Fungible Convictions

Director Richard Linklater’s trippy adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story “A Scanner Darkly” debuted Friday, after many delays, many doubts about the animation-from-live-action process, and many pessimistic articles about both. Critics claimed Dick’s near-future story of addiction and duplicity (both personal and corporate) couldn’t even be rendered on film.

Fortunately, the director, his crew, and his cast—Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson—haven’t reason to worry. They’ve produced an amazing product, the first narratively successful reimagining of the medium since Jurassic Park introduced the public at large to CGI.

Much film technology has changed in the last two decades. But little has changed in how directors using that technology tell their stories in pictures. Shots from The Matrix were hailed as technological achievements, and they were—yet, narratively, they contributed little, nothing more than eye-candy. Despite the power of computer-aided filmmaking, since that technology’s introduction, visual storytelling still hasn’t been revolutionized, neither with the immediate impact of Citizen Kane nor with the slowly blossoming influence of John Ford’s The Searchers. In fact, cinematographic advancement in the last twenty years has largely come in the form of reaction to the power of computers: handheld cameras gave Saving Private Ryan its terrifying presence, and a camera strapped to Sean Gullette captured his character Max’s instability in the film Pi.

Linklater, whose previous credits include Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, and The School of Rock, has provided in A Scanner Darkly our contemporary visual-narrative breakthrough. And he did it with an old—but previously too-overwhelming-to-accomplish—trick: rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping, a “tracing” process Linklater used to animate his actors, allows filmmakers to capture, in motion, a level of physical detail not quite available to animators otherwise. Even stick figures can take on an astonishing level of motion-naturalism, like in this rotoscoping of a soccer player:

Now see what rotoscoping can do in a feature film like A Scanner Darkly:

Rotoscoping isn’t new. Betty Boop, Snow White, and Yellow Submarine used versions of it. Rotoscoping doesn’t even have its conceptual roots in movies—photographers, before and even after the French invented color film, would paint black-and-white photographs by hand.

But the scale and centrality of rotoscoping in A Scanner Darkly is unprecedented—and it’s utterly essential to the story. An example: the Dick short story tells of “scramble suits” worn by the police that display sections (hair, half a face, a chest) of a million different people to disguise officers’ identities (you can see a scramble suit in the trailer above). Theoretically this could have been accomplished with CGI—but it never could have captured the drug-induced fissure in visual perception as Linklater’s rotoscoped suits do. But, moreover, the animation of real actors, objects, and backgrounds gets a viewer to question what it is really real and what is rotoscoped. It’s subtle. It’s frustrating as a viewer. And it communicates perfectly the characters’ states of mind.

Much is made in film literature of contemporaries from different media borrowing from one another. European surrealist painters, for example, traded much with their surrealist friends in film, resulting in classics like L’Age d’Or with Salvador Dali. Yet what is more significant is how filmmakers will use old artistic solutions to address new problems. Linklater has a relationship with the Cubists of a century ago. The filmmaking problem for A Scanner Darkly: How does one film a science-fiction story that asks you to doubt reality, not in a whole-hog Matrix way but in a nagging, sometimes-certain, sometimes bewildered way, the way associated with drug addiction? How does one capture the feeling of not knowing whether you’re in too deep or not deep enough? It’s a description of the problems faced by Cubists, which they solved much the same way as Linklater. They all succeeded in using a two-dimensional medium not to mimic the three-dimensional world but to layer sets of three-dimensional worlds, even some that don’t go well together at all.

It’s too early to say if the rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly will find a home in other films; few screenplays would be well suited. However, Linklater’s movie has accomplished what a hundred cool movies from The Matrix to The Incredibles weren’t able to: using new technology to tell stories in a brand new way.