Aug 4-10  Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefer anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!

Written in 1977 by Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly is based on Dick’s life. Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife, Nancy, left him) and mid-1972, Dick opened his house up to teenage drug users as his amphetamine addiction went out of control. How else do you write 68 pages of books a day? To escape, while in Canada, he went to X-Kalay, a Synanon recovery program. That’s why the book — and the movie — ends with a dedication to the people — including Dick himself — who died or had their lives ruined by drugs, saying that they were “some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did” and informing the audience that “drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to move out in front of a moving car.” It took him two weeks to write and three years to rewrite, a time that his fifth wife, Tes, said that she would find him crying, as the book was so hard to write. As a result, Dick wrote a contract giving Tessa half of all the rights to the novel, as she “participated to a great extent in writing the outline and novel A Scanner Darkly with me, and I owe her one half of all income derived from it.”

Richard Linklater wanted to make Ubik, but couldn’t figure out how to film it, a problem that most people who made Philip K. Dick movies solved by just doing their own thing and just using the title (see Paycheck, The Adjustment Bureau, Next — which is based on “The Golden Man” — as well as Minority Report, Total Recall and nearly every movie made from his books). His daughters, Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett, started looking closely at the scripts and learned that while they didn’t want a cartoon made of their father’s most personal work, Linklater got it.

The process of making this movie involved the actors being involved in the writing process, then making the movie, then 18 months of animating everything, which was way more than the studio thought it would take. The rotoscope process gives this a look beyond anything I’ve seen outside of Waking Life. This is the next level of what Linklater did in that film.

20% of the country is addicted to Substance D. Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover cop living in a house of addicts reporting back to the government agents that police the war on drugs, who all wear scramblesuits so that they have no idea who they are, undercover and masked even to one another, maybe to themselves. He’s in love with Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), from whom he buys the drugs, and wants to get closer to the supplier. But she is also Hank, his boss, and this has all been a trap to make James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) get overly paranoid. Or maybe she’s Audrey. Also: Who are the people that Bob has a suburban life with? Is he addicted to Substance D? Whichever, whatever, because Substance D was created by New-Path, a drug abuse clinic, to make money for themselves by creating and curing the supply and demand. Is Bob in the clinic to get help or is he there undercover to stop them?

None of it matters, but it all does in the end. Nothing is everything. Or, as Dick said, “There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be “My phone is spying on me.””