August 09, 2006
a scanner darkly
In the recent annals of Squigglevision, A Scanner Darkly falls between that anthology of monologues for hipsters auditioning for grad school, A Waking Life, and heroic trifle Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
The squiggles, one assumes, are meant to indicate the unstable reality of both the addict and the subject of certain technologies the book envisions — two categories that overlap almost entirely, herein. Well, that's what paranoia does: it makes unities, and in that regard the visual strategy, which posits both a surface coherence and its falseness, seems justified.
But it's also up to something else: making an equivalent to the shaky intensity of Phil Dick's writing, which scarcely qualifies as elegant but never relents from its tremulous comedies of describing a world it's certain is a hoax. Dick's too freaked out to be boring, and the film goes for this effect. Alas, the film can't quite manage it.
The majority of Dick adaptations (Total Recall, most obviously) take the central conceit of a book or story and make merry with it, much to the annoyance of purists. And yet, watching Scanner, one understand that choice — this, a relatively faithful translation, must stew around in its inability to render Dick's textual twigginess into an equivalently charged visual field. No tragedy, certainly; the film's interesting enough, its surmise as timely as ever, its strangely-unearned elegiac finale still nonetheless redolent for a certain substantial portion of the crowd. It remains, nonetheless, a kind of half-failure of visual thinking — in classic slacker fashion, it doesn't lack the courage of its convictions but the ambition to see them past the horizon of the medium-cool idea.
Posted by jane at August 9, 2006 08:04 AM | TrackBack