(Ed. Note: Originally published at Image Facts.)
“Does a passive infrared scanner… see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
These few paragraphs of review are bracketed by two quotes from Philip K. Dick’s book A Scanner Darkly, recently adapted by Linklater. It isn’t a rote adaptation, but he manages to get out of the book what is central to Dick’s intentions in the novel. On the basis of a number of odd personal coincidences, Dick’s novel has long been my go-to depiction of substance abuse and its psychoses in print, a sad and gentle giant of a novel that only unfolds its terror to the reader willing to stand on its shoulders for a while. The novel is a confession, and next to Dick’s two “mainstream” novels, a rare moment of unambiguous self-reflection. In terms of his biography, A Scanner Darkly is what they call “a moment of clarity.”
Linklater’s triumph in the film version of A Scanner Darkly is the transposition of these personal transactions that take place in one’s reading of the novel into images. The film makes use of the same animating/painting process he helped pioneer in Waking Life, which is arguably more effective and germane to the subject matter of A Scanner Darkly. Linklater’s frequent closely framed shots of Fred/Bob in personal dialogue, cloaked in the hallucinatory tones of the film’s unique format, are effective in turning the internal monologue of the novel into something other than simple voiceover narration. In these moments we are able to look the helplessness at the center of the novel straight in the eye. Meanwhile, the plot turns the empathy developed by these scenes into something far less conventional as the viewer becomes subject to Fred/Bob’s own confusion.
The impressionistic animation of the film enables Linklater to reconstruct the world of Substance D without the unnecessarily hysterical techniques of other addiction operas like Requiem for a Dream or Spun. In an ultimate irony, this world of Substance D (often just referred to as “death” or “slow death”) fabricated by Linklater’s painterly approach is in direct contradiction of André Bazin’s understanding of actual, physical celluloid passing through the camera as an extension of photography’s unique capability of recording and preserving life. From a purely formal standpoint, A Scanner Darkly isn’t a “film” at all. Linklater tipped his “holy moments” hand to Bazin in Waking Life, and I kept wondering throughout the film if he recognized how well his “film” matched Dick’s evocation of substance abuse, death, and the incapability of technology to penetrate either. Contra Bazin, A Scanner Darklyliterally is a slow death, his painting the film frame by frame the foreground of a terminal, reality-altering illness.
Even if such an analogy is simply a by-product of Linklater’s production process that I just made up, it is brilliant. It embodies a profound criticism of films like Requiem for a Dream that have been heralded as effective depictions of addiction. What we really have in Requiem is the sort of short term, surface level escape from reality that drugs pretend to offer their users. All of Aranofsky’s tricks with steadi-cams, time-lapse cinematography, and split screen editing seem to be depicting the profound internal crises of his characters. But in reality, these techniques are fleeting, resting superficially on the surface of the film itself and failing to penetrate the psychosis of addiction. Their affect wears off soon after the film is over, the viewer quickly needing an equivalently MTV-like fix. In contrast, Linklater hasn’t made a film about addiction, but an entirely different world from reality itself which epitomizes the process and pitfalls of substance abuse. Somewhere there between Dick’s prose and Linklater’s formal mechanism of translation is an enduring performance of what they call “rock bottom.”
“‘Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written,’ a voice said. ‘Death is swallowed up. In victory.’ Perhaps only Fred heard it. ‘Because,’ the voice said, ‘as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not into the body but up – in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death.’”