A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Blade Runner is a great motion picture, but despite what the credits say, it’s not a Philip K. Dick story. Total Recall is one of Arnold’s better action movies, but it isn’t Dick either. Minority Report comes closer, but it still doesn’t capture Philip K. Dick’s vision.

I have not seen The Adjustment Bureau, Paycheck, The Man in the High Castle, but I have my doubts.

A totally unrelated movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came closer to Dick’s reality-bending fiction than the so-called adaptations I’ve seen.

Oh, I almost forgot about A Scanner Darkly. I passed on this one back in ‘06. I think it’s mostly because I’d given up on Richard Linklater at that point. I didn’t care for Before Sunrise, The School of Rock, The Newton Boys, and SubUrbia. The very idea of a Bad News Bears remake didn’t help my disposition, but I later came round and enjoyed the movie.

As I did for Linklater. I loved Boyhood and especially Last Flag Flying. He’s back on my A-List.

I was further disinterested in A Scanner Darkly due to its use of rotoscope animation. I’m just not a fan of that sort of thing. It’s too much like a comic book for my liking.

It’s nineteen years later and I’ve rectified the situation. I’m kind of glad I waited, because A Scanner Darkly is undoubtedly more relevant now than it was in 2006.

Philip K. Dick’s imagination was too much for mainstream publishing for most of his life. He was confined to the narrow borders of science fiction, which tends to be more open-minded than general fiction.

The novel is, to me, an elegy for a lost generation. The revolution failed. Maybe the hippies helped bring the war in Vietnam to a close, but the military-industrial engine plowed on, destroying hopes and dreams in the name of a more powerful America.

A lot of old hippies became drug casualties. Dick befriended many of them, and in fact he was one himself.

The central characters of A Scanner Darkly are a trio of drug culture clowns, played to the hilt by Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr, and Woody Harrelson. They share a dump of a house where they party, bicker, pontificate, and generally engage in a lot of hysterical paranoia. However, as the saying goes, You may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t really out to get you.

Reeves is a narc, working for an organization that is ostensibly trying to battle public addiction to a drug called Substance D. He’s also living a double life as an addict.

It’s a dark, terrifying world where everyone is watched and their actions recorded. People are addicted to a drug that is manufactured and surreptitiously distributed to the people. Brain-fried addicts are easy to control.

There is a cloaking device that allows people to constantly change their physical identity, which is how the narcs move in and out of their social and professional rings. It’s eerily makes me think of the overpowering influence of AI technology. Or the way so many people use social media photo filters to mask their humanity.

Here’s a disquieting quote from A Scanner Darkly:

Living and unliving things are exchanging properties

Thinking about the rapidly changing world we now live in, that quote brings me chills.

Don’t expect a happy ending to A Scanner Darkly. I don’t expect one for all of us with the dehumanizing new technologies overtaking society.

I first read A Scanner Darkly sometime around 1980. It seemed like a crazy science fiction story then. Now it feels like a reality-based nightmare.

Linklater brought Dick’s vision perfectly to life with his movie. Watch it and weep.


Written by Mark Sieber