less attention to. ASL, the first language I ever learned, uses body language heavily, it's not just your hands. So a deaf person or another native ASL speaker is frankly a bit more sensitive to it than the average. I wouldn't worry about deaf people being able to read your secrets from body language however folks, because most of you throw out such conflicting messages using it that ASL speakers try to ignore it when dealing with you. Anyways, Ryder does a great job with her body language of adding depth to her relationship and by making it a point of only allowing Bob/Fred to actually touch her even casually.

Now let me talk about the rotoscoping, which was done via a computer program called rotoshop. Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion films of real things frame by frame to create fluid movement and more realistic action than hand drawing is capable of. It was invented by Max Fleischer, a Polish-American animator in 1915. Walt Disney used it in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Ralph Bakshi used it extensively in his works including his version of Lord of the Rings, Ice and Fire, American Pop and Cool World as well some sequences in Wizards. Don Bluth used it in American Tail, Secret of NIMH and Titan AE (And George Lucas used it for the lightsabers in the original Star Wars films.).

Rotoshop is a software producing much the same effect only replacing the long and tedious hand technique with computer animation to create the same effect. In A Scanner Darkly the result is a dream-like atmosphere which increases the unreality of Bob/Fred's world while keeping it real enough that you can't shrug it off. It's honestly both rather beautiful and disturbing (It was incredibly surreal.). I don't think I would want to see this become a staple or mainstay of animation but for works like A Scanner Darkly, it honestly works incredibly well. (It is one of those techniques that is used to communicate the sensory reality of the viewpoint character from the third person.  Like Dutch Angles to portray being off-balance, or…the whole of Come and See in its use of sound design to portray auditory exclusion  Bob/Fred’s reality is breaking down, and the rotoscoping gets that across.)

Now, as is our tradition in this review, adaptions get two grades. The first grade is of the adaption as a stand-alone project and the second is how good of an adaptation it is. As a stand-alone movie, I would consider A Scanner Darkly very good. It's well written, very well acted, and while the story is bleak and only ends with the barest glimmer of hope, it still keeps you on board. It's not quite to an A, however. Maybe it's the bleakness or the sense of the uncanny running through it but I can't quite hold it up as a film you would watch again and again. But it is a film that you can watch and it stays with you and you certainly don't feel like you wasted your time. So A Scanner Darkly gets a B+ from me. As an adaptation, it's bloody amazing. While large parts of the book are skipped and we don't get a lot of the slow slide into irreparable damage with Bob/Fred that we do in the book, these changes are due to the medium. The only real changes actually help streamline and improve the narrative honestly. So as an adaptation I'm giving it an A-. 

Obviously, I watched this too, and will be giving it my own grade.  Actually grades.  I cannot grade it as an adaptation, but I will grade it on two criteria.  The first is how much I subjectively enjoyed the film.  The second is the artistic merit of the film.  There are some movies that are absolutely amazing films that everyone should watch, as art, but that aren’t really enjoyable.  Think “Come and See” which is a soviet war movie about partisan fighting in the Great Patriotic War.  It was so accurate - because the guys who made it fought as partisans in Belarus against the Nazis - that it hospitalized veterans.  It is absolutely amazing, but you only ever watch it once.  There are other movies that are complete schlock with little artistic merit or social commentary to be had that are just great fun to watch.  Dante’s Peak is a good example of this.  It is a terrible movie that makes geologists weep, but I secretly love it.

As a piece of entertainment, I give this movie a C-.  It isn’t terrible, I would watch it again to make sure a friend saw it, and I’d be able to emotionally stand doing so.  But it wasn’t enjoyable. As a work of art that everyone should see, it is a straight A for me.  The cinematography, the writing, pacing.  Technically, it is a masterpiece.  More than that, it is also a poignant commentary on people in a broken society that hits very close to home.

With that, we bring another month of Philip K Dick reviews to an end.  These works were all chosen by our ever wise patrons, through a vote at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a 1$ a month.  We’re also considering some changes which will be put to patron vote so if you’d like a voice in that, please consider joining us.  Next week is Breach of Trust by Gary T Stevens and Daniel Gibbs. 

Red text was your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text was your reviewer Garvin Anders