Imagine you are arrested by the FBI and accused of being a terrorist. Despite your constant protestations of innocence, you are held in custody and interrogated. But suppose that really you are a sentient machine, moreover a walking bomb. You believe genuinely that you are innocent, and yet you are doomed to explode at some moment at the design of your creators.
The science fiction of Philip K. Dick is the reverse of the feel-good sci-fi of Star Trek, and not-so-removed from our society as the distant dystopian post-apocalyptic landscapes of such creations as I Am Legend. We as readers, as viewers, are drawn into Dick's creations because we could easily be one of his everyday characters. We laugh at conspiracy theories, but what if they were true asks the prototypical Dick story. And, most engagingly, what if we were the victim?
Despite its relative incoherence, A Scanner Darkly is one of Dick's most powerful novels, and interestingly one with the fewest elements of science fiction. Drugs as a means of social control occur in other Dick stories, most notably The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, but this theme is hidden in A Scanner Darkly until the end; the drugs instead being a source of comedy, escape and of course tragedy. The moment of revelation at the heart of the movie–that Donna is HANK–is utterly typical of Dick; the reality constructed thus far is interrupted and shown to be a falsehood, in the process revealing a new construction. The enemy thus far, the Despair Desolation and Death of Substance D, is revealed to be a tool of the greater enemy, the apparently benign New Path.
Linklater's film (view trailer) distils the novel–it is far truer to its source than any Dick film yet including Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Paycheck–into a coherent story; gaining an intensity that the novel's extraneous subplots lacks. The rotoscoping makes the film visually beautiful. Special effects such as the scramble suits are incorporated quite naturally within the animation (this was perhaps the primary motivation of the technique) and permit unintrusive comic moments, such as the Alien that reads Freck his sins and Luckman's metamorphosis into an insect.
As opposed to the rotoscoping in Waking Life, which was stylistically simpler and with its shifting imprecision served to invoke the sense of Dream, the rotoscoping effect in A Scanner Darkly opens a ambiguity between what is real and what is drug-related. On repeated viewings of the film our answers to such questions as at what point FRED fails to recognise that he is Arctor, how real the conversations with the psychologists were, whether Arctor/FRED's imagined family was ever real.... seem to shift.
The brutality of the sacrifice of Actor/FRED into the persona of Bruce is made so very emphatic in the movie by juxtaposing immediately before the moment of revelation the beautiful soliloquy;
"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. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too."
but it is not at all clear that this was in fact delivered or imagined. The movie concludes with the image of the recurring little blue flowers growing under the eaves of corn; the view widening and retreating to see the cornfields and the mountains. It is a poignant and homely image of America and the underlying visual metaphor–that the drugs, terrorism, control, the rot is within contemporary American society and outside the view of the scanners–is one that is not lost on the viewer. In this way, the novel and the film diverge: the former addresses McCarthyism, communism, hippie culture; the latter the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and the sacrifice of our civil liberties for the perception of public safety.
It would be easy to conclude at that point, but there is another layer above the reality heretofore constructed: the powerful anti-drugs message of the film is to an extent illusory. Dick himself never took heroin, he merely pretended to (read the biography of Dick I Am Alive And You Are Dead for the full story). Despite the strong indication of autobiography like the list at the end, there is a falseness to the story–as in The Man In the High Castle where one of the characters meets the novelist writing the novel–we are watching fiction. We are watching A Scanner Darkly: an image that does not let us get into the heart of the characters we see and does not allow us to see into Dick himself. Does this remove the stark, bleak, horrifying ending; does this mitigate the sacrifice of Arctor/FRED/Bruce/Dick?
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