A Scanner Darkly
While digging up the link to Goodnight and Good Luck for the previous post, I was amazed to see that Philip K. Dick's marvellous novel of a near-future drug culture A Scanner Darkly has finally been filmed. This is a project that has been in turnaround for decades, and the last I had heard, it was in the hands of Emma-Kate Croghan. Croghan's debut feature Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) seemed to me a massively over-valued little film, which launched the career of Frances O'Connor and not much else. To hear that Croghan had her hands on what was, to me, a very important property, was not happy news.
But things move on, and now the film has been made by Richard Linklater with a pretty strong cast - Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. If you've touched the link above, you'll already know that ASD has been filmed in the Rotoscope technique that Linklater used for his 2001 feature Waking Life. I'm not sure what I think of this, having only seen the online trailer, but my initial reaction is not good. If I can make a pre-emptive analogy, Dick always grounded his fictions in a very mundane narrative realism: he never tried for verbal fireworks, and the analogy would seem to be to film this novel in as straight a manner as you can. Still, I should reserve judgement here.
Judgement is also reserved on the contribution Reeves will make to this film. His wooden manner is probably just right for playing a junkie, and Dick's characters tend to be fairly numb and alienated, so Keanu might be good casting after all. Still, when I hear him intoning, on the trailer:
"Two...hemispheres...of my brain...are...competing?", I seem to hear an audience nervously tittering.
A Scanner Darkly is precious to me as my entry into the world of Philip K. Dick. After a few abortive tries with some of the minor novels, this was the one that really set me alight and started me on what I will always recall as one of the great reading adventures of my life. Thinking about Dick again, I realize that he is an almost unique figure in contemporary political-literary terms, in that he was a kind of liberal, who was able to construct paranoid fantasies about a fascist America under the heel of a Nixon-figure (in Radio Free Albemuth and Valis), which are still deeply rewarding as literature. Can you imagine any contemporary liberal writer capable of doing this? No, instead we get slop like Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, or the 'poems' of Harold Pinter.
Part of the answer, I think, is that Dick was drawing from a much deeper fund of ideas, about mysticism and transcendence, than are available to a shallowly secular liberal intellectual. What sort of exterior values does a liberal writer have to draw on? Most of them have a barely concealed disdain for democracy, and their contempt for the means by which freedom is generally purchased and preserved tends to hollow out the value it should possess for them.
Another thing that makes Dick's political science fiction rewarding - even when it should be ludicrous - is his depth of feeling and human sympathy. If you have read his remarkable essay 'How to build a world that doesn't fall apart in three days', you'll know that even though Richard Nixon was, almost literally, the Beast of the Apocalypse to Dick, he was still able to imaginatively empathize with him, in the dark days after Watergate. Again, can we name one liberal writer who would be capable of, or willing to sympathize with George W. Bush?
While digging up the link to Goodnight and Good Luck for the previous post, I was amazed to see that Philip K. Dick's marvellous novel of a near-future drug culture A Scanner Darkly has finally been filmed. This is a project that has been in turnaround for decades, and the last I had heard, it was in the hands of Emma-Kate Croghan. Croghan's debut feature Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) seemed to me a massively over-valued little film, which launched the career of Frances O'Connor and not much else. To hear that Croghan had her hands on what was, to me, a very important property, was not happy news.
But things move on, and now the film has been made by Richard Linklater with a pretty strong cast - Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. If you've touched the link above, you'll already know that ASD has been filmed in the Rotoscope technique that Linklater used for his 2001 feature Waking Life. I'm not sure what I think of this, having only seen the online trailer, but my initial reaction is not good. If I can make a pre-emptive analogy, Dick always grounded his fictions in a very mundane narrative realism: he never tried for verbal fireworks, and the analogy would seem to be to film this novel in as straight a manner as you can. Still, I should reserve judgement here.
Judgement is also reserved on the contribution Reeves will make to this film. His wooden manner is probably just right for playing a junkie, and Dick's characters tend to be fairly numb and alienated, so Keanu might be good casting after all. Still, when I hear him intoning, on the trailer:
"Two...hemispheres...of my brain...are...competing?", I seem to hear an audience nervously tittering.
A Scanner Darkly is precious to me as my entry into the world of Philip K. Dick. After a few abortive tries with some of the minor novels, this was the one that really set me alight and started me on what I will always recall as one of the great reading adventures of my life. Thinking about Dick again, I realize that he is an almost unique figure in contemporary political-literary terms, in that he was a kind of liberal, who was able to construct paranoid fantasies about a fascist America under the heel of a Nixon-figure (in Radio Free Albemuth and Valis), which are still deeply rewarding as literature. Can you imagine any contemporary liberal writer capable of doing this? No, instead we get slop like Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, or the 'poems' of Harold Pinter.
Part of the answer, I think, is that Dick was drawing from a much deeper fund of ideas, about mysticism and transcendence, than are available to a shallowly secular liberal intellectual. What sort of exterior values does a liberal writer have to draw on? Most of them have a barely concealed disdain for democracy, and their contempt for the means by which freedom is generally purchased and preserved tends to hollow out the value it should possess for them.
Another thing that makes Dick's political science fiction rewarding - even when it should be ludicrous - is his depth of feeling and human sympathy. If you have read his remarkable essay 'How to build a world that doesn't fall apart in three days', you'll know that even though Richard Nixon was, almost literally, the Beast of the Apocalypse to Dick, he was still able to imaginatively empathize with him, in the dark days after Watergate. Again, can we name one liberal writer who would be capable of, or willing to sympathize with George W. Bush?
posted by cuckoo at
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