Book: A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick, 1977
Film: A Scanner Darkly, Dir. Richard Linklater, 2006
Richard Linklater‘s 2006 rotoscoped film, A Scanner Darkly, remains the most faithful cinematic adaptation of a Philip K Dick (PKD) novel to date. But then the competition for this accolade is hardly fierce. Few authors, it seems, have been so poorly served by Hollywood as PKD.
Both versions of A Scanner Darkly, novel and film, tell the tale of Bob Arctor (AKA Fred), an undercover police officer investigating a new street drug being sold in Los Angeles. The drug is known as Death, or Substance D. As Arctor insinuates himself into the drug culture of Orange County, he becomes increasingly addicted to Substance D, leading to his mental collapse and entry into rehab.
A Scanner Darkly is partly based on PKD’s own experience and addictions. In the novel’s Afterward, PKD states that everything in the book is based on real events, before going on to give a roll call of his friends who died or were otherwise debilitated thorough addiction. PKD includes himself amongst the names of the fallen as having suffered permanent pancreatic damage. The stroke that ended his life in 1982 may have been a direct result of these earlier excesses.
While nominally considered a science fiction novel, there is little in A Scanner Darkly that could be considered futuristic. Other than holo technology and the Scramble Suits beneath which Arctor and his fellow officers conceal themselves at work, it is a novel routed in the here and now: Even if it is set in 1994 (or 2013 in the case of the film).
Indeed, the relative ordinariness of the landscape is necessary to bring objects in the foreground into sharp relief. All of what is strange or other worldly in A Scanner Darkly is brought on by the debilitating effects of Substance-D. Hallucinations. Paranoia. Characters falling down rabbit holes of wild conspiracy theories. Arctor’s own eventual aphasia, as he becomes obvious to the fact that Bob Arctor and Fred are one and the same person.
Richard Linklater’s aim in rendering the live action with rotoscoping was to make the film feel more like a graphic novel at a time when the term, graphic novel, was starting to seep into the public consciousness. Yet the choice of rotoscope is appropriate to the story. The camera is itself an addict and views each scene through a disjointed narcotic haze of Substance-D. Moreover, PKD’s book does contain comic-book elements, like Charles Frick playing out paranoid scenarios in a thought bubble above his head. In a purely live action movie, this might come across as naïve or naff. In a comic or graphic novel, it is part of the narrative language.
The film is far from a perfect or complete adaptation of the novel. Few films are. Novels are for the most part a continuous narrative. Cinema, being a direct evolution from theatre, is a series of set pieces threaded together. Thus scenes are truncated. Scenes are cut. Scenes appear out of order from the book. Jerry Fabin is excised from the film entirely and his few scenes given to Frick. Yet what remains is a fair representation of the original text.
Compare A Scanner Darkly to, say, Blade Runner. Blade Runner might be the best film adapted from a PKD novel and one of the best science fiction films ever made (in its 2007, Final Cut version), but its differences to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are legion. Even the name is taken from Alan E Nourse’s 1974 novel, The Bladerunner, adapted into a screenplay by William S Burroughs for a never made film.
Many, if not most, of the book’s main narrative threads are cut from Blade Runner. The replicants[1] are made more menacing. Much of the comedy is lost. Richard Deckard, a character of low status and low ambition in the novel, becomes heroically high status when played by Harrison ‘Indiana Jones’ Ford. A great movie, but not a great PKD adaptation.
Worse is Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 film, Minority Report, based on the 1956 PKD short story of the same name. The word, ‘based’ here is doing a lot of lifting. The PKD version is a nuanced evocation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where the act of observing an event changes that event. John Anderton is predicted to murder someone in the near future, causing him to police his own actions and ultimately defy the prediction.
In the film this nuance is reduced to a clichéd, ten-a-penny Hollywood thriller that could’ve (and has) been made at any time since the invention of sound. The effects are well executed but the futuristic landscape and technology are ultimately incidental to the plot. In all regards it is a poor shadow of the original source material. All cinematic adaptations of the written word are imperfect. Some are more imperfect than others.
Unlike Blade Runner, Minority Report, or indeed Total Recall, which again diverges wildly[2] from PKD’s short story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, A Scanner Darkly does a reasonable job of capturing the book’s narrative and themes. The main motif is one of paranoia. Everyone is paranoid, not just the addicts but the police as well. The later are so paranoid, they hide from each other behind Scramble Suits that generate a constant blur of fragmented images to render them barely visible to anyone looking in their direction. The effect is well approximated in rotoscope.
