Identities shift and melt like shadows in Richard Linklater's animated adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, a look at a future that looks an awful lot like today. Based on a 1977 novel by the science fiction visionary Philip K. Dick, the semispeculative story involves a cop (call him Officer Fred) who, by assuming an undercover identity (call him Bob Arctor), is inching his way up toward a big drug bust, score by score. But there's a little problem: Fred is starting to forget he's Bob, or maybe vice versa.
Given that Fred/Bob has been regularly dropping Substance D, as in Death, tab by tab, it's no wonder he's feeling a bit off; no wonder, too, given that this is the world Philip K. Dick made. Like the writer's other worlds, that of A Scanner Darkly is one in which drugs predominate and reality tends to be a big question mark, hovering like an electro-colored thought bubble above characters who are more everyday normal than super-this or -that. Ordinary guys who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances like Fred/Bob, who in Linklater's film has been given seductive voice and corporeal outline by Keanu Reeves, an actor whose penchant for otherworldly types and excellent adventures make him well suited for vision quests like this one.
Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly after several years of firsthand experience with what he called the street scene in the early 1970s. By 1971 he was ingesting a whopping 1,000 hits of speed a week, along with plentiful daily doses of tranquilizers. "The happiness pills," he admitted around that time, "are turning out to be nightmare pills." He entered a rehabilitation center shortly thereafter and in 1972, in a letter to a drug treatment center in Southern California, even offered his services as a counselor, having had, as he wrote, "five friends kill themselves on or as a result of acid trips — and seen many fine brains burned out on narcotics." The novel A Scanner Darkly, which drew on his memories of that time, followed.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS
As in the book, the film finds Bob Arctor pursuing his drug-and-love connection, Donna (voiced by Winona Ryder), while Fred puts in time in front of a bank of video monitors, watching surveillance images of himself as Bob Arctor and his housemates, the prankster Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and the joker Luckman (Woody Harrelson), vegetating amid their collective chaos and broken-down furniture. To protect his undercover identity, Fred often wears a "scramble suit," which turns him into a "vague blur" not unlike all the other vague blurs to whom he delivers antidrug speeches at the local Lions and Elks clubs. Not unlike the vague blur that Fred was once upon a married time, before he conked his head and, as Bob, started to turn on, tune in and drop out. On its most basic level, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of drug abuse and indeed closes with a poignant roll call of Philip K. Dick's friends who had been lost, "punished" — as he wrote — "entirely too much for what they did."
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would