13.4 Screening: A Scanner Darkly

Screening: A Scanner Darkly

Keanu Reeves in A Scanner Darkly 

For a filmmaker best known for amiable hang-out stories, Richard Linklater can direct a damn good wide-awake nightmare. A Scanner Darkly, his 2006 rotoscope animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name, is a consistently distressing and disturbing film.

It opens with unfortunate sap by the name of Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) being tormented by an endless horde of aphids that only he can see. From there, Linklater and his primary ensemble – Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and a post-sobriety/pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. – take the audience on a harrowing tour through all of Hell’s circles. A Scanner Darkly is haunting, dystopian science fiction at its best. A big part of the reason why it works so well is that, even in the depths of hallucinatory horror, it’s very much a Richard Linklater film. And when it does depart from Linklater’s usual storytelling style, it does so with intention and precision.

Linklater is famous for letting his movies take their time, for giving his characters the space they need to talk about everything from the search for self-actualization to the possibility that humanity was once telepathic. He’s one of the great directors of conversations, be they intense and personal or goofy and tangent-laden. Linklater and his creative collaborators use what folks talk about and how they talk about it to create dimensional, memorable characters. This is very much the case in A Scanner Darkly, with the twist that its characters range from tormented anti-heroes to truly appalling humans. Reeves, Ryder, Harrelson and Downey hang out and shoot the breeze just the same as their peers in, say Dazed and Confused (Links to an external site.) or Everybody Wants Some!! do. In the scenes where they are alone, Reeves and Ryder’s chemistry recalls that of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the much-loved Before Trilogy.  But where the heroines and heroes of Linklater’s gentler films generally like and love each other, A Scanner Darkly’s ensemble is a room full of razors.

Reeves’ Bob Arctor is an undercover cop who abandoned his safe, square life for horrors and the occasional dark miracle. As part of his cover as “Bob Arctor, local miscreant,” he abuses the mysterious and insanely addictive drug called Substance D. His “friends,” Ryder’s Donna, Harrelson’s Luckman and Downey’s thoroughly slimy and loathsome Barris use D too. Barring Donna, whom he loves unhealthily, Arctor doesn’t really like his pals. They don’t have much use for him either – Barris in particular aims to frame Arctor for his own criminal acts and later ignores Luckman nearly choking to death. Their scenes together play out like those of other Linklater ensembles, but a low note of dread plays throughout. These are people who hang out together to avoid being alone in their addiction, rather than out of any genuine camaraderie. 

But where the heroines and heroes of Linklater’s gentler films generally like and love each other, A Scanner Darkly’s ensemble is a room full of razors.

Due to its ensemble’s frayed relationships, the paranoia they all grapple with to one extent or another, and the nature of the dystopia in which they live A Scanner Darkly is, unlike much of Linklater’s other work, an intensely lonely picture. Arctor doesn’t like his friends when he hangs out with them, let alone when he has to watch them for hours on end through the array of surveillance cameras installed in his home. To protect their identities while on the clock, he and his fellow cops have to wear scramble suits – full body jumpsuits that constantly transmute their features and reduce their voices to a machine monotone (on a technical note, the scramble suits are truly stunning pieces of animation – 13 years on and there’s still nothing quite like them) – which render them totally anonymous to each other.

The brain-frying effects of Substance D should not be discounted either. Arctor’s addiction eventually grows so severe that he loses sight of his own identity – he does not realize that the man he is surveilling is himself. Arctor is a person lost in himself, one of many. What makes his slide into oblivion particularly distressing, even before the revelation that it was deliberately engineered, is that on some level Arctor realizes this. Consider the following monologue, in which Arctor ponders the surveillance equipment that blankets his home:

What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone’s sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I’m cursed and cursed again.

- Justin Harrison, "A Scanner Darkly Is A Richard Linklater Photo Negative," The Spool - Link Here

YOUTUBE CLIP of: 
A Scanner Darkly : by Philip K Dick - Voice of Paul Giamatti : Author's Note
Link Here

THE FILM - A SCANNER DARKLY