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."
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