When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, he replied, "I think that would be a good idea." That's been my reaction when asked about movies based on Philip K. Dick stories: What a great idea. I wish somebody would do it.
Ostensibly, Phil Dick has been inching up on Cornell Woolrich as the 20th century American writer with the most novels and short stories adapted to film—at least in the up-from-the-pulps category. (Stephen King doesn't count; those are best-sellers.) Woolrich, though, has been well enough served by some of his adaptors, both in Hollywood and Europe, that one can at least recognize something of the original writer and story in what wound up on the screen. Of course, it helped that Woolrich's stories fell into the hands of talent (geniuses, actually) such as Hitchcock and producer Val Lewton—though less-remembered filmmakers such as Robert Siodmak and Arthur Ripley also did pretty well by him. Phil Dick, alas, wound up with über-hacks like Paul Verhoeven (warming up for his Showgirls and Starship Troopers epics) and whoever that is who's apparently killed the real John Woo and is now hammering what's left of his reputation into its grave.
But of course, the process started with Ridley Scott, back before he climbed onto the Queen's Honours List and became Sir Ridley. Knighthood caps a career as Most Worthless Director, British Division.
Caveat, and the reader's "Feel Free to Disregard this Writer's Jaundiced Opinion" card: In 1996, I was hired by the estate of the late Phil Dick to write a couple of sequel novels to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. In that endeavor I succeeded, in the manner that test pilots regard any landing you walk away from as a good one. (Deep-sixed by their American publisher, the books wound up on the British and Australian best-seller lists, as well as several European ones.) I earned my pay not by writing the books, but by combing through a pre-DVD laserdisc of the movie, looking for something, anything I could use. To extend the crash metaphor, it was like Andean natives picking through the snow-bound wreckage of a downed DC-10, scavenging for functional debris: Oh, here's an empty plastic bottle and a bent fork, and this burnt thing must've been somebody's hat. And just look at all the plot holes! Well, we can't take them all back to the village, can we?
What non-mercenary intent I had in the project was to drag as much as possible from Phil's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and duct-tape the bits onto the movie's endlessly disintegrating story and characters. Duct tape is what you use when things don't fit, can't fit, will never fit, but you still want them to hold together long enough to rattle your way off the interstate. I know better than anyone that Blade Runner is a lot of people's favorite movie; it has a cult following that will rival the declining Roman church's in a few years. And as with all cults, it's based on the irrational. Blade Runner the film is, objectively, the poster child for Basic Narrative Incompetence Syndrome. To watch the worthwhile M. Emmet Walsh in the role of Basil Exposition—sorry, Police Chief Bryant—telling a sulky Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard background details with which he would've been completely familiar, whether he's a human or a replicant or top sirloin, is painful. For true believers, however, approaching the Ark of the Holies on other than bended knee is pretty much sacrilege. And to actually lay hands upon it? Now I know how Salman Rushdie must have felt, i.e. completely satisfied.
With the movies that came after, things got worse. It's hard to imagine a rabid fan base for Total Recall or the botch job Minority Report. (Remember when Spielberg could actually tell a story? Been a while, the surprisingly effective War of the Worlds aside. Why couldn't he have been as good to P. K. Dick as he was to H. G. Wells?) And, of course, if you believe Woo lubing Ben Affleck through Paycheck nailed the woozy Dickian Weltanschauung—best if you keep that to yourself, while you still have friends.
When the film of Phil Dick's bleak druggie pocket epic A Scanner Darkly was announced as a project for George Clooney's and Steven Soderburgh's Section Eight company, I thought this might be the one to break the curse. When Richard Linklater was attached as director, I feared: They think it's a story about feckless slackers. My apprehensions were misplaced. To the degree that Clooney, Soderburgh and Linklater pull it off—and they largely do— it's because Linklater, as both screenwriter and director, picks up on the book's essential noir element.
Or at least what noir was before the new Hollywood got it all wrong and redefined it as guns 'n' tarts, the rock-bottom example being Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's inexecrable Sin City. The old B-movie Hollywood got it right, but the new guys aren't even close. Of course, the French have the right to define their own word any way they want, but Phil Dick received a thorough grounding in American thriller formulae from his mentor Anthony Boucher, as close to an authority in popular fiction as there ever was. Phil's genius—or gimmick; take your pick—was in shoehorning the stock devices from Black Mask and the other pulps where Woolrich paced and brooded into Planet Stories and every other magazine with a rocket ship on the cover. The false memories, the accusations of crimes the hero can't remember committing, the criminal who's really the cop who's really the criminal, the cardboard realities—usually called "alibis"—deconstructed to reveal even flimsier ones—they're all there, waiting for a bit of gee-whiz chrome to be spackled onto them.
