the cutting room

The problem with a “review” is that it’s expected to be definitive. I saw this film, and these are my thoughts. Now here they are for your consideration. Of course you’re free to draw your own conclusions, later. But, nevertheless, here is my opinion, now. There’s something that’s always bugged me about that.

Having just watched “A Scanner Darkly”, I am compelled to write down my thoughts immediately.

I wanted to see a Scanner Darkly for having seen a Waking Life. I know that Richard Linklater has made other films. But I can’t think of any of them right now. A friend gave me the DVD for my birthday a few years back, and I have watched it many times, in all sorts of company. I have shown it to many people who had not seen it before. And it is accurate to say that I shared it with enthusiasm.

I knew that A Scanner Darkly was supposed to be a sequel to A Waking Life. But it never occurred to me to wonder exactly how a movie might even be a sequel to A Waking Life. I wish that someone who had also seen the first movie and was looking forward to the second just like I was, had asked me to speculate about this beforehand. I think I would have enjoyed that conversation. It seems to me now that I might have wondered, what things could even be inherited by a prospective sequel to A Waking Life. I might have wondered if they were calling it a sequel just because it had an animation technique in common with the first film. I might have wondered whether I’d be seeing any of the characters from A Waking Life again. I might have wondered whether dreaming was going to persist as a theme. For not having wondered in advance, I had no theories or predictions to confirm. I had but one hope, however, when I plunked down my cash at Borders the other night, and that has been satisfied. A Scanner Darkly will take its place among the small but precious collection of DVDs I play only when I entertain, lol.

I want to talk about the animation a bit.

Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) is a psychophysiologist who in 1967 is probing his own altered states of consciousness in an isolation tank, first in New York and then at Harvard. His assistant, Arthur Rosenberg, wires him to EEG and EKG equipment and tape records his accounts of what he is seeing, feeling, and experiencing. His wife Emily, an anthropologist, and Dr. Parrish, a colleague, are concerned about Eddie’s obsessive desire to locate in his inner space-time “the first self” and ultimate truth.

Jessup travels to Mexico where he takes part in a sacred mushroom ceremony performed by primitive Indians. The drug intensifies his journey backwards into time. He returns to Harvard and uses the mushroom potion in conjunction with his tank experiments. He hallucinates into a primitive stage of human development. Jessup then brings his ape being into the present and goes on a rampage, killing a security guard and escaping to the zoo grounds in Boston. Realizing his sanity has snapped, Jessup reprograms his love for Emily and defuses his animal self.

Director Ken Russell, who is hooked on human encounters with fantasy and the surreal, has a field day with the visual and dramatic components of Altered States. Film buffs who have reveled in the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey are sure to go gaga over Jessup’s psychedelic trips in the movie. The visual effects by Bran Ferren linked with the discordant, eerie music of John Corigliano are wild and exotic kaleidoscopes of color, movement, and energy. They contain images of nature undergoing explosion, animals, monsters, and weird sexual and religious visions.