What was a scanner darkly about

Not for everyone, but certainly worth a look. Certain to become a cult classic. FAQ Who is Philip K. What does the title "A Scanner Darkly" mean? How was this movie filmed? Details Edit. Release date July 28, United States. United States. Elgin, Texas, USA.

Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes. Related news. Aug 20 Den of Geek. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content.

Top Gap. See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. Bob Arctor's life is really Dick's life over a two-year period, from , after his fourth wife Nancy left him.

It was a restless life, sliding through relationships and jobs, and from city to city. Finding himself alone again, Dick filled his four-bedroom house with drifters and fell fully into drug addiction. A Scanner Darkly was born from this period and is a fascinating portrait of 70s Californian counter-culture. Arctor falls further than his creator. His dual life as an investigator and addict in thrall to the mysterious narcotic Substance D, lead him to a crisis. He ends up a low-functioning schizophrenic, embroiled in a plot to infiltrate the manufacturing cycle of Substance D.

The darkness here is not in the high-concept sci fi or conspiracy theories that permeate much of Dick's fiction, but in the credible depiction of a life collapsing under the weight of a mental breakdown. The synopsis below may give away important plot points. Getting Started Contributor Zone ».

Edit page. Top Gap. See more gaps ». Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about A Scanner Darkly , please sign up. This question contains spoilers Gio Mane This answer contains spoilers… view spoiler [ Yes, she did.

Remember her conversation with Mike at McDonald's fast-food stand. It was planned from the beginning. Substance D should have harmed Bob …more Yes, she did. Substance D should have harmed Bobs brain and he had to get in New Path as government needed information about them.

Mike himself was an undercover cop in New Path too, but they did not let him in farms as his brain was not harmed. The problem here is that Bob himself did not know about this plan, he didn't volunteer, he was just an instrument. Rob This answer contains spoilers… view spoiler [ I had the same question upon seeing the movie recently after having read the book first.

I paused the movie and went straight to the bookshelf. Hank …more I had the same question upon seeing the movie recently after having read the book first. Technically, the book doesn't exclude the possibility, but it's not explicit in the text.

The movie twist of revealing Donna-as-Hank is a cleverly compressed second movie element, where the book unfolds her undercover status in a more protracted way. See all 9 questions about A Scanner Darkly…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Rating details. More filters.

Sort order. Start your review of A Scanner Darkly. Jul 29, Lyn rated it really liked it. A Scanner Darkly can be described as follows: begin with Hunter S. This is actually a very well written book; PKD delivers a mature, far from romantic glimpse of addiction and the drug sub-culture as only he could, a recovering, on again off again user himself and with mental illness added in.

Still, this is a complete work by a talented writer and, minimalistic as it is, keeps the reader engaged. There is humor in the book, though it cannot be considered a comedy, perhaps a dark comedy as the subject matter, though painted with a mild sci-fi brush, is one of addiction and death.

The pervasive paranoia and the multiple layers of theatrical irony are the elements of this story that will stay with the reader long after the book has been set down. View all 25 comments. I used to wonder how Phillip K. Dick came up with all the trippy concepts in his stories until I read A Scanner Darkly.

Arctor appears to be just another burned out druggie who lives with a couple of other dopers, and they spend most of their time getting high on Substance D and assorted other drugs. Bob is actually an undercover nar I used to wonder how Phillip K.

Arctor wears a special scramble suit that blurs his features and voice when reporting to his boss Hank, who also wears a scramble suit to conceal his identity.

He gets a tricky new assignment when Hank orders him to start keeping tabs on a new target; Bob Arctor. Where it really shines is in its portrayal of the drug culture with long sections dedicated to things like an addict who begins seeing bugs everywhere or a botched suicide attempt that turns into a psychedelic eternity of recrimination for past sins.

The long rambling conversations with Bob and his fellow druggies are darkly hilarious in that they show a kind of weird creativity while also being completely devoid of logic and apt to go in paranoid directions. For example, a problem with a car eventually leads to their certainty that the cops have planted drugs in the house and that the only solution is to sell the place. Dick does a masterful job of showing how people could end up living in a perpetual haze while ignoring the long term damage being done even as they see their own friends die or get turned into little more than vegetables by their own behavior.

