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Painting a dark picture
A SCANNER DARKLY
Directed by Richard Linklater
Certificate PG
HOLLYWOOD turns time and again to sci-fi writer Philip K Dick for inspiration and A Scanner Darkly is one of Dick’s best pieces. Director Richard Linklater has stayed as true as he can to the book.
Linklater has also used a bizarre animation procedure that grabs your attention and then twist it in 100 different directions to create a truly memorable film.
The animation is called rotoscoping and consists of filming actors then painting over them. It has two effects; the first allows the director a broader palette to make a visually grabbing film. The other is he can make an animated film but use the strengths of actors – something which in the money-orientated studio world makes a difference at the box office.
The story focuses on the life of Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), who was once a well-respected member of his home town Californian community. But an addiction to Substance D has turned this once proud man into something else entirely.
He spends his days off his head with his equally spaced out mates. But he has a secret. Arctor is also working as an informer for the police, letting them have tit-bits of information about the drug scene he is embroiled in. To pass on his information, he dons a special coat that disguises his identity – a garment that uses holograms to hide the person under the garmennt. But his own personality has been so consumed by his cravings that you are never quite sure whether the Bob you see on screen is Bob the addict or Bob the informer, a moral dilemma that provides the essence of the story.
Winona Ryder pops up as Donna, a girl with a never ending supply of D – Bob sleeps with her, but whether this is for kicks or to purloin information, you are not sure.
It is an interesting take on what drug addiction does to the soul. Bob betrays his friends with no qualms, his only real wish to keep himself free to indulge his drug addiction.
Dick wrote the story in 1977. He was able to draw on the mistrust of the state apparatus in California which existed at the time. This makes it a snap shot of the period between the 1967 Summer of Love and the withdrawal from Vietnam, a useful piece of cultural history to augment the politics of the Nixon era: the Berkeley university demonstrations, the hippies in Haight Ashbury, the FBI hunting down members of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, emergency measures being taken against marauding gangs of Hell’s Angels… it can all be found in the psyche of Scanner, and in this context, makes the adaptation much more than just a well produced and exciting cartoon. |
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