This article was originally published on "Deep Focus Public Account"
I saw death born from the soil, rising from the earth in a blue field.
- "Dark Scanner" Philip K. Dick
1. Poisonous insects
In the United States in the 1970s, after the climax of its corruption, hippie culture began to decline rapidly. In this cultural movement that rebelled against traditional lifestyles, the widespread abuse of drugs filled the entire modern American history with a dirty and dark place. A bad account. One of the world's greatest science fiction writers, Philip K. Dick, spent half of his life creating, and the other half was deeply engulfed by drugs, mental illness, and several heartbreaking failed relationships. among. Although Dick was already well-known in the science fiction circle during his lifetime, his posthumous fame was not unrelated to the fact that his novels were adapted into science fiction films by Hollywood, which he hated many times.
Science fiction fans can easily name several classic "Dick adaptations" - "Total Recall", "Minority Report", "Impostor"... not to mention the "Silver" that is regarded as the "Bible" Wing Runner was brought up over and over again, and it was almost chewed and drained. But most films have been adapted beyond recognition after extracting the eye-catching elements of Dick's novels. The only film so far with a high degree of restoration of the original work, "Dark Scanner", was shot by director Charlie Linklater in 2006.
The plot of the film is highly consistent with the novel "Dark Scanner", and even many dialogues and inner narration come directly from the novel published in 1977. The entire background setting of "Dark Scanner" does not particularly pursue a high-tech "sci-fi sense". It focuses more on drugs and the impact of a society that produces and consumes drugs on people. So this work is closer to a realistic reflection under the guise of "science fiction". It opens with finding and cleaning up non-existent aphids. One layer of meaning shows the self-generated hallucinations of drug addicts, and the other layer of meaning points to "drugs", the life itself that devours our humanity, hidden beyond the universal definition. When the center of vision is focused on the drug addicts who are constantly scratching, a black vortex is formed around them from time to time. The lives of the "daoists" aside from gossiping and gossip are thinking about how to make money. Charles Furyk's hallucinations vividly activate the irritability of people resting on top of the emptiness of real life, and his meaningless life is as absurd as the vision he produces when he is about to commit suicide. And Jim Burris, played by Robert Downey Jr., is smart, but his almost inhuman indifference makes him a real danger in this small group.
Since God forsaken us, loneliness has become the fate of each of us, and in loneliness human beings are constantly looking for possible "miracles". After centuries of evolution and quest, the divinity is dead in modern society, but a series of deformed substitutes have developed, in which the hallucinogens that were originally used as "psychic" media have in turn become the gods we worship. , this layer of disguise of life constitutes the soul of our physical existence after the dissipated spirit. In Dick's world, each character is arguably "millions of loneliness," and they quickly split after finding fun and exploitable value in each other. Men, watching over each other in the solitude they found themselves in, ultimately only watched over their exhausted lives being destroyed.
These children who will never grow up are looking for those so-called "meanings" in the process of constantly consuming themselves, and will eventually get lost in the cruel mire of life.
2. Twins
Like the existence of two stars in the twin galaxies, Philip Dick was born with a twin sister. Tragically, his identical twin sister died in an electric blanket accident six weeks after birth due to poor parental care. Throughout his life, this sister, whom he had never known for a chance, was ghostly connected to his spiritual world. In Dick's consciousness, this sister did not seem to die, but coexisted with her in the depths of her soul and affected his spiritual world at all times, just like a dark star affected the operation of the entire twin galaxy system by gravity.
Fred's inner turmoil as he wears his invisibility suit to an almost idiot-like audience is a key point in giving him multiple layers of meaning. His loneliness is no longer the disappointment of life in the general sense of the "friends", but the despair of being completely lost under the influence of two lifestyles and ways of thinking. As an undercover police detective, his daily life is almost exactly the same as that of a drug addict. In order not to be recognized and murdered, he must pretend to be more like a drug dealer than a drug dealer. So the question is, who is a man when he pretends to be another man? Or is he no one? This trap, like questioning the reality of the world, leads to total nothingness.
In the setting of identity anxiety, the Hong Kong movie "Infernal Affairs" uses the identity swap of police and bandits in the plot to create an outdated dramatic tension, but the characters in the film seem to have a predestined tone, which makes it expandable behind the scenes. Thinking space becomes very narrow. When Fred was completely unable to make cognitive judgments on self-identity in the context of identity conversion and the effects of drugs on the brain, he led to a deeper philosophical proposition-the world in which we exist exists by the way our minds perceive it. , does changing the way we perceive the world rewrite the "shape" of the whole world in our minds? From this, we uncovered a small opening on the surface of the world, and found that the truth inside it seems to rely on "acting" to realize the external operation. He became famous and even wrote a biography of himself pretending to be. Fred formed a twin relationship with his character, Aktor, who gradually took the initiative from "Dark Star" in his public appearance. This paradoxical state of loneliness (he can't maintain candid and normal communication with his colleagues, but also has huge secrets in front of "friends", and when you really live with a group of people, it's actually hard not to feel sorry for them There is some kind of friendship-like feeling) that splits him into a dual personality, so far our poor protagonist has been completely reduced to a tattered toy by work and life.
The American Nightmare
Director Linklater began to experiment with a special video style as early as 2001's "Half-Dream Life". "visual effects. This image style born through technical means has been inherited in "Dark Scanner". The film also uses live-action performances and animation processing in the later stage, making the realistic images originally recorded by the camera become erratic and flowing. Just as Dick's novels consistently question the authenticity of the world, these fluid colors and seemingly ready-to-change shapes shape a holistic framework of lies. In this framework, the whole world can be arbitrarily tampered with, like a drug.
Under the promotion of the media, advertisements and various mainstream values, the country always presents itself to the public with a gorgeous halo. Just like the special picture texture used in the film - the sleepwalking effect that is true or false after secondary packaging, people who fall into such a life are constantly being attracted by the packaging and dismantling the packaging to seek the truth. harm. What is even more absurd is that the task Fred received was actually to let him monitor himself, just like the mutual supervision, whistle-blowing and suspicion between neighbors and friends (American society does have this kind of community tradition), the original purpose was to monitor and preserve each other in the community. And strengthen core values, resulting in self-behavior split into a "two-faced person" in contradiction. In this process of self-examination, it shows the pervasive cybernetics of modern society. As an individual monitored person, when he knows he is being secretly monitored, he is unable to make valuable arguments and fight back against the monitoring behavior itself. That discomfort refers to a state of self-castration.
Fred has a memory of the past after being awakened by the riotous gunfire of his fellow Taoists. In this paragraph, we shed some light on Fred's inner experience of why he became an undercover drug cop, or can be said to be a "friend". Tired of the mediocre middle-class life, he kept fleeing, and finally destroyed everything with his own hands and entered a more mysterious and dark world. Looking at Fred from another angle, we might be able to come to a conclusion that -Actor played the police Fred in the process of escaping from the mundane life? What can 24-hour uninterrupted monitoring see from piles of junk material? The problem gradually spread from Fred to us in front of the screen. There is an observer behind the observed, and behind the observer there is a higher-level observer. We the audience also watch others as a level of observation and are monitored by others... The dark vortex here is the so-called "dark scanner". "Bar.
Fred was destroyed in the end. In order to find out the behind-the-scenes drug company, he was used as a sacrificial bait. Just as what appears to be a drug rehabilitation agency is actually a new channel company for a drug production agency, his destruction is a metaphor for the ruthless oppression of the world. Perhaps because of his sacrifice, many people will be saved in the future, and the children will grow up healthier, but all this has nothing to do with him. But is this good intention really possible in a drug-producing system?
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