A Scanner Darkly

Just got back from seeing the new Linklater movie. I never really thought about him too much before now, but the way the new movie fits in with the rest of his work sort of finally clicked it all into place for me. Obviously, his obsession (worthy of someone who came of age in Austin) is with the lunatic fringe and its place in society. Reviewing his films, you get two different, and seemingly diametrically opposed, perspectives. Films like Slacker and A Scanner Darkly are largely critical, or at best indulgent, towards the habits and quirks of druggies, rockers, losers, and bums. Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, Before Sunrise, and others are openly celebratory of the power of those living on the edge to see and experience things not available to those content with the status quo.

It's a topic that's really interesting to me - in fact, I've written about it in an academic context in an attempt to explore the mix of triumph and despair that I saw in my own time in Austin. People accomplishing great things often seem in many ways to live shitty lives, and this duality comes up again and again in Linklater. Jack Black's character is a complete loser until the School of Rock comes knocking and he's able to put all of the skills of his loserly life to work for the social good. The same boundary is crossed in A Scanner Darkly, multiple times - Keanu Reeves' character rejects the pedestrian life of the middle class for something more risk-prone, but carries with him the sense of responsibility instilled in him by straight life. He then crosses back over, via rehab, and carries with him both the commitment to classical liberalism and a healthy society that come from his middle-class background, and the willingness to push boundaries that found expression in his descent into druggy hell.

This synthesis is what any responsible and thoughtful observer of counterculture (that is, true counterculture as opposed to over-the-counter-culture) has to advocate. There is, as Scanner bluntly states, a great cost to those who have the penchant to rebellion and acting out without the concommitant willingness to see and serve a bigger picture. For all my friends in Austin who were doing great things despite the chaos of their lives, there were many more for whom chaos was an end in itself. Maybe these really are what Scanner calls the canaries in the mine - those who can see and hear and feel what others can't, but who die for their prescience, screaming Cassandras to the wind. Dick, and Linklater, both seem to think that the cost is too high.

Stupid Television.

So, it's Sunday night, my parents (who I'm in Texas visiting) have gone to a ball game, and I have the house to myself. I've finished a couple of good letters to friends, but before I was able to get started on my real work – an essay about flying with my Dad that I've been working on – I realized that it's Sunday night, which means Adult Swim night on Cartoon Network. I don't have a TV at home in Iowa, so I kind of have an excuse for sitting here and watching these shows . . . they're funny, etc. But it's exactly the sort of thing I'm trying to get away from, and I end up feeling all muzzy at the end of watching some TV, so it's hard to get back into the writing. I need badly to work on my discipline, to try and get into a writerly routine. But I'm so easily distracted by even the option of a distraction – I have lost all the discipline I built up over my youth, in just a year and a half of being a slacker. Oh well, on the road to recovery.

But first, Aqua Teen Hunger Force is on . . .

(Hours later . . .)

Saw the Boondocks for the first time. Like the vast majority of TV, it's not worth the time. They were showing Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man documentary on Discovery - attempting to watch a movie on television is the ultimate in aesthetic blue-balls, but I kept at it. In fact, I watched TV for so long they showed Grizzly Man a second time, so I was able to see where I came in, so to speak. I do this, in various ways – I'll do something pointless and self-destructive for hours out of sheer inertia, when I have in my mind a clear idea of something much more productive I could and should be doing. I'll call this what it is – a relapse, a sliding back from the new standards I'm trying to establish (or maybe just re-establish). I have shitty work habits, is what it boils down to.