Excess and Uncertainty in Philip K. Dick's Novel a Scanner Darkly And

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―Reflected in a Mirror, Through a Mirror:‖ Excess and Uncertainty

in Philip K. Dick‘s novel A Scanner Darkly

and Richard Linklater‘s filmic adaptation

by Stanley Robert Janz

Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the Degree of Master of Arts (English)

Acadia University

Spring Convocation 2011

This thesis by Stanley Robert Janz was defended successfully in an oral examination on April 13th, 2011.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

______Dr. Paul Hobson, Chair

______Dr. Anthony Enns, External Reader

______Dr. Andrea Schwenke Wyile, Internal Reader

______Dr. Jon Saklofske

______Dr. Herb Wyile, Head Delegate

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree Master of Arts (English).

…………………………………………. iii

I, Stanley Robert Janz, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

______

Stanley Robert Janz

______

Dr. Jon Saklofske, Supervisor

______

Date

Table of Contents

New Path: Introduction 1

Chapter One: Bob Arctor – Let‘s Hear it for the Vague Blur 29

Chapter Two: The Writing Appears Backward 63

Chapter Three: What Does a Scanner See? 93

Author‘s Notes 135

Works Cited 146

Abstract

This thesis views Philip K. Dick‘s novel, A Scanner Darkly, and Richard Linklater‘s filmic adaptation through the lenses of remediation and transmedia storytelling. It examines how mediative distancing, in the forms of narrative and stylistic excess, can facilitate understanding rather than confound comprehension. A significant part of my argument is comprised of the assertion that perceptually obtrusive and conceptually ambiguous episodes in the novel informed Richard Linklater‘s hypermediated adaptation; which, via its filmic excesses, expands or transmediates the source narrative, providing the potential for a clearer understanding of the film and, upon subsequent reflection, the novel as well. The further we are distanced from both works, the closer we are able to come to an empathetic and unified vision of each narrative. Both stories become comprehensible through comprehensiveness. More scanners, more mirrors, more dissonant perspectives enable the reader or viewer to penetrate the narrative layers that obscure the story.

Abbreviations

AO – Anti-Oedipus

AT - The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell

ATF – Archaeologies of the Future

ATOS – A Theory of Semiotics

ASD – A Scanner Darkly

CC - Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

CG – Computer generated

DI – Divine Invasions

DAR – Difference and Repetition

FTC – Film Theory & Criticism

HC – The Man in the High Castle

HEUV - Human Emotion and the Uncanny Valley

IPV – Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis

ODLT - The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

OSA - One Summer in Austin

PATS – Plato and the Simulacrum

PCL - Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

ROU - Revenge of the Origami Unicorn

S.A. – Special Agent

SR – The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick

TIHR – Travels in Hyperreality

WIP – What is Philosophy?

WL – Waking Life vii

New Path: an Introduction

―The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom‖

William Blake – Proverbs of Hell

Excess often leads to dysfunction and confusion not wisdom. It ushers in new, unwanted trials and tribulations that foster confusion and turmoil rather than enlightenment. Although there is a good deal of truth to be found in Blake‘s deliberately paradoxical statement, uncovering that truth requires a willingness to go beyond conventional boundaries and see things from an unfamiliar, perhaps uncomfortable perspective. Excess imposes its own conditions. It insists on acknowledgement: if not by those engaged in immoderate behaviour then by witnesses who are empathetic enough to care, or prudish enough to reject such displays. Consider the myriad concerned parties

(the authorities, as Philip K. Dick might refer to them), who, in the face of what they consider to be excessive and therefore unreasonable behaviour, feel compelled to intervene. In these instances, excess is acknowledged through an attempt to regulate and normalize such behaviours. Blake‘s words, conversely, suggest that the libertine, the anarchist or radical thinker might find wisdom by going over the edge and beyond socially imposed limits. After the fall, they might look back at the precipice and truly understand the restrictive factors that once confined them and in doing so gain a better understanding of how to successfully exceed them.

For this reason, Blake‘s provocative words are a fitting epigram for Philip K.

Dick‘s most personal and poignant novel of the 1970s, A Scanner Darkly. The story is a faithful illustration of Blake‘s notion that you can ―never know what is enough unless 2

you know what is more than enough‖ (71). In an attempt to reflect his own, often decadent lifestyle, Dick explores the ideas of, and relationship between, excess and wisdom in many of his stories. In his writing, he frequently speculates that there exists a perceptual impediment that obscures our interpretation of the various ―realities‖ we are regularly confronted with and that this barrier must be exceeded if we are to see clearly.

He constructed A Scanner Darkly by holding a mirror up to his own excessive nature and revealing how, through addiction, one might go beyond the point of return. He believed there was a lesson to be learned from his tale of excess. However, because Dick held that he was only able to perceive distorted fragments of his world, a confused rendering of the author‘s own drug addled observations is perhaps the most evident narrative layer of A

Scanner Darkly. Absorbed by the immediacy of his experiences, Dick, quite understandably, had a myopic and distorted view of the events transpiring around him.

His novel, given its narrative fragmentation, communicates similar limitations.

Because feelings of unease regarding perceptual awareness pervade Dick‘s work to such a great extent, the themes most commonly attributed to the writer deal with the nature of authenticity (what is reality? what does it mean to be human?) and how our perceptions alter our understanding of that nebulous term. In his 1972 essay ―Man,

Android, and Machine‖ he explains the genesis of his skepticism:

We see very much the same notion expressed by St. Paul when he speaks

about our seeing ―as if by the reflection on the bottom of a polished metal

pan.‖ He is referring to the familiar notion of Plato‘s, that we see only

images of reality, and probably these images are inaccurate and imperfect

and not to be relied on. I wish to add that Paul was probably saying one 3

thing more than Plato in the celebrated metaphor of the cave: Paul was

saying that we may well be seeing the universe backwards. (SR 214-15)

Dick‘s interpretation of St. Paul and by extension Plato intimates the complex reflective nature of his literary oeuvre. Plato‘s suggestion, that we see only shadows, is conflated with St. Paul‘s belief that we experience a simulation of reality in the form of a reflection and that reflection is a hidden, unconsciously manufactured agent of self-deception.

Unlike a shadow, a reflection is very difficult to distinguish from its source image.

Perceiving only a reflection would cause one to normalize that perception over time. The information received from the environment via St. Paul‘s glass would be unobtrusive, requiring a blatant indicator. To shatter the illusion, something overt such as writing that appears backwards, which would reverse the reversal of the mirror and actually produce something akin to the reality beyond the looking glass, would be necessary. Possibly, because of his suspicions regarding the inverted nature of reality, Dick consciously attempted to ―write backwards‖ by creating ambiguous, inconsistent stories or ―worlds that fall apart‖ (SR 259), so that the reader might comprehend the insidious nature of St.

Paul‘s mediative mirror through attempting to put these ―worlds‖ back together.

A Scanner Darkly, which takes its name from St. Paul‘s famous words: ―For now we see through a glass, darkly‖ (NKJV, 1 Corinthians 13:12), evokes a parallel between the Christian trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and Dick‘s: ―Man, Android, and

Machine.‖ There is also a similar trinity established in Dick‘s novel with his protagonist,

Bob Arctor, who eventually splits into a schizophrenic collage of Fred, Arctor and Bruce.

Each example intimates the notion that there is one source which has taken on three integrally related and interconnected forms or states like the liquid, gas and solid forms 4

that water might take. The Christian trinity‘s Father corresponds with Man and Arctor; this is the condition of origin and authenticity.1 The Son corresponds with Fred and

Android; this is a conflicted, altered or compromised state. The Holy Spirit corresponds with Bruce and Machine; this is a transformed, non-human form. These parallels suggest an affinity between the three texts (Bible, novel and essay) which Dick explicates through his treatment of Arctor; in this regard, he intimates a temporal progression that is meant to be illuminating for the distanced observer. That is, the reader who can use the novel

―scanner‖ effectively will be made aware of the perils of Substance D abuse.

Initially, Arctor watches Jerry Fabin, one of his doper peers, move through each of the three stages but eventually, as his own addiction overwhelms him, he comes to realize that he sees through his holoscanner darkly, meaning he is unable to fully understand the excess of information that the scanner provides for him. Similarly, within the biblical passage, Paul speaks of a mirror through which we all see dimly. The passage ends with the line: ―For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known‖ (NKJV 1

Corinthians13:12). To St. Paul, the ―now‖ refers to the distorting effects of the mirror in this life. In the novel this perceptual confusion is perhaps realized by the reader through witnessing the split functioning of Arctor‘s mind due to his dependency on an intensely addictive and destructive drug known as Substance D. The simultaneous presentation of the combined and conflicting perspectives of Arctor and Fred creates perceptual excess,

1 In Christianity it is believed that everything is born of the Father. God is the source from which all extensions and variations are derived. Man, as Dick characterizes those capable of empathy and spontaneous human behaviour in his essay ―Man, Android, and Machine, represents an internally controlled, ideal state of ontological authenticity. Arctor initially behaves in an authentically human manner and, as a result, can provoke feelings of immediacy from the reader, but this immersive connection, if not disrupted, may potentially frustrate a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the novel. 5

which Dick likens to St. Paul‘s mediative mirror. This excess prevents Arctor from seeing clearly; that is, he only knows in part, but through the omniscient point of view provided by the novel‘s narrator the reader has the potential to see things fully, as they actually are.

The ―then‖ that St. Paul mentions seems to suggest a stage of clarity and awareness that might be achieved upon reaching heaven and being granted a sort of God- like omniscience. In the novel this is the point where Arctor/Fred has become Bruce.

Bruce can see clearly; unfortunately, because he achieves his awareness through drugs rather than God, he is unable to comprehend what he sees. This is Dick‘s substitution of the death of addiction for the death and eternal life of Christianity.2 In death we see things as they are, through God‘s eyes presumably. God will be our benevolent glass which re-reflects the distorting mirror of false perception. Conversely, in A Scanner

Darkly, Arctor becomes a machine, a scanner or mirror and Substance D is Arctor‘s impassive controller allowing only those external to him to see through him clearly.

Substance D, as it relates to St. Paul‘s notions, carries the perceptual promise of

Substance ―Divine‖ for those in control of the user. However, the novel confirms that the

D, as it relates to the drug, stands for ontological and cognitive death rather than eternal life. With Christian theology, the body passes back into dust and the soul lives on eternally, furnished with the wisdom and omniscience of God. In A Scanner Darkly, the brain is destroyed by Substance D but the body continues to live and serve the objectives of an external master. To extend this premise one remove further, through his book, Dick

2 This contrast, drug-induced vs. spiritually or philosophically induced awareness, is further illustrated by the different uses of the scramble suit phenomenon in A Scanner Darkly and Dick‘s later novel, Radio Free Albemuth. 6

attempts to simulate the perceptual confusion of the addict and the clarity that might be gleaned by witnessing, from a distance, brain death brought about by addiction. His novel, in this regard, is also a form of Substance D that has the ability to consume and manipulate those readers who are incapable of maintaining an objective distance from it.

Dick is clear in his assertion that perceptual, emotional and cognitive control must never be surrendered to an external agent, be it drugs, the authorities or some variation thereof.

The novel, as Substance D, has hegemonic tendencies that, if left unchecked, can lead the reader to the same confused state that befalls Arctor whereas the novel, as Substance

―Divine‖ (that is, the promise of God-like omniscience in death), can provide clarity for the reader capable of controlling it.

If Dick builds narratives that fall apart, that emulate the deceptive mirror, the question this thesis must address then, is how to penetrate the mirror-like qualities of the novel‘s narrative or how to see clearly through A Scanner Darkly? For the reader, comprehension occurs because the rebuilding process demands attention and consideration. Dick‘s stylistically excessive choices, his emulation of the mediative mirror, and the ambiguous details his narrative provides, are clues that attempt to ―make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world‖ (WIP 182) of the novel, or what philosopher and critic Gilles Deleuze refers to as percepts. For Deleuze, the percept phenomenon, along with experiences he called affects and becoming, attempts to illustrate philosophically how an individual is compelled to make meaningful, unexpected connections between an artistic work and the world both it and the individual inhabits. As John Marks explains it: ―Deleuze is preoccupied with all that leads to the dissolution of the ego in art . . . By means of the percept, literature becomes a way of 7

exploring not how we exist in the world, but rather how we become with the world‖

(199). It is the negotiation of artistic uncertainties, of sensations, colored by the connections the perceiver makes that affect and cause the formation of new concepts.

Percepts lead to unexpected changes in the way an individual understands or regards an artistic work. Deleuze calls the consequences of these transformations affects.

Felicity Colman‘s interpretation of this Deleuzian term states, the ―affect is change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact . . . the knowable product of an encounter . . . the additive processes, forces, powers and expressions of change‖

(11). Between these feelings of change and the sensations that provoke them is an indefinite, liminal state Deleuze refers to as becoming. Cliff Stagoll characterizes becoming as ―the very dynamism of change, situated between two heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal or end-state . . . the eternal, productive return of difference‖ (21).

The concepts of percept, becoming and affect can be used to navigate through A

Scanner Darkly. They are evident in the various stages of perceptual awareness that

Dick‘s protagonist, Bob Arctor, exhibits and they are illustrated through a variety of narrative devices as well. The provocative, perceptually challenging body of sensations that comprise a percept are articulated through the scramble suit, and Dick‘s insidious force of perceptual control, Substance D. Throughout the story, we watch Arctor react to numerous, confounding sensations. Through his conflicting, plural points of view we see him ―affected.‖ He ―becomes‖ Fred/Arctor and then Bruce as his mental faculties disintegrate and any ability to reconcile the perceptual stimulation he encounters is lost. 8

On a narrative level, the percept intimates something profoundly deeper than mere close reading. It compels the reader to pause and reconsider the text from a variety of angles. It is a phenomenon which, by creating stylistic and narrative excess, allows literary works to break with assumptions and interpretations that define and often confine them in a conventional way. Kristin Thompson‘s essay ―The Concept of Cinematic

Excess,‖ provides a suitable definition for the phenomenon referred to here. Thompson‘s explanation offers that narratives function as a struggle between opposing forces in which

―some of these forces strive to unify the work . . . that we may perceive and follow its structures [whereas] outside any such structures lie those aspects of the work which are not contained by its unifying forces – the ‗excess‘‖ (130). Percepts are the forces of excess that are not constrained by the narrative‘s unifying impulses.

Umberto Eco‘s discussion of narratives that deal in excess and provoke confrontation and reconsideration falls along similar lines. Eco suggests that when the narrative is made strange through stylistic excess or ambiguity, ―a violation of norms on both the expression and the content plane obliges one to reconsider their correlation . . . in this way the text becomes self-focusing‖ (ATOS 264). These transcendent and transfixing moments coincide with Deleuze‘s concept of becoming: a merging of the story‘s reality with that of the reader‘s but also a harmonizing of form and content. This synthesis is accomplished through art that resists expectations and accessible interpretations, or art that creates uncertainty and therefore must be contemplated beyond the context and immediacy of the narrative or visual frame in which it is encased. The sort of enigmatic novels that Deleuze talks about are, as Marshall McLuhan suggests, 9

cool3 and require a high level of participation from their readers. Consequently, if the reader is unwilling to read closely enough to see beneath the surfaces imposed by the narrative, the story will remain bound within its frame, dark and imperceptible.

In his book The Cinema Effect, Sean Cubitt discusses the sort of perceptual distancing required for comprehension that might extend beneath the surfaces or beyond the frame of a work. He draws an interesting parallel between the neo-impressionist paintings of Camille Pissarro and cinematic montage editing. As Cubitt explains, the paintings of Pissarro, perceived from less than arm‘s length, appear to be a collection of colorful smudges and dots and ―can only be discerned if the viewer increases the distance between himself and the painting‖ (28). Immersed in the apparent excess of the form, one is unable to grasp the message or in the case of a painting, the image. Conversely, a deceptive transparency, Cubitt suggests, is what many films conveyed prior to montage editing. His argument is that the edit or cut frames the filmic image, making the viewer aware of the medium and providing critical distance from the immediacy of the cinematic experience. However, because montage editing has become conventional, the medium is largely invisible in contemporary, mainstream Hollywood films. It, generally speaking, no longer interrupts immediacy or registers as excessive.

Beyond more conventional technique, narrative and stylistic excess, and the responses they provoke, can disrupt the immediacy of works of literature and cinema.

Excess can make us aware of the narrative text and processes by which the story is communicated. With novels and films that are completely transparent, the medium is, for

3 A hot medium is a platform that extends a single sense in ―high definition,‖ therefore requiring less participation; whereas a cool medium provides considerably less information thus requiring significantly more participation from its audience (McLuhan 22). 10

all intents and purposes, invisible. Every potentially excessive aspect is naturalized and a motivation is provided for each incongruent element of the form. With (as Kristin

Thompson calls it) classical narrative cinema, the situation is much the same; the audience needs to be made aware of the medium if they are to exceed the immediacy and transparency evoked by the story and understand the film on a critical level. As

Thompson states: ―the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect the narrative meaning‖ (132).

Peter Verstraten, in his book Film Narratology, also stresses the connection between ambiguity and excess as they relate to narration. He explains that narrative ambiguity resulting from stylistic excess can provoke the simultaneous confrontation of, for example, the primary text and its subtext forcing the reader to make ―the excessive, functional and suggestive aspects meaningful‖ (30).4 Verstraten likens this kind of filmic/textual encounter to the famous Ludwig Wittgenstein drawing that, at first, may be perceived as depicting a hare or a duck. Initially, viewers will see one or the other, but once both are noticed the image activates recognition of the two possibilities and in doing so, the drawing itself becomes apparent as well.

This sort of ambiguous mediative excess, not unlike Blake‘s notions of excess, in that it makes the viewer aware of a work‘s boundaries and presence, is comparable to what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin refer to as hypermediacy: ―a style of visual representation whose goal it is to remind the viewer of the medium‖ (272). Contrary to

4 A pertinent instance might be the imposition of the fictitious disclaimer at the beginning of the Coen brothers‘ film Fargo. This stylistically excessive and ontologically playful move forces the audience to consider the authenticity of such a statement in relation to the hyperrealistic film that follows. 11

this notion, Bolter and Grusin, in their book Remediation, explain that ―our culture wants both to erase its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them‖ (5). Paradoxically, through an exponentially increasing rate of sophisticated technological advances in digital media, we will eventually achieve complete immediacy of experience while remaining oblivious of the platform on which that experience is delivered. Bolter and Grusin refer to this impulse as the double logic of remediation.

They propose that remediation is a three-pronged approach to understanding mediation that involves the antithetical relationship between transparent immediacy and hypermediacy where the former is the perceived absence of mediation while the latter is the imposed acknowledgement of the medium. Bolter and Grusin suggest that hypermediacy, in making the viewer aware, creates a seemingly innate desire for transparent immediacy. Their notions of hypermediacy involve electronic platforms such as web pages with hypertext or contemporary news programs that use moving ―ticker tape‖ banners and frame-within-frame images to simultaneously make us aware of the medium while prompting a reconsideration of the message therein and a desire for the immediacy of the experience of watching television. Hypermediacy places us in the moment where we can critically consider that moment‘s significance and signification in relation to the immediacy of the message.

These concepts of analysis and internalization through distancing fit well with

Marjorie Siegel‘s discussion of the generative power of transmediation, a term appropriated from Education consultant Charles Suhor who, in 1984, defined it simply as the ―translation of content from one sign system into another‖ (qtd. in Siegel 460). For 12

example, when a reader translates a written narrative into a visual one, a more profound understanding of the source text is gained through the conversion process. Siegel expands on this definition through references to Umberto Eco and Hanna Buczynska-

Garewicz, suggesting that transmediation is a self-perpetuating process that opens the door to a "chain of interpretation or unlimited semiosis from which an entire semiotic system may be constructed‖ (qtd. in Siegel 459).

The term, transmediation, has taken on a more specific meaning in recent years.

Media scholar Henry Jenkins, in his 2006 book Convergence Culture, writes about transmedia storytelling, which he characterizes as ―stories that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world‖ (334). By way of example, Jenkins characterizes Mel

Gibson‘s cinematic remediation of Hamlet as an adaptation, while Tom Stoppard‘s

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is something he would consider an example of transmedia storytelling because Stoppard‘s play, by departing from and extending the original story, expands our perspectives on Shakespeare‘s narrative (ROU).

Jenkins‘ use of transmediation, like Suhor‘s or Siegel‘s, suggests that the remediation and imaginative extension of a narrative will increase comprehension and perhaps alter and deepen the significance of the source story. It will allow the story to

―become.‖ For example, when The Matrix Trilogy moved from the cinema to comic books, video games and short animated films, weaving integral story details from the films into the various mediated extensions of the source narrative, spectators were compelled to integrate the information provided on these different platforms with their knowledge of the cinematically rendered narrative in order to fully comprehend the films. 13

The primary filmic narrative was deliberately introduced into the external worlds of print, interactive games and digital animation in an effort to expand the film-spectator‘s understanding of the vast narrative context behind the film‘s specific narrative episodes.

Furthermore, Jenkins noted that the transmediation of The Matrix Trilogy compelled eager fans to discuss and share ideas online with each other and the trilogy‘s creators, Laurence and Andy Wachowski, allowing the films to become part of a larger, communal, cultural dialogue. Through a variety of artists‘ transmediations of The Matrix films, it was made possible that a more general audience could experience the collective benefits of the various individuals‘ remediations of the source narrative. Through this observation, Jenkins further suggests that the creators of transmedia story-telling experiences exemplify the same notions of transmediation that Suhor and Siegel discuss.

He makes this claim more directly by referring to educational studies conducted by David

Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, who looked at how children interact and play with toys and media connected with such franchises such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. In response to their work, Jenkins stated that ―trans-media storytelling is perhaps at its most elaborate‖ (CC 132) in these sorts of spontaneous, creative exchanges with media.

The inclusive, multi-level philosophy, used by the various creators of the Matrix and Pokémon transmedia experiences is called ―world building‖ by Jenkins. He states that it is becoming increasingly necessary ―as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium‖ (CC

116) to extend their stories over different platforms. Jenkins‘ choice of phrase, ―world building,‖ is, perhaps, serendipitous, as Dick famously claimed that he endeavored to build ―universes that do fall apart‖ (SR 262). And for those familiar with Dick‘s career, 14

Jenkins‘ observations must seem striking, since much of the author‘s corpus could be construed as a sort of world building because he threads similar characters, key plot devices and autobiographical anecdotes through many of his late 1960s and early 1970s novels. For example, Lawrence Sutin suggests that Dick‘s obsession with twins and dualities5, ―as complementary and conflicting . . . found expression in a number of [his] stories and novels, notably Dr. Bloodmoney (1965), Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

(1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), Valis (1981), and The Divine Invasion (1981)‖ (DI 18).

Moreover, it seems Jenkins might have been thinking of Dick when he said, ―Many of my favorite SF novels…break down into near incoherence by the end, yet they offer us richly realized worlds which I would love to be able to explore in greater detail than any one narrative allows‖ (AT).

Readers of Dick are often confronted by this incoherence that Jenkins speaks of.

A provocative idea advanced in one novel can generally be found in several.

Furthermore, his intertextual ―world building‖ seems to have found its appeal in film, where, as Sutin states: ―the ongoing adaptation of Dick‘s works into movies at an astonishing rate [is] exceeded only by Stephen King . . . There must be a reason why

Hollywood keeps anteing up for the rights to Dick‘s stories and novels‖ (DI xi). The excessively detailed worlds and themes that weave their way through his canon continue to draw filmmakers to Dick because in his novels they see opportunities to expand the story rather than merely exploit its ready-made audience. There are many concepts and situations in Dick‘s writing that intimate and, apparently, inspire perceptual renderings and cinematic remediations that go beyond the source narrative.

5 Dick and his twin sister Jane Charlotte were born six weeks premature. Jane died during infancy, a traumatic experiences that seems to have deeply influenced Dick‘s writing. 15

Interestingly enough, in Convergence Culture Jenkins uses an example taken from the Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner, an adaptation of Dick‘s novel Do Androids

Dream of Electric Sheep, to demonstrate the type of catalyst that is the essence of transmedia storytelling. During the final scene of the original theatrical release, Deckard, the film‘s protagonist, finds an origami unicorn in the hallway outside of his apartment door that another character, presumably Gaff, has placed there for him to discover. This apparent non sequitur is left as a puzzling enigma for the audience. In the 1992 director‘s cut, Scott adds a segment where Deckard dreams of a unicorn. This added information allows the viewer to infer that Gaff knows what Deckard‘s dreams are and that Deckard is likely a replicant. This one equivocal moment has the power to change the audience‘s entire understanding of key elements in the film‘s narrative. Thus, Jenkins asserts, it is ambiguous details like the origami unicorn, what John Keats (and Jenkins in his MIT

Tech TV lecture, incidentally) called negative capability, that compel a deeper reading of, in this case, the film. The origami unicorn, without the added dream sequence, creates uncertainty; it is a Deleuzian percept that, perhaps, leads to reconsideration of the narrative. With Scott‘s additional guidance, however, it becomes an element of narrative excess that provides a more unified reading of the movie, which, in turn, enhances the immediacy of the viewer‘s response.

Bolter and Grusin discuss hypermediacy and transparent immediacy mainly through digitally produced media, whereas immediacy, as Gilles Deleuze might see it, is most accessible, and media most transparent when the experience is initiated via literary percepts. Deleuze‘s literary examples of hypermediacy commence a profound artistic encounter, which can then be internalized and transmediated (Siegel) or remediated 16

(Bolter and Grusin): two terms that come very close to Deleuze‘s concepts of becoming and affect. For Bolter and Grusin, virtual reality is the ultimate manifestation of transparent immediacy. In Remediation, they continually refer back to the 1995 film

Strange Days and its portrayal of a futuristic, technological device called ―the wire‖6 as the paragon of a form of mediation that annihilates awareness of the medium. They comment that ―if the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to make all media obsolete‖ (3). The

―wire‖ in Strange Days is an SF projection of Deleuze‘s concept of becoming. For

Deleuze, the mind is the most effective purveyor of virtual reality; it colors and shapes reality for each individual. This assertion brings us back to Dick, a sometimes addict and self-diagnosed schizophrenic, who frequently speculated that we are each already engaged in a virtual relationship with reality, no batteries required.

This mediated circuit of generation and regeneration that loops back on itself is what I wish to expose through my discussion of Dick‘s novel and Richard Linklater‘s hypermediated transmediation of it. I propose to illustrate how Siegel‘s more general use of the term transmediation is consistent with, and complementary to Jenkins‘ later discussion of transmedia storytelling. Transmediation, as Jenkins defines it, relates well to the notion of overcoming narrative dissonance via excess in the form of plural perspectives. As mentioned previously, there is substantial evidence to support the notion that Dick‘s writing, in general, involves Jenkins‘ notions of world building and, in doing so, anticipates Linklater‘s work, which, I contend, extends the impact and scope of

6 The wire is a device that is shown to transfer seemingly unmediated perceptions and experiences from one mind directly to another. It is the digital manifestation of a completely unobtrusive virtual reality along the lines of William Gibson‘s descriptions of cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer. 17

A Scanner Darkly‘s world in meaningful ways. I attempt to reveal this interdependent relationship through my discussion of Dick‘s novel and its subsequent reconstitution in

Linklater‘s film.