As he puts it, their sin was in wanting to play all the time but the penalty was far harsher than they deserved. On a side note, I also loved the movie version of this done by Richard Linklater that featured a hand drawn rotoscope process over filmed scenes to give it a feeling of realistic unreality. Robert Downey Jr. View all 28 comments. Dick's searing, hyperrealist tale of a specific time late s , a specific place California , and a specific mentality seek maximum happiness now since tomorrow you might die set in , enough in the near future for the author to inject massive doses of his signature wild imagination into the mix.

As most readers will know, director Richard Linklater employed distinctive digital technology and animation in creating a blockbuster film based on the novel. He also reveals something extremely personal to his readers: he is not in the novel, he is the novel. You should be. Here are ten hits of what this unique, drug-centered classic is all about: 1.

Freak-Out: The opening scene features doper Jerry Fabin in a frantic battle with thousands of aphid bugs infesting his hair and every inch of his body. Unfortunately, Jerry is fighting a losing battle - even standing under hot water in the shower ten hours a day doesn't help.

After suffering one particularly severe attack, Jerry admits defeat and is admitted into Number Three Federal Clinic. The psychic meltdown of Jerry Fabin is a haunting reminder to all of Jerry's friends of what can happen with too much dope, a reminder coating every page of the novel like a thick syrup.

Drugs and More Drugs: In addition to hash, heroin, cocaine, mescaline, LSD, speed and other familiar names on the list, there is the new prima numero uno drug of choice, Substance D aka Death or Slow Death.

Among its many side effects is the risk of split brain phenomenon, where a user will develop two identities and have one side of their brain talk to the other as if two different people in conversation. And cut with bad ingredients, in a matter of months, Substance D can cause a sixteen year old girl to look like a scraggly old lady with grey hair falling out. But the supercharged high produced outweighs the possible side effects by far. Oh, wow! The Setting: Sprawling air-conditioned Southern California nightmare, an unending repetition of McDonald hamburger stands, strip malls, gas stations and freeways.

Main character Robert Arctor reflects: "They McDonald's had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed.

Nothing changed; it just spread out father in the form of neon ooze. War: It's straights vs. And those straights include fully armed Birchers and Minutemen, city police and federal police, army forces and unidentified forces. If you are a doper and caught off guard, you will quickly be eliminated via jail or bullet or even worse, a federal clinic. In this war, the straights don't take any prisoners since, for them, dopers are disgusting filth, not even on the level of mangy dogs.

Scramble Suits: An underground cop will report gathered information wearing a futuristic scramble suit, a full body, head to toe covering, a piece of technological magic, rendering the wearer a vague blur. The police chief receiving this information will also wear a scramble suit. Thus concealment and secrecy are maintained on all levels.

Surveillance: In this futuristic world the police possess powerful technology to spy on dopers in all sorts of ways, including scanners that can zoom in and out in 3-D. Feeling paranoid? There might be good reason - smile, you are on candid camera.

Robert Arctor, One: Bob was once a straight, living with his wife and two little girls out in their three bedroom house, working as an investigator for an insurance company, but one day Bob hit his head in the kitchen and all instantly came clear in a flash: his entire life was a sham, nothing but a deadly routine and he hated all of it. Soon thereafter Bob gets a divorce and shifts into the doper life. Robert Arctor, Two: To support his drug habit and live in his now rundown doper house, Bob takes on the job of undercover narcotics agent.

The drug world, Arctor recognizes, is a murky world were dopers work for the cops and cops posing as dopers get hooked on dope and might even become full-time dealers. And Robert Arctor gets hooked on a bunch of dope, most notably on Substance D. Arctor escaped his drab, humdrum, straight family life but can he be sure his new doper life will turn out to be any better?

But, then, Bob has to deal with the crazy effects of Substance D causing his personality and identity to split in two. Oh, my spacey hallucinations! A custom-made phenomenon for the one and only PKD.

Dopers Friends: We are provided detailed glimpses into the inner and social lives of the two doper dudes living at Bob's house: supercool Ernie Luckman and supersmart Jim Barris.

