Film Flam

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Coloring Outside the Lines

There’s a thing that I do when I write fiction. As I’m writing I see different ideas display themselves to me, not necessarily answers to the what if… question, but paths that I might not have considered. It’s a paranoid process, because the biggest what if is What if I get it wrong?, What if down that road is the right way? Generally, movies avoid this sort of paranoia. You’ve got to trust them, so they march along to an ending that should seem apparent from the get go. Justice will be served, all will be right with the world by the time the titles scroll up toward the heavens.

A Scanner Darkly, like most of the work of Philip K. Dick, isn’t concerned with endings as much as it is with cautious steps. Every step could lead down a dangerous path, a deadly path if you’re not careful. So much thought goes into the how and why that fear renders things immobile.

The world of A Scanner Darkly is a drug-fueled paranoid ramble — but it’s fun. Often movies with drugs anywhere near the plot will portray them as the ultimate evil, a dark and foolish choice where nothing good can come from it. There is that in A Scanner Darkly but there is also community.

In A Scanner Darkly, and most Richard Linklater films, drugs are tools of psychic and philosophical exploration, discussed and dissected in social settings. For all the technological wonders of the film it’s visually just a bunch of people sitting in a room talking to one another about what makes them afraid, and what makes that fear go away. In A Scanner Darkly it’s Substance D; a MacGuffin drug with an apparent high that is difficult to discern from an audiences perspective. Substance D makes you see wild stuff, but that’s more a bug (no pun intended) than a feature. Substance D seems to be more about depression and not living in an empty house filled with the same nothing everyday.

Director Richard Linklater feeds off of the the free-form mental jazz riffs that spill from Dick’s frenetic drugged-out characters. To them, most of the “real” world is bland and repetiive. Better to seek out other realities; scary and weird, the unknown landscape looms large and unexplored. Skiing down the slopes of ideas churned out by stoners pushing their minds to the limit is an exciting and fascinating journey to watch.

This is what drugs do. They spiral into implosions of the self. Drug users appear passive and useless to the outsider looking in, but a chasm of self is revealed and reflected back to the drug user. In their minds they slam on the gas, collide, carreen and redirect from idea to idea like a psychological bumper car.

There is only pain when you start to wonder what these cerebral Lewis & Clark’s have left behind, and what are they trying so hard to get away from. Because everyone’s reality is their own, the group will always disintergrate. The journeys into ideas always boomerang back to the self.

After surviving a near fatal car crash, the characters assess the probable causes; freak accident or vastly detailed conspiracy? In the end it doesn’t matter. Substance D gets passed around and when one character begins to wonder if maybe his disconnection with reality has anything to do with their lack of answers or trust in them, the group replies “…man, don’t blame the drugs…”.

They’re right. It’s got nothing to do with the drugs, and everything to do with choice. Sometimes another reality is easier to explore when someone else is with you. It’s why going to the movies with a group can better than going alone. A Scanner Darkly is about a drug community. As a non-drug user I don’t think these really exists anymore.

As I understand it some of the most dangerous drug use comes from prescription drugs. The panic, and fear of the numbing blandness and screaming horror of the world has caused people to turn Big Pharma for salvataion.

The evils of A Scanner Darkly aren’t unlike the evils at your local multiplex. Corporations have created drugs that will alter your god, and change the mantra of your internal worship. You will love them, you will worship them. They will fill your voids, and heal your lonely nights; they are experts of your emotions; the new explorers of your mind. All of your dreams and joys will be enginneered by them and birthed into your soul. They wil color the world inside your mind if you let them.

You can get through this of course, you can fight it, but you’ll need friends to help you find your way, and it is this sentiment that holds A Scanner Darkly together.

Yes, everyone’s reality is their own, you can step away from it with the drugs and whiz-bang blockbusters, but when that crumbles and decays your mind will run back into the cave, afraid and lost and begging not to be alone anymore. In these moments you must reassess the things that you love in this world, if you have courage you will venture forth once more into the unknown with a friends hand to guide you as far as the road will take you both.