[Snippet on] A scanner darkly

A scanner darkly, by Richard Linklater (USA 2006)


I small note on this movie that I appreciated much. Just to clarify what I am talking about, the movie is an adaptation of a Philip Dick novel that tells stories related to drug use in a near future.

There is a wonderful sentence that at a certain point one of the protagonists tells (and the screenplay could be just quoting the novel verbatim); I add a detail to put in context the situation, in this movie the police is doing remote surveillance operations (using the "scanner" in the title), and since one of the policemen infiltrated a drug ring then he can watch recordings of himself.

At this point a beautiful intuition of Dick comes out: the policeman protagonist (who feels confused for several reasons among which the fact that he is forced to take drugs) hopes he will be able to understand himself by watching himself on the "scanner". In my opinion in this way D. describes one of the feelings that a person could experience when he or she lives in a society in which rules and procedures are very sophisticated; so sophisticated that most often, from the point of view of efficiency, the official procedures are better than what anyone could come up with just applying one's own intelligence. It is the feeling that the external structures are more valuable than one's own thoughts and the fear that this greater effectiveness of external things with respect to one's own thougths could extend also to the private and intimate moments of life: what the rules tell about me counts more than what I think about myself.

I don't add much else because I had trouble following the plot of the movie (the accent of some of the actors was too difficult to understand for me): just that the movie has been made with an interesting technique in which real actors are filmed and the shot material is then used as a basis to build an animation. At any rate I was satisfied when going out of the movie theatre.