Frightening and Subjective: A Review of A Scanner Darkly

What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? Does it see into me? Clearly? Or darkly?

Think about it this way. Everything that you have ever been or ever will be, everything you have loved, every preference, every joy, every sweet or sordid memory is contained in a squishy mass of about 1.5 kg. That squishy mass is so fragile that whiplash can mortally wound it and so demanding that you must eat constantly to feed it. The slightest change in temperature or decrease in oxygen will leave it useless.

True, it is surrounded by a skull -- which from personal experience in anatomy lab is a lot tougher to get through than you would think -- and a dural layer with the consistency of kevlar. Still, you and everyone else is one 10 foot fall at a bad angle from a persistent vegetative state. I am one city bus running a red from wasting two decades of education.

And, as if you didn't have enough to worry about, there are other squishy masses in the world. Squishy masses who like you realize that they are so very vulnerable. Squishy masses that, though they have also erected barriers, may take steps to harm you. Perhaps it would be best to take care of them before they take of care of you...

Thinking about it that way you get a tiny sip of the subtle paranoia that is A Scanner Darkly. A Scanner Darkly is a movie about deeply paranoid people with deeply warped minds, and it will quickly suck you into paranoia until you have no idea what is going on.

Yet that is the beauty of it because in its depth of paranoia this movie reveals something intrinsic to the relationship between brain and mind: having a mind is often a frightening and subjective experience -- even more so when you are high -- and it is a frightening and subjective experience in no small part because mind is chained to brain.

Don't get me wrong. I like this movie for other reasons. There is a certain charm in Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson acting like drugged out crazy people. It actually made me wonder for one brief moment if Woody Harrelson's roles have not -- as I have always suspected -- been played in his place by a cyborg designed by an alien race unfamiliar with human customs. The dialogue is hilarious even if barely anything happens -- most of the action being focused on the oddity of a man surveilling himself and on the irony of overly paranoid drug addicts who ARE actually being watched. This is drugged-out crazy at its best. It could take Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a Pepsi challenge and do not bad.

However, this movie would not have been impressive if all it had to say was about how weird it is when you are high. It surpasses that and says something about the constructed nature of consciousness. As much as we would like to rejoice in the rationality of man and the triumph of human achievement, all that rationality and triumph is subject to container that is shockinlgly susceptible -- to drugs, to capricious environment, to chance, all of which can warp it horribly. That does and should stir us to contemplation, particularly in light of the list at the end where Phillip K. Dick (the writer of the book on which this movie is based) lists those he lost to drug use.

Consciousness is a messy, scary thing even untampered with. Best not to tamper with it, lest like the characters in the film it becomes unclear whether the drugs caused the paranoia or the paranoia summoned the drugs.