A Scanner Darkly
Richard Linklater has been preoccupied with dropout culture since the earliest days of his career: in the loopy Slacker (1991) and the larky Dazed and Confused (1993) he developed archetypal characters fueled by experimental lifestyles, mood- and mind-altering substances, and endless conversation. But more recently, as in the vertiginous Waking Life (2001), he’s tracked the gradual disillusionment of the dissolute, the drift of those once-sunny optimists toward an uneasy dystopia. Nowhere is this more evident than in his newest film, A Scanner Darkly, an ambitious animated adaptation of one of the most personal novels by sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick.
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Published in 1977 and set in 1994, Dick’s lurid, pulpy story follows a quartet of intensely verbal, directionless drug addicts as they lose their grip on reality. Linklater’s version is set “seven years from now” in Anaheim, California, a world in which the sort of genial potheads the director once let run wild in Texas have been worn down by a hard hallucinogenic drug known as Substance D. Twenty percent of the population is addicted. “There are no weekend warriors on the D,” comments one of its devotees, snaky motormouth Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). “You’re either on it or you haven’t tried it.” Paranoid doped-up citizens inform on each other as frequently as East Germans under the Stasi, either to save their own skins or to burn their friends and neighbors. Barris fingers his own druggie housemate, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), whom he happens to owe a considerable amount of back rent, but has no idea how close to the truth he is when he suspects there’s more to Arctor than meets the eye.
One link from Linklater’s early work that reverberates almost viscerally is the casting of Rory Cochrane, who played Slater in Dazed and Confused; his elfin pot smoker has morphed into Freck, a freaked-out addict who at the beginning of the film is convinced imaginary bugs are crawling all over him. Compare Slater’s goofy stoned rap about George Washington planting fields of pot everywhere (“a good cash crop for the south”) with Freck’s terror that the medics in a rehab clinic will maim him irrevocably–it’s like watching a set of before-and-after drug-prevention videos.
Where: Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire, Pipers Alley
