The Most Underrated Phillip K. Dick Thriller Remains Eerily Timely

It’s become so trite to point out Philip K. Dick’s legendary impact on Hollywood sci-fi that it’s easy to forget just how remarkable it really was. From Blade Runner and The Man in the High Castle to Minority Report and the legendary Cortical Impasse, Dick’s prolific fiction output put his fingerprints all over modern media. And for a man who’s been dead for nearly half a century, his ideas sometimes feel remarkably prescient.

Those less familiar with Dick, and the Hollywood system in general, might imagine that he dashed out best-selling ideas between laps in his Bel-Air pool. But much of Dick’s life was troubled by mental health issues, relationship breakdowns, and substance abuse, subjects that appeared throughout many of his novels. Of all his work, it was A Scanner Darkly that most explicitly dealt with drugs, and it was 20 years ago today that the trippy thriller hit theaters and became one of his most underrated byproducts.

Directed by Richard Linklater and starring Keanu Reeves, the fact that Linklater and Reeves teamed up to make a dreary sci-fi rather than a nostalgic comedy is perhaps the film’s first surprise. Set in sun-drenched Anaheim, Reeves plays Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent trying to track down a major supplier of Substance D, the mind-rotting hallucinogen of choice for a crumbling America that’s all but lost the war on drugs.

Unfortunately, Arctor has gotten hooked on Substance D himself, and he spends his days milling around his flophouse with roommates James (Robert Downey Jr.) and Ernie (Woody Harrelson), sometimes getting involved in schemes straight out of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and sometimes recalling a family that he may or may not have had. Also on the scene is Donna (Winona Ryder), a small-time dealer Arctor is trying to ingratiate himself with so he can move up the supply chain and get his big arrest, all while trying to get her in bed, too.

Linklater’s trademark rotoscoping adds a dreamy layer to an already twisty story, one that features both police work and Woody Harrelson hallucinating a cosmic entity that issues judgment for his chronic teenage masturbation. Several of Dick’s favorite themes are on display: a heavily surveilled America, a cop protagonist, and, of course, reams and reams of drugs. But it’s the fragile and precarious natures of our own identities — another Dick classic — that come to dominate the picture.

Arctor and his fellow narcs hide their identities from each other with scramble suits, which reduce their voices and appearances to an ever-shifting slurry of possible people. Seemingly introduced as little more than a sci-fi world-building detail, the suits end up being the story’s most distinctly PKD touch. At a time when surveillance is constant, those doing the watching feel obligated to keep themselves at an alienating remove from the people they’re monitoring. But Arctor, whose rotting mind can barely keep his own life straight, soon gets lost in the maze.

Reeves, working in the early days of his meandering post-Matrix, pre-Wick interregnum, is a fine star, but the standout here is Robert Downey Jr., who applies the manic arrogance he would later give Tony Stark to a rambling, strung-out loser. Without wading into spoilers, it’s a brilliant and instantly recognizable touch that, in a story where there is indeed a conspiracy afoot, James heads down the exact wrong track, convinced of his own genius all the while. Ryder is also effective, and perhaps it’s fitting that two actors who were working on comebacks following drug scandals best fit Dick’s material.

We never learn why Arctor and his roomies turned to Substance D, but you get the sense that America’s state of affairs hasn’t only rendered them hopeless, but bored. The impact of their use is sometimes funny and sometimes almost unbearably bleak, but, above all else, drugs give them something to do with their time. When the foursome talk each other into a tweaked-out, paranoid conspiracy about a bike James buys, it’s like they don’t even have the enthusiasm to get invested in a real scandal.

But a big conspiracy is at the heart of A Scanner Darkly whether Arctor wants it to be or not. That the movie presents a brief cameo of Alex Jones railing against the man as sympathetic is perhaps its biggest flaw, albeit one now systemic to the entire genre of conspiracy fiction. With the American government now run by Jones-like people happy to rip the copper out of the White House walls and sell it on the open market to fund a diarrhea-inducing nutritional supplement called TestroBlast, it’s difficult to buy stories about clandestine cover-ups run with ruthless efficiency. Forget Deus Ex or Enemy of the State — the conspiracies are farcically inept and unfolding in plain sight.

Then again, maybe that makes A Scanner Darkly the right movie for our times. Arctor spends most of the movie stumbling around on autopilot, working for people he doesn’t know on an assignment he doesn’t believe in on behalf of a surveillance state that’s watching its moral high ground slip away. His America isn’t an irredeemable hellhole, but something is wrong, and all Arctor can do is dream about what once was or might have been. The movie never judges him for his vices, but the story does end with Dick’s eulogy to all the friends he lost to drug use. Sub in the modern vice of your choice, and imagine #BikeGate taking place online, and at least it’s clear what we should try to dig ourselves out of.

A Scanner Darkly is available on YouTube.