PKD, Adapted
Collin beat me to the review, so I’ll simply say: if you’re a fan of weird fiction, Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is worth your time. I saw it with my attorney as my final Massachusetts art-theater moviegoing experience, and it was very, very good. In fact, I’d say that the movie version pulled together the incoherencies of the original text in much the same way that Blade Runner extrapolated from and pulled together DADOES.
It’s a movie that knows all about drugs, and the tweaks and former tweaks who see it will well appreciate the ethos and deeply paranoid logic with which it constructs its paranoid anti-drug and anti-paranoia theme. I’ve heard some sci-fi fans complain that the movie fails in that it neglects to replicate the suffocating dread and paranoia of the book, but frankly, those fans are missing one of the movie’s big points, and one of PKD’s book’s big implicit points as well:
Drugs. Are. Fun. That’s why people do them.
Which, in and of itself, constitutes the lure of addiction, and its danger. The movie, in following the book’s indictment of the drug culture and its horrible casualties, would be deeply dishonest if it didn’t show why people do stuff like Substance D. (It also nicely encapsulates the reasons why “Just Say No” is an ineffective campaign to attempt to sell to teens: the logic of “Just Say No,” as the movie indicates, actually creates desire.) The comedic and comedic-paranoid moments in the movie, in the way they get you to laugh along and see (and even empathize with) the skewed logic of intoxication, humanize Arctor and his friends, and that’s what gives the movie’s final act its emotional punch.
Check it out.
July 24th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Didn’t you know that the throttle screw turns the other direction when you travel South?”
Very interesting movie. But not for everyone.
July 24th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
I saw it yesterday. I went into it not having read the story or with any idea it was going to be animated. It dragged in places, I thought, and Keanu is as bad an actor animated as not, but it was interesting. Robert Downey, Jr. was riveting (if an animation can be riveting).
July 24th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
For me, Keanu was, er, less bad. Downey, of course, has his own history, and was wonderful. And yeah, Kirill, that moment was priceless — that logic of the moment that seems, at the moment, so incontrovertible.
For some, as you say.
July 25th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
[…] Apropos to Collin’s and Mike’s reviews of A Scanner Darkly, was the discussion of Philip K. Dick on Talk of the Nation today. I wasn’t able to listen to most of it, so I need to listen to it on the web (and I really want to hear what Jonathan Lethem has to say — his Gun, with Occasional Music is one of the best Dickian novels I’ve read). I do have one complaint, however, one of the guests — I think it was Marshal Fine, responded to a question about Dick’s skepticism of technology by stating that technology often dehumanizes us. Specifically, he brought up cell phones, Blackberries, email, and the like and said, “It’s not people talking to people but machines talking to machines.” Are hand-written letters and books okay because they’re machines talking to people? I’m not taking issue with Dick’s representation of technology but with the comment itself. The day cell phones on conversations with other cell phones with no human agency or prior programming — and I’m not a data exchange, but a conversation about their day, what they’ve seen, who they went out with, how horrible we human owners are, that’s the day I’ll say that we have machines talking to machines. But even then it won’t be dehumanizing. […]