Angle On:
By: James Ryan |
Tuesday June 20, 2006 |
| A Screenwriter's Preview of A Scanner Darkly |
| In his author's note to A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
dedicates the book to himself and 14 of his friends, all of whom, like
the characters in his book, were "punished entirely too much for what
they did." The crime, in this case, is drug addiction, or as Dick
frames it, the sin of wanting "to keep on having a good time forever."
According to Dick, he and his friends merely wanted to enjoy life,
did so, and in return the cruel hand of the universe swept in to take
the lives of 8 of Dick's cronies, leaving the rest with life-long
physical and/or mental ailments. Dick notes himself as a man
"punished" with "permanent pancreatic damage." Dick also notes that
the characters of Scanner are based on his friends, one of
whom, like his character, committed suicide while Dick was writing the
book.
This July, wirter/director Richard Linklater (Slackers, Dazed and Confused) will release his adaptation of this highly personal journey through a futuristic Orange County where citizens are under constant holographic surveillance and the underworld is hooked on "Substance D," a designer drug of Dick's invention. Whether or not Linklater's version will succeed artistically depends largely on his choices as a screenwriter. Adapting a Philp K. Dick novel for the screen is a relatively easy task (compared to doing the same for, say, a novel by Beckett or Joyce) but there are certain elements that require some thought. Dick is famous for his bizarre set-ups and plot-twists (qualities that have endeared him to hollywood), but he is no literary giant. Like so many other sci-fi authors who value concept over execution, Dick's prose drags its knuckles across the page. Thin characters, wooden dialogue, the barest descriptionïthese are the hallmarks of Dick's style. In fact, reading one of Dick's novels is a lot like reading a really good treatment. They are both full of good ideas that aren't fully developed. While Dick may never win a Nobel prize, he lends himself almost perfectly to adaptation. The screenwriter's task in adapting a novel is to strip it of its prose and poetic nuance in order to make use of its basic structureïpremise, characters and plot. Dick does half the work himself by creating fiction that is hardly developed beyond the basics. All a screenwriter needs to do is polish the dialogue and flesh out the setting and characters. As easy as that may sound, several lousy films have been produced based on Dick's work (think Paycheck or Impostor). Bad adaptations of Dick's novels and short stories do one of two things: they take liberties with the plot, or they fill in the blanks with bad writing. The first mistake is generally the worst of the two, since Dick's pretzel-twist plots are sometimes enough to rescue a film from its otherwise lousy script. Consider Total Recall, a film saved from being just another bad Schwarzenegger flick by the fact that the six writers who worked on the script somehow managed to preserve Dick's careful plot, which keeps the audience guessing about Arnold's sanity and the film's true premise. Alternately, consider Minority Report, a typically insipid Tom Cruise vehicle torn for the pages of one of Dick's best short-stories. Scott Frank and Jon Cohen made the mistake of hacking apart a brilliant triple-twist-ending of a story and filling in the holes with gratuitous eyeball-replacement surgeries and the like. The one obvious exception to the rule is Bladerunner, a box-office flop that is now regarded as one of the best sci-fi flicks of all time. Hampton Fancher and David Peoples took such incredible liberties with the source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, that it is arguably not based on Dick's novel at all. Therefore, the cardinal rule for Philip K. Dick adaptations is this: Unless you've already got a killer plot and Ridley Scott attached, stick as close to Dick's story as possible. Beyond that, the quality of the script depends on the screenwriter's ability to improve on Dick's characters and dialogue. With this rule in mind, there are a few aspects of A Scanner Darkly that must be included in Linklater's version if this is to be a successful adaptation. Scanner follows Bob Arctor (to be played by Keanu Reeves), an undercover narcotics officer working a fairly small group of suspects, all living in his house: Luckman (Woody Harrelson), a slow-witted goof-ball; Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), an especially vicious and conniving junkie; and Bob Arctor himself. Arctor the narc reports to his superiors as agent "Fred" while wearing a "scramble suit," a typically Dickian technology that blurs the identity of its wearer so as to make him impossible to ID. The novel takes a turn when "Fred's" superiors instal a holographic monitoring system in his home and assign him to report on all the doings of Bob Arctor. While monitoring his own activities on tape (and high out of his mind), Arctor has a psychotic break, his sense of identity as scrambled as the suit he wears. In Scanner, the plot-twists and second-guessing that are Dick's hallmark take place entirely within the protagonist's head. Dick's prose is at its relative best as it moves through the paranoid speculations of Arctor. Did Barris steal Arctor's old check book, forge a check in his name and curse out the shop owner when he called to complain that the check had bounced? Was Barris on to him and messing with his life as a form of revenge? Or had Arctor/Fred done all that in order to set himself up? This type of paranoid scheming escalates during the novel, reaching its peak during Arctor's break-down, and is essential to the novel's effect. Dick's accomplishment in Scanner is that he has taken the mundane warfare that is the life of a junkie and worked it into a reasonably compelling thriller. In order to deliver this achievement to the silver screen, Linklater will have to focus on the increasing levels of Arctor's paranoia, zeroing in on the suspense created as Arctor "flashes" from one delusion to the next, and then turn the film on its head by assigning Reeves' character to spy on himself. Given the information currently available on the filmïits trailer and imdb entryïwe have reason to fear that Linklater is taking undue liberties with the text. He has introduced at least one character, Arctor's wife (Melody Chase), and allowed Mr. Downey Jr. to deliever a type of screwball sermonizing that is foreign to Dick's version of Barris. Tellingly, the current trailer concludes with a heavy-handed, pseudo-philosophical and title-referencing voice over by Keanu Reeves. This last detail is especially foreboding. Even if Linklater manages to keep the essentials of Dick's narrative, he might very well ruin the film by "polishing" Dick's dialogue with the type of sophomoric blather that was appropriate to Slacker but made Waking Life unwatchable in spite of its lovely special effects. Linklater is not afraid to fill his work with pretentious monologues, and even a little pretentiousness could be sufficient to kill the effect of A Scanner Darkly, which derives its value from Arctor's drug-induced speculations about the motivations of other characters and not from similarly induced ramblings that attempt to affect a greater intelligence than they actually possess. Sci-fi fans will have to hope that Linklater was careful with what he cut from Dick's novel, and equally careful with what he added in. |
