Film: A Scanner Darkly

I think maybe I have been thinking about Over The Edge too much, this being the self-described role-playing game of surreal danger. It is on this that I a blame my main problem with this film of Philip K. Dick’s novel – it’s just not that weird. Obviously, I have not read the book and cannot really claim to be an authority on Dick’s writings, but when I heard that the film was based on one of his books and was about drøgs, a plot instantly suggested itself to me.

This is what I expected – there would be these guys who were taking some funny drøgs. As a result of said drøgs, they would be getting a bit fucked up, and would be having hallucinations and stuff. They would be finding it hard to tell the difference between reality and their hallucinations, but the viewer would know that they were only imagining the really weird stuff, so no problem. But then, something would happen to suggest that OH NO the hallucinations were kind of real, and that the drøgs were not merely fucking them up but they were also tearing away the veil of apparent reality to reveal some mentalist true reality. Reality and so on would breakdown and everything would be incredibly scary and confusing.

What actually happens in A Scanner Darkly is that a load of stoners get fucked up on drøgs sit around having stoner conversations, and grass each other up to the peegs. Part of the roffles in all this comes from said stoners being played by a troupe of notorious Hollywood caners. While they do have wacky hallucinations and stuff, it is pretty much always clear what is real and what is not – any confusion the characters feel comes from their being fucked on drøgs and not from any problems with the fabric of reality itself. The moment when the main character (played by Keanu Reeves) most feels like reality is breaking apart around him is dealt with as an entirely subjective experience, so you can still cling to the “he’s fucked on drøgs” hypothesis.

That’s not to say that this is a bad film. The interpolated rotoscoping technique they use (essentially, shooting live action footage and then drawing over it) looks dead weird, and suits well the whole thing about people losing their grip on reality and stuff. The stoner conversations between the characters are very funny, especially any of the ones involving Robert Downey Jr. – his applying to join the cops is particularly amusing. Winona Ryder is amazingly hot once rendered into a cartoon person.

And the film does live in my mind after I saw it. But I would have to say one thing that annoyed me about it was something that sticks it very faithfully to the book. Right at the very end the film throws up some text from Phillip K. Dick, dedicating the film to all his drøg buddies who have since fallen on hard times as a result of their habit, whether it is through psychosis or physical damage of one sort or another. I mean, it’s grand that he gets to commemorate all his pals and stuff, but it turns the thing into some kind of tiresome anti-drøg diatribe. There is enough of that kind of thing already in mass culture.