The novel can be made clearer; that is, it can be transmediated in the Siegelian sense and made subjectively more significant, through an acknowledgement of the interplay between remediation and transmediation. With regards to perception, if it is, as

Friedrich Nietzsche explains, that ―behind every cave . . . there is, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface‖ (160), then the richer cave beyond the novel is Richard Linklater‘s cinematic remediation and the still deeper cave is that which is inferred by the viewer as the result of the cinematically rendered, myriad perspectives that Linklater derived from the novel source. In the case of the novel, there is a world hidden beneath the machinations of the cool novel form.

The multiple points of view contained within the story suggest the necessity to see and comprehend it from more than one narrative perspective. It is strangely opaque and the challenge of reconciling these disparate perspectives through the remedial conversion of the printed text to a filmic one compels an active, generative response from the reader (in this case, Linklater) and provides a more intensely hypermediated and, initially, less immediate perspective for the viewer.

To enhance the potential for a clear perspective, a combination of any two of the related mirror texts: the autobiographical/roman à clef mirror and the novel mirror, or the novel mirror and the filmic mirror, need to be reflected back upon themselves creating a 18

mise en abîme,7 or state of infinite regress, which, when perceived by the reader/viewer, is so completely disruptive and distancing that perceptual clarity via an awareness of the various frames, or media, is imposed and perhaps unavoidable. This notion also pertains to mirrors within the individual texts. Dick‘s novel is replete with episodes that reflect the primary fabula and Linklater‘s film, through hypermediated visual layering, mirrors itself as well. As derived from heraldry, the term mise en abîme refers to the visually inundating8 practice of placing a smaller shield or coat of arms within a larger shield that is to be used on the field of battle. Dick‘s multi-layered, literary treatment of the images and ideas found in his novel provide the reader with these sorts of reflexive, complex interpretations and Linklater‘s adaptation allows the viewer to see them more clearly from a mediated, objective distance.

The story of Dick‘s protagonist, Bob Arctor, is set within the larger framework of the narrative. The overtly uncanny reflection and remediation of these various elements in Linklater‘s film take the viewer more forcibly out of the narrative cave, bringing the machinations of mediation into relief and formally illustrating (and to an extent performing) the process that the novel‘s narrative explores. The grim paranoia and schizophrenic attributes of addiction become paradoxically more empathetic beneath the reflected glare of Linklater‘s filmic remediation because the viewer is compelled to contend with the uncertainty of the narrative through perceptual excess. The novel is challenging but these incomprehensible aspects and episodes can be naturalized, that is, its excessive story aspects can be ignored or ascribed a tenuously connected motivation

7 A term coined by the French writer André Gide, supposedly from the language of heraldry, to refer to an internal reduplication of a literary work or part of a work. (ODLT) 8 An early literary example is the ―play within a play‖ found in such works as Shakespeare‘s The Taming of the Shrew, where the opening induction scenes instruct the audience as to how the play is to be received. 19

and, as a result, these provocative ambiguities can be lost amidst the background noise.

Linklater‘s distanced rendering directs the film‘s viewers away from the narrative and invites a consideration of the cinematic medium and its hypermediated characteristics which in turn has the potential to draw the viewer back to Dick‘s narrative objectives.

The filmic shield wears the novel crest en abîme creating the potential infinite regress of a mirror being reflected by another mirror.

The novel itself is a distracting and distorting scramble suit-like apparatus;9 with its various parts and the manner in which it functions, it causes the reader to see into its faltering worlds darkly. It does not provide clear narrative insight or commentary. It renders the events in the story in the confusing way that Arctor experiences them with little judgment or guidance for the reader. Linklater exceeds this premise. He manufactures a confrontational, rather than passive, holoscanner with his film. The filmic medium itself, by the very nature of remediation, actively interprets the source text and to some degree attempts to redirect the viewer‘s understanding. Cinema can be, as

McLuhan suggests, a hot medium requiring very little input or participation. Linklater‘s film, however, is an interesting, perhaps unique, combination of McLuhan‘s media types.

It combines conventional cinematic techniques with cartoonish, sometimes painterly aesthetics. Linklater‘s cinematic adaptation, because it effectively simulates Dick‘s hypermedia awareness through perceptual excess is, in some instances cool, requiring substantial ―participation or completion by the audience‖ (23) if it is to be seen clearly.

9 A cloaking device worn by agents in A Scanner Darkly, the scramble suit consists of ―a multifaced quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks [hold] up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human‖ (ASD 23). 20

That is, because the immediacy of the film‘s narrative is intermittently disrupted by the hypermediated nature of its presentation, the spectator, unable to recuperate these excessive aspects, is compelled to ―read‖ or interpret them rather than experience or perceive them as perceptible sensations. Through distancing hypermediation there is a lack of resolved information and, as a result, the viewer is required to participate in a reconstruction of the film‘s narrative.

Chapter one of this thesis focuses on the ―man,‖ Bob Arctor. The progression towards a clearer understanding of A Scanner Darkly begins within the heart of darkness that is the story‘s protagonist. Arctor‘s story is one of confusion and compassion and the impulse compelling a connection with the immediacy of his experience is intense at this level but narrative dissonance impedes this desire. In looking at Dick‘s source narrative,

Mieke Bal‘s narratological approach, which hinges on the triadic set of narrative text, story and fabula, will be applied here:

A narrative text is a text in which an agent or subject conveys to an

addressee (‗tells‘ the reader) a story in a particular medium, such as

language, imagery, sound, buildings or a combination thereof. A story is

the content of that text and produces a particular manifestation, inflection

and coloring of a fabula…A fabula is a series of logically and

chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. (5)

Verstraten‘s filmic extension of Bal‘s Narratology offers a concise and comprehensive description of the narratological trinity as it relates to both literature and film. He condenses the triad into a single formula: ―‗A says that B sees what C is doing.‘ A is the 21

narrator on the textual level, B is the focalizor on the level of the story, and C is the actant on the level of the fabula‖ (Verstraten 12).10

Bal‘s approach allows for discussion of characters in relation to what she refers to as character-effects. The character-effect ―occurs when the resemblance between human beings and fabricated figures is so great that we forget the fundamental difference‖ (113).

This concept ties in nicely with Bolter and Grusin‘s theories regarding the immediacy of a mediated experience. It is because the reader experiences the uncanny world of the novel initially and most immediately through its characters, and as a result, might be confounded by their irreconcilable turns (their lack of transparent immediacy or character-effects), that I will use this narratological position as my point of origin.

Bob Arctor is the focal point, or focal points of the narrative and through his addiction and cognitive deterioration the confusion of perceptual excess and narrative dissonance is conveyed. Arctor is the enigmatic character through which much of the story is focalized. We witness Arctor as he witnesses the externally induced mechanization of many of the other characters and as he also views his own increasingly dysfunctional states from several different perspectives (each of which he is incapable of reconciling with the other). Formerly a ―straight,‖ he plays the role of an addict primarily, but he is also an actor in the law enforcement world in the form of SA Fred.

Through his strange perceptual and cognitive journey within a temporally dislocated universe, the defining thematic characteristics of the narrative are introduced.

10 These terms: text, story, fabula correspond with Thompson‘s definition for narrative: ―an interplay between plot and story‖ where plot is ―the actual presentation of events‖ and story ―the mental reconstruction by the reader/spectator of these events in their ―real‖ chronological order. In this definition, plot is equivalent to Bal‘s definition of story, while story, for Thompson, equals fabulation. Verstraten uses plot within his definition of story to denote the elements to be arranged. Because Bal‘s terms and definitions seem to be the most comprehensive and concise, I will use them primarily. 22

As an addict, he becomes consumed by Substance D, a highly addictive narcotic of dubious origins. As an officer, he is compelled to wear a scramble suit, which, due to the protean nature of the suit‘s projections, turns the individual wearing it into an overwhelming perceptual distortion, a literal ―Everyman,‖ completely lacking any features which might denote uniqueness or identity. Though Arctor occasionally experiences moments of lucidity, he is ultimately heading towards a state of what Dick refers to as entropic demise.11 His efforts to negotiate his perilous life reveal the dysfunctional and dehumanizing landscape of A Scanner Darkly. However, the sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing nature of his peers, the overtly inauthentic nature of his adversaries and the complexities of his own nebulous identity, like the flashes he receives from his brain‘s conflicting hemispheres, hint at humanizing potentials within the narrative. Through consideration of Arctor‘s story it is evident that, as critic Christopher Palmer suggests: ―there are several helpless observers in the novel, and the novel hints to us that novelists are helpless observers‖ (190) as well. I contend that readers also potentially experience these feelings of helplessness as they try to reconstruct the events of the story according to causality. It is this effort, the reconciliation of the narrative‘s story aspects with their fabulation that is the catalyst for the perceptual excess, or percepts that might compel the reader to pause and re-evaluate the novel‘s aesthetic, philosophical or social significance.

In chapter two, various ―android‖ aspects of A Scanner Darkly‘s narrative provide another, more pronounced level of mediative distancing. The exterior or most immediate

11 A cosmological variant of entropy, also known as heat death or ―the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity‖ (OED) 23

elements of the novel appear transparent and human-like but if we go beneath the surface and explore the inner-workings of the story, we find it contains hypermediated mechanisms that disrupt its unification. In this chapter I will focus on a discussion of the non-narrative elements, descriptive passages, and the role of primary and embedded texts. A Scanner Darkly forces a reconsideration of the structures it appears to support by causing those structures to fall apart. The fabula resists the story, as Dick suggests he designed it to, but the text also creates excess by inserting what Bal refers to as ―non- narrative comments‖ and embedded texts.

There are, as mentioned above, the distorted perceptions attributed to a number of the junkie characters, but beyond these we also get intertextual references to psychological studies by Joseph E. Bogen and Michael S. Gazzaniga, an excerpt from

Goethe‘s Faust, Beethoven‘s Fidelio and a lyric from Heine. These non-narrative comments are clues that provoke more questions which lead to an awareness of the novel form. These are excessive elements that ―provide a large range of possibilities for the roughening of form . . . inviting the [reader] to linger over devices longer than their structured function would seem to warrant‖ (Thompson 133). These episodes that the characters sometimes refer to as ―items‖ have significance beyond the narrative that can distance the reader and allow for a more objective assessment of the narrative text. As the fabula becomes more difficult to reconstruct, the excessive story aspects hint at an illuminating hypermediacy.

Chapter three argues that Linklater‘s filmic ―machine‖ lifts the veil further by cinematically reifying those rhetorical profusions Dick suggests with his novel. More so than novels, films stringently manipulate the spectator‘s temporal and perceptual 24

experience. Within the conventional confines of the cinematic mechanism, Linklater‘s adaptation is transparent and immediate in that there are relatively few stylistically excessive shot choices. Also, the screenplay follows the chronology of the novel quite closely. All of the novel‘s main characters and most of what might be viewed as pivotal episodes remain intact. It adheres to the suspenseful ambiguousness of the novel‘s plot while attempting to convey an atmosphere consistent with the sinister uncertainty of the addict‘s plight.

However, this analysis of adaptation moves to a discussion of hypermediation, transmediation and transmedia storytelling as those terms relate to Linklater‘s unique reconstitution of Dick‘s novel. Through filmic excess, hypermedia awareness is imposed on the viewer. Non-narrative comments and embedded texts related to specific casting choices that break from and extend the source story, distance the viewer from the immediacy of the film. Documentary-style cinematography, which implies Linklater‘s hyperrealistic rendering has connections to the audience‘s external reality, and enigmatic special effects,12 suggest this adaptation has much in common with Jenkins‘ notions of transmedia storytelling and is, perhaps, a previously undefined or unacknowledged hybrid form. It is a film that uses stylistic excess to pursue artistic goals, but it also transforms the literary source text into a work of cartoon animation, a form that comes

12 The film incorporates digital rotoscoping in particular, an effect which layers animation on top of realist analogue or digital images. The effect is, at the same time, hyperreal (as the film‘s mise-en-scène and characters suggest a connectedness with reality while asserting something unforeseen – the pure simulacrum of the rotoscoped image) and hypermediated (in that the film‘s animated façade distances the audience through making viewers aware of the medium via the uncanny manner with which it has been rendered). A more comprehensive discussion of simulacra and hyperreality can be found on page 117 of this thesis. 25

with a decidedly different set of rules and expectations than those attached to cinematic realism.

Verstraten explains the nature of such distancing tactics in Film Narratology. He maintains that ―whenever the stylistic elements of a film seem to be relatively autonomous and do not further the plot . . . excess ensues. This non-narrative excess . . . can serve as an in-built guide for viewing that may be helpful in determining the status of the story‖ (11). Verstraten‘s point is that when filmic stylistics is independent from the plot, a stereophonic effect is created. The effect is one of simultaneous showing and telling, which results in narrative elements and cinematic techniques that are not completely merged.

Through the conscious personal and artistic colorations of Linklater‘s adaptation, the potential to distance the viewer is more pronounced. He extends the paranoid schizophrenic visions that Arctor experiences in the novel via a precarious balance between the overtly artificial and the visually realistic modes of animation and cinematic realism. His remediation is one where ―filmic style manifests itself so ostentatiously that it draws attention to itself‖ (Verstraten 193) or calls attention to its own mediations. It is a prime example of what Bolter and Grusin refer to as hypermediacy. Through the use of hypermediacy, Linklater attempts to balance many of the polarities which exist in Dick‘s story: the tragic and the comic, the modern and the postmodern, the quantum and the ordered. It is this tension which composes the final layer of a filmic structure that exceeds the narrative boundaries of the novel and can elevate spectators to a place where they might look back and understand the film‘s source clearly. Ironically, the novel is 26

possibly humanized through this distinctly mechanical medium and its overtly hypermediated presentation.

Generally speaking, adaptations are often done for crude, commercial reasons that privilege the novel over the film. They are processes, as Dudley Andrew suggests, of

―borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation‖ (FTC 374) which render a literary form into a cinematic medium with little consideration for how this process serves the film apart from the ready-made audience attached to the book. For this reason, filmmakers ―have been drawing on literary sources, and especially novels of varying degrees of cultural prestige, since film first established itself as preeminently a narrative medium‖ (MacFarlane 381). With Linklater and Dick there is symbiosis. The novel, cinematic in some regards, informs Linklater‘s adaptation, a transmediation, which in turn clarifies the novel‘s original, perceptual hypotheses. Film clearly influenced Dick‘s writing. There is much discussion by his biographers as to how his estranged father,

Edgar, believed that Phil‘s mother, Dorothy, ―was trying to exclude him from Phil‘s upbringing so he fought back by courting the boy with movies‖ (DI 23). Furthermore,

Dorothy and her son spent a good portion of the boy‘s formative years visiting movie theatres. We see this influence in Dick‘s writing in general and in A Scanner Darkly in particular. The novel has considerable cinematic appeal: the scripted scenes and the constant references to flashing, reruns and horror fantasy films, along with the central, holoscanner device all contribute to a filmic atmosphere. In Dick‘s novel we find what

Steven G. Kellman calls the ―Symbolist impatience with mere words‖ that urged modern novelists to ―aspire to the visual presence of film, to attempt to abandon concepts for percepts, telling for showing‖ (474). 27

In spite of the Dick‘s ability to ―show‖ the reader various aspects of his story, it is apparent that the novel‘s journey ends with both Arctor and possibly the reader ―knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too‖ (ASD 185). Arctor, Dick and

Linklater share similar microcosmic views of their individual worlds. They intimate suspicions of something macrocosmic, which individually they are unable to realize but collectively they demonstrate for the reader or viewer. Each version of this one narrative poses the same perceptual challenges. The novel is about excess and the consequences of an excessive lifestyle. The characters involved do not see clearly where their addiction is leading; however, it is the macrocosmic perspective that their combined points of view produce and the counter-intuitive notion that more narrators in the narrative and more witnesses to the crime provide a clearer understanding of it. This notion translates to the film. It seems intentional that the reader gets overwhelmed by the novel‘s excess. The film transmediates this excess and manages it differently, creating a sense of awareness that is derived from being overwhelmed, caught off guard and compelled to make new associations. The percepts within the novel become comprehensible through the transmedia comprehensiveness provided by the movie. More scanners, more mirrors, more dissonant perspectives enable the viewer to penetrate the noise of the film, which creates instances of becoming that lead towards the empathetic and ethical concerns of the source narrative.

Ultimately, it is the novel‘s ambiguities and narrative excesses reflected by a stylistically excessive cinematic adaptation that leads the viewer beyond the distortions of the story to a more meaningful recuperation of the fabula. It is the dissociative ―push‖ of hypermediacy and the emotional ―pull‖ of immediacy that both the novel and film 28

endeavour to effect. The sporadic connections made with the narrative‘s characters and the disruption of those attachments allows the reader or spectator to juxtapose intimate reactions with intellectual responses and in doing so a coherent union with the narrative can be formed. By negating or transforming our desire for immediacy we acquire the ability to observe clearly and understand fully situations and perspectives external to us, and through this intimate distance we find empathy. 29

Chapter One: ―Let‘s Hear it for the Nebulous Blur‖ Bob Arctor

The unfulfilled desire for transparent immediacy in

A Scanner Darkly

―Fred is seeing the world from inside out,‖ the other man was declaring at

the same moment. ―From in front and from behind both, I guess. It's hard

for us to say how it appears to him.‖

A Scanner Darkly (213)

Bob Arctor is a reflection that is seen darkly in the novel mirror. His inversion, as

Fred and his amalgamation as Fred/Bob/Whatever are subtle narrative effects that are not always detectable and are often difficult to recuperate. Consequently, Arctor does not always fit neatly into the novel‘s unifying structures. He is the embodiment of narrative excess, in the form of conflicting, plural perspectives and, as such, compels the reader to take notice of his inconsistencies; however, these excessive elements can be confusing rather than revealing. Conceivably this is why, in his earlier essay ―Man, Android, and

Machine,‖ Dick speculates that because we understand human behaviours instinctively,

―rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to‖ (SR 184). For example, it seems rather than studying one of Dick‘s novels to learn about him, he is recommending we study him to learn about his stories.

This is an interesting but possibly misleading idea. As Dick‘s comments relate to the analysis of literature, the humanizing of constructs is what most readers default to when first exploring any work of fiction. We endow characters, fictional constructs, with 30

human qualities and observe how they behave in order to understand something about ourselves. In such an instance, rather than regarding Arctor as a story aspect with a specific narrative purpose, we might focus only on his anthropomorphic qualities and make sense of him on a psychological or social level. We instinctively want to naturalize the idiosyncrasies of this ―man‖ and provide unifying motives for the unexpected things he does. Narrative fiction, Mieke Bal tells us, ―thrives on the affective appeal of characters. Whether we like them or not, we are compelled to respond to those paper people‖ (112). This compulsion is caused by something Bal refers to as character-effects, which occur when ―the resemblance between human beings and fabricated figures is so great that we forget the fundamental difference‖ (113).

For the immediacy of the character-effect to take hold in the presence of A

Scanner Darkly‘s protagonist, Bob Arctor, the reader must navigate some murky waters.

Bolter and Grusin‘s definition of immediacy suggests that ―a transparent interface would be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting the medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium‖ (24).

Arctor, as a character, resists erasure and makes the reader increasingly aware of the novel. His story is an overwhelming tale of excess where his immediate perspectives and observations are complicated by the conflicting views of his alter ego, Fred. The narrative itself, much like Dick‘s fictitious scramble suit, also provides constantly shifting layers of information. As a result, any attempts to put the pieces of Arctor‘s fragmented world back together are frustrated because within the hybrid, detective/SF novel that is A Scanner Darkly, the clues often do not add up. 31

This absence of unification can largely be attributed to Arctor‘s observations, which, throughout the novel, are examples of the enigmatic, equivocations typical of

Dick‘s oeuvre. They are instances in which, as John Huntington explains: ―The more clearly one side is affirmed, the more profound it seems later to find its opposite unexpectedly affirmed with equal unambiguousness . . . There is no implication that the alert, understanding reader will see the correct reading and discard the false one‖ (155).

However, the purpose of the story‘s ambiguities is not simply to confound the reader; on the contrary, it necessarily gives the reader the opportunity for interpretive choice. As

Bal explains, ―between the naturalization of the fabula world and its theatrical, artificial mise-en-scène in the story, there is a fine line that is constantly transgressed by fiction, leaving it up to the reader to go along in one direction or another‖ (136).

The narrative of A Scanner Darkly thrives on this desire to resolve the conflicts that exist between the novel‘s fabula elements and its story aspects but it also falters in this regard. There is no single direction readers might choose to go that will lead to a resolution of the story‘s complications. The various, divergent perspectives attributable to Arctor‘s permutations and other characters, along with the numerous non-narrative digressions that might distract the reader, must all be accommodated in order for a unity to be found. A Scanner Darkly is a special kind of detective novel that does not provide a ready explanation of the crime, and searching for a singular solution to this perceptual puzzle is limiting because there is no preferred perspective and no right answer. The story might suggest several particular directions, but there is little assurance in the novel that the careful reader will follow any of them to a definitive, logical conclusion. To solve the mystery the reader must be willing to venture down several narrative roads 32

simultaneously while attempting to reconcile each path‘s conflicting and misleading messages.

Thus, with Dick‘s writing, Huntington suggests, questions remain uncertain because the problems they suggest are, in fact, unresolvable (155). These complications are given potency ―not by the strength of the device itself, but by the [reader‘s] own urgency to get free. In reading Dick we trap ourselves‖ (159), and it is our desire to escape into a satisfyingly unified narrative that compels us to read on and read closely.

However, as Bal explains, with ―the denial, distortion, or, ‗deconstruction‘ of a realistic story-line . . . readers, intentionally or not, search for a logical line in such a text . . . and, if necessary, they introduce such a line themselves‖ (182). This compulsion is one of A

Scanner Darkly‘s most appealing traits, but it is also an aspect that may leave readers frustrated and narrative complications unresolved. Unable to find a logical, thoroughgoing motivation for the divergent plurality of narrative points of view, the novel may force the reader to introduce an implausible storyline. It may compel a recuperation which the narrative is unable to support.

In similar fashion, Bob Arctor both charms and challenges the reader. He can provide immediacy while at the same time he can suggest an awareness of hypermediacy.

As he goes further down the path of addiction, he becomes like the devices he uses to watch his addict companions. As a scanner he can merely see and record. He is not capable of analysis and critical self-awareness and, as a result, he provides little coherent, deliberate instruction for the reader. His dysfunction as a character, however, is precisely what empowers him as a scanner. Arctor creates an inverse character-effect. His appeal is a reversal or reflection of the transparent and accessible character. He keeps us 33

interested because, as Bal suggests, ―characters give the most literary pleasure when they are allowed to resist their readers, rather than overruled and forced to conform to their expectations‖ (114).

Arctor does overrule rather than conform. He is an informant, a narc, who is consciously unable to reveal what he has seen or what he might know. This is a fundamental premise within the narrative. Arctor cannot tell, he can only unknowingly show. If we try to empathize with him or relate to him on a human level, we risk missing much of what he has to show us. The observer of Arctor‘s activities must, through dispassionate analysis of his actions, fill in the missing details. The missing details, the incidents he is unable to reconcile, and his observations that do not make sense are percepts and the rigor of an analysis of these episodes potentially compels the merging of novel and reader, or situates both in a state of becoming, where a new story-line that accounts for the excess is introduced, not as a means of naturalizing Arctor but as a method for making sense of his function as a construct, a narrative device.

Accordingly, for this sort of transmediative encounter to occur, Arctor‘s emotional appeal, his character-effect potentials, must be overcome. The reader needs to see and contemplate the literary and ideological frame that surrounds and defines him; we must see the excessive elements in the narrative and confront them. It is insinuated through the story itself that the potential for the reader to see clearly increases the further one struggles to move away from Arctor‘s point of view. It is his development as a character, in particular, which reflects the various stages of perceptual awareness via addiction. But it is not the addicts who understand the machinations beyond the 34

scanner‘s view; it is those who watch from a distance, with a macrocosmic awareness of the situation, who see clearly.

This empathetic connection might be found through observing Arctor in his various incarnations with a mediated purview. The Arctor triad: as a law-enforcement agent (Fred), a marginalized junkie (Arctor) and a brain-dead addict (Bruce), illustrates macrocosmically how one ends up within a Substance D-like circuit of production and consumption. Arctor‘s reflections and re-reflections via his different personas‘ perspectives create the conflicting perceptual messages in the novel which the reader must work to resolve, for Arctor is powerless to do so himself. Ironically, he is a law- enforcement agent whose personal agency gradually erodes. He is an actor in a film that is being directed by his superiors in the agency and by the drug he is addicted to,

Substance D. His frustrated desires are left unresolved and his hope that the scanners might be able to provide him with an insightful or introspective view is left unfulfilled.

Consequently, sympathy, humour, cynicism and passion must be set aside periodically if the reader is to realize Arctor‘s remediative potentials. We must dissociate from the engaged reader within and disrupt the more intimate connections we have formed with the character, if we are to comprehend Arctor‘s confusing situation from the more objective and empathetic position of the other.

Arctor is first introduced as S.A. Fred13, covered from head to toe in his scramble suit, as a relatively lucid yet frustrated undercover agent working for the Orange County

Sheriff‘s Department. While giving an anti-drug lecture to a group of Lion‘s Club members, Fred does the unthinkable; he begins to improvise his pre-programmed speech.

13 The reader is told that this is not his actual name but a code name used only in his official capacity as an agent. 35

He consciously takes control of his thoughts and actions. He behaves in an unpredictable fashion rather than as a mirror reflecting his department‘s agenda. As he explains the department‘s efforts to stem the rising tide of Substance D abuse in the community, he reaches his breaking point. Fred realizes that he is no longer capable of delivering the propaganda that had ―been written by others and set before him to memorize‖ (ASD 25).

He decides to humanize the addicts for the assembled crowd instead of desensitizing and terrorizing his audience with statistics and images of drug-related crime and violence.

When he is questioned as to why he has gone off script his response is ―‗because this [the propaganda] is what gets people on dope‘‖ (ASD 27). Fred‘s strategy against the agency‘s brainwashing tactics is to provide a compassionate perspective for his audience.

This approach stands in contrast to that of the novel, which attempts to evoke distance and desensitization so that the reader might see the machinations of the agency Fred works for and the society he lives in. For the reader, comprehension is found by moving away from the immediacy of the story and dehumanizing Fred. This distance allows for a circumvention of the kind of insidious conditioning he is rebelling against in this early episode and, indeed, throughout the novel.

Fred‘s vitriol is directed at the manner in which people in the story‘s society are distracted from what is really going on around them by the indoctrinating methods of the state. The straights are prevented from seeing and understanding the complexities of their culture. Media, for them, works to direct their ideas and opinions rather than provoke insight and awareness. They are given a one-dimensional, polarized perspective and this lack of depth in the messages they receive forestalls consideration. Like machines they have been programmed to allow others to think for them. They are the 36

grim anticipation of what Arctor will become should he remain on the ―straight‖ and narrow path. Ironically, the ―war‖ on drugs that Fred helps to perpetuate, and the rhetoric that accompanies it, leads to an addiction of a different kind: dependence on security and routine. The straights‘ passive behaviour, we might conclude, is a model for how one must not act in order to successfully negotiate the machinations of a complex world like the one found in A Scanner Darkly.

It is clear during this inaugural address that Arctor, in spite of his increasing

Substance D use, is still conscious of the treacherous nature of addiction and control. His impromptu speech here reveals his spontaneous, human qualities. He beseeches his audience to not kick the users‘ ―asses‖ after they get hooked on drugs because, he pleads,

―half of them, most of them, especially the girls, didn't know what they were getting on or even that they were getting on anything at all‖ (ASD 28). Arctor preaches prevention rather than punishment. He empathizes rather than accuses. He is still a spontaneous individual, capable of independent action and comprehension at this point in the story.

