If the scanner sees only darkly

I finally got a chance to watch A Scanner Darkly, and wasn't disappointed. I started watching it for the art, because that's what everyone hyped up. It's animated, but based on live action. I watched for the art, but stayed for the plot. I must have missed that it was based on a novel by Philip K. Dick or I would have seen it sooner, definitely.

Since it was art that motivated me, let me cover that first. What makes this form of animation unique is that they start with actual live action footage of actual actors actually doing stuff -- Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson in this movie. They then run that film through a bunch of filters that create blotches of color and strong outlines, similar to what you'd see in a graphic novel. It's a neat, surreal effect but a little hard to follow. That is, your mind is constantly switching back and forth between what it thinks is live action and what it knows is animation. It's a few minutes into the film before your mind compensates and you can comfortably watch it.

I don't know why they billed it as a breakthrough animation technique. You can easily copy the basic idea using Adobe Flash's trace bitmap feature. It'd still require some post production, but the point is it's not that much different. It's also been done before. A few years back they used a similar technique to create the movie Waking Life, a film about the bizarre state of lucid dreaming, or being conscious and aware while dreaming (I'll have to come back to lucid dreaming later because it's something I'm really into). It's been done before, but not as well, so I guess in that sense it was a breakthrough. It did look awesome.

So I think the style of the film, animated, was actually a plot device as well. The story takes place in a not-too-distant totalitarian future where every aspect of people's lives is monitored in a 1984 sort of way. There's an ultra-addictive drug that's seeped into society, simply called "Substance D", and the main character, Bob Arctor (Reeves), is both an undercover detective working to stop the spread of Substance D, and a dealer/addict to it as well. As the story progresses, Arctor begins to lose his own identity and display schizophrenic behavior. A main theme of the movie is identity. As the main character finds himself in a surreal world and mind that he is increasingly unable to identify with, the similarly surreal style of the film becomes all the more brilliant.

Like I said, the movie is strongly about the main character's struggle and ultimate inability in understanding his own identity, all the while feeling a lack of control over the events that are happening to him, and being constantly watched by electronic scanners embedded everywhere. It is in this despair we get the best line of the well-written screenplay:

Whatever it is that's watching, it's not human, unlike little dark eyed Donna. It doesn't ever blink. What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Good stuff. Go rent it.