There is also Arctor's heartthrob - young, superfoxy Donna Hawthorne. Hey, wait a toker minute. Is Luckman or Barris or Donna what they appear to be? How many of them are also living a double life?

As noted above, the drug world is a murky world. And that includes government agencies more than happy to slide into a sinister double life to achieve their goals. Read all about it. What a trip. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.

Dick, A Scanner Darkly View all 31 comments. Mar 07, Mario the lone bookwolf rated it liked it Shelves: dick-philip-k. The Sci-Fi element got completely lost in this one, except for some magic cloak style and I still remember how long I waited for the ending until it suddenly erupted and ended the novel far too early at a point where it could have unfolded instead.

Wait a moment, one of my inner voices just told me that I did yet delete them for the sake of my peace of mind and mental sanity. Just as if they wrote down whatever came to their mind without caring about the conventions and rules of the art of writing real, great, worldbuilding space opera sci fi, or meta social sci fi or full dystopian sci fi, or anything that has more than 2 grains of sci-fi trope elements, and not just egocentric, eccentric, very average novels with tiny amounts of fantastic elements and much drivel and delusion.

So the one is wasted, drunk or on drugs, mentally ill or extremely unstable, promoting pseudo fringe philosophical drivel about conscience and reality, conspiracy theories, alternate realities, and timelines, uchronias while he is losing the red line and inner logic of his strange ideas until he finishes with an extremely unsatisfying and far fetched conclusion nobody except of him understands. The other one is arbitrarily and unpredictably switching between extreme political and economic ideologies and ideas he is hardlinering and proselytizing about, while his views about women, gays, and sexuality are insulting half of the family, until he finishes his endless monologues without referring to any details, facts, or integrating complex interwoven character arcs.

Family gatherings suck. View all 14 comments. Mar 12, Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , sci-fi , made-into-movie , novels , americanth-c. This was a fascinating story if somewhat terrifying about LA in the 90s seen from the 70s and the future is grim. In a lot of ways, PKD's predictions have not bourne out: we don't have scattersuits and no one was using cassette tapes anymore because of the CD.

However, the long-term effects of hard drug use are not that off mark. I suspect that Substance D or "death" as it is known on the street would today be some kind of crystal meth like Heisenberg's on Breaking Bad, but ingestible with This was a fascinating story if somewhat terrifying about LA in the 90s seen from the 70s and the future is grim. I suspect that Substance D or "death" as it is known on the street would today be some kind of crystal meth like Heisenberg's on Breaking Bad, but ingestible with tablets.

Its widespread use and devastating impact on users is certainly not understated. That being said, there is also a narrative about spies and counter-spies and how governmental institutions dehumanize agents and occasionally sacrifice then willingly. The overall feeling of the book was kind of like Fight Club meets Naked Lunch or something. I really enjoyed how he described the scramble suit using cubist painters, that was a nice touch.

I also saw an interesting parallel to Fight Club with the split personality of the protagonist. I felt that his descriptions of people freaking out on LSD or D, particularly the bug episode, were extremely well done. I also have owned Linkletter's animated film of the book since the DVD was released and - although I have not watched in in several years - I recall it being quite faithful to the book and that the animation was groundbreaking at the time.

View all 21 comments. In , Philip K Dick's fourth wife, Nancy, left him and took their little daughter with her. Dick's new housemates stopped him from killing himself, but a lot of them weren't so lucky themselves. This was the genesis of A Scanner Darkly , in which Dick, grounding his metaphysical speculations in the real environment of the California doper scene, finally produced an out-and-out masterpiece.

The novel's motivation is hinted at when its protagonist looks around at the drug addicts and drop-outs around him: In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they'll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand. This is the colossal impulse of sympathy animating the book. Though it's obviously and openly about the California of the late 60s, Scanner is set, by genre convention, in the then-future of , a distancing technique that Dick uses merely to blow up contemporary issues.

Our main character is one of them. As Agent Fred, he is responsible for infiltrating and monitoring a house full of drug addicts, using hand-wavy technology which means that no one, even his superiors, knows what he really looks or sounds like.

