Philip K Dick fans - "A Scanner Darkly"

[Rigorous Intuition]

<!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wip/us/med/scanner_darkly/2.35/scanner_darkly_tlr1_qt_500.mov">trailer here</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><br><br>From the <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly">Wiki on the novel</a><!--EZCODE LINK END-->:<br><br>Plot<br><br>The main character is both Bob Arctor, part of a household of hippie drug-users, and Agent Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to spy on them. Arctor/Fred shields his true identity both from those in the drug subculture and, ironically, from the police themselves. The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book. While supposedly only posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to Substance D (known simply as Death), a powerful psychoactive drug. An ongoing conflict is Arctor's love for Donna, a drug dealer through whom he intends to find the uppermost source of Substance D. Arctor's persistent use of the drug, which causes the two hemispheres of the brain to function independently, leaves him unable to distinguish between his roles as a drug user and a policeman. Incapable of combining what each persona knows, Fred begins spying on himself, Arctor, more passionately. Through a series of drug and psychological tests, Arctor's superiors at work discover that his addiction has made him incapable of performing his job as a narcotics agent. Donna takes Arctor to "New Path", a rehabilitation clinic, just as Arctor begins to experience the symptoms of SD withdrawal. It is revealed that Donna has been a narcotics agent all along, working as part of a police operation to infiltrate New Path and determine its funding source. Unknowningly, Arctor has been selected to carry out the sting.<br><br>As part of the rehab program, Arctor is renamed "Bruce" and forced to participate in cruel group-dynamic games intended to break the will of the inmates. The story ends with Bruce working at a New Path farming commune, where he is suffering from a serious neurocognitive deficit after withdrawing from SD. As he slowly begins to regain cognitive function, Bruce realizes that New Path's funds are from sales of Substance D itself, grown using the labor of the brain damaged former users that populate the communes. Readers are left uncertain, about Bruce's prognosis, and the chances of reporting his discovery to the police, however, he grabs one of the blue flowers and puts it in his shoe, saying he will take it to his friends (Mike Westway and Donna and thus the drug-abuse agency), when he is allowed to visit on holiday.<br>[edit]<br><br>Substance D<br><br>Use of SD over an extended period can cause the user's consciousness to separate into two distinct parts. The drug also appears to facilitate the inducement of shared delusions, manifesting as folie à deux. The source of Substance D remains a mystery throughout most of the novel, though various theories are proposed. It is speculated that: SD is imported from the U.S.S.R. as a Communist scheme to destroy American resistance to Communism; that it was sent to Earth by aliens intent on either enlightening mankind or reducing humans to a zombie-like slave race; that it is involved in a government or corporate plot. At the end of the book, we find out that Substance D is an organic substance, derived from little blue flowers that are grown on large plantations, hidden between rows of corn as cover. Ironically, the drug is harvested by the brainwashed inmates of SD drug rehab centers who are suffering from neurocognitive deficits as a result of their drug addiction.<br><br>Philip K. Dick also gives the name of the species of the flower, which helps to show the relevant meaning of the story and the nature of both the drug and the character's struggle. The name is Mors Ontologica, which could roughly be translated to "the study of the existence of death."<br>[edit]<br><br>Title<br><br>The "scanner" of the title is a holographic recorder/projector on which the main character views clips of his own life but doesn't recognize them. It is also a reference to a Biblical verse in 1 Corinthians 13 that includes "we see as through a mirror darkly", and thus refers to the main character's weak grasp on reality. SD, the initials of Scanner Darkly, are presumably clipped from LSD, and are also the initials of Substance D.<br> <p></p><i></i>

[professorpan]

It's sad that he's only getting his due long after his death. A true visionary, and prophetic to boot.<br><br>An interesting verbal synchronicity -- <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>S</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->ubstance <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>D</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> -- <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>S</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->alvia <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>D</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->ivinorum (which made an appearance on NPR this afternoon: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5290545)">www.npr.org/templates/sto...d=5290545)</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>"The Empire never ended." <p></p><i></i>

[jingofever]

Alex Jones has a small part in the film, I understand. If anyone has seen the director's last movie, Waking Life, they will remember Alex in that driving a van and being his usual self. <p></p><i></i>

[Rigorous Intuition]

You're right, Jones is in the <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0405296/">IMDB</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> cast listing. <p></p><i></i>

[NewKid]

Jeff, please take a look at the 9-11 USA Today video thread and give us your comments. Have you seen anything about this? <p></p><i></i>

