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A Scanner Darkly July 16, 2006 |
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“D is for dumbness, and desertion, and despair,” says Keanu Reeves as Philip K. Dick’s undercover detective/drug addict Bob Arctor in “A Scanner Darkly”, “D is finally death, slow death, from the head down.” Anybody who has read Dick’s 1977 mind boggler about the double life of a law enforcer investigating a ring of dopers he, in his civilian life, is very much a part of, knows what this sentence is all about; with all it’s gloom and foreboding, it’s the cry of a man who has seen the ugly side of drug addiction and experimentation, and knows from where such dark thoughts originate. D is Substance D, the drug of choice in the fictional California Dick was writing about in ’77, but it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that it really means LSD, for which the author had experimented extensively with in the early and middle seventies, and taking it a step farther, the D can also double for both Drugs and Death, as the above quotation finally argues, the death of the body, for which Dick knew all too well given the number of friends he lost, or had been cripplingly afflicted with permanent damage from heroin and amphetamine addictions. The melancholy of Dick’s final message in “A Scanner Darkly” was that drug addiction is as much a painful phenomena of the brain craving something it knew was slowly causing it harm, than it is the human loss of will, or stamina, to fight that craving, thus creating a psychologically deficient consciousness where the body suffers the effects of a brain that is tricking it to obsessively crave that which is dangerous and deadly. In the novel, this duel consciousness is represented in the shifting narratives of drug addict Bob Arctor, and his supposedly straight-laced cop alter ego Agent Fred, as he struggles to comprehend which side of the equation he’s working for (thanks to Substance D, and the Orwellian agency he works for, and is spying on him, which dresses him in a face changing body suit called a “scramble suit”, he hardly knows what is what in either of his lives), and in the new film adaptation of the novel, it is quite literally represented by the filmmaking itself, which digitally paints colored outlines of the filmed action to create a kind of other reality that is not unlike a floating subconscious dream state, one, perhaps, influenced by the very substances that it’s wholly confronting as evil. The result is trippy, and confusing, but director Richard Linklater never suggests that his technique (Rotoscoping it’s called, like in his earlier “Waking Life”, which makes the scramble suits an ever changing tableau of eyes, lips, noses, ties, blazers, and clothing infinitum) is anything more than an adherent to Dick’s complexities as a writer of vast mental states, letting us watch his characters, all of whom are influenced by Substance D one way or another, in the state that Dick originally intended his prose to base them in, a world of shifting realities, left and right brain hemispheres acting against each other, and finally the last step between waking life, and a complete mental and physical breakdown. There is no substitute for the brilliance of Philip K. Dick’s great narrative, but Linklater is faithful to the original work, and his unique animation approach makes “A Scanner Darkly” one of the strangest, and most sobering social critiques of recent years. “A Scanner Darkly” is playing exclusively at the Amherst Theater, 3500 Main St. in Buffalo. by Adam Suraf
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