Best Keanu: “What happened? How’d I get here?”

When the opening titles began for A Scanner Darkly, I had a flashback to fifth grade. I was carrying around a novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? whose cover had been stylized to reflect the recent Blade Runner movie. My friend looked at the cover as I held it, read it, and said the author’s name aloud: “Philip K. Dick.”

The dates don’t exactly match up; in grade 5 I would have been nine or 10, and Blade Runner came out when I was about eight and I didn’t see the movie until years later. I think I carried the book — which I never recall actually reading, except for glimpses of dialogue — because of the uniqueness of its title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The source material for A Scanner Darkly, the film, is also a Philip K. Dick novel, and the movie ends with a searing dedication from the author. It’s a tough road to get to the dedication, through a little less than two hours of film that require you to first disconnect yourself from what you think you want to see in a movie and then console yourself through some wrenching scenes. It’s this dual experience of having to immerse yourself into this strange world but not wanting to do so because its elements are too disturbing.

I don’t know why Richard Linklater — already my hero for creating one of my all-time favorite movies, Boyhood, one of the main villains of which shows up in the last scene of A Scanner Darkly — chose to douse this movie with animation. I am sure the reason is easily looked up.

Perhaps it’s designed to reflect the characters’ mental states, making it a creative and effective cinematic choice. But it also makes the movie just easier to get through. If A Scanner Darkly hadn’t been so visually shifted, I am not sure how far I would have gotten before turning it off, or at least, watching it in small chunks out of a sense of obligation to this website.

There’s also the practical element, a plot detail of the agents’ ability to disguise their identities through shifting cloaks. That was maybe easier to convey, and more visually interesting, with the revolving shapes and images across the agents’ faces and bodies.

But more fundamentally, there’s the need to shroud this movie in surrealism. It’s about the future, ostensibly, but it’s also about something very dark, very immediate, and for some, I imagine, very close to home.

On one level, A Scanner Darkly is a mind fuck. It’s like The Matrix but in a scarier context. Especially if you go into the movie cold, without reading any kind of synopsis, you don’t know how to contextualize the experience of the Keanu Reeves character. You don’t know what around him is hallucinatory, imaginary, or real, or who is manipulating him, directing him, or who doesn’t actually exist.

A Scanner Darkly finds its robust messaging in the final arc, with a plot twist many — including myself — would see coming. But it still comes with driving emotional impact, enough to leave me staring at the screen, absorbing while the credits rolled what the film was trying to convey.

March 2022