Throughout this entire scene he communicates an awareness of the relationships he has entered into within his society. The contrapuntal connection that exists between the addicts and the agents is emphasized here and Arctor‘s visions and feelings (his character-effects), which denote him as still functioning beyond the systematized, closed- circuit of straight society and that of addiction, are intact. Although he is starting to show signs of confusion and frustration (symptoms of his increasing dependence on Substance

D), his unpredictable behaviour, and compassion for the very people he has been assigned to infiltrate and arrest, betray his as being a predominantly human nature. 37

In spite of Arctor‘s overt commentary on drug addiction, through his observations, personal drug abuse is illustrated as merely a symptom of a larger behavioural problem. Arctor‘s actions and insinuations throughout the novel suggest that through an examination of the mechanical lives people are inclined and often conditioned to live, the real instrument by which individual authenticity is undermined might be found. To illustrate this point, there is a flashback involving Bob Arctor‘s life before he went undercover as a special agent and became addicted to Substance D. We are shown

Arctor drifting towards that more dangerous soma: the drive to consume. The setting during this event conveys a dystopic vision of a mechanized future. Amidst a room full of mechanical devices, Arctor realizes that ―he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it‖ (ASD 64). Of this experience and his past in general, Arctor shows little remorse because he understands that his life had been ―like . . . a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank‖ (ASD 64). He is able to dismiss his comfortable domesticity outright because he realizes that his conventional life is leading him towards complete mechanization.

From this initial epiphany and several subsequent ones, Arctor provides much of the novel‘s socio-political commentary. Consequently, the story and the character become more meaningful via the non-narrative comments of an externally focalized protagonist. For example, his extended meditation on life in Anaheim, like those regarding his prior family situation, reveals a human impulse in Arctor that consciously works to resist mechanization. He refers to his community as an endlessly replaying 38

commercial for itself where ―nothing changed: it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze . . . as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale ‗How the Sea Became Salt‘‖ (ASD 31). Mieke Bal asserts that a story‘s non- narrative comments can allow the reader to ―measure the difference between the text‘s overt ideology as stated in such comments, and its more hidden or naturalized ideology, as embodied in the narrative representations‖ (31). Arctor‘s consistent alternation between narration and commentary provides such a measuring device. His internal monologues also reflect his more thoughtful, lucid perspectives; his human-like points of view, which the story juxtaposes with his bizarre, drug-induced encounters.

In another flashback, Arctor recalls a confrontation with a woman named Thelma

Kornford. Thelma had wanted him, along with Barris and Luckman, to go to her place to kill a mosquito hawk. When they see what she requires of them, and explain the irony of her request (mosquito hawks are helpful in reducing the more dangerous, encephalitis causing mosquito population) she says the words ―that became for them their parody evil- wall-motto, to be feared and despised: ‗if I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself‘‖ (ASD 93). Her comment sums up for Arctor et al what they distrust in their straight counterparts. By making this statement, ―well-educated-with-all-the- financial-advantages Thelma Kornford became at once a foe,‖ and Barris‘s final words regarding the episode with her are that ―the rich never understand the value of life‖ (ASD

93).

As illustrated through Thelma, with an excessive amount of money comes a dearth of compassion. Those identified as members of the establishment, the rich, the 39

government, or anyone that is part of the larger societal machine, are portrayed as behaving irrationally and mechanically. Thelma is acting in a dispassionate, socially conditioned manner. To compound this characterization of her, she is described as a collection of inanimate objects by Arctor: ―her heart . . . was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about‖ (ASD 94). Thelma‘s addiction to fear undermines her ability to empathize. She becomes a type, while the addicts maintain an uncanny, spontaneous, human-like appeal. With them, the immediacy of the character- effect that Bal speaks of is gradually disrupted, but through their ambiguous moments and conflicting perspectives they sustain their empathetic appeal.

Arctor‘s side trip to, and reflection on, Cromwell is another example of his socially-conscious, human side. His pessimistic diatribe regarding the proletariat tenement buildings stands in sharp contrast to the novel‘s depiction of the straights. They live in fortified, guarded communities, and value electronic devices and other middle- class accoutrements more than the lives of the marginalized addicts, who, if caught stealing in order to procure a life-saving hit, are shot on sight. To gain entry to their shopping malls, special credit cards confirming the holder has enough money to purchase the merchandise therein are required. The addicts‘ story, as an extension of Arctor‘s socially conscious perspective, is an example of that which Zygmunt Bauman calls ―the criminalization of those unable to choose‖ and the increasingly prevalent attitude which asserts that ―whatever makes sense economically does not need the support of any other sense and does not need to apologize for the absence of any other sense – political, social or downright human‖ (45). 40

The generally materialistic nature of the straights is also discussed through the novel‘s numerous ―itemized‖ references to McDonald‘s hamburgers, Solarcaine, Drano and Seven-11. The products have specific titles while the people who consume them, conspicuously, remain a part of a faceless, nameless crowd. By placing more significance on brand names than the names of people, a fundamentally distorted hierarchy within straight society is intimated. In the novel, the straights are oblivious to the crises developing in their own neighbourhoods. Their callous actions show little regard for the rights of the individual because, as Arctor comments, ―when you're living inside looking safely out, and your wall is electrified and your guard is armed, why think about that?‖ (ASD 26).

Arctor‘s candid insights into straight society early in the novel also act as establishing shots, allowing the world of the straights to underscore much of what happens to him in the novel. Generally speaking, it is their synthetic reflection that helps to illuminate the significance of the junkies‘ stories. To reinforce the straights‘ superficial demeanour, Arctor provides us with brief but poignant glimpses into the mundane qualities of their deploringly predictable lives. Their irredeemable and artificial nature is first witnessed through the Fred-focalized description of the members of the

Anaheim Lion‘s Club. The Lion‘s Club host is described as a disingenuously cheerful man who wears a ―pink waffle-fiber suit and wide plastic yellow tie and blue shirt and fake leather shoes . . . an overweight man, overaged as well, overhappy even when there was little or nothing to be happy about . . . The audience . . . mirrored the qualities of the host in every possible way‖ (ASD 21). Mirrored, in this case, is a term that suggests the absolute homogeneity and limited perspective these characters provide. Rather than 41

seeing through a glass (even darkly), they are caught up in their own reflections.

Consequently, the uniformity of this group is conspicuous as compared to the erratic, tweaked-out nature of the junkies.

The implication is that the straights, via societal conditioning, have lost all of the qualities that might define them as unique, or indeed human. They have become part of the social mechanism. They nod and smile in unison, they applaud when instructed to do so and they sit dumbfounded as Arctor has an emotional breakdown in front of them.

They are the culmination of a lifestyle based on consumerism and xenophobic hysteria, and Arctor‘s apparent frustration with their lack of autonomy boils over as he concludes that ―in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes . . . Substance D can‘t destroy their brains; they have none.... he was talking to nitwits. Mental simps‖ (ASD 26-7). The straights, in Arctor‘s mind, do not have the potential to become authentic humans or to internally control their own lives.

Theirs is the curse, the compromise of individuality for security that Donna

Hawthorne (the novel‘s heroine and Arctor‘s love interest) and Arctor comment on at different times in the story. Chris Palmer suggests that commentary on this sort of destructive and homogenizing condition is a common feature of Dick‘s writing, and in many of his speculative works dealing with humanity and authenticity we find ―a condition of non-differentiation; things converge or melt into each other rather than attaining and retaining distinction . . . An individual is often better seen as a process‖

(204). The satiric effect of this assimilative approach is twofold. These processed individuals provide stark counterpoint for Dick‘s complex, human-like characters and they also have socio-political ramifications. A Scanner Darkly is a multi-layered, 42

complex narrative, each level harkening back to and reflecting the other. Here,

Christopher Palmer refers primarily to the author‘s facility as a writer to manipulate assumptions regarding authenticity and individuality. The sinister aspects of simulation, relating to identity and the general dissolution of distinctiveness in a postmodern world, is a theme commonly found in Dick‘s canon. During the episodes in which the narrator, focalized through Arctor, reflects on conventional living, the story attempts to illustrate for the reader that we are all potential victims of a consumer-driven society where we sacrifice freedom and individuality for convenience and security.

We begin to see the more insidious, societal-induced changes that overwhelm

Arctor and diminish his empathetic appeal when he is among the authorities. The human/mechanical, junkie/straight dynamic reverses; he is impassive while performing his S.A. role. This sort of conditioned obedience is most pronounced within the confines of the Orange County Civic Center. There, he addresses his peers in a compliant, mechanical manner: ―‗I'll certainly keep my eyes open for that,‘ Fred said, and heard the mere mechanical quality of his voice, like that of a dutiful child in school. Agreeing to obey whatever dull order was imposed on him by those in authority . . . whether it was reasonable or not‖ (ASD 112).

Also, during his first meetings with Hank (aka Mr. F, Fred‘s supervisor) he intimates that there is an emotional shift that occurs within him during his stints as a law enforcement agent. He becomes more detached, less emotional. The change within Fred is described as ―an economy of passions‖ (ASD 58). Fred explains that ―Hank did not force this dispassion on him; he allowed him to be like this‖ (ASD 58). Through Fred‘s musing, it is made clear that he has been deviously conditioned to perform his duties in 43

such a way that he believes the directives have originated internally and they are, therefore, benevolent. Fred speculates that the scramble suit‘s impenetrable perceptual barrier is to blame for his and Hank‘s unemotional relationship as ―they could not physically sense each other. Later on he conjectures that the suits made no actual difference; it was the situation itself‖ (ASD 57). Their situation is founded on acquiescence and, as with drug dependency, conformists come to believe they are in control of their decisions and that their custodian is a facilitator not a tyrant.

Accordingly, as an agent Fred is encouraged not to think but to simply gather information through his restricted means for his superiors to analyse. There is no room for speculation; as Hank explains to Fred, ―‗what we think isn‘t of any importance in your work . . . we evaluate; you report with your own limited conclusions‘‖ (ASD 106).

They wish to train him to be their scanner. The authorities that Fred works for, like those who manufacture Substance D, desire that he function in an involuntary way within their system and under their control. Manoeuvring between the chemical and the social polarities of addiction, and within his role as an agent, Fred effectively illustrates the disparities and the ironic parallels that exist within his fractured universe. The dealers and the police want the same things from their subjects, submission and control. In

Deleuzian terms, Fred has been oedipalized: trained to desire his own repression

(Lorraine 190). This training is leading Fred towards the loss of his identity and the emptiness and fear that Thelma Kornford typifies. Arctor, as well, is moving towards his own, parallel, degenerate form of oedipalization via Substance D.

The dissolution of Arctor‘s identity and resistance as an immediate and transparent character that allows the reader to see the narrative clearly through him can 44

also be traced back to the first pages of the novel and Fred‘s expositional Lion‘s Club speech. In that episode, he refers to himself as ―Fred, Robert Arctor, whatever‖ (ASD

26), immediately showing his own confusion and frustration regarding his multiple identities. His formal names throughout the story change from S.A. Fred, to Robert

Arctor, to Pete Wickam (very briefly in Chapter Thirteen), and finally to Bruce. Bob

Arctor is the most centered and sympathetic of these incarnations. Quite conspicuously, the solitary mention of Arctor‘s middle name, Postlethwaite, does shed some light on his confusion. This name and its obscure, Welsh, etymology is revealed, during an obtrusive, seemingly unmotivated conversation with Hank. Fred explains to Hank that

Postlethwaite refers to Harlech castle, which, during the War of the Roses, is ―where the heroic defense against the Yorkists in 1468‖ (ASD 60) took place. Like Harlech, Arctor‘s identity is under siege and this allusion suggests that, like the famous castle, eventually

Arctor will succumb to his opponents. The name, Arctor, insinuates the word author and that Dick is somehow mixed up in his protagonist‘s identity; also, it is perhaps an amalgamation of author, actor and narc, suggesting the acting inherent in the narc role.

Arctor must act like an addict but within the context of the story the Arctor persona resonates as something more genuine than either Bruce or Fred. It is Arctor who has the spontaneous exchanges with Barris, Luckman and Hawthorne. And it is Arctor who, while still self-aware, comments on the world of A Scanner Darkly, its society and his own desperately addicted state. He is the author/actor caught on tape, while Fred is merely a code name for the guy who watches him, and it is ultimately Arctor‘s story that we witness and attempt to reconstruct from his fragmented telling of it. 45

His aliases are the most overt part of a larger identity crisis that leads to dissociative episodes and experiences of temporal dislocation. Like Barris, Luckman, and Freck, Arctor often expresses confusion over what it is he has done, where he has been, or whether or not he actually did something he is unable to reconcile as having been performed by him. His ambiguous roles within his own stories become significant catalysts for the narrative‘s development. The discussion Arctor has with his junkie cohort about the imposter who ―never posed as anything but a world-famous impostor‖

(ASD 197) leads into the culminating episode on this topic of espionage and identity. Is an imposter who poses as an imposter still an imposter, or in compounding their criminal role do they become legitimate? Does the mirror reflecting back on itself provide a true image? Do the two negative guises cancel each other out? This discussion becomes most profound when Arctor ponders out loud how a guy could ―pose as a nark‖ (ASD

198).

His question cuts to the crux of the perceptual issues that pervade the novel. A narc is already posing as an addict, so how does one pose as someone already posing?

How does someone pose as a narc? For Arctor, we know his shifting roles lead to a complete loss of self-awareness. Like the scramble suit, the story‘s manipulations turn

Arctor into a nebulous blur which complicates and obscures his role within the narrative.

The reification, as addict, of Arctor‘s uncertain S.A. identity leads to perceptual confusion for the character and also (quite likely) for the reader. As an agent, Arctor sees himself reflected and re-reflected but is unable to recognize his own face in the mirror.

He eventually concludes that ―any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often . . . he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as 46

well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all‖ (ASD 186).

As the story is relayed from this vertiginous vantage point, it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend. However, through several early observations made by Bob Arctor, the self-deceiving, self-destructive nature of addiction is clearly foreshadowed. Initially, the reader is shown the mechanical workings of the junkie from

Arctor‘s uniquely focalized perspective. It is a flashback sequence that, from a distance, anticipates his looming conclusion. In this detached manner, Arctor‘s disturbing account acts as an affirmation of the denaturalized image of the mechanical human that the novel conveys: ―They sleep like Count Dracula . . . until all of a sudden they sit up, like a machine cranked from position A to position B . . . the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio . . . it sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something . . . obtain more junk‖ (ASD 159). Here Arctor exhibits the insight that permits him to conclude that Substance D is not merely a drug; it is a self- perpetuating machine. It is a recording with a solitary message and goal: compel the addicted to feed their addiction.

This, like his spontaneous lecture for the Lion‘s Club, is a flash: an epiphanic moment that is brought on by the clarity he derives through contemplating the unnatural behaviours he has observed. Junkies, he concludes, are also machines fuelled by the mechanical impulses of drug dependence. In a state of intense addiction the human mind loses its ability to distinguish between what is real and what is illusory. The addict‘s brain is incapable of making sense of the illusion or of mediating the reflection in the glass. It is unable to react and guide the body effectively and together the mind and body 47

becomes ―a reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over . . . Appropriate or not‖ (ASD 65).

As his own addiction progresses, Arctor starts to lose track of who he is and what he has been up to. His Altec Cephscope is damaged by ―somebody out to burn him‖

(ASD 46). When he begins to sense that someone really is out to get him, suspicion falls on any number of his peers or perhaps the police, all of which, ironically, is true. As he starts to contemplate his situation more thoroughly, concluding, ―I've got an enemy. Or anyhow I've come onto his trail: signs of him. Another slushed creep, in his final stages‖

(ASD 69), earlier suspicions begin to dissipate and turn towards the person his description most aptly reflects: Arctor himself.

To compound this ambiguity, a connection between Arctor‘s misfortune and his sinister roommate, Jim Barris, is insinuated. Uncanny similarities between Arctor and

Barris pervade the story to a point where it seems Barris might, like Fred and Bruce, be another part of Arctor‘s fragmented personality. As with other conflicts or parallels within A Scanner Darkly the subtle use of Barris as an implicit doppelgänger for Arctor turns out to be misdirection. Many specific comparisons are made between the two, the most remarkable being their similar relationships with their cars. Barris, always reluctant to lend his vehicle out, suggests a number of excuses any time someone makes the request. He claims that he has ―had secret unspecified modifications done on it‖ (ASD

135). These ―mods‖ are eerily similar to those Arctor‘s S.A. vehicle has. The main vehicular adjustment that provokes speculation as to the nature of the Arctor/Barris relationship is that which pertains to both vehicles‘ radios. In Barris‘s car, Arctor explains: ―the radio . . . had been cunningly changed. If you tuned one station you got 48

only one-minute-apart blips. All the push-buttons brought in a single transmission that made no sense‖ (ASD 135). Of his own vehicle, Arctor also explains that he ―had a few devices too, a few covert modifications built into his own car radio. But he didn‘t talk about them. Actually, it was Fred who had. Or anyhow somebody had‖ (ASD 137). What is clear is that Arctor is unsure who has modified his car or whether the car he considers his own is in fact Barris‘s.

As things progress, Arctor becomes intensely paranoid and convinced that Barris has uncovered the fact that he is an undercover agent. This suspicion is given as one of the reasons why he conjectures that it is Barris who is sabotaging his various devices.

Barris, in turn, goes to S.A. headquarters to inform on Arctor, who he suspects is a dealer. The profoundly ironic nature of this situation, Barris reporting to Hank and Fred on the illegal activities of Arctor and Hawthorne, the criminal informing on the cops to the very people he hopes to incriminate, only adds to the confusion surrounding the identities of Barris and Arctor. It is a confusion that is left unresolved, and their paranoid demeanours from this point forward never dissipate, leaving the reader to wonder if

Arctor‘s perspective can be trusted or if Barris‘s insights are indeed true.

As the story twists into a tangle of disconnected wires and burnt-out fuses,

Barris‘s explanations for what is happening to the main characters start to reflect Arctor‘s undercover activities. While watching Barris on the holoscanners, Arctor overhears

Barris answer a phone call as Arctor. Barris, it seems, had written an ISF cheque to

―Englesohn Locksmith‖ as Bob Arctor. The payment was for keys to Arctor‘s house and car. It is never satisfactorily explained whether Barris wrote the cheque as Arctor, or

Arctor wrote the cheque himself and simply forgot. It is even insinuated that Barris 49

claiming responsibility for the cheque is perhaps an example of his erratic nature surfacing. Questions arise. Is Arctor who he thinks he is? Is Barris Arctor‘s undercover personage? Are the schizophrenic issues Dick alludes to early in the novel more complex than they initially seem? Do Barris and Arctor share a single undercover identity (à la

Fight Club) within the S.A. Fred, barely knowable ―nebulous blur‖ guise? These contrasting perceptions serve to further confound the reader‘s ability to recuperate the story via its protagonist as time and again it appears we are meant to see Barris as an agent of deception, or a manifestation of Arctor‘s subconscious mind. In fact, it is suggested quite directly that Barris and Arctor are one and the same and that their separation is merely perceptual. When Barris proposes his ―initial theoretical view as to who might have systematically damaged [Arctor‘s] cephscope‖ he implicates Arctor. He then alters his initial accusatory ―you‖ by saying ―no, no . . . You are looking at the person who did it . . . That was my complete intended statement" (ASD 70).

It is at this stage in Arctor‘s devolution, as Barris intrudes more directly into his affairs, that he is sent to room 203 for his first interview. The office is described in a clinical, featureless manner as being ―an all-white room with steel fixtures and steel chains and steel desk, all bolted down, a hospital-like room, purified and sterile and cold, with the light too bright‖ (ASD 108). The two deputies he encounters there are quite noteworthy as well. There is a dubious yet overtly acknowledged, ―left-hand medical deputy,‖ and another less authoritative, more accommodating voice that the reader is left to assume is the ―right-hand deputy.‖ They question Arctor about his symptoms and explain to him the tenets of split-brain theory, a hypothesis which suggests that the left hemisphere is logical, while the right is less dominant and functions as a synthesist. 50

At this point, the careful reader might suspect that this is more than just a routine medical examination. When Fred asks the deputies about Donna Hawthorne and how he might get next to ―that kind of sweet, unique, stubborn little chick?‖ (ASD 121), his human-like connection with the reader is potentially disrupted and within the context of this irregular situation he becomes a construct for analysis. The deputies make the cryptic suggestion that he get her ―little spring flowers‖ (ASD 121), real ones rather than plastic, which look fake. As a result of this encounter and the deputies‘ curious advice,

Fred notes a strange compulsion to shake the deputies‘ hands. Again, this impulse resonates as suspicious. As he leaves room 203, he muses: ―spring flowers . . . Do they grow wild? Or in special commercial vats or in huge enclosed farms? I wonder what the country is like . . . where do you find that? Where do you go and how do you get there and stay there . . . And who do you buy the ticket from?‖ (ASD 121). Through the deputies‘ remarks and Arctor‘s equally peculiar responses, it is insinuated that this entire encounter is situated, not in a clinical laboratory, but inside Arctor‘s head. The deputies are his disputing left and right hemispheres and they are attempting to warn him of his increasingly disorienting mental state. They also manage to reiterate some of the subliminal messages that Hawthorne has been suggesting to Arctor. The blue flowers and how to obtain them, the farm and how to get there, are ideas that will become integral to Arctor‘s role in the agency‘s attempt to incriminate New Path.

Fred returns to room 203 on two subsequent occasions. Upon arrival, during his second visit, we are told the two medical officers are different. However, by the end of the scene they have inexplicably transformed back into the original clinicians. During his third and final visit, the medical deputies provide what could be construed as an 51

allegorical description of how Arctor, as a character and actor, functions on a narratological level within the novel‘s story and fabula. They explain to him that the

―competition . . . between the left and right hemispheres of [his] brain [is] not so much a single signal, defective or contaminated; it‘s more like two signals that interfere with each other by carrying conflicting information‖ (ASD 209). This psychological notion, much like the incompatible information or narrative excess that creates conflict between the novel‘s fabula and story, intimates a means of understanding both Arctor‘s and the novel‘s perceptual issues. The right-hand psychologist tells Fred that because it is dominant, the ego or consciousness is located in the left hemisphere along with the speech center. Spatial abilities, it is further explained, are situated in the right hemisphere. The left is described as a digital computer while the right is compared to an analogic one, ―so bilateral function is not mere duplication; both percept systems monitor and process incoming data differently. But for [Fred], neither hemisphere is dominant and they do not act in a compensatory fashion‖ (ASD 210). For Arctor, the incompatible data he is receiving from his brain causes him to feel uncertain and confused, while for the reader it is the narrative‘s story aspects that do not coincide with its fabula elements which create excess and confusion;

This detailed explanation of Arctor‘s conflicting hemispheres leads to one of the novel‘s most perplexing questions, which, again, seems to direct the reader towards a vantage point from where the novel might be seen clearly. One of the deputies, it is not clear which at this stage, asks Fred to define ―a left-hand glove compared to a right-hand glove so a person who had no knowledge of those terms could tell you which you meant?

And not get the other? The mirror opposite?‖ (ASD 212). Fred is unable to answer the 52

question and so the deputy offers him an analogy that provides insight into his situation and the conflicted nature of the novel‘s narrative as well: ―It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies . . . Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity‖ (ASD 212).

Because Arctor‘s left-hemisphere sees a ―reflection,‖ which is reversed and the right-hemisphere sees a photographic image, which is re-reversed, he is unable to reconcile the two. He does not know that in both images ―it is the identical person‖ (ASD

213). According to St. Paul, normally we only see a reflection, a reversal. A photograph, then, merely duplicates our reversed perceptions of reality. In fact, if we take St. Paul‘s word as truth, a mirror that reverses what we actually see should be closer to a representation of how things actually look. However, our brains already reverse what our eyes see. So, our eyes see an image and invert it, then our brains re-invert or correct that image to how it actually, physically is. A camera duplicates the brain-eye process while a mirror is more like the eyes in isolation. In his current condition, Arctor is seeing both of these disparate versions of reality. Like two mirrors, each reflecting the other,

Arctor‘s conflicting perspectives create the spectacle of a mise en abîme and the realization of this fact prompts one of his last ―flashes.‖ He mutters distractedly, ―I understand . . . what that passage in the Bible means, through a glass darkly. But my percept system is as fucked up as ever. Like they say. I understand but am helpless to help myself‖ (ASD 215). He is helpless because he is unable to make sense of the perceptual excess he is experiencing and; furthermore, he is unaware of what these conflicting images foreshadow. 53

The room 203 episodes denote progressive stages in Arctor‘s ontological deterioration and contain several of the more significant non-narrative comments relating to it. However, his fight to maintain some semblance of who he is within the story reaches a crisis point shortly after he begins watching taped recordings of himself. The experience is perceptually dislocating for him and as he reviews the surveillance footage of a previous evening‘s activities at the junkie flop-house he sees something that throws his increasingly confused world into chaos. As Arctor wakes, from a murky, Substance

D-induced coma, he notices ―Donna . . . and then by degrees … Connie again, hatchet- faced, bleak-jawed, sunken, the gaunt face of the out-of-it junkie, Connie and not Donna; one girl, not the other‖ (ASD 159). As he comes to accept his sighting of Donna as merely a hallucination, Arctor is left wondering what is responsible for his misperception. Later, when he reviews the video-tape of the incident in the confines of one of the agency‘s ―holo-tubes,‖ he, as S.A. Fred, observes the completely unexpected confirmation of what he thought was a delusion: ―Bob Arctor and a chick, but not Donna!

It was the junkie chick Connie . . . And then, as Fred watched, Connie‘s hard features melted and faded into softness, and into Donna Hawthorne‘s face‖ (ASD 172).

His horror at the realization that his previously assumed hallucination has somehow managed to end up in his video surveillance tapes does not lead Arctor to conclude that he is experiencing ―cross-chatter‖ (ASD 111) or conflicting messages from his two dysfunctional cerebral hemispheres; instead, he defaults to an earlier stance regarding mechanical tampering. He decides that what he is witnessing is ―a film technique . . . pre-editing for TV viewing . . . by a director, using special visual effects‖

(ASD 172). This acknowledgement, that his conflicted view of reality has come to 54

resemble a film layered with jarring visual effects, suggests the hypermediated nature of his chemically altered perspective. His uncanny perceptions merge with his dysfunctional reality. Arctor determines that he should take the tape to the agency‘s labs for analysis because it had ―been tampered with by an expert [and, ultimately, he believes he has] been fed fake tape‖ (ASD 173).

For this surprising turn of events, he is unable to suggest any plausible reasons outside of his paranoid assumptions. He cannot reconcile the tape sequence because it scans ―like a goddamn dissolve!‖ (ASD 173). His incredulity compels him to put the tape on a visual enlarger and go through it one frame at a time. He posits that what he is seeing might be ―what they call printing. Holoprinting: from one section of the tape storage to another. If the tape sits too long, if the recording gain was too high initially, it prints across‖ (ASD 173-4), or perhaps ―Crosstalk . . . Like ghosts on a TV screen.

