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Monday, July 10, 2006
Everything Is Not Going to be Okay
The Onion: Have you thought about how the events of Sept. 11 might change the way you make movies?
Richard Linklater: I don't think so. I'm not working on any terrorist scripts or anything.
-From an interview in 2001 (P.S. there might be spoilers in this post)
The first thing we see in A Scanner Darkly is a hallucination. Bugs are crawling all over Charles Freck (Robbie Cochrane) and no matter how hard he cleans he and his dog are still covered in aphids. With the technique Linklater uses in this film thousands of animated bugs crawl over the characters onscreen, who are played by live actors but are then processed so they are then a part of animation. We are seeing something real and unreal at the same time, not unlike the Substance D-induced experience Freck is going through. What we are seeing can never be trusted and since in the world of A Scanner Darkly, which is only a slight exaggeration of our own; everything can be seen nothing can be trusted.
When I read Philip K. Dick’s book a few years ago what captivated me the most was the sense of desolation Dick had instilled in the lives of his drug-addled characters. This wasn’t one of his books dealing with robots, aliens or parallel worlds. The only sci-fi touches in the story are the scramble suits undercover cops like “Fred”/Bob Arctor (played by Keanu Reeves in the film) wears and a short sequence involving Freck’s suicide. Most of the book, certainly the aspect that I most responded to, was the accurate depiction of what a suburban drug addict’s world is like, with all the tragedy, comedy but mostly boredom that entails. Arctor’s brain is splitting him into two different people making him a man who personified the split between the “straight” worlds of law enforcement and that of the “freaks.” The law was so out of it in the ‘70s, with nothing much changing since but we’ll get to that later, that they thought the junky world that Dick was a part of were enemy number one. The greatest scene in the film is when Arctor, James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson) are at their most paranoid, convinced someone has broken into their house and that their privacy has been violated. Their bumbling reaction to the would-be intruder, they’re so right they’re wrong, proves they are only a threat to themselves and how bizarre it is for Arctor’s other side to spend so much time and money surveying these people and considering them such a threat. If these lives are so pathetic what does that make those who are voyeurs into these lives?
The addicts’ side of the story is in fine form as it takes up the first 2/3rds of the film. Linklater’s talent in depicting low key human behavior that rings so very true, as seen in Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Waking Life which first employed this animation technique, serves him well as Reeves, Downey and Harrelson form their “Three Stooges on Ecstasy” routine. They are some very funny scenes as the gears on a bicycle and later a car’s engine confounds these three grown men. We never get an objective view of life in A Scanner Darkly so it would make sense that what would irritate the players in the show are mechanical systems that are not open for debate. Debating, philosophizing and just being gabby is what Arctor, Barris, Luckman, Freck and Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder) like to do the best although their logic only makes sense to them, if that. My personal experiments in substances were hardly notable but I was still whisked back, with some embarrassment, to lazy stoned days after school with several friends and me getting into the most boneheaded of discussions. Downey provides the best performance here as a fast-talking shyster of a man. Harrelson plays off him well being just as slow as Downey is fast. Reeves is the de facto leader of their group and you can see him stew in anger at the stupidity of his cohorts. Reeves may get a lot jokes at his acting talent’s expense but while he certainly offers no great range he is good at playing a confused and bewildered everyman. It worked in the beginning of The Matrix and it works very well here as Arctor and “Fred” split into two people.
The world “Fred” lives in is meant to be an ideal against Arctor’s world, celebrated by a group of Orange County conservatives early in the film. Here the scramble suit worn by cops working for private drug enforcement agency Newpath has the people in them float through all possible configurations of the human body. It is the most impressive part of a visually rich film. Newpath can see every face on the planet but for their employees to be above such surveillance they must wear the face of everyone on the planet. Linklater’s text follows Dick’s faithfully; Freck’s suicide even comes complete with a narration directly from the book. But put in the context of a film released in 2006 as opposed to a novel released in 1977 and we see similarities and differences in subtext. The ideas about Big Brother’s watchful eye were certainly present in Dick’s novel but I felt it more prominent here, with a reference to tapped cell phone conversations appearing fairly early on. When Barris and Freck go to fetch the ingredients for some homemade cocaine the scene is sped up and looks like a fast forwarded tape made by a security camera. Barris is an informant of a different variety than Arctor and when he is talking to “Fred” and his boss “Hank” he is unafraid to paint his so-called friends as a “terrorist cell.” It may have taken a few years but I think Sept. 11th and the ensuing mishandled and corrupt War on Terror has influenced Linklater’s work. The animation in the film puts a deliberate layer of distance between us and the action were are seeing, making everyone in the audience someone scanning for activity. Arctor ruminates that if the scanner surveying him is not seeing things clearly then no one can find something tangible to make sense of his life because we certainly can’t. As we see the painted shell on Reeves wiggle and convulse we realize that we cannot find any solid truth either.
This political side of the story creeps underneath the film at first but by the third act it has come to the forefront. This is where the human drama Linklater establishes pays off and perhaps affords this film a second viewing. For most of the film we see Arctor and Hawthorne enter into something resembling a relationship, albeit one that is far more complicated than it should be due to both participants’ altered lives. We find out at the end that “Hank,” the boss of “Fred,” has Hawthorne only faking her drug addiction (or was she?). In the scramble suits the two talk to each other in cold voices not far from sound of the device Stephen Hawking uses to communicate with. Outside of the suits they are two damaged people but at least they are two damaged people who sound like they have some affection for each other. The climax of the film has Arctor freaking out when “Hank” is informing him that he will be sent to one of Newpath’s treatment facilities. The strength and weaknesses in the film are both on display in this key scene. The distortion of the scramble suit grows more severe as Arctor loses his grip on his life. At the same time we hear “Hank” give a long speech where I could just imagine the blocks on type on the screenplay. Linklater’s dependence on dialogue that worked so well before gives out as it must tackle exposition. It got to the point where I couldn’t pay attention to what the character was saying anymore and just concentrated on the psychedelic look of the person speaking to me. I felt like I was on drugs myself being lectured to by a cop and perhaps that’s the point. The final scenes of the film have the two sides of Hawthorne come together as she tries to find some way to help Arctor while he is transported to one of Newpath’s ranches in Northern California. The Methadone technique, introduced by the Nixon administration while Dick was first starting his drug career, is contemplated in the film’s final scenes.
The film ends with the most powerful section of Dick’s book recreated as text on screen. Dick lists his comrades who have fallen in the War on Drugs. Linklater has made a film for a time where a similar never-ending and destructive war has bolstered the government’s power to spy on its citizens for the crime of recreation.
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