This weekend I caught a preview of Linklater's movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It's perhaps one of the best stoner movies I've seen since Depp's re-enactment of Hunter S. Thompson's pyschedelic road trip in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The opening psychosis sequences in both films I found bizzarely entertaining. To add to the hallucinatory experience, the movie was done using a rotoscoping animation technique. You have to ask the little voices in your head if you are really watching a movie or a graphic novel come to life. Kewl.
I stopped reading Asimov or Dick science fantasies ages ago because they tend to get me depressed. More so because I'm a technologist. If Asimov or Dick's version of the near future were to come true, then we are all fucked up. Blame should be pointed to scientists and engineers...........er, hang on............Blame should be pointed to politicians for usurping the good inventions of scientists and engineers for evil big brother-type uses.
As with all his works, Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly while chock full of every imaginable narcotic during his time and was dedicated to his junkie friends who were 'punished entirely too much' for the mistakes they made. How appropriate that the best drug addled soon-to-be-classic cinema bits were delivered by Robert Downey Jr. (a recovering drug addict) and Woody Harrelson (a recovering drug and sex addict). Even Winona Ryder (a recovering drug addict and kleptomaniac - and she can come put her naughty fingers on me anytime.) is in this film. Keannu Reeves plays the title role but he clearly never needed to have experienced drugs to play the role of an addicted cop because his face is permanently in a state of stupor. To complement the doped-up cinema experience, the soundtrack includes songs by Thom Yorke and Radiohead (who incidentally started playing small gigs in the pub on the same block as the Jericho Picturehouse where I saw this movie.)
The drug in question is called substance-D which induces the two hemispheres of the brain to wage war against each other.
From personal experience, I don't need such drug to fry up the coordination between the right and left hemispheres of my brain. My early conservative Catholic education took care of that. I'm a natural left hander but there were no left handed armchairs when I was in nursery and everything had to be done using the right hand (these are deep seated psycho-religious hang-ups that were hard to remove even after Vatican II - Right is good, anything not on the right hand is the devil's handiwork).
I hold knives/swords/rackets, play balls, shoot, even 'stand' on a surfboard as a leftie but I was forced to write using my right hand. I've paid a high price for this - my artistic right hemisphere not reaching it's full potential. It doesn't help that I also suffer from a dyslexia hence, even if I have a very good spatial awareness (which is how I get to solve pi to three decimal places in my head) and can read notes, I'm crap at both painting and playing music.
It's odd though that despite my natural left handedness, when I reached puberty I was instinctively reaching down my trousers and polishing my bishop with my right hand. Perhaps it was a subconscious way of rebelling against the right-eousness of my ultra-conservative upbringing.
After all these years, isn't Winona still yummy...
Photos courtesy of George Clooney (well, his production company really)