Functional, a malfunction. A transducer opened up briefly‖ (ASD 174), but these suppositions are defeated when Fred realizes that on tape, Arctor notices the

Connie/Donna transformation as well. This last observation is revealing, if not for Arctor then potentially for the reader, because it is a phenomenon very much like ―holoprinting‖ that is afflicting Arctor‘s brain. Images and ideas experienced or suggested to him earlier are being projected from the right hemisphere of his brain while the situation, as he experiences it in real time, is being perceived simultaneously in conflict.

As a consequence of this cerebral holoprinting, Arctor is perplexed and moved by the possibility that the scanner may have captured something within his reality that he cannot account for. Substance D has reduced his perceptual acuity along with his ability to realize that he is seeing into the scanner darkly. It is his mind that has been tampered 55

with not the tapes. The result is he is unable to fully comprehend what the scanner is showing him or what he is seeing in it because he fails to make sense of his two merging and conflicting perspectives. The holoscanner is conveying the world as it actually appears to both Fred and Bob concurrently. The right hemisphere is relaying emotional, analogic, synthesized perceptions while his left side is showing him what is actually happening before his eyes. To complicate matters, Fred is seeing this conflicted encounter on tape in the bizarre, distorted way Bob experienced it. That is, the videotaped episode is being incorrectly mediated by his malfunctioning percept system as well. Thus, as he becomes more like a scanner, what remains of his former, lucid self, can only see through the actual holoscanner in the conflicted manner by which his brain mediates his reality.

At this stage, Arctor still has some awareness of his conflict and this knowledge is unnerving because he has no frame of reference by which to situate the experience. His confusion illustrates the necessity that an actively engaged, critically aware agent needs to operate the holoscanner if the information disseminated by it is to be understood clearly. Passivity or partial awareness, in this instance, leads to confusion. The mind in conflict creates these hallucinations and prevents the user from realizing that they are false, and because Substance D prevents the two halves from communicating effectively, what is an obvious perceptual distortion becomes an irreconcilable, supernatural anomaly. Fred sees what Arctor saw after the fact and on tape. He expects objectivity or clarity from the holoscanner, but fails to realize that as he re-experiences Arctor‘s bizarre perceptions of the night before on videotape, they are inaccurately reproduced by

Fred/Arctor. The two separate incarnations of the event, the actual and the videotaped, 56

are perceptually conflicted and conjoined when viewed through the lens of an addict whose mind has been damaged by Substance D.

His drug-induced delusions supersede the objective view of the scanner, demonstrating the absolute hegemony of the drug over his conflicting cerebral spheres.

Substance D controls Arctor and Arctor controls the scanner. The scanner mediates

Arctor‘s reality and then Arctor defectively remediates what the scanner is showing him.

Substance D, which is in control of the mediative device, Arctor‘s mind, compels it to hypermediate the content of its message by sending two signals simultaneously. Arctor should be fully aware of the medium through which his experiences are being filtered because the message is obviously incongruent. The usually transparent and immediate nature of perception is disrupted by the imposed awareness of the faltering mind as mediator. His mind is trying to tell him what is happening to it; however, mediated and mediator are one and the same and, as a result, comprehension of the message is difficult.

Arctor, were he other than a character in a novel, would need to be drug-free and lucid, watching this situation from another room via another scanner in order to clearly reconcile the taped viewing of the event with his actual, previous experience.

Paradoxically, in order for Arctor to function as a scanner he must remain oblivious to the discordant nature of his situation. In Arctor‘s case, internal, hypermedia awareness is simply overwhelming and because scanners must see clearly and objectively, he cannot be his own scanner.

Arctor senses this fact intuitively and because of his suspicions on several occasions, he charges Donna with the task of seeing clearly for him or bringing both he and his friends back to reality. After the ―seven-speed bike‖ incident, he comments, 57

―Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him‖ (ASD 102). As well, one of the most human and touching passages in the novel arrives through Arctor‘s final, lucid comments about Donna‘s ability to make him feel an authentic, emotional connection with her. He refers to the hope that she deliberately instils and inadvertently inspires within him, ―the actual touch of her [that] lingered, inside his heart‖ (ASD 157). Arctor contrasts these sentimental thoughts with Donna‘s overtly human acts of vandalism. She is described as having been involved in the heist of crates of Coke from the back of a delivery truck and the petty theft of a stamp-dispensing machine. Both of these gestures are characterized as socially insignificant and humanistically redemptive. Furthermore, of her impulsiveness, Arctor comments ―there is something wonderful and full of life about [Donna] and sweet and I would never destroy it. I don‘t understand it, but there it is‖ (ASD149) and it is this faith in her humanness that compels him to rely on her guidance.

However, theirs is a complex relationship which is revealed through various scattered fragments. During a holoscanner viewing session, Fred considers the possibility that Donna, and not Barris or some other slushed creep, is out to destroy him.

He wonders what Donna is like when no one is around. He wonders if, perhaps, there is

―a nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror, a terror city reverse thing, with unrecognizable entities creeping about; Donna crawling on all fours, eating from the animals‘ dishes . . . any kind of psychedelic wild trip, unfathomable and horrid‖ (ASD

133). As it turns out, Donna is the master manipulator who conditions Arctor to seek out the source of Substance D. Much like the Austrian zoologist and former Nazi scientist,

Konrad Lorenz, whom she references several times when speaking with Arctor, Donna 58

operates on fascistic and eugenicist premises in her approach to dealing with the drug related matters afflicting Scanner‘s SoCal society. Only at the end of the novel do we find out that she has been conditioning Arctor all along, subliminally planting an idea,

―some small thing seen but not understood, some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide [him] by reflex until the day‖ (ASD 234) he must carry out the task she wishes him to perform. Insidiously, she tells Arctor of her desire to have a garden with vegetables in it and how she wishes to someday live in a pastoral, mountain setting, both of which are characteristics that are suggestive of the New Path facility where,

Arctor, as Bruce, ends up.

Her final comment on Arctor, his situation, and her feelings for him is one of regret. She tells Mike Westaway, her agency contact at New Path, that ―there is nothing more terrible than the sacrifice of someone or something, a living thing, without its ever knowing‖ (ASD 255). She realizes this is the fate she carved out for Arctor but because the objective (to rid society of Substance D) is so important, she concludes the sacrifice of her friend‘s conscious identity, his essential self, was necessary. In the end, it is revealed that she, more than any other character in the novel, fits Dick‘s definition of the android, when she tells Westaway: ―I am warm on the outside, what people see. Warm eyes, warm face, warm fucking fake smile, but inside I am cold all the time, and full of lies. I am not what I seem to be; I am awful‖ (ASD 257).

Donna leaves Bruce with New Path where he becomes one of the living dead, sentient but alive machines he described earlier in the story. His confused, synaesthetic connection with his environment becomes more prevalent. He comments on the warm or cold qualities of the smells around him. It seems Hawthorne‘s subtle allusions to Lorenz 59

and his book, On Aggression (which details the behaviour of wolves), has had a subliminal impact on Arctor and, in his reflex/Bruce state, affected the manner in which he interacts with his surroundings. He tells Thelma14, one of the children he is allowed to spend time with, ―The story of the Black-and-White-Wolf.‖ It is a tale about a unique wolf that lives in a tree and is eventually killed for eating the farmer‘s animals. In the story, after killing the black-and-white-wolf, the people save his beautiful hide. It is said that future generations marvel at its magnificence and the wolf‘s tale becomes legendary.

As Bruce reflects on this story, he remembers that ―the black-and-white wolf had never complained; he had said nothing even when they shot him. His claws had still been deep in his prey . . . that was his fashion and he liked to do it. It was his only way. His only style by which to live. All he knew. And they got him‖ (ASD 260). The story‘s implications relate to Arctor‘s addiction, his sacrifice for the agency and the instinctive manner by which he now must function if he is to succeed.

This third and final stage of addiction, which is indicated by a necessary lack of awareness, is acknowledged and confirmed by Donald, the executive director of New

Path. Upon discovering Bruce, he comments on the ―transcendent vision,‖ the little blue flowers15 Bruce sees before him. After barring Bruce‘s sight with his hand, Donald watches him attempt to re-envision the flowers he had been staring at. Donald‘s disruption of Bruce‘s line of sight renders them imperceptible for him. His dead, ―frozen eyes‖ are unable to see the Mors Ontologica growing before him because his mind is incapable of retaining the perception of them. Donald explains to him that the

14 Undoubtedly this is an obscure reference to the Thelma Kornford from an earlier digression about the straights. 15 These are the flowers from which Substance D is derived. They are called Mors Ontologica. Loosely translated, the name means death of the spirit, the identity or the essential nature. 60

disappearance of the flowers is a philosophical problem Bruce is unable to comprehend; it is a matter of ―epistemology - the theory of knowledge‘‖ (ASD 174-75). After Donald places his hand over the flowers, Bruce can no longer see them, because for him, in a cognitive sense, they actually cease to exist. He is unable to speculate, think abstractly, deduce, or make assumptions based on prior knowledge. He only comprehends what he physically experiences to the limited and literal extent of the immediate encounter. As he stares at Donald‘s hand, time ceases for Bruce because a scanner has no concept of the past or future, these are abstract ideas that require the ability to think critically. There is nothing he does not know or nothing left to happen because his severely limited mental capacities will not allow for conjecture of that nature.

Donald, his external controller, is fully aware of this fact and exploits it. Bruce‘s ability to perceive and understand that which he sees has been lost to his addiction, but his ability to ―scan‖ objects remains intact. Epistemologically speaking, his capacity to visualize the flowers is limited by his failure to process the information he is receiving from his damaged percept system. Donald, simply by reaching down and momentarily blocking Bruce‘s sight, is able to interrupt his awareness of the flowers making them inconceivable. He derives this ability from the simple awareness of Bruce‘s cognitive limitations. The scanner, Bruce, is switched off by the commands of his controller

Donald. The machine ceases to function independently; it relies on external input from an external source in order to perceive what is actually there before its eyes. This scanner-like device is what Fabin or Freck was for Arctor and it is what Actor has become for Westaway and Hawthorne by novel‘s end. Arctor‘s confusion leads to their clarity but, tragically, not his own. 61

Because of his drug addiction, Arctor eventually experiences Mors Ontologica.

He becomes like the tape loop, the cephscope, or the scanners that he uses to spy on himself. He is unable to lucidly comment on his decline because he is viewing it from a precariously close distance. As a result of this proximity, he is hindered with a microcosmic perspective that impedes his ability to discern and resolve his conflicts.

Throughout the story, Arctor is shown to be transiently aware of his larger situation.

However, in spite of his ephemeral self-awareness, he is unable to save himself. He sees the signs but, because the signals cross and confuse him, he is unable to interpret and act on them effectively.

In the final chapter, Bruce can see the flowers intermittently and he does remember to pick one to bring to his friends. He looks ―forward inside his mind, where no one could see (emphasis added), to Thanksgiving‖ (ASD 275). There is a hint of perceptual awareness beneath his mechanical veneer, and the vague suggestion that no one, perhaps even the reader, has been able to see his tragic story clearly. It is an intimation of hope. This is Dick‘s coy optimism, and it seems to suggest that an emotion as abstract as love or a connection as personal as friendship is potent enough to defeat mechanization and sustain humanity. Maybe it is as St. Paul suggests in his famous letter to the Corinthians: ―if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge . . . but have not love, I am nothing‖ (NKJV 1:13:2). For with love there is empathy, the desire and the ability to see a situation from someone else‘s perspective.

Because of addiction, this is a quality Arctor lacks.

The novel‘s ending also implies that with distance there might be a way to see through a scanner clearly. The clues necessary to break the distorting mirror of 62

immediacy can be found by stepping back from the story and viewing it as a machine or construct. Arctor sees through his holoscanners darkly and it is not surprising that the reader, perceiving the story directly through him only, might see it darkly as well. The hypermediacy of Arctor‘s overwhelming experiences, his percepts, need to be acknowledged if they are to draw the reader into a more illuminating relationship with the narrative. 63

Chapter Two - ―The Writing Appears Backward‖

Emerging Excess and Hypermediacy Awareness

―Any confusion? Are you experiencing any difficulty identifying persons

or objects? Does anything you see appear inverted or reversed?‖

A Scanner Darkly (195)

These are questions the ―medical deputies‖ ask Fred when he is invited to return to Room 203 for a second battery of tests. The symptoms they list are examples of perceptual excess or cross-chatter. Fred will know he is experiencing cross-chatter if he has any thoughts that appear to be someone else‘s, from another mind, or if he utters foreign words that he might have learned peripherally and, most significantly, if he notices any backwards writing. Signs such as these would indicate that his left and right cerebral hemispheres are in conflict, sending dissonant rather than complementary messages. Via cross-chatter, it appears as though Fred is experiencing an internalized form of hypermediacy. In fact, he is having bouts of confusion and is beginning to show difficulties recognizing his alter-ego, Bob Arctor. The perceptual excess his mind is producing is sending him clear messages that there is something wrong, but because it is his mind informing on itself, the message is lost in a continual feedback loop of perceptual noise. It is, the medical deputy explains, as if Fred has two fuel gauges on his mind ―and one says [it] is full and the other registers empty. They can‘t both be right.

They conflict . . . There should never be two gauges reporting conflicting information, because as soon as that happens you have no knowledge of the condition being reported on at all‖ (ASD 210). This is the dysfunctional state of Fred‘s mind. He is receiving two 64

conflicting and thus, hypermediated messages that, for him, cancel each other out. For the reader, the fact that Fred/Arctor is experiencing something which distorts his point of view and confuses him is quite apparent; however, reconciling the narrative anomalies that result from his dissonant perspectives can be difficult. Bolter and Grusin argue that

―hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and . . . reminds us of our desire for immediacy‖ (34) but this awareness does not provide the solutions that lead to solving the textual puzzle; it only poses the questions.

In order to transform a work into something memorable and significant enough to warrant cult status,16 Umberto Eco suggests, ―one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can only remember parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. In the case of a book one can unhinge it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of excerpts‖ (TIHR 198). The fragmented nature of A

Scanner Darkly‘s narrative demands this reductive approach. The myriad perspectives in the novel require isolation and individual attention if they are to be recuperated within the whole. Therefore, in order to see A Scanner Darkly clearly, one must first take it apart, isolating those profound moments that resonate with a totalizing significance. The potential to subdivide it into a number of excerpts is most readily located in those instances that verbally render the perceptual conflicts that are the cerebral cortex of the story. For example, several of the junkies‘ individual stories contribute to a meandering narrative that is difficult, even with careful consideration, to penetrate. Bewildered by the irreconcilable messages Fred finds in the holoscanner tapes he has accumulated on his

16 I propose that the novel, A Scanner Darkly, and Linklater‘s filmic adaptation achieve this designation due to the niche appeal of Dick‘s work (and SF in general) and because of the film‘s anti-mainstream presentation and distribution. 65

friends, he speculates that ―all these guys walked one game board, [and] stood now in different squares [at] various distances from the goal, and would reach it at several times‖

(ASD 182), intimating that because of their perceptual disparities, there can be no unification of the various dopers‘ respective tales.

Bal, as mentioned previously, calls these narratological excerpts embedded texts, and further suggests that ―the embedded text presenting a story that resembles the primary fabula is comparable to infinite regress. In French the term is mise en abîme‖

(62). Bolter and Grusin discuss this effect in relation to Dutch art of the seventeenth century as explored by Svetlana Alpers in his book The Art of Describing, where it is stated that ―with their fascination for mirrors, windows, maps, paintings within paintings, such artists as Gabriel Metsu, David Bailly, and especially Jan Vermeer often represented the world as made up of a multiplicity of representations‖ (qtd. in Bolter and Grusin 37).

In both instances, the picture within the picture or the story within a story draws attention to the visual or printed text creating an objective, mediated distance. As well, in A

Scanner Darkly, Bruce makes note of New Path‘s strategy, in which they conceal their

Mors Ontologica crop by placing the tiny blue flowers amongst a field of corn, ―one crop inside another, like concentric rings‖ (ASD 274). The smaller flower crop is obfuscated by the larger corn plants but the insidious nature of the practice, once exposed, creates an awareness of New Path‘s ulterior motives. This is to say, the mirror-text, or embedded image might get lost in the overall presentation of a narrative but once discovered, its purpose and power is intensified.

Dick describes a theological phenomenon that is similar to the mise en abîme in his exegesis, In Pursuit of Valis. This collection of journal entries recounts Dick‘s own 66

attempts to understand his beliefs and encounters with the ―Vast Active Living

Intelligence System‖ he believed was monitoring his life like a benevolent scanner. In it, he discusses an instance where God tells him ―I am the infinite. I will show you. Where

I am, infinity is; where infinity is, there I am . . . I thought a thought and then an infinite regress of theses and countertheses came into being. God said, ‗Here I am; here is infinity‘‖ (IPV 45). Dick interprets the question that repeats to infinity as insurmountable and therefore, God-like. The narrative mise en abîme operates in this self-perpetuating way as well. Excerpts that diverge from and reflect the main plot provoke reconsideration of it and in turn a reconsideration of the mirror-text as well. These mirrors bring the reader to a place where speculation can lead to new, unexpected ideas; hence, by expanding our view beyond the limited immediacy of Arctor‘s story, we might see the novel more clearly.

The novel begins with an unusual excerpt involving an enigmatic addict named

Jerry Fabin: ―a guy [who] stood all day shaking bugs from his hair‖ (ASD 1). Fabin‘s story comprises the opening episode of the novel and as such it functions as a frame or mirror-text, reflecting and foreshadowing the primary, Fred/Arctor narrative. Fabin sees bugs that are not there. This is a hypermediated delusion, an example of perceptual excess, and he is caught somewhere in between an awareness of his environment and the ability to accurately interpret that insight. Fabin is depicted enduring Substance D generated hallucinations that place him in conflict with his more conventional understanding of reality. For him, this conflict, which manifests itself as a sort of cognitively induced, perceptual hypermediacy, should intimate meaningful information relating to his increasingly addicted, schizophrenic state. His delusions should make him 67

aware of his failing perceptual apparatus, but his mind, riddled by Substance D, is no longer capable of critical self-awareness and as a consequence it is unable to differentiate from, or reconcile the disparity between what it suspects (the bugs are not real) and what it actually sees.

As Fabin conforms to the urges brought on by his addiction and thus gradually becomes more predictable, his humanness diminishes and insect impulses, those that he initially senses in the form of perceptual delusions, take over. He is too close to his own malfunctioning system to see it clearly and to do anything consequential about his deterioration. Fabin spends a solid month showering compulsively trying to rid himself and his dog Max of the non-existent aphids. His peculiar response becomes increasingly robotic; he is compelled to behave in this uncanny manner by Substance D. He devolves into an anecdote, or flashback within the story. He becomes a scanner for all those able to peer into his fictional guise.

Thus, the Fabin insect-archetype functions as a means of informing those who come into contact with him of the perceptually debilitating nature of Substance D addiction. During the novel‘s first episode Fabin introduces an ―item‖ where he outlines the three stages of addiction via insectification: ―First, they were carried to him to contaminate him by what he called Carrier-people, which were people who didn‘t understand their role in distributing the bugs . . . In the next stage the bugs grew wings or something . . . permitting them to swarm, which was how they migrated and spread‖

(ASD 4). The second stage, characterized by the bugs‘ ability to swarm or overwhelm their victims, is emblematic of perceptual excess. The third stage, however, is never explicitly illustrated; it arrives implicitly in the following section where Freck says he is 68

going to see Jerry Fabin at ―Number Three Federal Clinic‖ (ASD 16), the place Fabin is taken after having a complete, drug-induced meltdown. Arctor recounts this event, describing the time that “Jerry . . . had piled every goddamn object in his house against the front door . . . and then told everybody that a giant superintelligent aphid from another planet was out there preparing to break in and git [sic] him‖ (ASD 68). From

Arctor‘s description we can conclude that stage three occurs when the addict is no longer capable of differentiating between delusion and reality and has to be institutionalized.

As mirror-text, Fabin‘s aphids are also revisited at the end of the story through comments made to Bob Arctor. In the final episode, and after he has deteriorated to a state beyond that of Fabin‘s, Arctor (now known as Bruce) is sent to work at one of the

New Path Corporation‘s farming operations, a situation which is akin to being placed in a rehabilitation clinic. The New Path farm manager tells Bruce that the ―farm facilities are closed, because [they contain] experimental and hybrid crops [and they] want to keep insect infestation out. People . . . even staff, track in pests on their clothes, shoes, and hair‖ (ASD 272). The insinuation here is particularly revealing. People potentially bring the ability to understand what is actually occurring at the New Path farming facility through their awareness of insects or insect-like behaviours. Similar to the effect of hypermediacy, Arctor‘s awareness of Fabin‘s aphid delusions provides him with insight into Fabin‘s deteriorating condition. When Arctor refers to Fabin‘s insectified state his words resonate with regret: ―Poor fucker . . . Biological life goes on . . . But the soul, the mind - everything else is dead‖ (ASD 65).

Through the conflicting messages Fabin‘s mind is sending him, he is made aware of its (his mind‘s) mediative presence. That is, the aphids are a distortion of the 69

immediacy of his natural, perceptual experience. They are like a flickering television screen, or subtitles in a foreign language film in that they have the potential to signal to him that his brain is not working properly. His perceptual conflict manifests itself as the neurotic urge to rid his body of the aphids he believes are covering it. The dispute within his brain does two things then: it drives him towards paranoid, mechanical behaviour, but it also provides him with a hypermediated prescience of his approaching terminus, a conclusion he lacks the agency to comprehend and prevent.

This comparison between human behaviours and insect ones resonates as narrative excess because, like many of the situations portrayed in the novel, the reader is eventually enlightened to the fact that the insect analogy is derived from Dick‘s own experiences as a junkie. The author‘s perspective, layered over the various characters‘ perspectives creates a kaleidoscopic effect. Interplay between reality and fiction is imposed by the author. Dick first conveyed his understanding of insect-like behaviours in addicts in an interview with critic Bruce Gillespie. During one of their conversations, questions arose regarding X-Kalay or ―Unknown Path,‖ a drug rehabilitation center in

Vancouver where Dick convalesced, and the source for the novel‘s sinister treatment center, New Path. X-Kalay itself is mentioned several times in the novel, and the character Mike Westaway also mentions time spent running drugs to and from

Vancouver. Of his experiences with junkies at X-Kalay, Dick stated, ―when a heroin addict confronts you, two insect eyes, two lightless slots of dim glass, without warmth or true life, calculate to the exact decimal point how many tangible commodities you can be cashed in for . . . simply because we are still alive, we affront its insect intelligence‖ (qtd. in Gillespie 50). 70

Similarly, many of the conflicts in the novel which command attention as non- narrative digressions, those regarding perception, reality and humanness, are reflections of Dick‘s late 1960s, drug-addled phase. The most abrupt of these segments is found in the ―Author‘s Note,‖ where Dick states: ―I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel‖ (ASD 278). Dick‘s epilogue goes on to reveal that there are several characters and experiences depicted in the narrative that are taken verbatim from his life story. For example, he states: ―the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street‖ (ASD 276).

These statements, coming after the resolution of the main plot, have the power to change the way the entire narrative is experienced. The ―Author‘s Note‖ is a denouement that colours all that came before it with a stamp of authenticity. Dick claimed to be ―a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist‖ (DI 5), suggesting his novel-writing ability was simply a means to formulate his perceptions and that the core of his writing was not art but truth. As a result of such statements, A Scanner Darkly might be filtered through the dual layers of SF and Dick‘s autobiographical asides.

Lawrence Sutin provides a more extensive list of the various parallels between

Dick‘s roman à clef and his personal life in Divine Invasions: a life of Philip K. Dick.

Sutin states that ―Scanner was wrung from late-sixties darkness, from Phil‘s times of hellish despair‖ (203). Donna Hawthorne is based on ―dark-haired Donna‖ a woman who saw Phil through this difficult phase and his time at the rehabilitation clinic, X-

Kalay, in Vancouver. Fabin is a former housemate known only as Daniel, and Barris is based on an apparently sinister junkie named Peter who frequented Dick‘s Santa Venetia 71

home during this period of his life. The section in the novel which refers to fifteen-year- old Jora Kajas, an addict who was living off a State of California tuition scholarship, and the anecdote about the nineteen year old girl who, as the result of doing drugs for a mere four months ―looked fifty‖ (ASD 55) were both taken from Dick‘s extensive accounts of his times as an addict. Also, Dick‘s sustained fascination with dual realities, split personalities and twins is, Sutin claims, a direct result of the loss of his twin sister Jane.

Dick stated that Jane was everything to him and that he was ―damned always to be separated from her/& with her, in an oscillation . . . 2 realities at once yin/yang‖ (DI 19).

As a result of the novel‘s personal content, Dick‘s philosophical views are prevalent indeed. Mike Westaway‘s conversation with Donna Hawthorne during the

―New Path‖ episode (Chapter Fourteen) alludes to some of the author‘s deeply held beliefs. Westaway instructs Donna to ―wait for winter, it'll take until then. Never mind why, but that‘s how it is; it will work in winter or it won‘t work at all‖ (ASD 256). He is referring to the time when Arctor, as Bruce, will be able to help the federal agency he and

Donna work for, expose the sinister objectives of New Path. Substance D itself is characterized as ―the winter of the spirit. Mors ontologica. When the spirit is dead‖

(ASD 256). Both of these remarks regarding winter tie back into Dick‘s philosophical position on the current state of civilization as a whole. At the time of the novel‘s conception, he felt society was suffering in the midst of a spiritual and cognitive slumber, and Dick credits Robert E. Ornstein17 ―for helping bring winter to an end, and ushering in

- not just spring - but the living life of Spring alive but asleep inside us‖ (SR 231).

17 Ornstein‘s book, The Nature of Human Consciousness, was also Dick‘s source for the various articles by Bogen and Wigan on ―split-brain theory.‖

Dick also manages to embed several comments on French philosopher, geologist, and theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the narrative. Teilhard‘s notions of a noösphere or collective consciousness that envelopes the world is communicated in a rather perfunctory fashion by Ernie Luckman. Luckman spontaneously announces,

―Christ everywhere present and everywhere growing more great, Christ the final determination and plasmatic Principle of the Universe . . . that man indeed lives in a zone where no multiplicity can distress him‖ (ASD 127). This paraphrased comment, perhaps taken from Teilhard‘s The Phenomenon of Man, intimates the form of Christ that makes up the noösphere. Similarly, in his essay ―Man, Android, and Machine,‖ Dick interprets

Teilhard‘s ideas claiming that the noösphere ―is a layer in our earth's atmosphere composed of holographic and informational projections in a unified and continually processed Gestalt, the sources of which are our manifold right brains . . . a vast Mind, immanent within us, of such power and wisdom as to seem, to us, equal to the Creator‖

(SR 222). Dick uses his interpretation of Teilhard‘s noösphere concept as a means of illustrating how his characters and the experiences they have are interconnected within the world of A Scanner Darkly‘s narrative, and in doing this he also provides the reader with a textual noösphere that functions as excess.

