I have been meaning to write about A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K Dick, for a few months. I read it last year and really enjoyed it, but found it challenging and disturbing. It is a dark exploration of drug addiction and it is a vaguely autobiographical account of Dick's life. It traces the life and decline of Robert Actor and his dual life as a crime fighting drug cop or Narc and as Bob Actor a drug using sometime dealer. The paranoia and madness that come from the book is quite powerful. I really enjoyed it as the plot works, but it is a book you put down for a bit from time to time.
I was reading on Matt Jones' site about the new Wired on "The second coming of Philip K Dick", so I did some hunting and it seems that Warner Bros. have an option to make a film of A Scanner Darkly. Read more on the Philip K Dick fan site
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick to be a film ?
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A Scanner Darkly was the first PKD book i read, back at school, after finally watching blade runner and realising it wasn't some cheap film about popping people eyeballs out (don't ask). the cover of the paperback i have has a large zigurat similar to the one in the film, probably helped me pick that one. It is one of his most powerful books, its most complex (not just ODD) and also most moving. In fact that and Flow My tears, the polieman said are my favourites.
As to a film of it, well in the end i hope that they just launch from the material and go somewhere else with it, as they have done with every other PKD book/story to film. I don't need a film version of the book (a la harry potter) but do relish the thougt of some directors taking some of the material and reshaping it themselves.
Terry GIlliam and David Cronenberg, they would be interesting though in their own way they have already done this just not with a licenced title.
I am looking forward to a lot of those other films mentioned, especially the ones that are not PKD based, just paranoid :) That was what was good about the truman show, being John malkovich, gattaca, existenz etc.
mark.
The one ray of hope I saw in there was that Clooney and Soderburgh's company Section 8 brought the option for Scanner. They did a good job on Solaris which ended with a PKD end instead of the Lem end - Clooney's character ends up in a fantasy world with his dead wife inside of a giant computational gas giant.
Apart from that it could just about end up as anything. PKD based films have gone through a lot of morphing to bring them to the big screen and give them appeal. All his main characters are weasely and pathetic, which doesn't fit with a hollywood movie, but the cop character might be more interesting in a film version of Scanner.
I'm trying to remember where the title comes from. I'm sure it comes from a quote "through a lens darkly" but can't remember who said it. Was it Dostoevsky?
The title comes from I Corinthians 13 : "...we see as through a mirror darkly" and essentially refers to the main character's weak grasp on reality