July 17, 2003
Being Philip K. Dick
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”
--Philip K. Dick
“The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personality. On top of that you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.”
--Charlie Kaufman, as played by Nicolas Cage, in ADAPTATION, written by Charlie Kaufman, with help from his fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman.
Recently I came across a copy of the script for A SCANNER DARKLY (available at BeingCharlieKaufman.com), a screenplay written by Charlie Kaufman, adapted from the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. For those of you unfamiliar with Dick, he was one of the most influential sci fi writers to ever put pen to paper. He wrote thirty-six novels and five short story collections between 1952-1982, when he died of heart failure in Santa Ana, California.
And Hollywood loves Dick. His work has been translated into Hollywood blockbusters such as BLADE RUNNER, TOTAL RECALL, and most recently, Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT.
Sci fi isn’t always my cup of tea. I enjoy it, but I guess it has to catch me in the right mood. BLADE RUNNER, of course, is a classic. Any film geek worth his weight in popcorn will tell you this. I enjoyed TOTAL RECALL, and I thought last summer’s MINORITY REPORT was an interesting experience, although I’m sure I’ll have to see it once or twice more to sort everything out, and that’s a refreshing change from the plotless movies that typically occupy the majority of the summer release schedule.
While I was familiar with Dick’s work through Hollywood adaptations, I had never read a proper piece by the man himself. When I saw that there was a script adaptation for A SCANNER DARKLY written by Charlie Kaufman floating around, I knew that now was the time to take the plunge.
According to the back cover of the novel (published by Vintage Books):
“Cops and criminals have always been interdependent, but no novel has explored that perverse symbiosis more powerfully than A SCANNER DARKLY. Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug called Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, he has taken on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D—which Arctor takes in mammoth doses—gradually splits the user’s brain into two distinct, combatitive entities, Fred doesn’t realize that he is narcing on himself.”
Whoa. Sounds like a mind fuck if ever I read one. So it became instantly clear to me why Charlie Kaufman, the brilliant, enigmatic screenwriter responsible for giving us such over-our-heads gems as BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ADAPTATION, would be interested in trying his hand at A SCANNER DARKLY.
So first, I took it upon myself to read the book,--you know, some nice, (not quite) light summer reading. There’s something I have to get out of the way though, just so as not to mislead anyone. Judging by the blurb on the book’s back cover, I thought there would have been more action. I’m not sure why I even had that impression, but I did nonetheless. At the time, prior to reading the book, I thought a review of A SCANNER DARKLY would make for a great edition of SQUIB CENTRAL (although, as you can probably tell by now if you’re a frequent reader of this column, SQUIB CENTRAL is about more than just action flicks. It’s a whole attitude thing. Yeahhh, dude).
Okay, back to our main objective. So there’s not much action in A SCANNER DARKLY, no big deal, there doesn’t have to be. Maybe it’s the whole concept of cops and robbers and automatically I think “action,” who knows.
The book opens with the rather horrific, if not somewhat slightly comedic description of one character cracking up due to drug abuse:
“Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.”
In fact, much of the first half of the story concerns the characterization of the main character, Bob Arctor, and his stoner buddies, portraying them as the paranoid, worthless burn-outs that they’ve become. They share a lot of Spicoli-esque stoner conversation with each other, and while it comes across as somewhat amusing, there was nothing exceptionally hysterical about it, and the bottom line is it seemed dated. It would take the right character actor and delivery to get the full comedic effect out of these characters and their dialogue.
Knowing that I would be following the novel with the screenplay, I immediately started casting the parts in my mind’s eye. I do that with every book, but I tried to be extremely accurate with my casting choices this time around. For the role of the stoner buddies, I saw the typical casting choices for those roles like Steve Zahn, Jack Black, and for some reason, James Van Der Beek (don’t ask).
Who could I see as playing the lead? I imagined myself as a Hollywood agent with an agenda and I thought, “Damn, if Kevin Costner was just ten years younger, I’d cast him and jumpstart his career.” I ended up going with Johnny Depp, a sure-bet choice for this role. He’s played druggie madmen misfits (see his portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS), and he’s played law enforcement types as well (see his performance in DONNIE BRASCO as undercover F.B.I. agent Joe Pistone).
The second half of the novel is when we see the full split of our protagonist, Bob Arctor/”Fred.” Arctor is a full fledged addict by this point and you find yourself rereading some of the passages just to get everything straight (mostly due to Arctor’s own confusion with his identity). The novel’s ending is completely depressing and comes across as a preachy cautionary tale about the adverse effects of drug abuse. The conclusion of the book even sees a two page “Author’s Note” explaining the message behind the plot.
Dick writes: “Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.”
The author continues: “I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.” And it’s a powerful and important novel that falls short, just barely.
Dick dealt with the issue of duality, as well as pain, early in his life. He had a twin sister who died forty-one days after their birth. He also had a number of failed marriages to go along with his drug addiction.
Obviously, those of us familiar with Charlie Kaufman know that duality plays a central theme in much of his work too. Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of A SCANNER DARKLY remains consistently faithful to the original source material.
Although honestly, I was waiting for Kaufman to toss in some of his trademark zingers, but I think he left that up to Dick, since there are already several respectable twists and turns by the end of the novel. Interestingly, I thought the surprise twists worked better in the screenplay than they did in the novel. They just seemed to have more impact. Perhaps I was simply more familiar with the material by the time I reached the end of the script (having just completed reading the novel), but I thought it was a little more forthright, possibly since it wasn’t weighed down by unnecessary prose. This actually worked to the advantage of getting Dick’s message across.
The tale is somber and devoid of any light at the end of the tunnel. Arctor comes across as a man who is taken advantage of by his junkie friends, by his own addictions, and ultimately, by the system.
Kaufman’s script works better at being cautionary because it lets the dialogue speak for itself. At one point in the script, the female love interest, Donna Hawthorne, tells Bob Arctor about a former junkie acquaintance of hers.
Donna says:
“After he (her former acquaintance) saw God, he felt really good, for around a year. Then he felt worse than he had ever felt before in his life. Because one day it came to him, he was never going to see God again. He was going to live out the rest of his life, fifty years maybe, and see nothing but what he had always seen. He realized he was going to have to live on and on with no purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, working, sleeping, crapping---.”
Bob Arctor responds, “Just…like…the…rest…of us.”
The last that I heard was Jersey Shore Films was working on putting this movie together, although unfortunately, neither Charlie Kaufman nor his script are involved any longer. Sadly, I can totally see the studios botching up this film.
I love movies and novels that don’t have happy endings. You know, those Hollywood endings that tie everything up in tidy little packages? Yeah, well, A SCANNER DARKLY isn’t one of those, and thank God for that. It’s intelligent, it’s authentic, and it’s honest.
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