In Frank C. Bertrand‘s essay ―Encounters with Reality: P.K. Dick's A Scanner

Darkly,‖ some clarification of Luckman‘s cryptic Teilhard quotation is given. Bertrand explains that Teilhard‘s definition of energy is composed of two kinds: tangential, which is mechanical and external, and radial, which is spiritual and internal, ―an energy of arrangement and unification‖ (4). Tangential energy is a tendency towards order, while radial energy is a movement towards maximum disorder and death. As Bertrand explains 73

it, Teilhard‘s universal paradigm is ―woven together by a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity; against order there always stands disorder‖ (4). It is radial energy which

Luckman‘s quotation refers to, which suggests chaos, or as Bertrand calls it,

―unorganized multiplicity.‖ This notion of disorder reflects Fred/Arctor‘s experiences of confusion, dissociation18 and conflicting plural perspectives. Conversely, according

Teilhard, the galaxy itself and the collective consciousness of humankind are moving towards a state of organized complexity ―where no multiplicity can distress.‖ However, with Teilhard, this complex order is found through a Christ-centered, universal collective that interacts through the noösphere, whereas for the addicts in A Scanner Darkly, repetition and death (that is, organized uniformity) arrive via Substance D. Thus, the novel noösphere does suggest the progression from chaos to stasis that Teilhard‘s theory anticipates; however, with Scanner, Teilhard‘s desired result is inverted. In Dick‘s novel, it is the sporadic insight and subsequent terror of a Substance D manufactured chaos

(radial energy) which is shown to be indicative of life and transiently preferable to the homogeneity (tangential energy) it ultimately produces.

To some degree, the interconnectedness of the noösphere concept ultimately explains the mysterious similarities between Arctor and Barris and the parallels that can be drawn among all of the junkie characters as they regularly illustrate a tangential and unconscious awareness of each other. Freck‘s suicide experience, for example, acknowledges an earlier conversation Arctor has with Luckman and Barris about sins being ―listed in chronological order and in order of severity, which could be ascending or

18 The OED gives the psychiatric definition of dissociation as a ―separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality.‖ 74

descending, or alphabetically‖ (ASD 95). Compare this anecdote to Freck‘s failed suicide attempt at the end of Chapter Eleven where the creature from between dimensions reads

Freck‘s sins off chronologically (188). Other incidents that initially seem insignificant are found later to be suggestive of an unconsciously synchronous society. During

Arctor‘s trip to Cromwell we learn that Kimberly Hawkins and Dan Mancher live in

―building 4 marked G‖ (ASD 74). In the final scene of the novel this alpha-numeric designation is once again brought to mind suggesting an affinity between the deplorable conditions at Cromwell and the internment camp Bruce/Arctor finds himself in. ―4-G‖ is the cabin Bruce is assigned at New Path.

The ―novel noösphere,‖ reveals an intratextual coherence and like the addicts schizophrenic, chemically provoked hypermedia awareness, it is fleeting. Connections insinuating a cosmic consciousness are seeded throughout the novel in a seemingly arbitrary fashion suggesting that pursuit of this evolved state through drugs is futile. As a result, some of the links within the story guide the reader to new understandings while others appear to be examples of what Jenkins might refer to as ―overdesign.‖19 For example, an earlier item about Thelma Kornford and the connection Bruce makes with a little girl at New Path named, Thelma, appears to be an example of the novel noösphere.

The mentioning of the Earl de Winter character, during Fred‘s first meeting with Hank, seems to be superficially related to a janitor at New Path named Earl or to Westaway‘s winter comments during his meeting with Hawthorne. These patterns do not amount to any resounding, epiphanic truths. They appear to be suggestive, at best, or simply misleading, unless considered in the light of the Teilhardian noösphere. Of course, it is

19 Overdesign, according to critic Derek Johnson, is the use of narrative and stylistic excess to add what writer Ron Moore calls ―texture‖ to the audience‘s over-all transmedia experience (qtd. in AT). 75

easy to miss Luckman‘s comments and even easier to not follow where his allusion to

Teilhard might lead. The more obvious intention of references of this sort is to provide clarification of certain narrative aspects and objectives. Scanner‘s noöspheric allusions do not function in this manner but they do suggest possible pathways that the careful reader might follow. Therefore, they behave as mirror-texts or excess.

It seems that many of the episodes taken directly from Dick‘s experiences which reside outside of the narrative‘s unifying forces are hardly noticeable and likely require several readings before registering as something significant within the context of the story. Conversely, there are those, like the final ―Author‘s Note‖ that assert themselves immediately and compel consideration on a level that extends beyond the primary fabula.

The most dynamic and jarring of Scanner’s autobiographical excerpts occurs late in the novel when Donna is explaining a supernatural phenomenon that a friend of hers, Tony

Amsterdam, experienced. Amsterdam is said to have seen showers of colored sparks that led to a feeling of universal accord where ―there were no accidents: everything fitted together and happened on purpose, to achieve something‖ (ASD 232). This event culminates in the revelation of a doorway made of geometrically ordered sparks that

Amsterdam believed was a conduit to God. Amsterdam‘s encounter is clearly a reference to Dick‘s life-changing experiences of 2-3-7420 where sodium pentothal taken during a routine dental procedure is said to have created a similar supernatural opening through which Dick believed he could see eternity. The Amsterdam episode, like the other autobiographical excerpts, operates as narrative excess, perhaps making the reader aware of the fact that the narrative itself is a composite of differing perspectives. Like the small

20 February 3rd, 1974 - see Divine Invasions 208 76

details that occasionally remind Fred that he is Arctor, or like backwards writing in a photograph, Dick‘s autobiographical digressions potentially impose an awareness of the novel‘s mirror-like, thus inverted, reflection of reality, allowing the reader to see it in a more critical, hypermediated frame of reference.

The mirrors reflecting the author‘s life are subtly obtrusive whereas the more ostentatious examples of ―backwards writing‖ in the novel are the numerous ―item‖ episodes. These scenes explicitly reveal Fred/Arctor‘s divergent perspectives. Several are subtitled directly as ―items‖ while others are conveyed in a characteristic, itemized way. The overt ―item‖ episodes that conspicuously assert themselves on several occasions in the novel are clear, textual indicators of mediation: irregular passages which, like the scramble suit, stand out sharply from the story line and add a barrage of seemingly parenthetical information. Beyond these overt exemplars are other sidebars that simulate them in form and function. For example, a mechanical device, Barris‘s electronic voltmeter, is referred to as an item. During the latter stages of Arctor‘s deterioration, items are objects he is told to identify during a psychological exam.

Through much of the story recollections, historical artifacts, and evidence of recent events are also referred to as items. Each item example suggests the tangible nature of the term, as if feelings and ideas have the potential to effect change in a manner comparable to mechanical diagnostic tools.

The formal items, those which are set apart by title, are ideological and philosophical comments. These digressions, found primarily in Chapter Six, provide non-narrative layers that serve to deepen the reader‘s perspectives. The first passage of this sort concerns what is construed as an S.A.‘s most terrifying fate: ―Item. What an 77

undercover narcotics agent fears most is not that he will be shot or beaten up but that . . . he will be shot up with a mex hit, half heroin and half Substance D . . . which will nearly kill him . . . so that the above can occur: lifelong addiction, lifelong horror film‖ (ASD

86). This brief synopsis, we discover by story‘s end, is a concise summary of Arctor‘s own trajectory. He is indirectly encouraged to nurture his addiction as he moves deeper undercover with his junkie associates. He senses his own insectification via drug dependency and ends up unable to perform the most menial of tasks. All of this turmoil and tragedy is foisted upon him by the very people he serves: his superiors at S.A. headquarters and those at New Path. Consequently, this item works on two levels: first as a mirror of the primary fabula, and second as a pause in the rhythm of the story that attempts to provide time and space in which readers might enhance their understanding of

Fred/Bob.

The next item in the series, like the first, parallels Arctor‘s personal anxieties. It discusses industrial espionage via the insidious nature of ―numerous small failures and misfirings‖ (ASD 91). This excerpt suggests that these seemingly insignificant occurrences can lead to the complete breakdown of systems and institutions over time and what is worse, because of their deviousness they are never detected and the victim is left with no avenue of recourse. These attacks are characterized as both more demoralizing and destructive than direct assaults because the enemy can never be identified. This ambiguous premise afflicts all of the dopers who, because of Substance

D, are never certain who is after them and why. Arctor is not sure if he unconsciously damaged his own cephscope and car or if it was Barris who, for compulsive, paranoid reasons, decided that Arctor had harmed him and was exacting retribution. The novel 78

never clarifies these matters, but the injection of these deliberate items compels the reader to shift focus towards ideas that exceed the immediacy of Arctor‘s paranoid delusions.

With the third item there is a distinct shift towards intertextual reference. The passage cites Joseph E. Bogen‘s 1969 article, ―The Other Side of the Brain: An

Appositional Mind‖ in which Bogen quotes an article written in 1844 by Dr. A. L.

Wigan. Wigan states: ―The mind is essentially dual, like the organs by which it is exercised . . . each cerebrum is a distinct and perfect whole as an organ of thought . . . .

[and] a separate and distinct process of thinking or ratiocination may be carried on in each cerebrum simultaneously‖ (qtd. in ASD 110). Bogen extends this premise, writing:

―I believe . . . that each of us has two minds in one person . . . But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One‖ (qtd. in ASD 110). Each of us cherishes the intuitive notion that we are a single, unified being with a singular mind that mediates what is delivered to us through our senses from the exterior world. However, this non- narrative comment suggests that a dual and simultaneous approach to ratiocination or logical thinking is a means to a heightened sense of awareness if the perceiver is able to accommodate the conflicting points of view. Plural perspectives are not the issue; it is merely our flawed belief in a conditioned singularity that puts us in conflict with Bogen‘s progressive ideas.

His split-brain theory intimates a variation of hypermedia awareness that is derived from a more comprehensive, albeit schizophrenic, perspective on reality. Much like the effects of hypermediation where the perceiver is made conscious of the medium, 79

becoming aware of the brain via its internal perceptual excesses can, according to Bogen and Wigan, lead to a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of that which is perceived. As well, the formal and authoritative tone of this excerpt adds a kind of empirical weight to the previous documents. Each item comes across in the form of a chapter in a training manual. Because they are externally narrated and focalized, there is the suggestion that a disembodied, non-diegetic voice is communicating these concepts directly to the reader from beyond the world of the narrative. This detached presentation style further emulates the delusional experience of the schizophrenic and in doing this, is potentially distancing for the lucid reader.

These non-narrative excerpts guide the reader to an understanding of Fred‘s later use of the term ―item‖ in reference to an incident involving Arctor. After reviewing the many hours of holoscanner tape, Fred abruptly remarks ―there is an item . . . to extract from the total tape and pass along. That cryptic statement about ‗posing as a nark.‘ The other men in the house with Arctor - it surprised them, too‖ (ASD 200). In this instance,

Fred is certain the comment made by Arctor is a revealing slip that he is unable to decrypt; all the same, he plans to take this puzzling evidence to his supervisor Hank. The first ―item‖ relates to the fears a narc experiences. The second passage relates to the insidious and malicious nature of covert operations. The third excerpt relays factual information about split-brain research. In the last example, first Arctor‘s and then Fred‘s comments on posing as a narc relate to the mise en abîme notion as it pertains to a narc‘s identity. Is ―a man inside a man . . . no man at all?" (ASD 186). This is a paradox that

Arctor ruminates about earlier in the novel which involves the ―ironic agreements in the minds of narcotics agents and dealers‖ (ASD 87). In trying to perpetrate more than one 80

identity does Arctor obliterate his authentic self? This question is posed through the sequence of narrative devices that pull the reader directly from one perspective to its inverse and then back to a point in between where they conflict.

The ―items‖ and autobiographical digressions allow the reader to periodically move out of the primary fabula and consider the excessive story aspects as something other than devices installed to perpetuate Arctor‘s tragic journey. These moments, where critical distance is made possible, can help us to piece the various fragments together and find a more unified whole. To this end, the item which clearly denotes the way

Scanner’s narrative functions is derived from the novel‘s most overt SF device, the scramble suit. Through its attempts to reproduce a multitude of identities at a visually indiscernible rate, the suit‘s overwhelming excess of visual imagery obliterates any sense of individual identity. The scramble suit itself, rather than its wearer, dominates an encounter. The medium and not the content within is what the perceiver is compelled to reflect on. Excess leads to complete identity effacement and because of this the scramble suit is the perfect catalyst for the ironic moments that Arctor dimly acknowledges and on which many of the novel‘s narrative turns rely. Dick generally tries to push his enigmas to a point where answers cascade into a self-perpetuating impulse of thesis and antithesis.

The unity of his narratives, the answers to the philosophical questions he ponders, are found not in definitive solutions, but in possibilities. The scramble suit is an extension and an affirmation of this notion: S.A. Fred, the observer, is confined within a mirror that reflects the realities of the novel. The suit, like the story, is an overwhelming display and mechanism of perceptual excess and the presentation of this device is mirrored or sits en abîme within Fred/Arctor‘s internal conflict. 81

The scramble suit, in form and function, also bears an uncanny resemblance to

Deleuze‘s concept of the percept. Marks‘ concise definition indelibly unites these two devices:

The percept . . . is the literary expression of the things that the writer has

seen and heard that overwhelm her or him . . . . the percept implies a

particular relationship between character and landscape . . . . [where] the

mind is a sort of membrane that is both in contact with, and is actually part

of, the external world . . . . the literary hero of the percept is the ‗man

without qualities‘. This sort of character - closely related to what Deleuze

calls the ‗seer‘ (le voyeur) in his books on cinema - ultimately has the

tendency, at once modest but also crazy, to ‗become‘ everyone and

everything. (200)

In the novel the suit is described, through a narrative digression, as a ―superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human‖ (ASD 23). Its conception is the result of an intensely overwhelming chemically instigated experience.

It is further stated that the suit‘s objective is to completely efface identity, turning the wearer into a vague blur that possesses the qualities of ―Everyman and in every combination . . . . Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless‖ (ASD 99).

However, peering out through the face of a scramble suit, the wearer‘s perceptions are not obscured. The scramble suit is a glass through which the other who looks back at it sees darkly.

The scramble suit, as percept, is a medium for the merging of the observer with reality, putting the wearer in a constant state of becoming. However, the wearer of the 82

scramble suit is unknowable and the suit‘s expressions of change are so fleeting as to be consciously indiscernible.21 The suit works to disrupt the flow of immediacy. It demands acknowledgement. The pretext for its existence is entirely pragmatic, as it prevents detectives from knowing fellow officers‘ identities, while allowing the same law enforcement agents to spy on and incriminate anyone they care to with little fear of their cover being compromised. The scramble suit also prevents any criminals, who may have infiltrated the agency, from knowing who is working undercover.

The excerpt which conveys the scramble suit‘s origins is an interesting story of excess. It was invented by one S.A. Powers while he was experimenting with mild disinhibiting substances that caused a dramatic drop in the GABA22 fluid of his brain.

Powers subsequently witnessed what is described as ―lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings‖ (ASD 22). These paintings are equated with works by Paul Klee at first and then later Chagall, Kandinsky, Modigliani and

Picasso: modernist paintings of the early 20th Century that gained notoriety for being regarded as aesthetically and artistically impenetrable. S.A. Powers watches this drug- induced spectacle for six hours but, immersed in the moment, is unable to reconcile the visual spectacle before him with anything he has experienced previously. It is only after

21 Linklater struggled with the mediative qualities of the scramble suit to such an extent that the project of adapting A Scanner Darkly, which had been conceived several years earlier, was not seriously pursued until technological advances in cinematic/digital special effects were such that its hypermediated presence could be accommodated. Furthermore, in adapting the idea of the scramble suit to film, Linklater decided to slow down the flashcut sequencing so that the spectator might have time to discern the various identities scrambling about the wearer. 22 Gamma-amino butyric acid: is an amino acid which acts to inhibit the transmission of nerve impulses in the central nervous system (OED). 83

he emerges from his delusional state that he is able to consciously use the experience in a constructive way.

For Dick, this notion of perceptual ambiguity through the synthesising of flashcut montage with abstract modern art continued to evolve for several years after the writing of A Scanner Darkly. A similar situation to that of S.A. Powers occurs in Radio

Free Albemuth23 involving that novel‘s sometime protagonist, Nicholas Brady. With

Radio Free Albemuth the author had moved on to a Gnosticized perspective of his universe. In both instances there is sensory overstimulation. For Powers, a drug-induced experience prompts the creation of the scramble suit: an external device which cloaks the wearer‘s identity, creating a barrier between the individual and her/his environment.

Nicholas, on the other hand, gains a new kind of vision that allows him to see clearly, and, unlike Arctor, it is a vision he is able to understand and use to his own benefit.

However, what is most significant about these two separate uses of the scramble suit concept is that in Albemuth Dick sees the sensory excess of the suit as a means of reconciling the mirror‘s inversions whereas in the realm of A Scanner Darkly the ―excess effect‖ is bewildering. As well, in Radio Free Albemuth perceptual excess arrives via an external, benevolent, supernatural force whereas with A Scanner Darkly the experience is narcotically catalyzed and subsequently mechanized by the agency Powers and Arctor work for. Hence, it is apparent that the clarity which accompanies addiction is fleeting and progressively more controlling.

Much like the scramble suit, the cinematic characterization of several of the junkie characters‘ thoughts seems to be a clever analogy for the fragmented memories of

23 Written in 1976 and published posthumously in 1985. 84

an addict. The effect of suggesting that people remember in this detached, mechanical manner is dehumanizing. Like the insect motif, the filmic point of view is an anticipation of impending cognitive inertness. Examples of this approach come early in the novel.

We see Freck referring to another prominent character‘s difficulty to recall him as her inability to ―flash on [who he] is‖ (ASD 13). References to these cognitive ―flashes‖ are repeated throughout the story as the manner in which any understanding or memory might occur. It is a flash like that of a light bulb or the sudden flash of an image on a TV screen, and it is the suggestion of this inorganic remediation of images that evolves more completely as the characters transform into reflex devices. Their memories, rather than revealing personal thoughts and emotions, convey a schizophrenic mentality as they shift between conventional expressions of humanity (fear, regret and sexual desire) and mechanical ones (flashing).

―Flashing‖ begets full-length features where the camera is depicted as the source and the controller as opposed to an aspect of the character‘s cognitive functions. Freck‘s flash sequences become ―fantasy [films that roll] suddenly into his head, without his consent‖ (ASD 18). In more precise filmic terms, when the fantasy becomes a familiar memory and loses its allure it is acknowledged as ―a documentary rerun‖ (ASD 19).

Some of Freck‘s extended cinematic sequences relate compelling, non-narrative episodes.

These situations are conveyed as if he were watching a film rather than recalling an experience: ―Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent: He saw, first, a big parked Pontiac with a bumper jack on the back of it that was slipping and a kid around thirteen with long thatched hair struggling to hold the car from rolling‖

(ASD 18). This ―fantasy‖ transforms into a rerun when Freck realizes it is indeed a 85

memory. Freck runs ―fantasy‖ films routinely. There is the one about the dump trucks of cocaine at the Solarcaine factory (ASD 47), his ―flash‖ to the scene where all the dopers run out of drugs on the same day (ASD 9) and his ―short fantasy number‖ involving a reunion with all of his deceased addict friends in which Jim Croce, Janis Joplin and Jimi

Hendrix songs are playing on the stereo, tragically reminding Freck of their untimely deaths due to drug use (ASD 130).

Arctor casually mentions several poignant memories as ―reruns‖ and Donna refers to hopeful visions as ―trailers.‖ The informal item regarding the invention of the scramble suit characterizes its operating process as ―a frantically progressing montage‖

(ASD 22). On two occasions, ―Fred/Arctor/Whatever‖ makes direct reference to this mode of thought. Shortly after the holoscanners are put in place Arctor comments that

―in the script being filmed, he would at all times have to be the star actor. Actor, Arctor, he thought. Bob the Actor who is being hunted; he who is the El Primo huntee‖ (ASD

134). Later, after he has begun to dissociate and is vaguely aware of his immediate connection with Arctor, a focalized narrator who is not definitively Fred but comments on Arctor in the third person says: ―like an actor before a movie camera, he decided, you act like the camera doesn‘t exist or else you blow it. It‘s all over‖ (ASD 184).

However, the cinematic perspective, suggested by the addict‘s thoughts and memories, is most apparent when experienced through Fred‘s eyes as he watches Arctor and the other junkies on the holoscanners. After Fred meets with Hank in Chapter Seven and begins surveillance of Arctor‘s house, his focalized point of view becomes predominantly cinematic. The scanners place Fred in the director‘s role rather than the actor‘s. He watches himself and his friends via the scanner‘s passive gaze, eventually 86

dissociating with himself entirely. In Chapter Ten, Fred scans Arctor‘s house. He watches Barris through ―Holo Monitor Three,‖ putting together hallucinogenic mushroom capsules. His gaze cuts to ―Holo Monitor Four‖ as Arctor comes in the front door, after which he follows Arctor to his bedroom on ―Holo Monitor Five.‖ When

Fred‘s point of view shifts back to ―Monitor Two‖ he catches Barris on the phone with the Englesohn Locksmith Company, pretending to be Arctor.

As with the more obvious items, what the scanners see only gains significance through analysis and interpretation by external operators. The holoscanner is a futuristic rendering of St. Paul‘s mirror, and as Fred peers into it, he sees darkly. The holoscanners themselves are not inherently distorting. They provide a clear and passive view of what they survey. St. Paul‘s notion of the dark mirror is a simile; the mirror itself is not distorting, it is how we perceive that creates the perceptual impediments we need to negotiate. Similarly, the holoscanners provide a window into Arctor‘s confused world which is mediated by Arctor, and, naturally, looking through that window we find his confusion.

There are several other comparable scenes that illustrate this sense of cinematic ekphrasis. In each of them, the immediacy of the filmic medium is predominant to the extent that the verbal representation of it becomes conspicuous. From Fred‘s holoscanner sessions it emerges that the tapes contain every minute occurrence that takes place in

Arctor‘s house, and because the holoscanner tapes are so comprehensive, they are generally mundane. The experience of watching the junkies‘ seemingly mindless banter hour upon hour is frustrating for Fred. He is unable to make sense of what he sees. He assumes Arctor is up to something sinister because that is what Hank has suggested, and 87

Fred is incapable of recalling what he actually did while he was acting his Arctor role.

The holoscanners provide him with a filmic document that he feels is beyond dispute; thus, as he slips deeper into a dissociative state, the scanners‘ perspectives become his window to a reality he can no longer connect with in person.

Fred begins to equate his temporal world with that of the tapes. He remarks, ―but all Fred‘s got is hindsight. Unless, he thought, unless maybe if I run the holo-tapes backward. Then I‘d be there first, before Barris. What I do would precede what Barris does‖ (ASD 171). He begins to apply the temporal logic of a video recording to his life on the other side of the scanners‘ lenses. He is, of course, not able to manipulate time as he would a tape, and is, consequently, unable to get ahead of what Barris does. As a result of Substance D Addiction Fred/Arctor cognitively deteriorates and devolves into a representation of the holoscanner trope. He is eventually known by those who manipulate him as one of the ―dead.‖ Towards the end of the novel, Mike Westaway, the federal agent assigned to handle Bruce/Arctor, explains, ―the dead . . . who can still see, even if they can‘t understand: they are our camera‖ (ASD 266). It was the agency‘s objective all along, it turns out, to turn Arctor into a camera so that they could infiltrate

New Path and see clearly into its operations.

This cinematic conceit is fully realized in Chapter Seven when an incident involving the entire doper entourage is presented in the format of a screenplay. The

―seven-speed bike incident‖ transcript insists the reader acknowledge the Substance D directed nature of the scene or, conversely, exists as an ironically hypermediated frame of counterpoint to the confused and arbitrary nature of the situation. The catalyst for this conspicuous narrative event comes at the end of Fred‘s first session with the ―medical 88

deputies.‖ He learns that he has been recommended for treatment because of an ―off the cuff‖ exchange he had earlier that involved Hank. This comment in itself is suspicious because Hank is not one of those present during the screenplay episode. The conversation begins innocently enough:

BARRIS: (Standing in the middle of the living room with a great big new

shiny bike, very pleased) Look what I got for twenty dollars.

FRECK: What is it?

BARRIS: A bike, a ten-speed racing bike, virtually brand new. (ASD 115)

The scene gradually devolves into a confused discussion about the number of gears on the so-called ten-speed bike. Freck suggests there are only seven: two on the front and five at the back. At this point the scripted dialogue is further interrupted by the interjection of another non-narrative ―item:‖

FRECK: (Going over to bike and pointing) Look, five gears here, two

gears here at the other end of the chain. Five and two . . . .

When the optic chiasm of a cat or a monkey is divided sagittally . .

. . This is the fundamental split-brain experiment of Myers and

Sperry (1953; Sperry, 1961; Myers, 1965; Sperry, 1967).

. . . makes seven. So it‘s only a seven-speed bike.

LUCKMAN: Yeah, but even a seven-speed racing bike is worth twenty

dollars. He still got a good buy. (ASD 116)

The imposition of the script formatting, juxtaposed with the quotation from Myers and

Sperry is one of the clearest examples of stylistic excess in the novel. A reader that was working towards finding motivation for every aspect of the story would have to consider 89

the implications of this playfully discordant segment. It is an excerpt that distinguishes itself as unique and compels consideration of the ostentatious manner in which it is rendered.

The hypermediacy of the scripted scenes24 and that of the deliberately denoted items establish an effect which is intensified through the German ―ellipses‖ passages from Goethe‘s Faust, Beethoven‘s Fidelio and an untitled lyric from Heinrich Heine. In

Chapter Eleven, Fred as Arctor takes a trip to the Englesohn Locksmith Company.

During the previous chapter, while watching Barris on the holoscanners, Fred witnesses his nemesis in a telephone conversation with Clay Englesohn. For some inexplicable reason Barris takes the call from Englesohn as Arctor. Details are divulged involving a late-night service call and a fraudulent cheque, both of which Barris as Arctor acknowledges as being accurate. Barris informs Englesohn that he does not intend to pay his bill and that he has neglected contacting him earlier because he is experiencing an illness that, by Fred‘s estimation, sounds suspiciously like withdrawal symptoms. Barris ends the conversation by uttering ―Turn on, tune out, and good-by‖ (ASD 166), a distortion of the counter-culture slogan made famous by Dr. Timothy Leary. While trying to figure out a solution to the Barris issue, Fred experiences an abrupt instance of dislocation. The ―other side of his head [opens] up and [flashes] to him as to how to handle it‖ (ASD 171). His dislocated self tells him to go to Englesohn early the next day, redeem the cheque and get it back. This exchange with himself precipitates one of the most unusual and blatantly hypermediated sequences in the novel.

24 There is a second, short scripted scene involving Freck and Barris on page 122-23. 90

Fred, at the behest of his presumably left, logical sphere, resolves to take care of this matter. In order to do that he must ―pretend‖ to be Arctor while dealing with the

Englesohn people. As he begins to negotiate payment and the retrieval of his cheque, his dialogue is interrupted by lines in German from Goethe‘s Faust. Fred/Arctor starts to say: ―I‘m here . . . to pay for a check of mine which the bank returned. It‘s for twenty dollars, I believe‖ (ASD 175-6). This line of dialogue is broken at the ellipsis with ―Ihr

Instrumente freilich spottet mein, / Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz’ und Bügel: / Ich stand am Tor, ihr soiltet Schlüssel sein; / Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt ihr nicht / die

Riegel25 (ASD 175-6). The interjection of the indented and italicized German passage stands in stark contrast to the rest of the text which is justified left. No translation is provided in the novel, so the reader, unfamiliar with German, must go outside of the text for an interpretation or speculate as to the significance of this jarringly excessive section.