At one level the Scramble Suit is the greatest flaw in A Scanner Darkly. If no-one knows who is and who isn’t a cop, how do they know who to monitor and who to ignore? Which is inevitably what happens. Fred, aka Bob Arctor, is charged with conducting surveillance on himself. Hs addiction has become such that when he is unmasked Arctor, it is most a surprise to himself. Even his immediate superior, Frank, has figured out who he is by that point. Which again seems to render the Scramble Suit a pointless plot device.
On the other hand, the Scramble Suit is PKD applying the twisted logic of the junkie to those supposedly in the know. The brass are so paranoid about their officers colluding with each other or with the dealers that neither they or anyone else knows who they are. Given the levels of assumed or actual conspiracy in the story, A Scanner Darkly resolves into a truth that is anathema to most conspiracy theories: Those in authority are no more well organised or less shambolic than the general population.
Yet there is conspiracy here. The main dealer among the core group of addicts is also an undercover agent. The people growing Substance-D’s active ingredient also run the rehab clinics. In many ways, PKD predicted the recent opioid crisis in the US. The drug addled Arctor is sent to work on one of the farms on which the plants grow in the hope that his few remaining brain cells will fire and return with the evidence. Ultimately, it seems, his undercover mission was not to spy on Barris, Donna, or even Arctor, but to become so frazzled he can be sent into places other agents cannot infiltrate.
This is perhaps the weak point of the film. In the book, Arctor’s journey through rehab lasts several chapters. The cinematic version is rushed through in the final ten minutes. It’s understandable. At one hundred minutes, much fat needed to be trimmed to make it a lean production. Besides, the rotoscoping took eighteen months to complete as it was, whereas principle photography was completed in a few weeks. A longer film would have significantly increased the time to animate it.
In other regards, the film squeezes in as much of the book as possible. It didn’t need to be much longer. It wouldn’t require, say, four seasons of a TV series to narrate a PKD book of similar length (I’m looking at you, The Man in the High Castle). A Scanner Darkly introduces little into the narrative that wasn’t already in the novel. It’s almost as if by employing rotoscope, Linklater felt little need to impose his own vision or ego upon the story in the way that most other directors invariably do.
There’s a nice touch where an preexisting stoned conversation about a man who pretended to have been a famous con artist (i.e. he faked being an fake) is augmented with reference to Catch Me if You Can, the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a famous con artist. Although there is also a discontinuity when Hank, states that Fred could be anyone, including Barris, even though Hank has already seen Fred in the same room as Barris. In the book this makes sense, as it happens before Barris appears at the station. In the film those two scenes appear in a different order and apparently no one thought to amend the script.
In spite of that, it’s difficult to imagine another cinematic PKD adaptation getting any closer to its source material than A Scanner Darkly. Nor should they try. Different mediums have different narrative methods and much fidelity is lost in the transfer process. Despite publishing forty four novels, there aren’t many remaining PKD books that would translate well onto film. Ubik maybe, which Linklater was originally going to make before dropping it in favour of A Scanner Darkly. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said would be interesting. VALIS, probably PKD’s best novel, would be next to impossible to film, not for anything in it, but in delaying the final reveal. A bit like trying to film Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The Penultimate Truth would be interesting if reframed to deal with the climate crisis.
In spite of its sprinkling of sci-fi elements, A Scanner Darkly is perhaps PKD’s most personal and autobiographical novel. It’s inappropriate to lump it in with purely sci-fi books like Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep, or Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, accomplished as these undoubtedly are. The science fiction elements in A Scanner Darkly are little more than a veneer applied to the farce and human tragedy beneath; like the rotoscoping drawn over the film.
A Scanner Darkly fits better with PKD’s more grounded novels, like VALIS or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Indeed, those books were written in response to psychological episodes PKD experienced that were arguably the consequences of his earlier narcotic experiences. A Scanner Darkly does not quite scale the heights of VALIS, but would still make the list of many people’s best PKD books. And while A Scanner Darkly, the film, might not quite reach the heights of Blade Runner, it is still a faithful and honest attempt to portray and project the world as PKD saw it.
All cinematic adaptations are unfaithful. Some are more faithful than others.
[2] Essentially the film’s first twenty
minutes is loosely based on the story, after which it goes off entirely on its
own trajectory.
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