What made all that noir, in source and result, was Phil's recognition that noir was at its heart a literature of anxiety and despair, rather than mere cathartic violence. The noir protagonist was more often not a cynical outsider and loner, but one of the claustrophobically over-connected, some poor schlub desperately trying to keep his middle-class world from collapsing around him. The mainspring of Phil Dick's original story, which Ridley Scott and company myopically dropped from Blade Runner, was the cop Deckard's situation (mirroring Phil's own biography at that time) of hoping to scrabble together enough bounty money to buy bourgeois status symbols such as a live sheep and thus keep his stress-fractured marriage together at least a little bit longer. American noir, both the movies and the pulpy Gold Medal paperbacks, are full of noncriminal, hard-working guys, into whose lives chaos has murderously intruded, and now they've got to deal with it. Realities were coming apart at the seams long before Phil Dick caught the Sixties' moment, in fiction rather than Hunter Thompson's skewed pseudo-documentary style, and came up with a pharmacy of fictional drugs—JJ-180, Substance D, et cetera—as the universal solvent.
The other side of the noir hill is where the post-collapse wreckage gets piled up. The other American noir guys are the ones who have had some exhausted clarity of vision, poked a finger through the shabby cardboard of postwar consumer culture surrounding them, and then invite chaos into their lives as a means of getting a few thrills along with their own self-destruction—the prime example being the burnt-out insurance agent Walter Neff in both James M. Cain's novel Double Indemnity and the film Billy Wilder made of it. (Fred MacMurray's portrayal being the single greatest acting job in noir cinema history; after that, there really was nothing left for him but the long penance of TV and My Three Sons.) Neff's brother-in-chaos is Scanner's doper cop Bob Arctor. Neff-like, Arctor has already dismantled the middle-class existence in which he had found himself trapped, including his marriage (again, mirroring Phil's own bio), and as the story begins in the book, is now tearing the cardboard universe's fragments into ever tinier and tinier pieces—not with drugs, but with the using of drugs, which is rather a different thing.
Which is why the casting of Keanu Reeves in the film version is not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong-headed. Keanu is an eternal adolescent; with his weirdly narrow face, like one of those pedigreed collies whose skulls have been bred too small for their brains, he probably will still be one when he's in his eighties. The character Arctor is way past adolescence; he can't even remember that bright, hopeful time. Clooney and Soderburgh, at the controls of the Scanner production, should have dialed in Clooney's character from Syriana. That would have been closer to the Scanner novel's Arctor: no longer young, body image blurring with badly trimmed beard and middle-age gut, out of options, turning over and over again the cards he's dealt himself, another poor bastard who has just started to realize that maybe he shouldn't have pushed over so many of his universe's flimsy cardboard walls, but it's too late now to put them back up. Clooney's Syriana character has eyes baffled and hyper-aware at the same time; he at least understands some—but not all—of the process that got him to where he is. Whereas Keanu in the movie Scanner is just baffled. Things are happening that he doesn't get, and he confronts them like a teenager squinting at the blackboard in a remedial algebra class.
One has to speculate whether Soderburgh, Clooney and Linklater got steam-rollered by some financing source. It's easy to imagine the brainstorming session right outside the bank vault: Sci-fi picture, right, boss? And it's that Phil Dick guy, so it's all about, um, the nature of reality, whatever that is. Yeah, like those Matrix flicks—sure, the last two sucked enough that you can dig why one of the Wachowski brothers would get a sex-change operation, just so it'd be easier to stay incognito, but the first one did decent box office. And sci-fi's for kids, right? So we'll get Keanu! Call Linklater up and tell him we got his lead.
Where the film Scanner's casting gets it right is with Robert Downey Jr.'s twitchy, know-it-all conspiracy-spinner Barris. So wired that he can't even sit down without circumnavigating the chair like one of those jittery stop-motion novelty films, it's probably the role for which he's been studying his entire off-screen life. Wynona Ryder's Donna is a surprise, given that she has to do all the heavy lifting in her scenes with Keanu. The similarity in their apparent ages erases the sweetly, sadly wistful relationship between the book's characters, with Arctor both aroused by and protective toward the vulnerable, narcotized waif who is, unbeknownst to him, actually winding the gears in which he will be crushed. Nevertheless, Ryder does what she can with what's left of the part, enough so that the sense of a real human being burns through the detail-flattening rotoscope process with which Linklater chose to slather the film.
To its credit, the movie retains a good dose of the novel's drug-addled dialogue—but unfortunately gives much of it to Woody Harrelson, as Arctor's house- and drug-sharing buddy Luckman. While casting Harrelson in a doper flick must have seemed like a no-brainer—literally—he winds up reducing the unending, time-annihilating sound of brain cells frying like bacon into the least funny parts of My Dinner with Cheech & Chong. Fortunately, Harrelson disappears from the movie early on, with Linklater making the smart call of pumping up the book's bug-devoured drug casualty Freck, all wide-eyed paranoia as played by Rory Cochrane. If anything, Linklater retained a bit too much of the book's verbiage, with a completely unrelated character popping up like a hand puppet at the end, just to spout some of the millenarian twaddle that ate up so much of Phil's last works, the contrarian Transmigration of Timothy Archer aside.
Towards the end of his life, Phil Dick grew obsessed with the notion that some different, better and more authentic universe was seeping through the cracks in this flimsy, badly assembled one. Scanner the film, with all its flaws, provides evidence that might be the case. Perhaps also in that other universe, Gandhi didn't have as much call to crack wise about Western civilization. Or if Phil had been writing his dialogue, perhaps he would have decided it was just a bad idea, after all.