There are four more non-narrative digressions of this type, each from Faust and each in the original German without any translation. The second one alludes to a grinning hollow skull, the third comments that the speaker is like a worm, the fourth refers to a doppelgänger-esque relationship and the fifth talks about a deep vault. Each passage, if translated, reveals intertextual significance that relates to Fred/Arctor‘s psychological deterioration. Left as they are, the German phrases create hypermedia awareness. They draw our attention to the narrative-text and provoke inferences that might go beyond the scope of the narrative. That they are in German and at this point in the novel, insinuates a connection with Barris who has been previously associated with all things German via his Karmann Ghia, his ―German-made, nowhere pistol‖ (ASD 88)

25 ―You instruments, of course, can scorn and tease / With rollers, handles, cogs, and wheels: / I found the gate. You were to be the keys; / Although your webs are subtle, you cannot break / the seals. 91

and one line of dialogue in which he says: ―easy, easy . . . as our German friends would say, leise.26 Which means be cool‖ (ASD 89). The Barris-related ―clues‖ turn out to be misdirection as we learn later that Arctor has a German background. His great-uncle was

German and used to sing to his nephew in his mother tongue. Therefore, we can conclude that the German passages are, in fact, the normally less dominant right hemisphere or Arctor‘s voice as it interprets this desperate situation from its dissociated point of view.

After the passages from Faust, the story is interrupted by libretto from Fidelio and the aforementioned short, unnamed lyric poem from Heine. Each of these excerpts, because of the manner in which they are displayed and in the absence of a translation, is a clear instance of narrative excess and within this context, capable of provoking a critical and distanced reconsideration of the story. However, hypermediated distancing might only make the reader aware of the dissonance within the narrative, it cannot resolve these issues. All of these examples of excess make us conscious of Dick‘s narrative machinations and compel us to try and sort things out, but the sorting process is challenging because of Dick‘s predilection for building dysfunctional worlds. If nothing else, it is clear that A Scanner Darkly frequently falls apart. The narrative celebrates the frustrations and the anxiety that might be derived from its equivocal use of fragmentation. The novel illustrates how both Substance D and the holoscanners use divisive tactics to conquer the unwitting protagonist, Bob Arctor. The reader, following this model, might be compelled to further divide the novel mechanism into its various

26 A term derived from music meaning quietly, softly or gently. 92

component parts to see if it can be reassembled in a more functional form. That task is, perhaps, overwhelming and might compel . . .

Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,

Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz' und Bügel:

Ich stand am Tor, ihr soiltet Schlüssel sein;

Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt ihr nicht

die Riegel.

. . . the reader to leave the narrative broken and confused. The unrealized potentials of

Dick‘s non-narrative digressions, his autobiographical comments, philosophical allusions and excessive textual signs might require several readings if they are to be satisfactorily unified within the context of the narrative. Arctor‘s example suggests that a further mediated perspective is what it takes to see the novel clearly, to unify the disparities that exist between the narrative‘s fabula and its excessive story aspects. The careful translation of A Scanner Darkly into the cinematic medium it draws so frequently from reveals, more explicitly, the patterns within the novel‘s figurative and structural mise en abîme. The hypermediation of Dick‘s narrative murk and the expansion of the story‘s implied directives help the reader to locate the path of excess that leads to wisdom.

However, these elements suggest that more excess and additional perspectives might lead to clarity, a kind of hypermediacy, which is precisely what Richard Linklater‘s filmic transmediation of A Scanner Darkly delivers. 93

Chapter Three: ―What does a Scanner See?‖

I‘m gonna tell you about a dream I once had. I know that when

someone says that, usually you‘re in for a very boring next few

minutes. And you might be. But it sounds like what else are you

going to do, right? Anyway, I read this essay by Philip K. Dick.

Richard Linklater, Waking Life

The final scene of Richard Linklater‘s 2001 film Waking Life involves an extended episode which discusses Philip K. Dick and his 1974 novel Flow My Tears the

Policeman Said.27 Linklater mentions Dick‘s professed use of ―channelling‖ while writing Flow My Tears and how he claims that the novel ―flowed right out of him‖ (WL).

The monologue details Dick‘s own version of an uncanny encounter he has at a party four years after the publication of Flow My Tears where, by chance, he meets a woman who reveals a number of details about her life that are eerily similar to certain aspects of his novel. She has the same name as a character from the story and her boyfriend‘s name matches that of the protagonist. A man she is having an affair with, the local chief of police, also happens to have the same name as the chief of police in Flow My Tears. This event is described as unsettling for the sometimes paranoid author and he leaves the encounter shaken and confused.

Because of this strange incident, Dick comes to believe that in writing Flow My

Tears the Policeman Said, he had inadvertently punctured the veil obscuring his physical

27 The novel, published in 1974, was completed by Dick just prior to the writing of A Scanner Darkly. 94

reality.28 This enabled him to see his world ―clearly‖ for a brief period. His recently acquired Gnostic beliefs convinced him that a supernatural being had created ―this illusion of time to make us forget that Christ was about to return, and the kingdom of God was about to arrive.‖ Linklater interprets this to mean that for Dick ―that‘s what time is.

That‘s what all of history is . . . just this kind of continuous daydream, or distraction‖

(WL).

Apparently while still in a dream state, Linklater has an experience that he describes in an effort to extend his explanation of Dick‘s ideas regarding time and reality.

In his dream he meets up with Isabella Augusta Persse29 who explains that Dick is more or less correct regarding his interpretation of the manner in which time functions, but that it is not in fact 50 A.D. Lady Gregory tells Linklater ―actually, there‘s only one instant, and it‘s right now. And it‘s eternity‖ (WL). Time, she explains, is God eternally asking each of us whether or not we are ready to enter eternity. Life is our repeated refusal which ends in death or our acceptance of the eternal moment. Until then we are always in the same instant, the same present moment. We spend our lives moving from no to yes, eventually accepting and embracing the unknown.

This overt commentary on Dick is one of several strong connections that can be found in Linklater‘s work prior to his development of his Scanner production. Another example is found in David Bordwell‘s book Poetics of Cinema, where he discusses another Linklater-delivered monologue from the auteur‘s 1991 film, Slacker noting that it

―introduces the notion of parallel worlds, along with the butterfly effect, chaos theory,

28 Dick‘s apparent puncturing of the veil and subsequent heightened state of perceptual awareness occurred as a result of his experiences during 2-3-74 (SR). 29 Lady Gregory, patron of William Butler Yeats. 95

degrees of separation, and other pop science motifs . . . [suggesting] it‘s as if Richard

Linklater is opening up a box of formal devices for the independent cinema to explore in the next two decades‖ (455). These investigations that Bordwell claims Linklater initiated, are consistent with Dick‘s oeuvre and are also pursued in the filmmaker‘s adaptation of Scanner. In spite of Linklater‘s affinity for Dick‘s ideas, there are fundamental differences between novels and films, as George Bluestone explains, that are potentially irreconcilable. He states that ―like two intersecting lines, novel and film meet at a point, then diverge . . . . At the farthest remove, novel and film . . . have . . . made maximum use of their materials . . . . At this remove, what is peculiarly filmic and what is peculiarly novelistic cannot be converted without destroying an integral part of each‖

(150). Linklater clearly merges with Dick at many intersecting philosophical points, but how does his film transcend the inevitable destruction the cinematic medium must impose on the adaptation of any novel? Can what is integral to each be clarified or enhanced by the other so that the integrity of both works is more clearly illuminated or expanded? We assume novels provide more depth and detail than their filmic counterparts, but can this effect be reciprocated; that is, can a film expand its source‘s narrative and perhaps refine it through cinematic adaptation?

Despite the validity of Bluestone‘s argument, Linklater‘s remediation of A

Scanner Darkly makes a compelling case for the notion that the novel and film, within the context of adaptation, can have a symbiotic relationship where first the novel informs the cinematic process and then the film returns the favour by reiterating and clarifying the novel‘s less immediate narrative objectives. Bluestone‘s main point of contention regarding the adaptation of novels into films is the manner with which the two mediums 96

deal with temporal and spatial relationships. According to Bluestone, the novel‘s formative principle is time and cinema‘s is space. With novels, the illusion of space is created through the verbal image, while with cinema the illusion of time-flux is sustained via the film‘s mise-en-scène and other stylistic choices such as montage. The novel‘s narrative integrity rests in the causal relationships formed in its fabulation whereas the film‘s narrative relies more heavily on its material verisimilitude or a believable connection with the physical world.

Bluestone suggests that both movies and novels create ―the illusion of psychologically distorted time and space, but neither destroys time or space‖ (148); that is, the two forms are not completely transparent or immediate. However, in the case of both versions of Scanner, neither seems to fall adequately within the confines of

Bluestone‘s criteria as each, through the effacement of a reliable point of view, render a logical relationship with time and space, to some degree, inaccessible. This is the

―nightmarish uncertainty‖ that Fredric Jameson attributes to Dick‘s novels: the drug- induced, schizophrenic, reality inversion where the internal, cognitive world is illustrated as hyperreal through hypermediation and ―the narrative line comes unstuck from its referent and begins to enjoy the bewildering autonomy of a kind of temporal Möbius strip, [effacing] the boundary between real and hallucinatory‖ (ATF 350). It is this effect that Linklater‘s film attempts to recreate in response to Dick‘s narrative‘s excess, and in his adaptation we can see that the novel‘s equivocal and often cinematic perspectives generated an intensely hypermediated cinematic response which requires careful

―reading‖ to be scanned clearly. 97

Embracing the ambiguities present in the novel and then exposing how those questions are potentially answered by the film can reveal some of the transmediative potentials therein. The challenges provoked by the novel lead to further complications, theses and countertheses, and through trying to reconcile the puzzles Dick‘s novel imposes, Linklater‘s film takes on a subjective, conceptual significance that can extend

Dick‘s story. Through narrative excess, both novel and film successfully mimic the drug- addled confusion experienced by Arctor, and through efforts to recuperate this excess a more meaningful perspective of both narratives might be gained.

There is a synergetic relationship between novel and film that helps to facilitate a coherent understanding of both works. With the film, the viewer is physically and spatially outside of the narrative looking inwards whereas with the novel, the reader sees much of the story through the failing mind of a junkie. Consequently, even though the novel illustrates how it might be ―seen‖ clearly via its use of myriad perspectives filtered through an external, omniscient narrator, Arctor, as primary focalizer, is too close to his own story to provide an objective view. His conflicted scanning abilities obscure key aspects of the story. As a result, readers must glean what they can from his hypermediated and distorted point of view. By way of analogy, the novel is like a scramble suit, while the film is comparable to a holoscanner. The novel provides layers of narrative excess; the film provides a clear point of view by which to see through and beyond those layers. The film actually shows the spectator what the novel can only suggest. As Bluestone states, ―in between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image‖ (137) is the distinction that exists between the two mediums and this difference between Dick‘s novel and Linklater‘s film is made all the more uncertain 98

and potent because of the reciprocating qualities found in both renderings of A Scanner

Darkly.

The relationships between movie and book which complicate Bluestone‘s notions of what is fundamentally different can be articulated through a comparison of Marshall

McLuhan‘s notions regarding hot and cold mediums. Dick‘s novel was produced through an internalized perspective for individualized comprehension; consequently, it requires a significant amount of active engagement on the part of the reader. It is essentially a detective story, and being such, the reader must ―participate as co-author simply because so much has been left out of [or obscured by] the narrative‖ (McLuhan

29). The effects of Linklater‘s movie (which is a hybrid of hot and cold elements) are unavoidably different than those of the novel. For one, the film is ultimately the result of a group effort or plural perspectives. Many opinions, ideas and interpretations came into play to produce it. There was a consensus of input, regarding the diverse and divergent points of view that make up Scanner‘s narrative, which was intended to create a consensus of response, making it more readily accessible to a plurality of spectators. The movie, as most movies are, was made collectively with the intention of provoking a more immediate and prescriptive communal response rather than an entirely introspective and individual one. Literature turns the reader inwards, guided by a narrative voice or a collection of voices, in the search to find meaning, while film turns the viewer outwards into the spontaneous environment of audio-visual communication and spectacle. As

Dudley Andrew explains in his essay ―Adaptation:‖ ―Generally film is found to work from perception toward signification, from external facts to interior motivations and 99

consequences, from the givenness of a world to the meaning of a story cut out of that world‖ (FTC 376).

With cinema, how the story is cut from the film‘s world is also influenced by those in the room sharing the experience. A similar relationship is implied by the novel in those episodes where Fred is coached or gently reprimanded by his fellow ―vague blurs‖ as he watches himself and his peers on the holoscanners. They take time to reflect on and discuss what they see. In the film, there are fewer exchanges between Arctor and his agency peers, but a similar effect is, perhaps, achieved via the collective movie audience. While watching A Scanner Darkly, we react along with the other ―vague blurs‖ in the theatre. Reaction to cinematic spectacle is often spontaneous; however, with

Linklater‘s film, this immediacy is tempered and brought back into the realm of the novel. Bluestone comments that a novel can afford to be more diffuse as the reader is provided with the option of controlling the rate at which it is read, whereas a film must economize because ―the film viewer is bound by the relentless rate of a projector which he cannot control. The results, as may be expected, are felt in the contrast between the loose, more variegated conventions of the novel and the tight, compact conventions of the film‖ (142-3). The cinematic moment typically provides less time to reflect on and interpret information, but Linklater, in his efforts to preserve the scattered and verbose nature of the junkies, slows the pace of the film dramatically by keeping substantial portions of the novel‘s dialogue intact. Its diffuseness is a quality that is reflected pejoratively in much of the criticism directed at it. However, this approach allows the audience not only time to process what individual characters are saying, but opportunities to scan the mise-en-scène and read it for clues as well. As a result, those shared 100

experiences are, perhaps, less reactionary and more considered. Linklater‘s film is, at times, more diegetic than mimetic; it tells, rather than shows the audience, what is happening, and in doing so it allows us time and distance to contemplate the experience.

It is because of cinema‘s compact conventions and perceptual leanings that it is one of the mediums associated with Walter Ong‘s theory of secondary orality.30

Electronic forms of communication like the telephone and television that derive from literate society and are inherently inclusive have, Ong suggests, brought our civilization back to an oral stage where we enjoy the intimacy and immediacy of spontaneous communication. Film falls within Ong‘s definition of post-literary secondary orality; however, Scanner‘s ability to distance the viewer might allow for a return to the filmic document where it can be reconsidered, taking into account the numerous aspects therein that contribute to its meaning and how it affects us as viewers. Linklater‘s film is, perhaps, part of a new wave of literacy, a kind of narcissism that Bolter and Grusin suggest is ―a general feature of works of blatant hypermediacy; [where] the awareness of the various media leads to self-awareness and to a sense of satisfaction in the power of mediation‖ (148). For example, consider this era‘s return to written communication in the forms of online messaging or texting. These might be construed as egocentric, self- affirming modes of communication that foster situations where users are made aware of the medium employed and the efficacy of its message, while at the same time becoming

30 Secondary orality is the result of electronic forms of communications such as the telephone and email, but also radio, television and film which brought western society into an age that is ―concentrated on the present moment . . . [and] groupminded self-consciously and programmatically [thus] the individual feels that he or she, as an individual, must be socially sensitive . . . With increasing literacy rates, modern society gained the ability to look inwards critically. Thus, with our current society ―secondary orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection [a result of literacy] we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing‖ (Ong 136-7). 101

increasingly self-aware of their role in the process through which the message is delivered. Similarly speaking, because of its hypermediated qualities, Linklater‘s film has the potential to make the spectator more aware of her or his own person in relation to its overtly non-realistic presentation, and because of this effect we can look at it from a less prescriptive literary perspective as well. In this way, Scanner allows the viewer to be empathetically connected while remaining intellectually detached. The film‘s secondarily oral components in conflict with its hypermediated aspects, draws the viewer out of the world of the film to a place where the point of view of the other is more accessible.

Thus, through Linklater‘s hypermediated adaptation, a balance between perception and explanation is struck. Although the viewer‘s response is manipulated in a more immediate manner, Linklater‘s Scanner allows room for active engagement with the audience. In this way, the machinations of the plot are expeditiously shaped while the visual elements add textual layers that would necessarily be accomplished in the novel through Dick‘s narrative style but not rendered as immediate as they are with the film.

Linklater‘s movie is the confluence of visual, auditory and literary input that both instructs the viewer as to how the story should be ―read‖ and shows her or him what that reading looks like. The film imposes its ―clarity‖ on the viewer knowing full well that it is a stylistically excessive inversion of what is normally experienced via conventional cinema. It confidently asserts that it is not simply the mirror reflection of the novel; it is a transmediation, the reflection of the reflection or true form.

Transmediation, as Siegel defines it, is a natural result of Linklater‘s transformation of Dick‘s novel. Transmedia storytelling, from Jenkins‘ point of view, 102

occurs where Linklater expands or extends our understanding of the original narrative.

For example, confirming Hank as Donna is more than mere adaptation. With this choice,

Linklater is filling in some of the narrative gaps for the spectator, and for the reader he is adding an ―origami unicorn‖ that has the potential to change the way the original narrative is read. As Jenkins comments, ―more often, transmedia is about back story which shifts our identifications and investments in characters and thus helps us to rewatch the scenes again with different emotional resonance‖ (AT).

There are clues in the novel that informed Linklater‘s decision to expand the

Donna and Hank relationship. For example, in Dick‘s narrative, during the culminating scene in room 403 (Hank‘s office), Hank says several things to Fred which might confirm our suspicions that he is indeed Donna. In Hank‘s preamble to exposing Arctor‘s true identity, he tells Fred ―I think you‘re a very good person‖ (ASD 225). These words are echoed, almost verbatim, by Donna as she takes Arctor to New Path. When Fred remarks that he has two kids, two girls, Hank responds with ―I don‘t believe you do; you‘re not supposed to‖ (ASD 227). This cryptic comment leaves Fred/Arctor and perhaps the reader bewildered and confused. Is Hank unsure of who Fred actually is or is this remark a reflection of Donna‘s relationship with and knowledge of Arctor? Also, after Fred has been informed that he is in fact Bob Arctor and, moreover, that he will be fined for

―willingly becoming an addict,‖ intense withdrawal symptoms begin to kick in. At this stage he hears two voices (both of them originating from inside his own head) respond to

Hank‘s queries. Hank suggests calling Donna Hawthorne and having her come and pick

Fred up. The next episode in the novel, like the film, is a direct ―cut‖ to Arctor and

Donna in Donna‘s car on their way to New Path. 103

Characteristics of transmedia storytelling are also present in the scenes dealing specifically with Fred/Arctor‘s psychiatric evaluation. In the film, each time he is required to visit room 203, his scramble suit is conspicuously missing. Like the novel, it is also insinuated that the two deputies examining Fred are, in fact, manifestations of his conflicting cerebral hemispheres; and Linklater, like Dick, does not state definitively that the deputies are indeed delusions. Instead, on several occasions he composes shots where

Arctor, in a reverse, eye-level, medium shot, is in the center of the frame while the two deputies occupy the space on either side of his head. The spectator sees the back of

Arctor‘s head while being provided with the contrasting expressions on the faces of the two clinicians. One of the deputies, the left-hand one (presumably31) is female. Clearly the more assertive of the two, she is also the officer who, in close-up, stares deeply into

Fred‘s eyes and instructs him to get Donna tiny blue flowers as a gift. Linklater, without stating Arctor‘s schizophrenic encounter as fact, uses cinematic clues to help the spectator read his film, clues that are derived from Dick‘s narrative‘s excess.

In general, Linklater‘s cinematography has transmediative qualities. It directs the viewer‘s gaze towards certain aspects and away from others in a manner that allows the spectator to make inferences and expand her or his understanding of various novel- derived story aspects. Additionally, the effective use of montage editing is the most noticeable manipulation of this wholly cinematic aspect of the film‘s presentation.

Transitions and cuts, like those in the novel, are abrupt and positioned in such a way to

31 In the film, the female deputy stands to Arctor‘s right, the deputies‘ left, suggesting Linklater‘s acknowledgement of Dick‘s suggestion via the notion that the right hand is generally associated with left- hemisphere dominance or the simple fact that the female deputy is standing to the left of the male deputy, thus, making her the left-hand deputy. 104

move the story forward while sustaining the suspenseful elements of the narrative. These transitions have a more decided impact on how certain lines will be understood by the audience because, as Bluestone explains, ―in the novel, the line of dialogue stands naked and alone; in the film, the spoken word is attached to its spatial image‖ (146). The image that accompanies those lines that fall at transitional points influences the spectator‘s reception of the idea to be inferred. A thought, an accusation or a suggestion placed at the end of a scene just prior to a strong transition has more impact than those situated in the middle of an episode that flows through several ideas and images only to culminate in a jump cut. Through the associations we make between images and words, as Bordwell suggests, ―film encourages us to deceive ourselves. It deceives us blatantly but helps us overlook the deception. It accomplishes this because narrative comprehension demands that we go beyond the data, jump to conclusions – make inferences and frame hypotheses‖ (Poetics 149). With Linklater‘s film, we must jump to conclusions and infer meaning from many of the main characters‘ often paranoid and irreconcilable comments.

The challenge of recuperating their skewed perspectives is, at times, exacerbated by

Linklater‘s montage. His misdirection, like Dick‘s within the novel, compels the sceptical spectator to test a variety of hypotheses before settling on anything conclusive.

Likewise, the manner in which different shots are edited together, as well as their duration and angle and the way objects are placed within the frame of those shots all contribute to the manner in which the viewer will interpret the story being presented.

There are several featured techniques Linklater uses that help to render the media- saturated environment of A Scanner Darkly as one that is overtly fictional and entirely cinematic. A hypermediated scene, such as Freck‘s and Barris‘s video flash-forward 105

sequence, which takes the two characters from the ―Fiddlers Three‖ diner, through a convenience store, past the watchful, uniformed, law-enforcement agent, through the store‘s aisles and to the counter to buy the Solarcaine, back into Freck‘s Datsun and across town to their rundown, suburban home, shows the viewer a film within a film and draws attention to the medium. The filmic medium itself becomes part of the narrative as it communicates various notions regarding the hypermediated nature of Scanner‘s mise- en-scène and, like the novel, intimates the cinematic point of view often espoused by the external narrator. The exposition of the surveillance camera in this instance gives viewers the feeling that they too are surveilling the subjects. We are alerted to the fact that we are, like Fred, agents regarding a bizarre narrative unfold.

There are also a number of figurative connections to be made from this spectacular scene. First and foremost, the viewer is given the sense that ―Big Brother‖ is always watching. That such a seemingly insignificant scene might be caught on surveillance video suggests this notion, if nothing else. Through the film‘s enigmatic presentation of a perceptual experience, attention is also drawn to the novel‘s insinuation of the detached mechanical perspectives the addicts maintain. The overtly video-taped treatment of this apparently externally focalized episode effectively combines the filmic and literary mediums suggesting multiple perspectives and necessitating a distanced, reassessment of the film and consequently its narrative content.

The externalized point of view in the film is most apparent in those episodes taken from the novel which might be considered examples of hypermediacy. The opening

Freck/aphid sequence is focalized via the camera‘s detached, voyeuristic position; that is, 106

the viewer is given the sense that she or he is looking through Alberti‘s32 window at this bizarre situation rather than through Freck‘s eyes. This distanced perspective, providing a greater sense of objectivity, is sustained through much of the scene, except for the instant when Freck recognizes that Nellie,33 his dog, also has insects. The film‘s shift, from an objective to a subjective point of view, coincides with Freck‘s false ―awareness‖ of Nellie‘s aphids intimating that the viewer, like the addict, is able to see both conflicting visions, but that the bugs are, in fact, Freck‘s delusion as they respond to his perceiving them.

Recognition of the filmic medium is also gained during the internal and external scramble suit scenes. They provide the stark contrast between the figure, as viewed from outside the suit and a cool blue image of Fred within the suit. The spectator is also provided with a hypermediated perspective (as focalized through Fred) of the ―Brown

Bear Lodge‖ audience, complete with a green ―live‖ graphic in the upper right hand corner. The hypermedia significance of this cinematic episode is superseded later in the movie when Fred watches the scanners, for in these instances the spectator is permitted the privileged position of peering over his shoulder, watching him watch himself and his peers. The effects of layered animation enhance the depthlessness of the holoscanner screens as they stand in contrast to the hard outlines and shadows of the animated figures around them. The image of a mirror within a mirror, the mise en abîme, is rendered here

32 Alberti, Leon Battista: An Italian Renaissance artist who, in his treatise, De Pittura (On Painting) helped to define perspective as a geometric instrument of artistic and architectural representation. 33 Jerry Fabin is the focal character in the opening episode of the novel and his dog‘s name is Max. Freck‘s awareness of Nellie here implies an interesting connection with the novel‘s narrative and its insistence that the junkies, whatever issues they might have, never mistreat animals and, furthermore, this characteristic is conveyed time and again as being a particularly human one. 107

in such a way that this central concept is made to resonate through one of the most captivating sequences in the film.

The two episodes from the novel that are overtly scripted (the ―seven speed bike‖ scene being the most memorable) rely heavily on an external focalizor. With these scenes, it is as if the spectator is being given a voyeuristic vantage point within the world of the narrative from which to watch these flashbacks unfold. The most moving use of external focalization occurs during the last scene of the film when Bruce has discovered

Mors Ontologica and has resolved to bring some back for his friends at Thanksgiving.

On his final lines, as the camera draws back from him, it transitions into a high-angle crane shot that gradually pulls out to a long shot, revealing the magnitude of New Path‘s farming operation and the formidable presence of Substance D. The impact of Arctor‘s story and the immensity of the issues at stake come into focus for the audience in this penultimate shot, suggesting that we, as observers, need to see the macrocosmic picture if we are to see this story clearly.

Through such cinematic episodes, Linklater‘s adaptation or remediation of Dick‘s novel, regardless of which term we use to define the process, intimates the conflating characteristics of Jenkins‘ transmedia storytelling. Unlike many previous adaptations of

Dick‘s stories, Linklater‘s film uses more than the mere skeleton (that is, the basic plot, main themes and characters) of the novel‘s original narrative; it takes on the more difficult task of sustaining a ―fidelity to the spirit, to the original‘s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm‖ (Andrew 376). The novel itself is an integral part of the film‘s message, and we see many examples of its spirit in the film‘s content. 108

In this regard, the film‘s soundtrack provides examples of the expansive nature of transmedia storytelling. Linklater uses special sound cues that enhance particular moments such as those where Fred/Arctor is given subconscious suggestions regarding blue flowers and idyllic mountain locales by Donna or the medical deputies. Sounds more typical in cartoons or slapstick comedies accompany some of Freck‘s more farcical moments. The scene that depicts his failed suicide is an example of this sort of audio texturing. Another example, Fred/Arctor‘s shifting voice as the camera moves between external and internal scramble suit perspectives, illustrates Linklater‘s attention to the novel‘s verbalization of the pervasive dualities inherent in its protagonist. At first we hear the harmonically altered voice of the suit and then, in an instant, the image and the audio cut to Arctor, within the suit conveying the agency‘s prescribed doctrine in Keanu

Reeves‘ more natural, human tone. This auditory shift, from external mechanical to internal human, also coincides with Fred/Arctor‘s rhetorical adjustment. As he transitions from propaganda to his improvised speech, the image and the audio-track adjust as well.

The most noticeable and affecting sound device, apart from the characters‘ dialogue, is the non-diegetic music that Graham Reynolds wrote specifically for Scanner.

