Dark horizon
Richard Linklater goes back to the drawing board in A Scanner Darkly
Anaheim, Calif., seven years from now is a soulless, hopeless place ruled by the highly addictive, paranoia-inducing drug Substance D. Providing a hallucinatory William Burroughs-worthy high, Substance D is ingested in an innocuous red capsule but sends its users careening on a ribbon of delusion. They imagine their bodies infested with hundreds of marauding bugs, or their friends transformed into giant talking cockroaches.
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Almost as awful as the drug itself is the cure. Treatment is meted out behind the doors of a mysterious company called New Path. And a Big Brother government uses the drug scourge as a license to continuously survey and strong-arm its citizenry. Riot gear-outfitted police patrol the aisles of drug stores and white vans quickly whisk away subversives.
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Science fiction is at its heart a penetration of our own reality for an alternative, darker one, a taste of what could be. Even when he stumbles — which he does fairly often in this sci-fi Slacker — director Richard Linklater uses the form nimbly to convey a disheartening sense of our own times.
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Linklater uses this animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick's classic 1977 novel (inspired by the author's own drug addiction) to peel back society's skin to reveal a world, very much like our own, beholden to corporations like New Path and a strong-arm government. Despite such a worthy revelation, his social commentary is desultory and rambling and is soon traded for other interests, like the philosophical ennui of Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves).
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Bob is a cop assigned to penetrate a group of Substance D addicts holed up in a shit-colored Roach Motel of a house presided over by the nefarious presence of addict and armchair sociopath James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Bob also shares quarters with a beautiful junkie, Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), and a surfer-type user, Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson) — all of whom engage in the kind of endlessly looping, speculative, verbally promiscuous talk sessions of Linklater's quintessential slackers.
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As Bob's residency wears on and his Substance D addiction intensifies, his presence in the house becomes murky. It becomes unclear if he is the observer or the one being observed via the cameras tucked into every room of the house.
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At police headquarters, Bob plunges into an even more outrageously disorienting mire. So as not to have his undercover identity blown, Bob and the rest of his colleagues wear "scramble suits" that create an ever-changing kaleidoscope of physical features to mask the person inside. In disturbing forays beneath the mask, Bob is glimpsed looking cornered and scared, unsure of his bearings, as addled by this identity scrambling as by Substance D. The scramble suit becomes a remarkably elastic concept, a metaphor for the alienating quality of both addiction and a culture of pretending and conforming and losing touch with a core identity.
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A Scanner Darkly is, unfortunately, dressed in its own scramble suit, its direction and interests shifting over and over until viewers may lose patience with the good ideas lost within the verbose muddle.
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In Linklater's film, the happy-go-lucky slackers of yore have gone rancid. Rather than talk as an expression of idiosyncratic worldviews, A Scanner Darkly's talk represents the throes of Substance D addiction and a disconnection from reality. The pop-culture discussions and intellectual ramblings that defined the vibrant, smart, perpetually academic quality of Linklater's Austin, Texas, hometown have been replaced by something ugly and sinister. Slacker conspiracies have curdled into tail-chasing inaction. Ideas are hit upon, madly pursued and then spiral out of control as determined action skids into inaction. Instead of living, having sex, working or seeing a connection between their empty lives and the Substance D that entraps them, Bob and his addict friends engage in white-noise chatter and nonsense activities, anesthetized to the despair and squalor that surrounds them.
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Despite a lack of focus and a reliance on often comically circular banter, Linklater's film is consistently successful in one regard. His use of the rotoscope animation technique he first employed in 1991's Waking Life proves especially well-suited to science fiction, a genre whose fantastic vision rendered via impressive special effects can often overwhelm and leech out the human component. Rotoscope retains the human focus, but adds an alienating effect in which the landscape and characters' faces are largely blank and featureless, eerily remote.
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Linklater dedicates his film to one of the characters depicted in Waking Life and Slacker, beloved University of Texas philosophy professor and Kierkegaard scholar Louis H. Mackey, who died in 2004. In its surest moments, A Scanner Darkly is a tribute to the art of navel-gazing rumination; the film is its own extended philosophical fugue.
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A Scanner Darkly is a film that asserts investigating and pondering one's own being is not a futile exercise, though it may be an ultimately unhappy one. Bob's tortured ruminations on his own lost identity become a metaphor for the painful and protracted state of living. If viewers can withstand Linklater's addled attention span, his story of one man's addiction can offer dark glimmers of our own times.