His bosses tell him to focus on one guy in particular, Bob Arctor, not realising that Bob Arctor is Fred himself. As Bob, wandering about his house, he frets paranoically about the possibility of surveillance equipment in the walls; as Fred, he studies the tapes of Bob's activity and wonders who this guy is and what he's hiding.

As the book goes on, the two increasingly fracture into separate entities. What's great about this is that Dick has always been fascinated by identity crisis and ontological instability; but whereas in previous books these are generated by sci-fi magic, here they are all rooted in a real evaluation of what drug addiction does to the human brain.

Indeed he saw A Scanner Darkly as being, essentially, his great anti-drug novel, telling friends he wanted it to do for hard drugs what All Quiet on the Western Front did for war. I don't see it working quite that way; to me its genius is not located in its moral message, which is anyway not as strong or unambiguous as I think Dick thought it was. Unlike most of his other novels, it's also very funny. There is a great ear for dialogue in this book, with whole conversations reproduced very naturally — you feel like you're eavesdropping on these people as they crack jokes, talk bullshit, get confused, freak out, get high and negotiate relationships.

It must be something they're adulterating all the stuff with. Some chemical. Everybody bangs me. That's what it's like to be a chick. I'm suing one guy in court right now, for molestation and assault. We're asking punitive damages in excess of forty thousand. In some ways the patina of science-fiction means it does a better job of explaining it all than any of them. And as the title warns you, it's not an upbeat tale.

It spirals into a dark place, and then leaves you there. In a heartbreaking Afterword, Dick lists the friends he knew at that time and records the damage that was done to them. One of the names is his own. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terribly brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief; even when we could see it, we could not believe it.

They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. It's like all his gifts and obsessions finally had something real through which to be refracted — and the results may be dark, but they're also brilliant. View all 39 comments. Oct 18, carol. Shelves: classic , mindbender , awards , male-lead. I've started and restarted this review a number of times.

Take moderate amounts of the drug of your choice recommend one with highly hallucinogenic and paranoiac qualities 2. Allow to simmer while reading Less Than Zero 3.

Stir in a random amount of a second drug preferably one with potential for permanent I've started and restarted this review a number of times. Stir in a random amount of a second drug preferably one with potential for permanent brain damage--current versions of the recipe recommend bath salts 4. Allow to cook in brain pan on high heat 5. Watch Rush, the movie. Rinse and repeat until brain fully cooked The literary critic: Wandering, borderline incoherent narrative. Half-hearted attempt to tack on conspiracy theory at the end, which might have been effective had there been more building earlier.

The story did surprise me in a couple of places, notably view spoiler [Luckman's unintentional drug trip hide spoiler ] which, while genius, does miss the consequence point he seems to want to make; and in the plot twist at the very end. That said, character creation was brilliant. Each has his own way of interacting with drugs, his own purpose and own experience, and the intersections were fascinating.

Barris with his experimental genius. Luckman with his pursuit of pleasure, Donna with her strangely drawn and arbitrary drug-use lines ha-ha , and Charles Freck with his sad effort to self-medicate mental illness. I'm sure several of the conversations came out of real life; they are too absurd not to.

The psychological evaluation sections were interesting, and a clever device to give the reader insight into the world and Arctor, although the mumbo-science passed through my own tired brain. Stylistically, the language was essentially prosaic, but occasionally a phrase would catch my attention and stop me in my tracks with meaning: "It will be a hindsight I won't even get to have.

Somebody else will have to have it for me. Under very specialized conditions, such as today. I get PKD and his motivations, I really do. His Author's Note was quite powerful, especially when he says "these people wanted to keep having a good time forever. Had he done so, my sympathy for the characters would have been greater and my connection to the story deeper.

I would have enjoyed it more if there had been more than the tiniest shred of redemption, some elements of joy and abandon to show the sheer delight of the "children playing in the street. View all 30 comments. Aug 28, Darwin8u rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction , , scifi , aere-perennius , american.

Be happy NOW , for tomorrow I will be writing. Let US all be happy. Four or five paragraphs.