Brett's A Scanner Darkly Notes

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Background

Executive producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh are deep state assets.

Erwin Stoff, one of the producers, was also an executive producer on The Matrix and has been involved with all sorts of other pernicious predictive programming projects, most recently Chaos Walking (about “a dangerous and disorienting reality where all thoughts are seen and heard by everyone”) directed by Doug Liman, a deep state asset whose father was a Fed lawyer who served as chief counsel during the Iran-Contra hearings.

Tony Pallotta, one of the producers, makes transhumanist propaganda like More Human than Human, featuring Nick Bostrom, a documentary about a director trying to replace himself with a robot.

Virtually everyone in the cast is suss. Ryder was Leary’s goddaughter, and her parents were also connected with the Huxleys. Harrelson father, who was assassinated for killing a Federal judge, was probably involved in the Kennedy assassination and Woody indicated in a Barbara Walters interview that he was in the CIA.

P.K. Dick said the story was partially inspired by the climate of paranoia that pervaded the Berkeley counterculture during the Nixon era. His house was broken into on multiple occasions, probably by government agencies, and, based on the details of the story, he obviously suspected that some people in the drug world were Feds. Consider COINTELPRO (FBI) and CHAOS (CIA) infiltration and subversion of the anti-war and Black Power movements. Some similar paranoia in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, where the protagonists speculate that a certain person might be a covert agent.

Linklater’s movies get rather soulless after Waking Life (where he used the same rotoscoping as in this film). At work is a pattern we’ve observed with a number of other directors, notably Christopher Nolan, that their early spunk and artistic verve starts to drain out of their work once they become part of the Hollywood elite. Linklater abandons support for Alex Jones during the Obama era, when continuing to say nice things about him became very inconvenient for Linklater’s career.

Consider other dystopian super-drug movies, like Alien Nation and Robocop2.

Drug horror

A quarter of the population is addicted to Substance D in a scenario that is something like the inverse of that envisioned by Aldous Huxley at the end of The Doors of Perception, where the perfect drug is available for everyone to be happy and well adjusted.

Film open with “bad trip” triggering sequence depicting the dope delusions (bugs crawling everywhere) of the Rory Cochrane character.

Note also the poster in his apartment with a skull flanked by psilocybin cubensis mushrooms.

Substance D comes from a blue flower, as in Batman Begins, released two years earlier and which also plays with drug horror. From imdb:

"Clerodendron Ugandens", the source of the organic component of Substance D is apparently based on a real species of flower - "Clerodendrum ugandense", the blue glorybower. However, it has been reclassified and is now known under the correct name "Rotheca myricoides". Like the movie asserts, the plant is highly poisonous to humans and livestock.

We learn that Substance D induces psychosis through “splitting” the brain, causing the two hemispheres to "compete” rather than cooperate harmoniously.

Drug War Psyop

Within the diegesis, which takes us “seven years from now,” drug enforcement has become a justification for the militarization of the police and the endless expansion of police powers, including the imposition of a total surveillance state in which information is highly compartmentalized. Not even Bob’s boss knows his real identity…and it doesn’t matter.

Red Pill Programming

Substance D is literally a red pill. From imdb:

The Red Pills, known as Substance Death, a drug that alters a user's reality, bear a striking resemblance to the Red Pills given to the character Douglas Quaid in the film Total Recall(1990) that, in this instance, are used to bring Quaid out of the Rekall Memory Implant-induced reality.

In his opening speech, which is scripted by his law enforcement handlers, Keanu/Bob balks at reading the script at one point (where he’s supposed to threaten the drug pushers with horrible “retribution”) because “this is the kind of stuff that gets people on drugs,” i.e., that it is red pill programming. Instead of going along, Bob tells them that Substance D is actually atomizing society and sowing death.

Alex Jones is the voice of wisdom in the wilderness, telling everyone the truth that Substance D is bad news but so is the drug war. He sees beyond the transgressive freedom vs. oppressive conformity dialectic on which red pill programming depends. Red pill programming frames the desired behavior as liberating and transgressive, over against the stultifying oppression of the square world with its forcible suppression of liberating eros. And then this raw, undirected eros  can be manipulated and channeled in the ways desired by the programmers, while its very existence can be used to justify the expansion of state powers to control it.

Alex also raises the question of where Substance D came from, the implication being that it was introduced by cryptocratic forces for these very reasons…like something else that recently came out of a biolab.

And Alex is right as usual. The drug is being cultivated by the “New Path Recovery Center,” which is conveniently exempted from scanner surveillance. It also functions as a brainwashing center (cf. Inherent Vice). People repeat these slogans which translate the behavioral expectations of the dystopian society into a tepid pseudo-spirituality. In the novel, “As part of the rehab program, Arctor is renamed ‘Bruce’ and forced to participate in cruel group-dynamic games, intended to break the will of the patients” (Wikipedia).

The rehab is perhaps, for some, the gamma stage of red pill programming. First, your eros is unleashed, then you’re demoralized as your unbridled erotic energies start to destroy your body and soul, then you seek help and are sent to “rehab,” where you’re mind controlled into a parody of the liberated self promised by red pill programming.

Also, it’s important to note how blaming the victim, a favorite pastime of psychopaths, is part and parcel of red pill programming. As “Hank” tell Bob toward the end, “No one held a gun to your head. You knowingly and willingly took an addictive drug.” Of course, Hank/Donna was deliberately getting him addicted to Substance D so they could infiltrate New Path.

