We’re white punks on dope, Mom & dad moved to Hollywood,Hang myself when I get enough rope, Can’t clean up, though I know I should, White punks on dope… White punks on dope —The Tubes
Directed by Richard Linklater
Screenplay by Richard Linklater
Based on A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
With: Keanu Reeves as Bob Arctor/”Fred”/Bruce, Robert Downey Jr. as James Barris, Woody Harrelson as Ernie Luckman & Winona Ryder as Donna Hawthorne/Audrey/”Hank”.
Philip K. Dick is best known for his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner (a very loose adaptation I must point out). That novel is not representative of PKD’s world view as Chronicler of the Surveillance State .He was the High Priest of Paranoia. Prophet of false reality. The Matrix would be real real to a man to whom god, supernatural or an A.I. orbiting satellite, spoke directly.
I spent a couple of hours talking to PKD at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1972. Interesting conversation, but you have no idea how strange. “So-called ‘reality,’ is a mass delusion that we’ve all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure.” PKD.
In A Scanner Darkly Bob Arctor, a Substance D (D for Death) addict, is in reality a Orange County Sheriff’s deputy named Fred, a narc, his identity hidden from even his cop superiors by a scramble suit, a garment that displays a kaleidoscope of appearances while also disguising his voice.
Fred was at one time an average citizen with a lovely wife and two adorable kids. One day while attempting to make popcorn for movie night in the family room (i.e., location of the television set), Fred bangs his head, thereby knocking some sense into himself. An epiphany if you will.
His petite bourgeoisie life is a prison he must escape. Welcome to the Orange County (Ca) Sheriff’s Department narcotics unit, ”don’t get addicted”. He gets addicted, you just knew he would.
As a narc he’s become part of the Surveillance State (a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Security State). His scramble suited superior known as Hank, unaware of his identity as Bob Arctor, orders him to surveil himself along with his two doper roommates, the madcap, miles a minute yappster and not so merry prankster, James Barris. (a role Robert Downey Jr. was born to play.) The third player in the domestic trilogy of terror is Ernie Luckman, a stoner right out of Central Casting.
Their home life consists largely of bickering over the minutiae of their stoner existence. Their house, Fred’s former family-man-middle-class prison gone to seed, is lousy with hidden cameras. Fred has total coverage of his friends, himself and his platonic girlfriend/drug supplier, Donna.
Substance D, like all narcotics, has an unfortunate side effect in addition to hallucinations and paranoia. It slowly severs the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. You can see where this is going can’t you? Fred soon forgets he is watching himself. Is Bob Arctor the nacroterrorist his friend Barris claims he is?
But the poor slob never realizes he is but a minor player in a continuing cycle of addition, arrest, recovery, rehab and repeat, all controlled and for the profit and amusement of the same people. Welcome to the War on Drugs. Price tag to date: a trillion dollars and counting. Human cost: incalculable.
A Scanner Darkly was shot digitally and then animated using interpolated rotoscope animation system. It gives the narrative an other worldly look that fits the theme. It looks real while unreal.
Any refuge of the 1960s will recognize Arctor’s pals Barris and Luckman as casualties of the drug counterculture. There are yet a few of them remaining. As for Bob Arctor/Fred, like most of us he didn’t get what he bargained for. He should not have been surprised.
(PKD died of a stroke at age 53. Massive consumption of speed will do that to you.)
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