Why A Scanner Darkly remains the most faithful adaptation of Philip K Dick’s work

“Everything in A Scanner Darkly I actually saw,” Philip K Dick once claimed. His 1977 novel is patently dystopian, as a narcotics officer ends up so deep undercover that he’s assigned to spy on himself. In the near future, fears of corruption have led the police force to don “scramble suits” – body gloves that cycle through “a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations” of different individuals. The images flash by so fast, the wearer appears as nothing more than a blur. Cops are left clueless as to the identities of their own colleagues.

The “scramble suit” is a product of the author’s own Promethean imagination – out of which also sprang “precogs”, android hunters, and memory implants – but the hero’s descent into addiction hell reads as pure biography. “Substance D”, the stimulant at the centre of the novel, shares similarities with speed, which Dick abused throughout much of his career. A Scanner Darkly was his first completed novel not written under the influence.

Its protagonist, Bob Arctor, once lived the quiet, suburban life – a wife, two kids, and a lawnmower included. Dick’s fourth wife Nancy left him in 1970, taking their daughter with her so that he was now alone in their four-bedroom house. The people he found to fill that void, mostly drug addicts, brought him into their vortex of self-destruction. A Scanner Darkly ends with a dedication to the friends who died or whose bodies were forever scarred (himself included, listed as suffering “permanent pancreatic damage”). “Let them play again, in some other way, and let them be happy,” he writes.

This dedication features at the end of Richard Linklater’s 2006 animated adaptation, still the most faithful translation of Dick’s work. Filmmakers have often been tempted to use the author’s concepts as inspiration for their own glossy, sophisticated sci-fi creations – say, Blade Runner (1982), or Total Recall (1990). But Linklater’s version sees A Scanner Darkly for what it is: not a story about infinite possibility, but about a near-future that feels only a few dark days away from our own. It’s a film filled with aching regret for events that may not yet happen – more so than the usual fear and technophobia.

Outside of the “scramble suits” and heightened surveillance technology, the world created by Linklater is inseparable from mid-Noughties Austin. With one major exception: the film was created using a technique called interpolated rotoscoping. Scenes would first be shot with live actors – artists would then digitally trace over a few frames by hand, with a computer filling in the gaps. The director had already employed the software, developed by MIT grad Bob Sabiston, on 2001’s Waking Life, which follows a young man through a succession of lucid dreams.

Keanu Reeves, who plays Arctor, and his onscreen compatriots Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder, avoided the usual fuss of the film set. The makeup never had to be perfect and the lights didn’t have to be placed just so. The whole shoot wrapped after just six weeks, with the real challenge coming in post-production.

Tension with producers saw the heads of animation all unceremoniously fired – the locks were changed, their workstations seized, and replacements were soon hired to finish the job. A September 2005 release was pushed back to March 2006, then July of that year. But the result is truly hallucinatory. It’s like a comic book come to life – harsh outlines contain a bubble of ever-shifting colours. It’s obvious that these images were once true reflections of reality, but they appear now as if they’ve been somehow distorted in the mind’s eye.

Fascism and surveillance culture both rear their head, as the Substance D epidemic allows the government to seize greater control over its citizens. But A Scanner Darkly is primarily about a loss of identity triggered by mind-altering substances. Dick had become interested in the work of neuropsychologist Roger Wolcott Sperry, who won the Nobel Prize after his discovery that the “left” and “right” sides of the brain can function independently from each other. The author wondered whether it might explain his own profound feelings of disconnect.

Just as the worlds of reality and animation sit together and separate within the space of the film’s frames, Substance D causes a split between the two cerebral hemispheres. This, in a sense, creates two different consciousnesses and two different identities. There is Arctor, but there is also the detective in the “scramble suit”, who watches back the surveillance footage, losing his grasp on the truth that he’s simply watching himself. “What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself,” he says, in the depths of mental disarray.

A Scanner Darkly was always going to feel like a side note in Linklater’s filmography, even if the addicts’s conversations still maintain the breezy, tangential quality of Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993) – Downey Jr’s unblinking stare and excitable motormouth mark him out as the film’s secret weapon, in that respect. The reviews were decent, but hardly enthusiastic. Robert Hanks, writing in The Independent, declared it “not a great film, but an insidious one”. It only made $7.7m worldwide, short of its $8.7m budget. But this soulful, sober period of Dick’s life deserves to be memorialised onscreen – and A Scanner Darkly remains a truly singular descent into chemical-induced despair.