A Scanner Darkly

Directed by Richard Linklater

Edmond

Directed by Stuart Gordon

Although A Scanner Darkly takes place slightly in the future, where drug-addicted citizens are surveilled by Big Brother scientists, it’s really retro. Based on a Philip K. Dick novel, the film’s ideas—on homegrown dystopia, everyday alienation—could only seem inventive to cultural retards. Greater social and psychological insight occur in Edmond, the long-awaited film version of David Mamet’s 1982 play, a more realistic and relevant social vision. 

But A Scanner Darkly has retro chic going for it; director Richard Linklater may be the most trendily attuned yet vacuous filmmaker at work. He’s made a career out of pandering to hipster self-involvement and here enlists hip-cred actors (Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey, Jr.) to claim media attention. Reeves portrays Robert Arctor, “the ultimate Everyman,” who plays out his alienation by fashionably deceiving friends and country. One scene shrewdly connects the Philip K. Dick cult to the Ayn Rand cult—deliberately avoiding the social confrontation and humanistic engagement that distinguishes Edmond’s story of a white racist (William H. Macy) recognizing his fears. It’s Mamet’s finest work, so if Edmond’s less well known than other Mamet—and less vaunted than Dick’s retro-glam sci-fi—that only proves how our cultural gatekeepers bow down to the least pertinent forms of Hollywood escapism. 

Not since The Newton Boys—actually, not since Tape—has a feature film been as visually ugly as A Scanner Darkly. This is surprising since it was made in Linklater’s capricious mode (last used for Waking Life) in which a digitally videotaped story is then rotoscoped by a squad of animators. In Waking Life, different artists in relay teams ensured that each segment was stylistically fresh, often with funny, signature doodles lancing the stoner-babble dialogue. Linklater proves his humorlessness by restricting A Scanner Darkly to the same animated style throughout. This is worse than monotonous; it’s torture.

Linklater’s style, in toto, is a refutation of the old cinema aesthetic that prized realism; the cartoony look dictates irony rather than direct emotional affect. (The visual redundancies in a DePalma-style TV monitor sequence are ludicrous.) This hipsterism is hilariously in-sync with the major studios’ current animation vogue where human experience is anthropomorphized into animal hijinks. Linklater’s anime not only makes his characters less human than Edmond but less empathetic than the regular Pixar or DreamWorks menagerie.