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A Scanner Darkly

Film // Jim // 6th September 2006

Philip K Dick was an almost absurdly interesting person, admittedly he was a touch on the troubled side, but that is often the case with people who are so absurdly interesting. Rather than make a poor attempt some sort of sketchy biography, here are some facts about the man himself.
- As a struggling writer, Dick was paid by the word for his stories. This lead to him taking large quantities of speed to keep himself going. Speed was not the only drug that Dick got into as you might well suspect if you read any of his books.
- His twin sister, Jane, died at the age of just three weeks. She was buried in a double plot with his name on as well and a space to fill in his date of death. He ended up there in 1982.
- In 1974, he experienced a series of visions that he interpreted as being contact from some kind of god or alien intelligence. Writing about this filled up a large chunk of the final eight years of his life.
- He was investigated by the FBI (for writing to a soviet scientist during the fifties) Dick made friends with the investigating agents to the extent that one of them gave him driving lessons.
- As a writer he was incredibly prolific, publishing more than 40 novels, hundreds of short stories and shitloads of other bits and pieces
- He was always in and out of shrink’s offices, receiving wildly varying diagnoses from complete sanity through to complete schizophrenia.
- He was convinced that the authorities had burgled his house and stolen some of his unfinished works, later in his life he stated that perhaps he had committed the burglary himself, but just forgotten about it.
- He was married five times in twenty-five years, but got divorced every time.

Dick’s stories are generally tremendous works of imagination that fit into the genre of sci-fi without all that usual bollocks about spaceships, big fights and people with no vowels in their names.

Often, the setting has a mundane feel to it and the characters are markedly ordinary salaryman types. But there is usually an absolute killer of a central conceit with profound philosophical overtones.

When adapted for the screen, the general practice is to take the clever idea out of the middle and then construct a fairly standard action/sci-fi film around it – often involving spaceships, big fights and people with no vowels in their names. For example:

Blade Runner: Based on the novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep"
A really good film which shares some major themes and a general plot with the book but differs hugely in many other ways. The whole Mercerism thing goes out of the window as does the obsession with owning animals. However the ideas surrounding what it is that actually makes a person a human being remain as does the ambiguity surrounding the identity of the main character. This is drawn out more sharply in the Directors Cut.

Paycheck: Based on the short story “Paycheck”
Takes the cunning idea of a man with a wiped memory using clues left by himself prior to the memory wipe and turns it into a total dogturd of an action movie involving Ben Affleck. What on Earth has happened to John Woo?

Total Recall: Based on the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”
The story involves the validity or otherwise of memories that may or may not have been implanted. Film takes this and adds on Arnie killing loads of people and bringing air to a totalitarian Mars. Also has a woman with three tits in it, which I am fairly sure, wasn’t in the original.

Minority Report: Based on the short story “The Minority Report”
Spielberg uses the framework of Dick’s story to build a big spectacular Tom Cruise action vehicle around. Does adhere to the central idea of using prediction to prevent crimes before they occur and the problems that occur when the man running the show is predicted to commit a murder.

Screamers: Based on the short story “Second Variety”
Fairly entertaining film based on the vaguely satirical notion that if you make really intelligent killer machines they will eventually take over and then start a conflict amongst themselves.

Impostor: Based on the short story “Impostor”
What if you could make suicide bombers who didn’t know they were suicide bombers? Hopefully come up with a better film than this fairly miserable effort.

Anyway, the other day along with Nick and Chris I went to see the new Richard Linklater adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, a PKD Novel that I have to be honest and say that although I know what it is about, I’ve not actually read. The skies were dark and foreboding as we arrived at the cheesy smelling fun palace known as the Coventry Showcase Cinema.

The depressing theme continued into the pre-film adverts which offered up dead kids in traffic safety adverts, a morbid mobile phone thing about getting bad news quickly and finally a truly heart-breaking piece about an old man with a disabled wife who has been carted off because he couldn’t look after her any more.

Then the trailers started and they weren’t any better, pick of the bunch being Right At Your Door, some kind of harsh morality fable set during the fallout of a terrorist attack. At this point we were starting to find the whole suicidal programme quite amusing, they should have gone the whole hog and thrown Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre flick in there too.

So, an odd atmosphere had been set up for the screening of the film, which was appropriate because, in the best possible way, A Scanner Darkly is a very odd film.

To start with the whole thing is rotoscoped, that is, filmed normally and then drawn over to create an image that is at once incredibly realistic but also cartoonish and highly stylised. One benefit of doing things this way is that if you want to show something outlandish, such as hallucinations of insects or a suit that disguises the wearer by changing their appearance many times a second, then it kind of fits right in.

A Scanner Darkly: Fucked, up

The story centres on Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) a junkie dependent on the hugely addictive Substance D and his group of friends. However Bob is actually an undercover narcotics policeman (known as Fred), who is charged with spying on his drug buddies and possibly even on himself.

Add into the mix the fact that Bob has been hitting the Substance D so hard that he is now having trouble with his perception of reality and his understanding of exactly who he is.

He isn’t helped by the non-linear antics and puzzle-logic banter of his friends played by Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr, or by his seeming girlfriend, Winona Ryder, who can’t stand being touched “because she does a lot of coke”.

The plot becomes as confused as Bob as he and the viewer try to work out what exactly the fuck is going on before the wool is pulled from our eyes (if not his) towards the end of the film. Without having read the book, I can’t say how faithful A Scanner Darkly is to Dick’s original. What is apparent though is that this is the most successful attempt so far at capturing the essence of PKD on film.

The look and style of the film dovetail excellently to create a dreamlike state where you feel that the perception of reality could change at any moment, a bit like being on drugs, really. Common PKD themes such as confused identity, paranoia, totalitarian authority and surveillance are all major touchstones and it is not long before you suspect that Bob might, through no intention of his own, be a most unreliable narrator.

This isn’t just a film for Philip K Dick fans to wet themselves over though, it is interesting and entertaining in its own right. The cast are excellent, especially Robert Downey Jr who reels off huge reams of witty banter as though it has just sprung from his Substance D addled mind. Once again we also see that Keanu Reeves is always much better in films that require his character to be very confused for a lot of the time.

I laughed much more than I was expecting, but maybe that was because this nightmare-ish tale of drugs, paranoia and possible schizophrenia was a complete blast compared to those adverts we had to endure before it.

Click my links, the web designer said...

PKD Official Web Site

Comprehensive info on everything he did

A Scanner Darkly

Official film site