Movie Review: A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Aug. 28th, 2006 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwoxThe following originally appeared in my now-defunct Wordpress journal 'Novitious' on this date:
Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's classic, drug-war-presaging novel A Scanner Darkly is harrowing, hilarious, and not easy to digest in one viewing. Even though I read the book a few months before seeing the movie, I still feel like I missed some things that may or may not show up if I see it again.
In the movie, as in the book, a police officer named Fred is undercover as a small-time dealer named Bob Arctor. He deals in, and is heavily hooked on, a drug called Substance D, which he learns is unraveling the connection between hemispheres in his brain. Because Fred wears a ’scramble suit’ that disguises his true identity while in police headquarters, even his bosses do not know his true identity, and order him to monitor Bob Arctor, as they believe he will lead them further up the supply chain so they can identify the makers of Substance D. As Fred/Bob descends further into Substance D abuse, Fred and Bob become separate identities, each trying to outmaneuver the other.
The movie loses some of the more intensely paranoid scenes depicted in the book, though not necessarily to its detriment. It focuses more on Fred/Bob’s overall descent, and the Machiavellian reasons behind the orders of his superiors. It captures the essential erratic humor, meandering sequence of events, and underlying anger of Dick’s book, which was in large part inspired by his own experiences, and his loss of numerous friends to drug abuse and the not-yet-formally-declared drug war, and helped me make a bit more sense of the point of the novel’s ending.
As with Linklater’s Waking Life, one of my favorite films of the past five years, a process called rotoscoping was used to animate the filmed material. While I don’t know that it was necessary (I can visualize a very effective version of the film without it), it does complement the unhinged feel of the book, and makes for a number of compelling images. I liked how the cars in the driving scenes seemed to float more than drive, and how the land in the background would sometimes wave and slosh like the sea.
A Scanner Darkly is a free-flowing, warped movie that I enjoyed for the same reasons I enjoyed Waking Life and David Lynch’s Lost Highway: because it made me believe, against all evidence, that if I see it enough times, I will unravel its full meaning.
--
Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's classic, drug-war-presaging novel A Scanner Darkly is harrowing, hilarious, and not easy to digest in one viewing. Even though I read the book a few months before seeing the movie, I still feel like I missed some things that may or may not show up if I see it again.
In the movie, as in the book, a police officer named Fred is undercover as a small-time dealer named Bob Arctor. He deals in, and is heavily hooked on, a drug called Substance D, which he learns is unraveling the connection between hemispheres in his brain. Because Fred wears a ’scramble suit’ that disguises his true identity while in police headquarters, even his bosses do not know his true identity, and order him to monitor Bob Arctor, as they believe he will lead them further up the supply chain so they can identify the makers of Substance D. As Fred/Bob descends further into Substance D abuse, Fred and Bob become separate identities, each trying to outmaneuver the other.
The movie loses some of the more intensely paranoid scenes depicted in the book, though not necessarily to its detriment. It focuses more on Fred/Bob’s overall descent, and the Machiavellian reasons behind the orders of his superiors. It captures the essential erratic humor, meandering sequence of events, and underlying anger of Dick’s book, which was in large part inspired by his own experiences, and his loss of numerous friends to drug abuse and the not-yet-formally-declared drug war, and helped me make a bit more sense of the point of the novel’s ending.
As with Linklater’s Waking Life, one of my favorite films of the past five years, a process called rotoscoping was used to animate the filmed material. While I don’t know that it was necessary (I can visualize a very effective version of the film without it), it does complement the unhinged feel of the book, and makes for a number of compelling images. I liked how the cars in the driving scenes seemed to float more than drive, and how the land in the background would sometimes wave and slosh like the sea.
A Scanner Darkly is a free-flowing, warped movie that I enjoyed for the same reasons I enjoyed Waking Life and David Lynch’s Lost Highway: because it made me believe, against all evidence, that if I see it enough times, I will unravel its full meaning.
--