[thoughtographer]

Ugh.<br><br>I'm still mourning the fact that Charlie Kaufman's excellent <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/scanner.pdf">script</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> is doomed to remain unfilmed, but Alex Jones being anywhere near this thing turns my stomach. I think Linklater is talented in a lot of ways, but his PKD fetish really grates on my nerves. Having the approval of the <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.philipkdick.com/films_scanner-061204.html">"Philip K. Dick Trust"</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> just makes matters worse, because most people will just assume that this accurately represents his work. <p></p><i></i>

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Yet another move fictionalization of Things The Government Would Rather You Didn't Know and Can Learn On the Internet.<br><br>Namely, that the CIA experimented with LSD on unsuspecting Americans for years before giving up trying to use it as a truth serum or neutralizing weapon. The drug didn't come from hippies and dope pushers. It came from Langley and Harvard.<br><br>The original 1977 book seems to be timed with the release of the CIA's declassified MKUltra papers and the then recent Church Senate Subcommitte Hearings on CIA abuses which were extremely embarassing for the agency.<br><br>This is what led to John Marks' 1978 book about CIA mind control experiments called 'Search For the Manchurian Candidate.'<br><br>In Marks' book, one can read of a Marin County safe house the CIA used for experimenting on people that mirrors Philip K. Dick's own experience. <br><br>Are people still not convinced that almost every movie you hear about is social engineering and psychic shock aborbing by CIA?<br><br>If so, c'mon. Look at the evidence. Be rational. <p></p><i></i>

[thoughtographer]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>VERTEX: You are known as one of the first authors to experiment with LSD. What effect has it had on your writing?<br><br>DICK: I don't know of any. It's always possible that it's had an effect I don't know about. Take my novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which deals with a tremendous bad acid trip, so to speak. I wrote that before I had ever seen LSD. I wrote that from just reading a description of the discovery of it and the kind of effect it had. So if that, which is my major novel of a hallucinogenic kind, came without my ever having taken LSD, then I would say even my work following LSD which had hallucinations in it could easily have been written without taking acid.<br><br>VERTEX: Isn't "Faith of Our Father's," from Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, supposed to have been inspired by or written under the influence of acid?<br><br>DICK: That really is not true. First of all, you can't write anything when you're on acid. I did one page once while on an acid trip, but it was in Latin. Whole damn thing was in Latin and a little tiny bit in Sanskrit, and there's not much market for that. The page does not fall in with my published work. The other book which suggests it might have been written with acid is Martian Time-slip. That too was written before I had taken any acid.<br><br>VERTEX: How much acid did you take anyway?<br><br>DICK: Not that much. I wan't getting up in the morning and dropping acid. I'm amazed when I read the things I used to say about it on the blurbs of my books. I wrote this myself: "He has been experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs to find the unchanging reality beneath our delusions." And now I say, "Good Christ!" All I ever found out about acid was that I was where I wanted to get out of fast. It didn't seem more real than anything else; it just seemed more awful.<br><br>VERTEX: In the light of your own experiences with acid, how accurate do you think The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is as far as drugs are concerned?<br><br>DICK: You remember what happened when they got on that drug? It was bad, wasn't it? It was so bad it taxed my ability to imagine bad. And it didn't do them any good to stop taking the drug because they had flashbacks. And nobody at the time knew LSD was going to produce flashbacks. I had it in mind that the ultimate horror would be to get an addictive, hallucinogenic drug out of your system and you would say, "Well, I'm back in the real world now." And suddenly a monstrous object from the hallucinogenic world would cross the floor and you would realize that you were not back. And this is what has happened to many people who have dropped acid. It was just an accidental prophecy on my part.<br><br>VERTEX: Doesn't your latest novel, A Scanner Darkly, also deal with drugs?<br><br>DICK: It's about an undercover agent who must take dope to conceal his cover and the dope damages his brain progressively, as well as making him an addict. The book follows him along to the end until his brain is damaged to such an extent that he can no longer wash pots and pans in the kitchen of a rehabilitation center. I hope the reader won't say, "Boy! I bet he did that!" This is the verisimilitude the author is trying to create, the sense that the novel actually is real. Now I was at a heroin rehab center in Canada, and I did draw from it, and I've had friends who dropped acid and became permanently psychotic. And a number who killed themselves too. But I wouldn't say that if affected my writing directly, that the acid wrote the book.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.philipkdick.com/media_vertex.html">www.philipkdick.com/media_vertex.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i></i>