Last night I finally watched "A Scanner Darkly."

I remember, badly, wanting to see it when it was in the threaters, but never getting around to it. (I loved Linklater's movie "Waking Life," and it gave me confidence that he might be the first director of a PKD adaptation whose own sensibilities were weird enough to actually pull it off.) There was even a day at Clarion when a bunch of people car-pooled out to go see it, but I didn't come. I'm not sure I entirely remember why. I probably had a story deadline or some such nonsense.

Anyway, only seven months or so later, I finally got around to it. It feels almsot anti-climactic at this point to say as much, but I did in fact love it.

Normally, something that at times felt like a fairly simplistic anti-drug metaphor might be a turn-off for me....

....e.g. the substance everyone is addicted to--Substance D--is referred to by its users as "Death," as in "take some caps of Death" and many things that only people who don't know what they're talking about say about various real world-substances are literally true of it: "there are no weekend warriors on D, only addicts and people who haven't tried it yet" (I've never understood why educators, parents and concerned citizens feel the need to resort to cheap lies like that about various real world cases, when the truth about them is bad enough)....but in any case, given the artistic freedom that comes from this being science fiction, Dick/Linklater can simply postulate that in the case of their fictional substance, this is literally true....

....BUT filtered through the paranoia and humor that only PKD and faithful adaptations of the same can provide, it's pure genius. The scene I was most looking forward to--Freck hallucinates a creature from between dimensions reading him a long list of his sins, so "after a thousand years, he had just gotten to the sixth grade, when Freck discovered masturbation"--was, if anything, even more hilarious in the movie than it was in the original.

And I love Liklater's trippy and sometimes nauseating visual interpretation of scramble suits. And the fact that he has the protag look a great deal *like* PKD.

And, of course, without spoiling anything for anyone who's neither read the book nor seen the movie, the ending makes clear that, if the whole thing's an anti-drug metaphor, it's sure as hell *not* a *simplistic* one, and the complexity introduced there makes it about a thousand times more disturbing. The twist sounds silly, but viscerally and horribly works.

Fascinating, too, to know that (according to Sutin in "Divine Invasions") the idea for that bit came to PKD while he was in rehab in Vancouver.

(Oh, and hey, I don't know if I'll get a chance to see it before I turn the DVD back in, but one of the people doing audio commentary on the bonus track is Jonathan Lethem.)

Anyway, enthusiastically recommended. In a way, it feels like its not quite putting it right to say that it's the best PKD screen adaptation yet (like, comparing it to Blade Runner or Minority Report, all of that), but rather I should say that it's the *only* one that's been made yet, and that it was done well. Those other movies were fun thrillers but they only took the most basic SFnal architecture--pre-cognition, androids--from the books, things that were genre cliches long before Dick got to them, but completely filter out the paranoia and lovely pervasive dark humor that make the books so distinctive.

If Linklater makes a "Valis" movie, I can die happy.