In accordance with Jerold Levinson‘s comments regarding the various objectives of composed (rather than commissioned) soundtracks, it seems Linklater employed original songs in his film for two primary purposes. First: Scanner‘s use of externally located music appears to tell the spectator how the presenter of the story regards the events being presented, or else how he would like them to be viewed by the audience, and, second, it seems the narrator is inviting viewers to share in, rather than merely observe, what 109

Fred/Arctor is feeling, and as a consequence, encourages them to adopt a sympathetic attitude toward him. That is, the non-diegetic music in Linklater‘s film consistently serves a narrative purpose by, as Levinson suggests it must, ―making something fictional in the world of the film‖ (417). That is, the musical compositions place particular scenes or characters within the story which allows the viewer to experience the immediacy of the moment in spite of the film‘s hypermediacy. Rather than pursuing an auditory use of intertextual reference,34 Linklater incorporates a composed soundtrack to underscore some of the film‘s more poignant scenes. This more typical Hollywood tactic is

Linklater‘s way of periodically bringing the viewer back into the diegesis after extended periods of mediative distancing.

Apart from style references (surf rock and stereotypical cartoon soundtrack music) and several songs composed for the film by the British band Radiohead,35 there are three main themes that deserve special notice here. The opening cello line, accompanied by echoing metallic hits, captures the sombre atmosphere of the narrative, immediately establishing the film‘s mood. This line is reprised on several occasions, most notably during Arctor‘s ―what does a scanner see speech‖ and at the end of the movie as the camera rises above the endless field of Mors Ontologica. The up-tempo, cartoonish, surf-rock music that often accompanies the farcical exploits of the ―Fiddlers

Three‖ - Arctor, Barris and Luckman - is another effective choice. We hear the first strains of this composition as Freck drives to meet Barris at the diner. It seems any time the junkies are on the move this theme is placed conspicuously in the background,

34 For example, Wes Anderson‘s use of Spanish renditions of David Bowie songs in his soundtrack for The Life Aquatic or Tarantino‘s incorporation of somewhat obscure pop music in many of his films to establish context. 35 The closing titles are over a Radiohead song called ―Black Swan,‖ alluding to Fred/Arctor‘s dual nature. 110

intimating the irrelevance or potential futility of their actions. Finally, the spacey,

Twilight Zone-esque flourishes that accompany any of the perceptually dislocating moments reinforce the sinister nature of Fred/Arctor‘s conflicted psychological state.

Via these auditory machinations and conventional cinematography alone, the film might provide a recoverable level of transparency; however, layered with interpolated rotoscoping,36 it becomes a remediation of the novel that compels intense analysis rather than the sensation of immediacy. The viewer must work to reconcile the painterly images with the film‘s story and thematic leanings. Rotoscoping impedes the willing suspension of disbelief, at least to the point where it is naturalized and accepted as a stylistic convention within the narrative. Whereas mise-en-scène is the ―general term for what has been arranged within a shot‖ (Kawin 549), the manner in which each shot is enhanced in A Scanner Darkly modifies every other aspect of the film significantly. As

Jenkins has commented in relation to transmedia story-telling and contemporary cinema:

―the art director takes on new importance . . . becoming almost as central as the screenwriter or the director, in terms of adding to our understanding of the fictional world‖ (AT). By way of example, he refers to Syd Mead's contributions to Bladerunner, claiming much of the audience‘s appreciation of the film stems from his ―complex and well considered rendering of a plausible future society‖ (AT).

36 Traditional rotoscoping uses a ―prism and lamphouse [i.e., a movie projector] assembly, usually set behind the lens of a bi-pack camera in order to throw an image onto a card or a screen, especially for the purpose of tracing a matte line, preparing a drawing from a photograph, or hand-drawing a traveling matte‖ (Kawin 552). The rotoscoping technique itself has been used for decades in the film industry to add background to scenes previously shot on a sound stage. Computer-assisted "interpolated rotoscoping" is the reinvented process which Linklater employed during the post-production of A Scanner Darkly.

111

Often found in transmedia narratives, these sorts of excessively detailed worlds are also examples of Jenkins appropriated definition of overdesign. In this regard, Bob

Sabiston (head of animation), Richard Gordoa (visual effects supervisor), and Fred

Daniel (art department coordinator) each played an integral role in the building of

Scanner‘s filmic world. What is most revealing is the list of the film‘s crew, which is dominated by technical people, many of them animators. Principal photography lasted six weeks while the finished film required an additional eighteen months where fifty animators working full days put approximately 350 minutes of production work into every minute of finished, rotoscoped film.37 The result is the overall pastiche of painterly, cartoon and cinematic realism that is Scanner‘s overdesigned mise-en-scène.

Linklater first used the interpolated rotoscoping technique in his film Waking Life.

Like Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly was filmed and then that film was animated over.

However, there are some notable differences between the uses of this technique with regards to the two movies. Scanner’s rotoscoping is more polished and less noticeably anti-realist than its predecessor‘s is; thus, it is more difficult to naturalize this hyperrealistic convention. Scanner‘s rotoscoping is more disruptive by being less consistent. This approach allows the film to create and use the tension that exists between the hypermediated moments and the more easily recoverable scenes by drawing the viewers into an immediate connection with the narrative and then ejecting them, allowing a distanced, empathetic reconsideration of the film from the perspective of someone emotionally connected and perceptually external to it. Also, the split-brain effect that is alluded to in the novel through the Orenstein article is in full effect as

37 See One Summer in Austin for a detailed account of the film‘s production challenges. 112

occasionally the animation comes very close to realism only to shift away in the next instant to an image which is almost cartoonish in nature. The film sends two conflicting visual messages. Shots of the main characters, during more intimate human moments, teeter towards the realistic while the crowd shots of the straights, especially as viewed through Arctor‘s scramble suit (which gives his entire field of view a blue tinge), look thoroughly animated. In this way the rotoscoped mise-en-scène of A Scanner Darkly functions as an overtly hyperreal representation of the novel‘s implied fictional environment.

With the creation of the rotoscoped façade, a dichotomous aesthetic appeal and conflicted ideological purpose is what Linklater was trying for. In his interview with critic Andrea Gronvall, he speaks of wanting the film to resemble a more life-like graphic novel. It seems he engineered it to have, in McLuhan‘s terms, a cooler effect that would require active consideration by the audience. The film does provide a high-definition sensory experience, but that experience is comprised of overwhelming excess and as a result the abundance of information being transmitted needs to be sorted through in much the same way Fred requires time and distance from his own situation to possibly comprehend that he is, in fact, Arctor. By way of comparison, Waking Life seems to revel in drawing attention to itself and its overtly anti-realistic veneer while A Scanner

Darkly strives to achieve the equilibrium between real and unreal necessary to convey the more perceptually challenging aspects found via the novel‘s non-narrative comments.

With Scanner, Linklater claimed that he wanted his audience ―to go into the story and not be consistently pulled out of it by artistic flourishes‖ (Russell 8), and he effectively 113

accomplishes this by making his emphatically stylistic elements functional within the context of the narrative‘s content.

By establishing this unity of form and content, Linklater allows A Scanner Darkly to operate in an uncanny manner. Its more nuanced use of rotoscoping potentially compels the consideration of the technique‘s purpose beyond its aesthetic impetus. In this regard, Linklater‘s earlier work, Waking Life, is consistently jarring. It allows for critical distance, but prevents the spectator from unifying its fragmented narrative.

Waking Life is an example of cinematic excess where ―the filmic style manifests itself so ostentatiously that it draws attention to itself and outshines the story . . . The story, in other words, is told first and foremost by means of excessive filmic form‖ (Verstraten

193). A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, does allow for the viewer to frequently enter the story, to recuperate the fabula, but when we are pulled from it, the effect brings about a reconsideration of the narrative‘s objectives that ideally extend beyond those envisioned by the filmmakers. By using some of the more surreal aspects present in

Waking Life that force visual fragmentation on the viewer in concert with naturalizing tactics associated with cinema vérité, A Scanner Darkly provides opportunities for the engagement of the audience both intellectually and emotionally. We are comfortably drawn in by the lush, realistic, painterly images only to be ejected from the diegesis in the next instant by an excessively stylized perspective. The hypermediacy of A Scanner

Darkly, as Bolter and Grusin suggest regarding other recent animated productions, challenges the audience by juxtaposing ―the immediacy of the traditional Hollywood style . . . to the hypermediacy of the cartoon [and] because this effect is dislocating and

‗unnatural,‘ we may be drawn in, but we are also distanced at the same time‖ (149-50). 114

Take, for instance, the scene at the ―Fiddlers Three‖ diner where Freck witnesses

Barris‘s lewd thought bubble. The initial conversation between Freck and Barris looks and occurs naturally enough to be visually unobtrusive. As Barris discusses dessert with the waitress, a cartoon thought bubble appears which Freck can apparently see. This humorous and unusual spectacle, if given proper consideration, suggests some interesting things about Freck‘s state of mind and the film‘s perspectives on addiction. It serves to briefly pull the viewer from the immediacy of the story, if only to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Ideally this short, hypermediated scene provokes thorough contemplation of the motives by which it found its way into the film. Within the moments created by this practice of audience inclusion and exclusion exists the potential to perceive the narrative from an external, objective position. Jason Vest has commented that in the first scene Scanner‘s rotoscoped images ―unpredictably shimmer and shift to suggest the unreality of Freck‘s situation even as they emphasize the oddness of the film‘s future world‖ (Vest 159). The contrast then is that within this odd environment there are elements that exceed even its unreal disposition. Our baseline of normalcy must be readjusted in order to find cohesion. The distinction between delusion and reality is effaced and in the attempt to reconcile this erasure, the larger ideas and the overarching structure of the film might be reconsidered.

Bolter and Grusin also account for the distancing effect of hypermediacy in mainstream cinema where it is often equated with dreams, mental disorder, or insanity.

When characters are in balance, the camera is a transparent lens on the world; ―when something is wrong (when they are drunk or physically or mentally ill), the subjective camera offers a distorted view that makes us aware of the film as medium and often 115

incorporates or refers to other media‖ (152). Bolter and Grusin give examples such as

Hitchcock‘s Vertigo for this combined use of hypermediation and emotional/psychological dysfunction. We might also consider Jeffry Lebowski‘s ―dream state‖ in the Coens‘ The Big Lebowski, or Vincent Vega‘s heroin-coloured drive to Mia

Wallace‘s house in Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction as evidence of the pervasive use of mediation to make an audience aware of an altered mental state. In A Scanner Darkly, special effects are employed in much the same manner as Bolter and Grusin suggest they typically are in more conventional films. In several ―memory scenes‖ hypermediation is used to indicate Fred‘s tenuous condition, but in these situations the added visual effects are placed over Scanner‘s already excessively mediated world. The obtrusive, subjective camera view is also employed during Arctor‘s ―family flashback.‖ In this scene, the images are softer and less focused, creating a dream-like or delusional quality consistent with his state of mind.

Along with its hypermediated, subtly animated facade, what is most interesting about Linklater‘s relatively low-budget adaptation of A Scanner Darkly is its high-profile ensemble cast. These actors create additional intertextual and, as Bal calls them, extra- textual situations, which create ambiguity and provoke the reader to consider ―the influence of reality on the story, in so far as reality plays a part in it [because] . . . we cannot ignore the fact that direct or indirect knowledge of certain characters contributes significantly to their meaning‖ (119). Germane to Bal‘s discussion of context, Richard

Dyer states, in his essay ―Performance Signs,‖ that film stars often have a unique style which ―through its familiarity will inform the performance she or he gives in any particular film. The specific repertoire of gestures, intonations, and so on that a star 116

establishes over a number of films carries the meaning of her or his image just as much as the ‗inert‘ element of appearance, the particular sound of her/his voice or dress style‖

(481).

Linklater disrupts the contextual effect that Dyer speaks of. His cast‘s visual accessibility relating to the fact that many of the key actors are immediately recognizable and have notoriously detailed public personas, ironically, makes them essential to the effectiveness of the film‘s reimaging through the use of interpolated rotoscoping. The celebrity actors‘ impact as uncanny, subtly animated figures is much more dramatic due to their notoriety as public figures. Before the opening titles roll, the viewer‘s knowledge of the group assembled by Linklater to recreate Dick‘s addicts imposes certain preconceptions which come into conflict with the manner in which the stars‘ images are rendered. The rotoscoping effect literally alters the way we see the film‘s cast and, quite likely, it confounds the manner in which we try to unify a specific actor with a particular type or role. Does the cartoonish Robert Downey Jr. invoke the same intertextual or societal connotations as the real thing? Does a disarming, animated veneer reduce expectations regarding Wynona Ryder‘s performance? Is the spectator able to regard any of the assorted actors as explicit, fictional constructs rather than celebrity figures with lives that might intersect with and colour interpretation of their role in the film?

Jason Vest, one among many critics, has commented that ―Winona Ryder‘s 2001 arrest for shoplifting, Woody Harrelson‘s work on behalf of legalizing marijuana, and

Robert Downey Jr.‘s drug arrests well suited them to playing stoners, addicts, and criminals‖ (170). He goes on to contend that in spite of these associations Linklater‘s actors still manage to ―reveal their characters‘ human vulnerabilities so convincingly that 117

Arctor, Donna, Barris, and Luckman become authentic individuals‖ (170). They transcend their intertextual associations and, at times, histrionic performances via their uncanny visual treatment. It is this tendency to historicize these actors; however, that makes them significant as filmic simulacra. And it is their personal and artistic identities that can, along with the hypermediated qualities of the film‘s animation, make Downey,

Harrelson, Ryder, Cochrane and Reeves doubly efficient as narrative excess. The film‘s animated defamiliarization of these actors‘ conflicts with their personal back stories. The opportunity to reconcile their apparent star power with their distorted appearances is critically distancing, and potentially reveals some of the narrative‘s objectives regarding identity.

Scanner‘s cast is hyperreal, and the effect of this is to remind the spectator of the medium and compel an active consideration of the movie. Linklater‘s use of hypermediacy is a method which forces us to consider the implications of the ubiquitous subterfuge of the mise-en-scène, and to define the film‘s aesthetic approach as a feature which serves to label the collection of characters therein as ―a culture of the image or the simulacrum" (PCL 6). Thus, the larger setting of A Scanner Darkly becomes something akin to Baudrillard‘s notion of hyperreality: a denaturalized ―abstraction . . . [which] is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept,‖ but is an overtly mediated environment replete with ―models of a real without origin or reality‖ (169). This cinematic choice is informed by the novel. The film‘s setting mutates into something hyperreal and more consistent with the perspectives of the drug-addled junkie or mechanized straight. Within the framework of the cinematic medium, the story re- emerges as a world for the viewer to consider through this dysfunctional immediacy. 118

Linklater‘s actors are familiar, as are the spaces they occupy, while at the same time they are cartoons in a hypermediated environment. As a consequence of this, we attempt to recuperate them and their world and see the film in a logical, meaningful way.

This effort to normalize key aspects of A Scanner Darkly occurs because the model without a real, the simulacrum, as Deleuze explains ―is not simply a false copy . . . it calls into question the very notions of the copy . . . and the model‖ (PATS 47) because

―it carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced‖ (AO

87). Brian Massumi, in his discussion of Deleuze‘s notions regarding simulacra, contends that the resemblance inherent to the simulacrum is ―a means, not an end‖ [and that] ―imitation is an indication of a life force propelling the falsifier toward the unbridled expression of its uniqueness‖ (91). Both Deleuze and Massumi celebrate and, to a large extent, remediate Baudrillard‘s more sinister notions of hyperreality. They suggest that the falsifier, the simulacrum, is driven towards this expression of distinction by our desire to reconcile its uncanny appeal with that which it simulates. In the same manner, the landscape and various characters in the film compel a similar sort of catalytic, transmediative encounter with the spectator. The simulacrum, for Deleuze and Massumi, is not empty; it is excess that demands reconciliation, and Linklater‘s hyperreal rendering of Dick‘s novel requires a similar response from its viewers.

Massumi, like Jenkins, uses Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner as his model for the creative potential that exists within the simulacrum. Interestingly enough, Massumi, neglects to mention the original, Dick‘s novel, or the fact that the film itself is a simulation. In fact, what he cites as being particularly Deleuzian with regards to simulacra is the notion that the androids in Blade Runner use their imitative stance as a 119

means of asserting their potential for difference or transcendence of their humanness.

That is, they wish to be seen as more than human because they are intimately aware of their mortality. For them, death is not a vague notion; they have an expiry date clearly stamped on their CPUs and as a result empathy is something they are inundated with.

The replicants know, unequivocally, the fear and desperation that their android peers must certainly share. Paradoxically, they understand what it is to be human because they are categorically not human and this ontological awareness, analogous to Bolter and

Grusin‘s notions of hypermediacy, is what empowers them to make this assertion. They are conscious of the mechanical framework, the medium, that contains their artificial

―lives‖ and because of this fact they are able to comprehend what ―death‖ is and how it must affect each of them. To extend these notions relating to the provocative nature of simulacra further, Massumi, in spite of his lack of acknowledgement for Dick‘s novel, inadvertently promotes the author‘s efficacy and sense of hypermedia awareness regarding the ―unbridled expression of uniqueness‖ to be found in simulation and remediation. For it is Scott‘s rendering of Dick‘s ideas that Massumi discusses, and their

(Dick‘s ideas) uniqueness, as well as the film‘s portrayal of them, is realized via this transformative process.

The transmedia perspective on the empowering virtues of simulacra in A Scanner

Darkly is somewhat less optimistic than that of Deleuze or Massumi. Dick sees the sinister nature of the machine in his characters and their setting. Like Baudrillard‘s notion of the simulacrum, A Scanner Darkly’s California is a tragic parody of itself: ―a liquidation of all referentials‖ (170) or, as Massumi pejoratively interprets Baudrillard, ―a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer 120

properly be said to be a copy‖ (90). Dick‘s dystopic vision of Southern California in the

1970s is one of endless reproduction in the absence of a uniquely human impetus. The society, like the addict, is a reflex machine. This is Dick‘s rendering of the commercially oppressive, synthetic environment he lived in and saw growing progressively worse. He neglects to acknowledge, as Linklater appears to, the ways in which ―the conditions of real experience and the structure of the work of art reunite: the divergence of series, the decentering of circles, the constitution of a chaos that comprises them, the internal reverberation and amplified movement, the aggressiveness of the simulacra‖ (PATS 52).

As mentioned previously, Dick does engage in what Jenkins refers to as ―world building,‖ which also appears to be an affirmation of the simulacrum‘s creative potential.

Jenkins suggests that works like War and Peace or Moby-Dick38 or Dante's Inferno are much more invested in the construction of environments than the communication of stories, and that ―their authors seemed content to stop their novels dead in their tracks for pages on end as we wander through their fictionalized geography, trying to map its contours or understand the connections between scattered events‖ (AT). This imaginative wandering leads the reader to construct the novel‘s elaborately detailed world. Similarly, Dick‘s story compels its readers to build worlds and communicates the contradictory notion that Deleuze sees in the simulacrum and Massumi sees in the simulation of Dick‘s own work via Scott‘s film.

The paradoxically life-rendering force of the falsifier is a notion that is also propelled further by Linklater‘s remediation of A Scanner Darkly. For example, an

38 Melville‘s famous novel about the white whale is an example Deleuze uses quite extensively to explain his notions of ―percepts‖ and ―becoming.‖ That is to say, the ambiguities or negative capabilities of Melville‘s novel are derived from a narrative more focused on world building than hegemonic narration. 121

interesting intertextual comparison between the actors with ―star‖ power and those who anonymously fill one of the secondary roles in the film can be found during Reeves‘ introductory scene. Prior to Reeves‘ first speech as S.A. Fred, Mitch Baker‘s Brown

Bear Lodge Host delivers an overture regarding Arctor‘s role in law enforcement and the technical nature of the scramble suit he is wearing. When we juxtapose the two in this immediate proximity, it becomes clear how effective, for the part of Arctor, an actor of

Reeves‘ status is. Linklater desires that the viewer see the ―host‖ character as depthless and animated. There is little that is authentically human to be recognized in Baker‘s portrayal or in the words he speaks to the other assembled straights and as a result he is completely absorbed by the visual context of the film. Baker‘s character is noticeably animated. There is little shadowing to his features, and the hard outline that contains his two-dimensionality clearly defines him as a comic strip figure. In fact, all of the seemingly plastic characters that populate this scene do little to provoke our sympathy or interest. They blend into the background, and the only thing about their nature that does arouse curiosity is their homogeneity of response to Fred/Arctor‘s comments. The group is clearly meant to merge into a single entity, thus representing the mechanical or synthetic nature of the crowd. They are the processual of form that Palmer suggests is so common to Dick‘s style.39

Comparatively speaking, Reeves as Fred/Arctor is conspicuously more humanlike in spite of the layer of animation that obscures his natural look. It is our familiarity with

Reeves‘ likeness, his inter and extra-textual endowments, coupled with the depth of detail in his reproduction that makes him more compelling and provocative as an animated

39 For clarification of Palmer‘s comments regarding process, see page 34 of this thesis 122

construct. Ironically, it would seem, because he comes somewhere nearer to our idea of a human appearance and because we are accustomed to how he is supposed to look, his presentation here is more remarkable and perhaps sinister than his animated, straight counterpart. Reeves, and the other main characters in the film, exemplify the phenomenon Masahiro Mori equates with ―Bukimi no Tani‖ or ―The Uncanny Valley.‖

Inspired by Freud‘s notions regarding heimlich and unheimlich, Mori found that with the more recent improvements to prosthetic hands, for example, ―we cannot distinguish them from real hands at a glance . . . So if we shake the hand, we are surprised by the lack of soft tissue and cold temperature . . . It is uncanny . . . quite human like, but the familiarity is negative‖ (34). He cites zombies as a primary example of the sort of agent that might provoke these sorts of feelings of strangeness.40 With relation to recent computer generated films such as The Polar Express, current studies are finding that it is not merely a figure‘s overall degree of human likeness that places it in the uncanny valley, but rather that there is ―a mismatch among elements, some aspects of its form, motion quality [that] may seem more human than others, and it is this we find disturbing‖

(HEUV 176). However, more closely related to Linklater‘s machinations41 is research which suggests that human-looking robots imply an evolutionary turn towards

40 Karl MacDorman acknowledges a similar response called ―terror management theory‖ which has demonstrated how ―subliminal reminders of death can cause a pervasive shift in our attitudes and preferences (697) regarding a human-like form. Christian Keysers has associated the uncanny valley with an ―evolved cognitive mechanism for pathogen avoidance‖ (HEUV 169) or disgust. Because the chances for transmission increase in organisms that are genetically related to us, we are more sensitive to the appearance of disease or abnormality in similar looking entities.

41 MacDorman also suggests that having an android doppelgänger may elicit a fear of being replaced. Human-looking robots (especially if they could one day rival human intelligence) raise the question of whether we might not all just be soulless machines (HEUV 170). 123

mechanization (the same transformation that Dick examines in the novel) that we might find unsettling.

Reeves and the rest of the primary cast of A Scanner Darkly illustrate this mismatch among elements and movement towards mechanization. Their disturbing closeness to nature that Mori sees as a kind of horror is also, at times, disarming, giving it a double potency, as their portrayals conjure a familiarity associated with cartoon artifice and innocence that is all the more alarming when juxtaposed with Dick‘s schizophrenic themes and motives. Their familiarity as celebrities and media icons coupled with the artful manner in which they are displayed in Linklater‘s movie gives them their unheimlich appeal. They are neither complete cartoon renderings, nor are they the actors we are familiar with. They are distorted reflections of both. Their humanness is challenged through rotoscoping and the film‘s manipulation of their public personas distorts the boundaries between fiction and reality. At times they look very much like the actual actors we have seen frequently in other mainstream films while at other moments they seem completely animated.

Certainly much of Arctor‘s empathetic allure can be attributed to his dialogue, but it is also the unsettling recognition that accompanies seeing a person as ubiquitously known as Reeves reproduced as a pseudo-realistic cartoon that adds to the impact of his presence. If he remains empathetically compelling, it is because the defamiliarizing effect of rotoscoping has allowed the spectator to focus on the significance of Arctor‘s situation within the context of the narrative rather than Reeves‘ reflection of the role. It is at times difficult to reconcile the familiar likeness of Reeves with the film‘s animated version of him, and it is through overcoming these perceptual barriers (which have the 124

effect of reminding the viewer that cinema, like literature, is a representation) that the viewer might find the means to fully comprehend the multiple, divergent perspectives contained within the Robert Arctor character. In this specifically filmic way, we are confronted with something visual that perceptually challenges our ideas of humanness and reality. Along this line of discussion, Linklater‘s earlier film, Waking Life, could serve as a meaningful comparison to A Scanner Darkly for the simple reason that nearly all of the actors in Waking Life are unknown (with the exception of Ethan Hawke), and beyond any personal associations one might make, they are so completely distorted by animation that it is difficult not to see them entirely as overt simulations because there is no external frame of reference.

Thus, the casting choices made for Linklater‘s film have very specific functions and effects. More than simply a collection of intertextual excerpts, his transmediation of

A Scanner Darkly, through the metafictional use of the public and cinematic personas of various prominent actors, is analogous to Linda Hutcheon‘s notions of intertextuality, and because of the complex nature of the film‘s referential approach, what the viewer is faced with is the problem of referential excess. Hutcheon divides the variants of intertextual postmodern fictional representation into a multi-term model with five categories: intra- textual, self, intertextual, textualized extra-textual and hermeneutic reference.42 In a manner more subtle than works generally associated with the intertextual mode,

42 Intra-textual reference refers to the reality of fiction, that is, the world of the text itself. Auto- representational or self-reference refers to fiction as fiction, and intertextual reference points not just to metafiction but to a text within the text (in this case the film‘s title as reference to St. Paul‘s letter to the Corinthians would be an example). Extra-textual reference, rather than an attempt to derive authority from documentary data, ―offers extra-textual documents as traces of the past,‖ such as Reeves‘ public persona, while hermeneutic reference acknowledges the ―performative process,‖ the hermeneutic process of reading and that ―the reader, the you, not be left out‖ (APOPM 156), or as Bal suggests, ―writing, and by extension, painting or making a film, is an act of reading, and reading is a manner of rewriting or repainting‖ (62). 125

Linklater, with A Scanner Darkly, appears to have deliberately incorporated elements of the personal and professional lives of his cast in an effort to augment the referential resonance of his characters. Previous roles and celebrity status combined with the perceptual complexities of Dick‘s novel and their subsequent interpretation by Linklater make Reeves, Harrelson, Downey and Ryder more compelling and meaningful with regards to inter, intra and extra-textual reference. In this way, the actors colour the characters, which are subsequently coloured by Linklater‘s cinematic techniques.

In the film, Woody Harrelson is, at times, difficult to separate from his earliest comedic incarnation; he comes across as a paranoid Woody Boyd of Cheers fame. His voice and colloquial speech patterns distinguish him as being consistent with his previously established ―Woody‖ character type. This familiar interpretation works fine, as Luckman, in the novel, is a hapless, socially inept stoner as well. He is never involved in the conspiracies; he only identifies them and shrinks in fear. Harrelson, through his various fictional incarnations, fits Luckman‘s narrative profile and his previous roles add resonance to his portrayal of it. In similar fashion, Robert Downey Jr.‘s version of James

Barris is intra-textual and extra-textual. Viewers see an individual they are familiar with from entertainment television and previous films in an uncanny, animated form. The same could be said about Wynona Ryder and Rory Cochrane, though their roles, at opposite ends of the plausibility spectrum, are on the one hand hyperbolic (Cochrane) and on the other understated (Ryder).

