A Scanner Darkly

In A Waking Life (2001) Richard Linklater laid animation on top of scenes that he had filmed using live actors. Animation allowed him to control ambiance and tone and perception in unconventional and sometimes uncanny ways. The animation in A Waking Life caused the characters and the world of the film as a whole always to be shimmering, shifting slightly from one frame to another, as if to signify the shifting lives and attitudes of the characters and some barely glimpsed higher state of being.

Linklater uses the same basic technique in A Scanner Darkly, though in this film the world as depicted through animation is more fixed and does not shift and shimmer. Instead, it is what happens to the characters that alters and subverts any sense of reality we may have. The film is based on a Philip K. Dick novel, and thus not surprisingly it pits individuals against an authoritative law enforcement agency, representative of an even larger impersonal and authoritative government, waging war against illegal drugs, in particular the drug called substance D, to which 20% of the population is addicted. The film is set seven or so years in the future.

Keanu Reeves plays an undercover agent for the agency that is waging war against substance D. In the course of the film he loses his family (which he may not have ever had to begin with), his friends, and his grip on reality. Close friends and loved ones betray him, or seem to. He makes terrible mistakes, or maybe he simply thinks he makes them. At first the film suggests that this loose grip on reality is the result of the drug to which Reeves is addicted, but ultimately it seems that other explanations may better apply. Through what happens to him, the film argues that to governments the individual doesn’t matter and is merely a pawn, to be used in whatever expedient way the government finds necessary.

I slept through portions of this film, and so I must admit that perhaps I slept through the portions that would have allowed me to make sense of the portions I did not sleep through. I should watch the film again. But it was difficult to make sense of, even though the basic outlines of the plot ultimately come murkily apparent.

I reacted with ambiguity to the animation techniques in A Waking Life and have a similar reaction to the technique in A Scanner Darkly. The technique aims for animated realism. It’s usually easy to recognize the actors who are portraying the animated characters. There is no attempt to camouflage them, most of the time. The overall effect is one of unsettlement, estrangement from the plot and characters, irritation. In P. T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002) I was irritated for the first few scenes by the disjunctive soundtrack, but finally it took hold and made sense and worked in a way that I have to say A Scanner Darkly never quite achieved. What does the technique achieve? Could a conventionally filmed version of this story have worked better than this animated version? If the point of the technique is to subvert one’s sense of reality, to suggest that what we think is real may be only an illusion or a supposition imposed on us by someone or something else, this does not come out from the animation. The characters themselves, their lives and what happens to them, brings the idea out.

The characters in this film are portrayed as aging members of the Generation X—aimless, hopeless, lost. I prefer the Linklater of Before Sunset (2004) and Before Sunrise (1995).