A Scanner Darkly may appear a screaming baby to the monolithic pharmaceutical-rehab-complex, calling out the medical model for hooking a great majority of the population on prescription medication. The contemporary drug climate reinforces this notion, where the populace widely accepts that evil people pushed compounds on unsuspecting patients, but the temporal inconsistencies invalidate this claim.

Richard Linklater’s  movie was released in 2007, before public awareness of the opiate problem existed. Moreover, the oligarchical impunity, shifting the target to a monolithic system which could only be operated by elites, would reveal itself much later, but seem to be a great theme in this film. Most damning is the publishing date of the source work, Phillip K. Dick’s masterpiece of the same name as the movie, 1977.

Phillip K. Dick might have been paranoid, popping amphetamines like oh so many candies, but that is not the primary focus of this book. Instead, it centers around a dyadical obsession with sanity, written from the perspective of a life which Dick knew well, one of long-days-into-nights blending as users wandered in and out of his house & life.

Bob Arctor’s insanity is the central point of the film. It affects everything, slowly skewing events until characters disappear and the real/fake paradigm comes into question. The key to understanding Substance D, and the movie, is understanding it revolves around a dyad. Duality emerges all throughout the film: his two friends, the twin doctors diagnosing his issues, and importantly the left and right side of his brain. Arctor, ever the “canary in the coal mine” is told that he has “bilateral dysfunction”, a lack of coordination between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Linklater does specify the conditions caused by the dysfunction for us fools, specifying that it causes a divide between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, which in turn causes something like split personality disorder.

These splits in identity are not independent splits, arbitrarily occurring as Arctor continues his spiral down a new path, but conflicting splits. His right brain was not some new development, but instead a long marshalled and subordinated counterpart to the dominant left-brain. Because of Substance D however, right-brain (or Bob Arctor) began to disrupt this hierarchy, taking over his left-brain (or Fred) for vast portions of time, becoming so different a person that the Agent can’t even recognise Arctor as himself.

This subversion of the observer-observed is a major dialectic within the film. Slowly, Arctor transitions from an observer, into the observed, and then finally to a third state somewhere between the two, where he is both observing and observed at the farm. This dialectic is mirrored by his own path through drug addiction. First, Fred was observing the users, and himself, under the influence. At this stage a degree of separation is maintained between Arctor and Fred. This degree of separation, just like the separation between right and left hemisphere on Substance D, slowly dissolved. The drug subsumes Fred’s life, and before long he is no longer Fred posing as a junkie, but Arctor “[posing] as a narc”. He came to enjoy the time he spent with Barris and Luckman, all of them rooting in disarray and paranoia like pigs in the mud.

Despite the strung-out enjoyment he derives from his threadbare life, Arctor understands he  is on a path of certain doom. As he puts it: “D is for dumbness and despair and desertion. […] D is, finally, death”. The scanners represent an escape from this path. They are the tentacles of the agency, remnants of a time when Fred held a separate and dominant identity. They are the only ones that know who he truly is, who exists beneath the hollowed-out shell of Arctor, the scanner who sees darkly.

Luckily, the scanners do see clearly. Donna finally comes out of the woodwork, taking a transformed Fred to New Path. He feels the full effects of D. He is barely above a vegetable, abandoned in a corporate rehabilitation center. However, he emerges from the red & black cocoon of a Substance D capsule as someone with renewed capability to finally eliminate the scourge that nearly killed him. Before, he could not enter within the networks from below. Substance D was simply too powerful for agents to spend enough time around junkie levels to glean useful information without getting addicted and lobotomized. His lobotomization allows Arctor to be injected right into the mainline of the organization, farming the very flowers that produce the drug. The future seems bright not only with the imminent destruction of New Path and Substance D on the horizon, but with the reunion of Fred & Arctor’s disparate halves, a slow return of the monad, and the end of the isolation.

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