The device which Linklater‘s adaptation hinges on most directly is its protagonist,

Bob Arctor, and Linklater‘s choice to cast Reeves in this role. Reeves/Arctor is the pinnacle of the film‘s layered mirroring of textual reference and visual effects. To this 126

end, Gronvall elaborates on the profound nature of Linklater‘s choice: ―who better than the star of The Matrix and its sequels, a trilogy that borrows heavily from Dick‘s sensibility and obsessions, to play a personality split through overindulgence in drugs and manipulation by outside forces he barely recognizes?‖ (2). Immediately, the association with previous, genre-related texts is apparent. In fact, Linklater claims to have been

―obsessed with Keanu Reeves as Arctor‖ (OSA) from the time the project was first conceived; thus, filming was delayed until he was available to work.

Linklater‘s use of Reeves in Scanner is similar to Tarantino‘s manipulation of the omnipresent pop culture appeal of John Travolta in his 1994 film Pulp Fiction. In

Travolta‘s Vincent Vega we get a simulacrum, a shallow copy of every white gangster thug since Al Capone. He is ―the map that precedes the territory‖ (Baudrillard 169) because he transcends all previous references to his type (gangster) and himself

(Travolta) through his unique status in this film. Although the Vincent character alludes to his various gangster antecedents, he is something more than just another cinematic thug. He is incongruous to the period and style of Pulp Fiction, as well as being incompatible with the narratives he may have been derived from. We sense that he is something extraordinary within the contemporary setting of Pulp Fiction but we know he would also be an enigma in a film such as The Godfather. He is a partial representation of something we are completely familiar with (gangster assassin), and an actual representation of something we are made only partially aware of (John Travolta and his various incarnations). In this way, Travolta reflects any number of associations back to the audience, reflections which again have the potential to be reinterpreted and directed 127

back on the character causing a perpetual exchange between the film, its content and the viewer.

Reeves also functions in this manner in A Scanner Darkly. His Bob Arctor persona is, on the surface, a slacker stereotype. The character superficially harkens back to Reeves‘ earlier role as a stoner, Ted Logan, in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. In a more meaningful way he resembles Scott Favor from My Own Private Idaho or Matt from River’s Edge. We also see the other side of Bob Arctor, that is, S.A. Fred, the

―troubled undercover cop dealing with the perils of addiction,‖ as a reflection of Reeves‘ previous law enforcement/action hero roles. Jonny Mnemonic from the film of the same name, Johnny Utah from Point Break, Jack Traven from Speed and Neo from The Matrix all make appearances within Reeves‘ Fred/Arctor performance. These characterizations contribute to our understanding of Reeves‘ portrayal of Arctor. In A Scanner Darkly, however, the characterization of Bob Arctor due to Dick‘s novel, Linklater‘s adaptation, and Reeves‘ portrayal transcends these antecedents.

Looking to Linda Hutcheon‘s postmodern evaluation of referentiality, we might discern how Reeves, as Arctor, becomes a percept. What makes Arctor so compelling is that he is no ordinary clone. He is intra-textual – as he operates within the realm of the movie, intertextual – as he refers to other fictional characters from which he was derived, and extra-textual – in the sense that he refers also to the actor, Keanu Reeves, more or less directly. Through his several incarnations, Arctor conveys a range of characters that encompasses Reeves‘ entire career. In this respect (the intertextual) Arctor/Fred/Bruce seems to be an amalgamation of Neo, Traven, and Ted Logan respectively. With the amalgamation of all Reeves‘ previous manifestations, Linklater creates something new, 128

distinct and hyperreal. Like Tarantino with Travolta, Linklater‘s fascination with Dick‘s dynamic addict constructs and ‗90s slacker culture is clearly what led him to shape the

Bob Arctor character in this filmic form and subsequently pursue Reeves for the role.

With this film, and this character specifically, Linklater bridges the gap between more sophisticated and obscure artistic values and popular culture. It is here we can find what

Jameson calls the, ―effacement . . . of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture‖ (PCL 2), and through that effacement we gain a perspective of Reeves which is textualized rather than historical or extra-textual.

In a distinctly less deliberate manner than Charlie Kaufman‘s use of John

Malkovich and Charlie Sheen as fictional characters within the fictional narrative of

Being John Malkovich, Arctor is a fictionalized version of the ubiquitous cinematic and public Keanu Reeves persona. The fact that Bob Arctor is not referred to as Keanu

Reeves merely alters this actor/character dynamic on the surface. The celebrity icon

Keanu Reeves, as a pop-cultural fixture, holds sway over our understanding of the Arctor character to such a significant degree that the Arctor name is easily dismissed as another alias in a long list of names that all refer to the singular individual, Reeves. Linklater‘s protagonist then, becomes ―Arctor-Fred-Whatever-[Keanu]‖ (ASD 29), and assumes a referential stance which, ultimately, enhances an understanding of Dick‘s protagonist as well.

The secret to Reeves‘ effectiveness seems most easily identified through his portrayals of action heroes. Films such as Speed and, most significantly here, The Matrix and perhaps Johnny Mnemonic flow along quite smoothly with his performance, rarely 129

drawing our focus from the narrative. It is in these films and in these roles, where he speaks less frequently and is required to emote sparingly, that Reeves is at his most effective. Like Arctor and Fred, in his best roles, Reeves is an observer. He seems to move along almost invisibly while buses, city streets and entire worlds explode and crumble around him. In these instances, he becomes the perfect everyman, the vague blur that Bob Arctor transforms into when he dons the scramble suit. The audience is perhaps able to project their own attentions and desires onto the character, played by an unimposing, oddly nondescript actor shifting silently through the action of the movie. In these action films, whenever Reeves does make some emotional ―noise,‖ it can be jarring.

It may give the viewer reason to pause and consider the very nature of the fictional world that Reeves‘ character of the moment inhabits, and to call this ―reality‖ into question.

When Reeves does pause to express genuine emotion, the viewer is held within the diegesis via the Reeves/Fred/Neo/Arctor simulacrum. It is a remarkably unexpected effect. When the Arctor character diverges from the novel‘s narrative and pauses to comment, his remarks feel removed, as though, like Fred in the safe apartment, he is standing at a distance from the situation and objectively regarding the scene. In similar fashion, with the film, the audience is simultaneously aware of Reeves‘ and Arctor‘s presence, and as a result, Arctor‘s introspective, poignant lines take on a sincerity that is attributable to the mechanical nature of Reeves‘ performance coupled with the mechanical manner in which Linklater has portrayed him. Rather than becoming less empathetic through the overtly non-human facade of interpolated rotoscoping, Arctor is dramatically more meaningful. Reeves‘ intertextual layers, in combination with the visual layers that compel our interest, hold the Arctor character in a sort of medial space 130

where he has the potential to move between the fictional world of the film and the external world of the audience.

On a literary level, it is clear that Linklater, with his script, was attempting to emulate Dick‘s narrative objectives. In concert with this notion, Dick‘s overt cinematic sensibilities, which also take their cue from the narrative‘s objectives, find their way into the film‘s visual presentation. The movie, like the book, clearly focuses on a dystopic future as seen through the bewildered eyes of several junkies. As well, the inspiration for the sinister themes of surveillance, central to each story, was derived from disturbing topical issues. For Dick it was Vietnam and the Nixon era while what made the cinematic production of A Scanner Darkly so meaningful for Linklater are its perceived connections with post-9/11 America. Having read the novel previously, Linklater explained that after September 11th, 2001 he re-read A Scanner Darkly and ―saw it in a whole new way. The way power works, and surveillance, and government control – all those elements make it more relevant than ever‖ (Russell 10). He states that ―what was paranoid then is our reality‖ (Russell 10) in this new millennium. We see Linklater‘s

Orwellian police-state sensibilities in two of the film‘s few added scenes. The first, a sequence, involving Arctor as he walks along the streets of Anaheim while talking with

Hawthorne, cuts abruptly to a control room full of sophisticated audio-visual monitoring devices which are being used to ubiquitously spy on seemingly everyone. The second involves a lone street preacher, bewailing the dangers of Substance D and government control, who is accosted and Tasered by a menacing paramilitary group.

Both artists attempt to communicate the sinister, dehumanizing aspects of external forces of control, and both believe their message is completely relevant to their respective 131

times. Dick uses his elusive story to recreate unfamiliar conditions and experiences such as schizophrenia, drug addiction and paranoia. The novel‘s equivocations and snares43 and its tenebrous mirror-texts fictionally represent the veil that obscures its meaning while, paradoxically, providing the reader with the means to penetrate it. Linklater, in similar fashion, uses the cinematic tools at his disposal to render Dick‘s sinister, schizoid world.

Rotoscoping is the most potent of the mirrors Linklater places before Dick‘s narrative in an effort to recreate the schizoid, tweaked-out perspective of the junkie in a hypermediated environment. The paranoia that accompanies constant surveillance and drug addiction is cinematically rendered here via Linklater‘s equivocal treatment of it.

His distorted rendering has the power to provoke a self-directed reading. He controls the viewer‘s gaze and guides it towards an intertextualized, hyperreal cast of actors, who, like the rotoscoping technique, vacillate between fabrications of subtly real and entirely fictional constructs. In this space, between fiction and reality, story and fabula, is excess that the spectator can acknowledge and use to pursue an independent interpretation of the film. His rationale: ―Scanner was good for animation, not only because of the scramble suit but because the animation would put the viewer into a similar headspace as Robert

Arctor. There‘s a certain brain split, because that‘s the way your brain sees it: something‘s real, something‘s not real as you see this animation‖ (Robb 275). Dick‘s narrative suggests the ―real/not real‖ dichotomy that Linklater equates with rotoscoping.

43 Here I refer to equivocations and snares as terms employed by Roland Barthes in his essay S/Z. Equivocations are devices which are a mixture of truth and snare. Snares are misleading answers or lies (32-38). 132

In the novel, Arctor‘s frame of mind is rendered via narrative excess, while in the film it is conveyed through visually layered special effects.

To put the viewer in a headspace similar to that of a junkie who exhibits faltering lucidity in the midst of his dark dreams, is perhaps Linklater‘s most significant comment on his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. In doing this Linklater creates hypermedia awareness, which distances viewers from the film so they can reconnect with its thematic concerns. By pushing the audience to naturalize the animated veneer of the movie, its significance as a stylistic device might be inferred. Where hypermediacy is insinuated in the novel, the film is able to reproduce those concepts perceptually. The images of split- brain dysfunction, schizophrenic delusion and paranoia are made more immediate via the medium of film, and the stylistically excessive manner in which they are conveyed manages the implications of these phenomena in the manner they were conceived by

Dick: from perception to conception.

The novel attempts to recreate visual and physical experiences in an assumed space while the film is more effectively able to fabricate the novel‘s intimations so that they are immediately accessible to the spectator. The bifurcated, drug-addled perspective of Dick‘s protagonist finds a new potency in filmic remediation through stylistic excess.

The description of Arctor‘s lack of bilateral parity in the novel is complex, as we might assume any verbal rendering of an obscure and intense mental disorder might be. His conflicting, plural perspectives are the glaring indicator of a falsified reality, and because of the uncanny nature of Arctor‘s illness, his condition would be difficult to illustrate through conventional, realist filmic images. With his visuals, Linklater consciously attempts to artistically re-represent or transmediate the often cinematic, sometimes 133

synthetic imagery that Dick‘s novel suggests. He takes Dick‘s ―percepts‖ and from them manufactures his own dynamic ―origami unicorns‖ that change the way we see the novel and compel a reconsideration of the film.

Not only is Linklater‘s film capable of showing the hypermediated perspectives

Dick tries to communicate through words, but the filmic medium is more able to reveal that spatial perspective for viewers, allowing them to become external controllers of the filmic narrative‘s ideas. The active engagement and autonomy of interpretation that the reader of a novel is afforded is effectively reflected by the filmmaker. The cinematic novel, remediated via the cinema in a transmediative manner that extends and fleshes out its story also reinstates the agency of the reader in the spectator via confrontational cinematic excess, and in this way the challenges of decrypting both texts is more easily negotiated. The film, through hypermediation, is perceptually challenging while maintaining the physical and spatial immediacy that cinema provides. The more readily naturalized aspects of the filmic medium, such as montage, mise-en-scène and cinematography are distorted through the hyperreal ―glass‖ of interpolated rotoscoping, and because of the hypermedia awareness, this conflict creates the narrative frame and the concepts it contains can be viewed from a critical distance. The combined roads of narrative excess in the novel and stylistic excess in the filmic transmediation lead to a comprehensive and clear perspective on A Scanner Darkly.

Linklater also plays on the disparities that define much of Dick‘s oeuvre. The postmodern environment that Dick anticipates through his writing is fully located in

Linklater‘s film. In concert with the jarringly mediated aspects of Dick‘s darkly humorous story, Linklater‘s filmic adaptation imposes the novel‘s social and political 134

objectives more stringently and coherently on its audience while cryptically addressing the question of its characters‘ humanity. Both author and auteur leave us with uncertainty. Linklater, through filmic excess, is able to amalgamate the excessive concepts which Dick suggests. A reflection of Dick‘s own experiences can be seen in his novel as well. Linklater takes this autobiographical content and places it before his own stylistically excessive, filmic mirror. Dick‘s roman à clef, a mirror, is placed en abîme in

Linklater‘s rotoscoped film. The result is an infinite regress of concepts and percepts whose reflections resonate internally within each work and externally between both media. 135

Author‘s Notes

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in

part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

NKJV 1 Corinthians, 13:12

There is another reference to 1 Corinthians 13 in the Dick canon that predates the publication of A Scanner Darkly. It is found in his 1964 Hugo award-winning novel The

Man in the High Castle: ―Now one appreciates Saint Paul's incisive word choice seen through glass darkly not a metaphor, but astute reference to optical distortion. We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense‖ (HC 233). Here one of the novel‘s protagonists, Tagomi, suggests that people, in general, see the world as though looking through a lens which refracts light in such a way that the resulting image is distorted.

Astigmatism occurs when an aberration in the lens prevents light rays from focusing correctly on the retina. Beyond his philosophical position regarding perception,

Tagomi‘s observations regarding optical distortion are, interestingly enough, physiologically accurate. Not everyone has astigmatism, but our eyes do alter what we see.

That is, sight occurs when light rays passing through our pupils are inverted, and as a consequence ―the brain sees things upside down and backward‖ (Margulies 42).

Light passing through the lenses is naturally inverted. This physical phenomenon forces the brain to compensate. Without the brain to reinterpret the data they collect, the eyes are a dark mirror. Furthermore, the brain can be trained to invert images. Using special glasses that reverse light before it enters the eyes will cause the brain to ―correct‖ the 136

reversed image. Once this occurs, when the distorting glasses are removed the world appears inverted for a period of time until the brain can readjust.44 Like Arctor, the human mind can be manipulated and trained to perceive things that do not occur naturally, and, like the holoscanners, the eyes require a mediator to correct the images they survey so that what is observed is seen clearly.

In spite of the mediative functioning of our minds, St. Paul suggests that we see our world as if it were reflected in a mirror darkly and it is only upon coming face to face with God in death that we shall see and be seen clearly. This passage, a favorite reading during wedding ceremonies, is used as a reminder of the significance and nature of the kind of love that is required in order to sustain such an enduring union. However, it is the lines preceding St. Paul‘s comments about the mirror that describe love as patient, kind and selfless, which are most often quoted. This section, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, speaks of a transcendent devotion that perseveres because it is founded on empathy, which stems from the ability to see things from the perspective of the other, through

God‘s eyes, or in the case of marriage, the betrothed. These comments on the clarity of vision and the profound connection with God that is achieved through death, a death of the self, resonates with hopeful couples everywhere because in marriage, perhaps, it is most desirable that the individuals involved should sacrifice their separate views on life and love in exchange for an empathetic, shared perspective. Marriage should provide a reflection of, and a mirror for, each of the individuals involved, in that through words and actions they each might see their own likeness in the other, not in reverse but as it actually is, re-reflected and infinite.

44 A more detailed explanation of the human visual system can be found in Breedlove, et al. 137

Not surprisingly, this vision of love and God is consistent with Dick‘s late 1970s, philosophical views. Towards the end of his life he moved away from drugs towards

Gnosticism and within his Gnostic lexicon, infinite regress equaled God. As Katherine

Hayles explains, ―for Dick, the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction of reality. Both end at the same point, in infinite regresses that, for mystical reasons, he chose to call God‖ (Hayles 190). In Deleuzian terms, the observer and her or his reality merge and move into a state of perpetual potential, of ―becoming:‖

―the eternal, productive return of difference‖ (Stagoll 21). The difficult questions we pose, the ―percepts‖ we encounter are potentially self-perpetuating and possibly lead to unexpected answers. Consequently, this epistemological feedback loop, which relates to

Dick‘s personal speculations and those which might be found in A Scanner Darkly, must be disrupted in order to see beyond the novel‘s infinite regresses. That is, its narrative excess must be reconciled and readers die a figurative death in which they are ejected from the diegetic world of the story and allowed to see through the novel scanner from an external point of view. This distanced perspective might provide the omniscient clarity that St. Paul speaks of.

Thus marriage is, figuratively speaking, a kind of death. It is the presumed end of a microcosmically leaning, egotistical love in search of a more empathetic, macrocosmic perspective. St. Paul proclaims that in death we will see clearly; we will see things as they actually are once we are in heaven with God the creator. Without the flesh or the ego to impede our view, God and the universe will appear before us, and through death we will enter into a more meaningful state of existence. But what does it mean to see clearly? The parallel with Dick‘s novel is straightforward enough. In A Scanner Darkly, 138

―Substance D = Death‖ (ASD 27). Arctor, while addicted to ―death,‖ is transformed and sees things clearly, but he is incapable of making sense out of what he sees, and; consequently, he confesses late in the novel that through the scanners he can only see darkly. However, it is revealed that Arctor, tragically, will become a mirror at some future point for Donna Hawthorne and Mike Westaway. Through his death they will see clearly and through his example the reader will, presumably, gain some insight into how the narrative works or perhaps what the author‘s objectives were in writing it. To see clearly then, is not just the ability to channel unobstructed light through the visual apparatus, one must be able to correctly interpret the images and information contained in the vision.

The story tells us that addiction leads to death, and society exploits the dead to serve the living. It is a pessimistic and tragic conclusion. It is Dick‘s conclusion for these are his reflections on his life after all. His comments to that effect are candid. He has said repeatedly in interviews and in the novel‘s afterword that parts of the dope scene

―were funny and wonderful and other parts were hideous‖ (DI 89) and that he actually experienced everything that occurs in A Scanner Darkly (Fuchs 46). The novel is his roman à clef, his story with a key, which he narrated ―from the deepest part of [his] life and heart‖ (ASD 277), and in it he reveals what can happen when one finds the key and discovers that behind the door it unlocks is merely another locked passageway. This perpetual unlocking is his metaphor for drug addiction, a pursuit that leads to brief, intensely revealing moments only to end in impasse. In the same way that Arctor is

Hawthorne‘s scanner that will allow her to see into New Path‘s operations clearly, the novel is the reader‘s scanner that can provide a clear view of Dick‘s narrative, but only if 139

we are able to see beyond the narrative‘s subterfuge. The novel communicates Dick‘s revealed worlds in the manner he experienced them: through eyes tempered by excess and uncertainty. Consequently, the novel itself is a dark scanner; it does not reveal itself in an immediate way, and this fact necessitates it be operated by a meticulous and astute controller.

Consequently, it is fortunate that the reflection and refraction does not end with

Dick‘s story. Writing, Mieke Bal tells us, ―and by extension, painting or making a film, is an act of reading, and reading is a manner of rewriting or repainting‖ (62). There is a symbiosis inherent in the exchange. The novel was also Linklater‘s scanner and the source of his film and, by extension, his audience‘s scanner as well. Linklater‘s additional perspective on Dick‘s narrative extends and clarifies the source through

Jenkins‘ notions of transmedia storytelling. This thesis is yet another clarifying reflection that aspires to increase its readers‘ potential to see both narratives, novel and filmic, clearly. Writing about the rendering and subsequent remediation of this singular story has hopefully extended this progression. Like Arctor, as the process moved along and I drew closer to completion, brief flashes of insight that initially seemed incoherent were revealed to be part of a more unified whole and it was the desire to find unity within my discussion of these narratives that led to an understanding of what I aspired to communicate to my reader. Therefore, distance and refraction of both film and novel through this thesis, perhaps, clarifies rather than obscures because the imposition of my external control on the reader is for benevolent purposes and is purposefully illuminating rather than bewildering. 140

Substance D creates a situation where users can see but are unable to comprehend the information their eyes behold. The distortions it creates only last as long as the mind is capable of fighting against its homogenizing effects. The ugly things, the surprising and occasionally wondrous moments that Arctor comes to know as an addict, these cease to exist once the drug has completely conquered the addict‘s mind. And the governmental institution that turns Arctor into their ―camera‖ is hardly better, for as Dick has stated: ―The reduction of humans to mere use - men made into machines, serving a purpose which although ‗good‘ in an abstract sense [is] the greatest evil imaginable‖ (SR

187). It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Donald Abrahams and Donna Hawthorne share such similar names, for their objectives are the same. But the altruistic or compassionate controller, like VALIS in Radio Free Albemuth, whose only desire is to direct Nicholas towards a more comprehensive understanding of his situation, can guide us down the road of excess to the palace of wisdom. Dick and Linklater fall into this latter category and each in their own way attempts to provide their audience with a clear view of their narrated worlds.

With A Scanner Darkly, Dick managed to manufacture a conceptual narrative that attempts to communicate some of the challenges and processes that inhibit perception and understanding. With writing in general, the same issues experienced by

Arctor can occur. For the writer, creating worlds that do not fall apart two days later is the objective even if, as in the case of Philip K. Dick, it is within the debris of those crumbling worlds where understanding might be found. In the novel, Arctor attempts to make sense of his story. He tries in vain to piece the various fragments together and come up with a coherent narrative. Reading Dick‘s story moves us in a similar manner, 141

and we try to pull the fragmented story aspects together to compose a logical fabula.

Linklater, having gone through this reader/writer process as well, provides his viewers with the benefits of his transmediated endeavours.

With the novel, clarity is achieved through careful navigation of the confused and plural perspectives provided by the characters and the non-narrative digressions contained within the story. These story aspects that function as excess create a distancing, hypermedia awareness, which Patricia Warrick suggests is comparable to the challenges often imposed on Dick‘s characters. That is, to live successfully within his stories the individual ―must somehow balance his mind on the invisible edge between polarities and also between the inner and outer view . . . break through the glass of darkness . . . and see himself from the point of view of the other‖ (30). Warrick‘s is a challenging proposition particularly if the other happens to be a dissociated fragment of the self, as it is in Arctor‘s case. To see yourself from the point of view of the other is to see objectively and empathetically.

In his essay ―Deleuze‘s Dick,‖ Russell Ford comments on what he refers to as

Philip K. Dick‘s masterpiece, A Scanner Darkly. He states that it is a novel in which

Bob/Fred ―is pushed past the point of endurance and into an inverted space, a space pulled through infinity . . . where interruption achieves a consistency of its own‖ (66).

According to Ford, A Scanner Darkly creates percepts that affect thought and interruptions that force thinking to endure unforeseeable events. The endurance of these events leads to the development of new inferences and understandings. It is through these interruptions, narrative and stylistic excess, that Dick and Linklater provide us with 142

glimpses of clarity. Occasionally, like Arctor, their works ―flash‖ the manner in which things actually function, but, also like their constructs, these flashes are not sustained.

Dick‘s novel is a passive and conflicted device that requires input from the reader if it is to make sense. It functions much like Arctor‘s bewildered brain in that it provides plural and oppositional perspectives, which, if left unresolved and unmediated are simply confounding. It is a curious mixture of conceptual mediation that suggests hypermediacy, but it does so with less force than the film. The result is a faltering immediacy. The point of view of Linklater‘s film, obviously postmodern and anti- realistic, provides critical distance from the complexities of the novel. Through the film,

Linklater‘s rendering of Dick‘s vision is imposed on the viewer; and because of the stylistic excesses therein, the astute viewer is in a better position to realize how the content of both the novel and the film is intended to be understood. The novel is a scramble suit, it is in many ways a multitude of potentially impenetrable flash-cut images. The film is a holoscanner and, like Arctor‘s scanner, it continues to provide conflicting images but from the spectator‘s distanced position, these conflicts are more easily reconciled.

Excess imposes its own conditions. It insists on acknowledgement. But can a scanner, as Arctor wonders, ever hope to see down into someone‘s head or heart? The question more germane to this discussion is: can it provide insight into the intricate workings of a person‘s mind as it has been rendered via fiction? In the final sentence of the novel, Bruce insists the scanners cannot see ―inside his mind . . . no one could‖ (ASD

275). Like the culminating scene between Donald and Bruce, there is the moment when

Donald places his hand before Bruce‘s eyes and as if by magic, Bruce can no longer see 143

the Mors Ontologica that is right in front of him. The novel, like Donald, frequently puts its hand in front of our eyes and suggests that we can‘t see. Like Bruce, we sense something significant, something we‘ve been reminded of time and again. Like

Hawthorne or the ―deputy‖ psychologists, Dick‘s novel places hints before us in the hope that we‘ll figure out how to use these clues. Dick places us among the obscured rows of

Mors Ontologica, but we need Linklater to make them visible for us. He does this by drawing us away from Arctor‘s murky and immediate perspective. He does this by placing us before a glass and compelling us to observe Arctor as he observes himself.

The final vague, blurry image of Bruce that the reader is afforded at the end of the novel is positioned by Linklater within the larger frame of the film‘s culminating crane shot. The camera gradually pulls away from Bruce revealing the immensity of the New

Path farming operation. As the music swells, we start to lose track of Bruce among the myriad details of this closing composition, and we cannot help but feel he is lost. He becomes a part of the landscape. His individual point of view has been overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment. And in that instant, as the music swells and the image of the fields and mountains fades to black, the abridged ―Author‘s Note‖ flashes across the screen and jars us out of the immediacy of this poignant, epic moment. Instead of reflecting on the final sentiments of the film‘s tragic hero, we are catapulted into the world of the author as the names of the fallen are listed and Dick‘s closing epitaph is displayed across the screen:

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too

much for what they did . . . I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I

dedicate my love: 144

To Gaylene deceased

To Ray deceased

To Francy permanent psychosis

To Kathy permanent brain damage

To Jim deceased

To Val massive permanent brain damage

To Nancy permanent psychosis

To Joanne permanent brain damage

To Maren deceased

To Nick deceased

To Terry deceased

To Dennis deceased

To Phil permanent pancreatic damage

To Sue permanent vascular damage

To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage

. . . and so forth.

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better.

They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The

―enemy‖ was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some

other way, and let them be happy.

Philip K. Dick

The picture within a picture, the mise en abîme, is placed before us and through the hypermediacy of this final moment we are made unavoidably aware of the novel, the 145

author and his autobiographical ties to the narrative. In this instance the film becomes the novel as it reflects the objectives of the author and his book via words rather than images. Some things get lost in translation, but in the attempt to find those missing pieces a clearer image of what was originally there can be found. And this closing image and all that it implies brings us back to St. Paul who tells us that without love, everything else is meaningless, but with love there is the potential to see things from someone else‘s perspective: ―For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away‖ (NKJV 1 Corinthians

13:9-10). Dick‘s love for his friends is the final thought we are left with and through this notion, above all others, we see through the darkness of Dick‘s narrative, clearly. 146

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