A Scanner Darkly

When people began to experiment with psychedelics, proponents touted them as a way to access a more profound and spiritual vision of reality. They presumed that the “real” world, as perceived through the five senses, was a façade masking something deeper and inherently better. Visions glimpsed while under the influence of drugs like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin gave users the impression they were seeing beyond the veil of the everyday, beyond the toxic capitalist lifestyle of mindless consumerism. To a generation of disenchanted youth in the 1960s and 1970s, the possibility of a more enlightened path was irresistible. While the idealism of psychedelics may have inspired Barris, Luckman, and Fabin to experiment with them, they are far beyond that idealism by the time the narrative opens. The search for a more insightful path has morphed into a paranoid interrogation of the reality they know. Arctor in particular becomes so detached from reality that he doesn’t know if he’s Arctor or Fred, he doesn’t know if Barris is a friend or enemy, and he thinks he sees dog feces smeared on his engine but then doubts himself even though he swears he can smell it. With his grip on reality slipping away, he plots to steal the holo-scanner tapes, the only hard evidence he has of his friends and their common past.