I’m pretty excited about A Scanner Darkly. The film comes out in two days, and stars actors whom I love -- Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves -- and is directed by Richard Linklater (Waking Life, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset) who hasn’t let me down yet -- and is rendered in the dream-like rotoscopic animation that was made famous in Waking Life, which I envision to be the perfect medium in which to tell this story.
I’m so excited that I went to Indigo -- and I hate Indigo -- at least 19 times looking for a copy of Philip K. Dick’s novel by the same name until I finally found it. Of course, Indigo being a lame cousin to Chapters, which I also hate, it only stocks good books when it’s economically viable to do so. And in this case that meant the book, complete with a shiny new “ Now a Major Motion Picture” cover, appeared on the shelves about a month before the film was due for release, regardless of the fact it’s been a brilliant book since 1977 when it was first published.
Well, I sucked up my indie pride and bought it.
Sorry about that long intro. I know I haven’t even started to discuss the book, which I must say, is incredible.
The premise is brilliant, the prose is compelling, and it sucks you so far into a world of drug addiction and paranoia you begin to feel like one of the characters in the story.
Bob Arctor is addicted to a drug called Substance D. He and his friends are pretty liberal in their experimentation however, and everything from booze to cocaine and pot get used in heavy doses, and much of the story is spent describing in fascinating detail their conversations, interactions and efforts to get more drugs, while under the influence.
This unique portal into several lives that orbit almost entirely around drug use would be worth reading on its own, but the story takes the reader a couple of layers deeper.
Fred is an undercover narcotics agent working to infiltrate a group of drug users and dealers to find out where their supply is coming from. His superiors have installed a set of cameras, or scanners, and recording devices into the house where they all live, and part of his work is to review the material for useful evidence and discard the rest.
But one of the side-effects of Substance D is that it establishes a divide between the left and right halves of the brain, in effect allowing the addict to become two people without realizing it.
As Fred infiltrates the group in order to keep tabs on a heavy drug user/minor dealer named Bob Arctor, he is really collecting evidence on an undercover narcotics agent named Fred.
Clever and funny in parts, this story, based largely on Dick’s own experiences and meant as a tribute to many of his friends who lost their lives to addiction, is also deeply dark.
There’s a scene where Fred is hearing for the first time what he is suffering from. He comes to a conclusion that ties back to these words in 1 Corinthians 13 which are tweaked for the title of the book:
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Fred, through the lens Substance D provides him, is seeing his own reflection in a darkened glass, and as such, he can’t recognize himself, and the realization of what he has become, or a distorted form of realization, sets in and he begins to realize how far he has slipped.
"'Through a mirror,' Fred said. A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner, And St. Paul meant, by a mirror, not a glass mirror – they didn’t have those then – but a reflection of himself when he looked at the polished bottom of a metal frying pan. … Not through a telescope or lens system, which does not reverse, not through anything but seeing his own face reflected back up at him, reversed – pulled through infinity, like they’re telling me. It is not through glass but as reflected back by glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, but it isn’t. And they didn’t have cameras in those old days, and so that’s the only way a person saw himself: backward.
I have seen myself backward.”
The realization though, is just a step in a process that is too far-gone to halt, and he will fall further before he hits bottom.
There’s deep sadness in this harsh story, but somehow there’s hope and the footprints of redemption too –- maybe those are the traces of what Dick was searching for when he wrote it. If so, I hope he found it.
