It’s official, what’s going on Iraq is a civil war.
Malu and I went to see A Scanner Darkly. I tried to untangle the plot for her afterwards — an almost hopeless task, but I suspect that all the plot twists are actually followable — I simply missed a jump or two. I also guessed that the dedications from Dick at the end, just before the credits, were a list of his friends and acquaintances who had died or been permanently damaged by drugs in the late 60s and early 70s. We agreed that the rotoscoped animation was the perfect medium for this story and that Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. were great. At times I was reminded of The Strangerhood, the machinima made from The Sims game characters — also a bunch of existentially lost stoners who can’t figure out who or where they are.
There are lovely visual metaphors — the scramble suits as the façades one wears at work, the view of Keanu Reeves's baffled face — his “real self” — inside a suit, trying to sort his life out. Spying on oneself as a metaphor for consciousness and the two halves of the brain at war with each other.
