(TV/streaming video) New & Leftover Items, a Touch of 2024, and some Nostalgic Forensics

Everything Is Not Going To Be Okay

Nick and I came back a little while ago from seeing the Warner Independent Pictures release of the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

Not feeling especially creative this evening, worn down by real life worries and finding the line perfectly adequate, I chose a tagline from the film's official site as the header for this post.

In its simplest framing, A Scanner Darkly (Rated R, running time 1 hr 40 min.) is an anti-drug piece. It's also an anti War On Drugs piece, ultimately calling into question who is best served by creating an escalating, never-ending war.

(If you're worried about spoilers you should stop reading now. I don't feel like writing about the movie by not writing about details. Call me lazy or unskilled if you must, but I'm not in the mood for dancing around the edges tonight.)

In the end we're faced with questions as to who is truly worse, the deteriorating wrecks hooked on life-splitting and -destroying drugs, or those who are willing to sacrifice the lives of others in their holy war against the drug trade. Hopefully it will lead at least some of us in a better, third direction, though there's no sign that the near-future world (ambiguously set seven years in our future), much as in our own, that a more humane, ultimately effective approach will be adopted.
The performances were solid, with Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, while adequate, being easily (and not at all surprisingly) eclipsed by Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane, whose drug-addled perceptions and behavior usher us into the film (see header illustration.)
To be fair, those three latter actors are all far more down the path of being fragmented by the drugs, and so are more deeply disturbed and colorful characters.

If I had to give the best actor award to one person in the film it would be Rory Cochrane for his performance as the deeply delusional, repressed paranoid drug case, Charles Freck. His performance is magnetic, despite him keeping nearly all of his movements very tight and close to his body. Jame Barris' (Downey) incessant, convoluted prattling and Ernie Luckman's (Harrelson) physical and vocal hyperbole are entertaining enough to distract us from Charles at spots, but he's so tightly wound that we're drawn back to Freck's living ball of intensity. Throughout it he somehow manages to remain a very human character, and there are remnants -- as during the opening scene when his delusion of insect infestations finds him trying to help his dog, too -- of the likeable person he was before his addiction.

A scene somewhere past the halfway mark in the movie sees Freck making a severe choice, leading into a bizarre illusion that for all the world reminded me, in spirit at least, of some of the best elements of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series.

The drug in question in the film (though cocaine is also mentioned, but in a much lesser way) is Substance D, a powerful psychoactive drug. It eventually not only causes paranoia & delusions that override perceptions, and damages the dominant lobe of the brain so that the other attempts to compensate, leading to increasing disassociation, aphasia, etc., but will in time find the competing lobes increasingly isolated and developing independent memories and personalities.

It's important to note that while they manage to make aspects of these characters' deteriorations entertaining, it's not done in a way that would easily suggest any of this as something desireable.

The production twist for the film is that it's shot in a process I've always thought of as rotoscope, though here in 2006 they may have a fancy new term for it arising from newer techniques. The fact of the process is that the film was shot with live actors in real locations and then animators overlaid it with line and color work. This is done in part to provide a surreal quality to all of the action, as so many of the characters are battling their own, strange perceptions. Consequently, there's an appropriately squirmy, crawling edge to much of the linework in the film.

This also not only makes morphing in some illusions and delusions more easily, but it also gives them a means of handling the scanner suit. The scanner suit is an identity-concealing device that constantly shifts one's appearance and modulates the voice, so that a person wearing one cannot be identified by any means. The scanner suit is meant to conceal the user's identity while he is reporting to superiors or otherwise visible as an agent. This means that the agent wears it when he's not actually doing his job. While on the job he's undercover, perfectly visible in his own identity, usually playing the part of a drug addict in order to make connections and try to develop leads that will open channels to someone high enough on the supply chain to be worth arresting. This means the agent gets to be "himself" only behind a mask, dealing with a superior who is also wearing a mask, and can only be face to face with people he's actively trying to insinuate himself with and use. The biggest trick of it is that if one's playing a drug addict for a living, events can easily turn so that it's no longer an act.

I had - for an early instant - thought I'd read Dick's novel this is based on, only to immediately recall that I was thinking of Cordwainer Smith's Scanners Live In Vain, a very different story. So, I haven't read Dick's original work this film was based on, leaving my expectations open. (My 1977 self wouldn't have been very open to a story so deeply concerned with drug addiction; I would have simply dismissed the characters as worthless with the moral certainty that only a teenager or religious fundamentalist could muster, and passed on by.)

That said, I found it to be an entertaining, if understandably dark film, and while nothing ultimately surprised me that isn't a bad thing. A couple of the fan reviews I'd casually skimmed had me slightly concerned that the film might be considerably less comprehensible if someone hadn't done his reading first, so I was pleased to see that was just a case of a couple people underestimating the intelligence of the potential audience.

Reading the text - or perhaps even a closer watch a second time around (we're talking DVD here, so that'll be a little while off) - will likely answer any lingering questions I have as to one or two items regarding Bob Arctor's history before he became a scanner, whether his memories of a normal life, complete with wife and children were real (and, if so, what exactly happened) or a comforting illusion. At the moment I'm presuming the former, and then left to wonder if his epiphany that he had to completely disassociate himself from that life was as simple as the blow to the head he attributes it to or if he'd simply started using Substance D already, making his family and the life he had the first casualty.