Note that they also gaslight him. The psychologists administer cognitive tests where the patient is supposed to identify a figure describes by the breaks in a series of horizontal lines. There’s a sheep on the card, but they insist it’s a dog, whereupon, on the next card, Bob says that he’s looking at plastic dog crap, meaning, that the whole exercise is gaslighting BS.

The gaslighting, in turn, seems to be part of a broader program of hypnotically controlling certain agents. Bob is clearly given a hypnotic suggestion by the female psychologist to buy his love interest “blue flowers,” i.e., Substance D.

So, to sum up the high-intensity red pill programming op: the authorities made intelligence work alluring to recruit people like Bob, dissatisfied with workaday family life; then it encourages them, indeed hypnotically commands them, to use drugs; and finally it turns around and uses their drug-use to blackmail and control them and suborn them into more and more ops. This process is basically a microcosm of the lower-intensity red pill-drug war psyop, whereby drugs are made alluring and then the addiction and excess that results from mass drug use is used as a pretense to expand the police/surveillance state and as a means of mass brainwashing the entire drug-addled population.

Intelligence culture

For Bob Arctor, having “taken the red pill” (that is, having become a covert operative and a Substance D user), there is no way out of the world of intelligence. Unbeknownst to him, his stint in rehab is actually another assignment—for another handler (or the same handler, but now revealed as such). And it will never end.

Intelligence culture pervades this dystopian society, with half the population working as informers. The red pill leads people out of normal social relations and into the “exciting” world of espionage and covert ops. The plot of the film reveals how the lure of intelligence work promises not only freedom from the stultifying oppression of domestic life (and intelligence agents operate best without the burden of a family) but also power over your circle of friends, in whatever walk of life you come from.

The “scramble suit” makes you “the ultimate Everyman.” No coincidence that this “ultimate Everyman” in the film is Hollywood Jesus Keanu Reeves. The suit also makes you no one, makes you anonymous. Everyman is No Man, and pure potentiality is 0 actuality.

Ernie (Woody Harrelson) references DiCaprio in Catch Me if You Can, in the context of a discussion about an imposter who pretends to be an imposter, which captures the intersection between postmodern self-reflexivity and intelligence culture and the synergy they achieve in decohering culture:

You see, he didn't pose as any of those. He just posed as a world-famous impostor. Yeah. It came out later in the L.A. Times. They checked up, and he was pushing a broom at Disneyland or something. He saw that old DiCaprio movie. You know, the one where he plays a world-famous impostor…before Leonardo hit his Elvis stage. And his first thought was: "Hey, I could pose as all those exotic guys and get away with it." But then, his next thought was, "Hell, why bother? I could just pose as an impostor, and it'd be a lot easier."

There’s another reference to Disney:  a poster with a head in a bottle and the phrase “Time to thaw Walt out,” alluding to Walt’s supposedly being cryogenically frozen.

There’s a way in which the proliferation of the intelligence culture mimics the effects of Substance D. The scramble suit changes one’s appearance constantly, so that it’s impossible to know who the wearer is, while the drug damages people’s brains until they can’t tell who’s who.

The Message

The twist at the end is that Winona was working for a high-level Gnostic group embedded within the law enforcement-intelligence establishment (cf. Q). This group is opposed to the red pill psyop, but they use the arts of deception necessary to get ahead in the mass intelligence culture. And, as Thomas points out, “these supposed white hats are also perpetuating that cycle, they purposefully got Bob addicted and insane so they could send him on this mission.” When Winona remarks that “we are colder than they are," her good guy handler, who already stated that there was just no other way to infiltrate New Path, gives the following speech:

I don't think so. I mean, I believe God's m.o. is to transmute evil into good and if he's active here, he's doing that now...although our eyes can't perceive it. The whole process is hidden beneath the surface of our reality and will only be revealed later. And even then...the people of the future...our children's children will never truly know...this awful time that we have gone through and the losses we took. Well, maybe some footnote in a minor history book. A brief mention with no list of the fallen. You're seeing the flower of the future.

What I will say in favor of the film’s message is that, unlike numberless other Hollywood films, A Scanner Darkly does not glamorize mass intelligence culture—quite the contrary. On the other hand, the ontologically and morally disorienting gnostic frame of reality that the film (and Dick) pushes offers no way out of mass intelligence culture (even for the best of us), with its nested rings of intrigue and deception. In the end, one just prays that some of the practitioners of these dark arts are “white hats” at heart. No accident that Q world is thoroughly gnosticized.

Is there not, though, a positive message in the fact that Bob left his supposedly empty, unsatisfying family life (taking “the red pill”) and ended up half-psychotic and compromised in every way? Dick seems to have regretted his failures as a family man more than he romanticized his bohemian lifestyle.

Occult stuff

James (Downey Jr.) is wearing an Eye of Providence/all-seeing eye shirt in his intro scene. In the next scene that he appears in, his first line is, “total, total, total, total providence….”

Is that a Masonic G on the poster of the crash house?

Imdb:

A theme of bears can be noticed in the film: the meeting at the start is of the Brown Bear Lodge; a California state flag (with a bear on it) is seen in Arctor's house; Arctor's name appears to be derived from "Ursus arctos", the scientific name for the brown bear, and from the star, Arcturus (located in the Bootes constellation, which is also known as the "bear keeper or herder").

Is there any astrological (Ursula) meaning here?

Imdb:

The lodge number and Arctor's house address are "709". This is a reference to the famed Austin satirical rock band "Uranium Savages", who use 709 as a "secret" number. All Uranium Savages fans are familiar with this, and Linklater likely inserted the number as an homage to the band.

Etc.

Rory Cochraine holds the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead during his suicide attempt, which, according to Dick, was meant to signal that he saw himself as “a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses.”