Is it getting heavy?

Don­na con­sult­ed her twen­ty-dol­lar elec­tric Timex wrist­watch, which he had giv­en her. “About thir­ty-eight min­utes. Hey.” Her face bright­ened. “Bob, I got the wolf book with me — you want to look at it now? It’s got a lot of heavy shit in it, if you can dig it.”

“Life,” Bar­ris said, as if to him­self, “is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For every­one and everything.”

Philip K. Dick­’s dop­er Odyssey A Scan­ner Dark­ly pieces togeth­er very neat­ly the drug­store cow­boy nos­tal­gia that’s gone miss­ing since Irvine Welsh put clean liv­ing to the test with his cyn­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion to drug folk­lore, Trainspot­ting. The dis­so­cia­tive prin­ci­ples under­gird­ing the nar­ra­tive focus on con­scious­ness and being, but the onto­log­i­cal issues at the book’s core attempt to con­nect cog­ni­tion to his­to­ry. Like Trainspot­ting, A Scan­ner Dark­ly reads as cau­tion­ary tale, but not with­out the world-weari­ness inher­ent in the genre.

Richard Lin­klater’s forth­com­ing adap­ta­tion does all it can to con­nect the sto­ry to its futur­is­tic mid-nineties set­ting with Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Har­rel­son and Robert Downey, Jr. in lead roles, embody­ing the beau­ti­ful­ly para­noid. But has­n’t junkie chic, Pete Doher­ty notwith­stand­ing, come to a close some time ago, giv­ing way in turn to ecsta­sy, then pre­scrip­tion anti-depres­sants and painkillers, fol­lowed by cocaine’s unlike­ly return? If there’s some­thing Trainspot­ting real­ly got right it was the sense that as the scene changed from slum­ming in opi­um squalor and scuzz punk, it mor­phed into dot com opu­lence, a cash buzz of incan­des­cence, house music and psy­chotrop­ics crept in seem­ing­ly overnight, and where every­where at once.

The imme­di­a­cy with which hero­in van­ished from its rei­fied main­stream idyll as pub­lic ene­my num­ber one, hav­ing but briefly updat­ed Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley for mod­ern times, came just as the polit­i­cal antag­o­nisms of the first Bush Pres­i­den­cy matric­u­lat­ed through Amer­i­ca’s col­lec­tive veins. As an uncer­tain pub­lic strug­gled to cope with reces­sion and a youth cul­ture that wor­shipped in the sec­u­lar tem­ples of grunge and gang­ster rap, each alien­at­ed main­stream Amer­i­ca in its own way. Sud­den­ly Kurt Cobain’s sui­cide cement­ed in the pub­lic’s imag­i­na­tion the real, per­son­al evil that drugs wrought on gift­ed and guile­less alike, with­out prej­u­dice. The sense of iso­la­tion that accom­pa­nied that peri­od was a real one, but it can be dif­fi­cult to remem­ber after the Feel Good Era vac­u­um that cleaned up Amer­i­ca con­trac­tu­al­ly ca. 1996.

Per­haps when viewed through Spe­cial Agent Fred’s (a.k.a. Bob Arc­tor and vice ver­sa) bifur­cat­ed lens we can see his dis­tort­ed view of jus­tice through the State’s pater­nal­is­tic eye. Maybe by putting into per­spec­tive The War on Drugs and the moral­is­tic notion of locus of con­trol, there’s a way to look into the recent past to see where Amer­i­ca has got­ten by crim­i­nal­iz­ing the sick and poor, offer­ing but a dim light for those for­tu­nate enough to escape the grip of addic­tion. Dick­’s epi­logue notes that it was excess and not the thing itself that destroyed the Hux­ley-esque day­dream. For a cul­ture that has replaced exper­i­men­ta­tion with absti­nence, how will this jibe with para­noa­ic igno­rance at-large?
Unless Lin­klater can rec­on­cile this sto­ry with an Amer­i­ca so deeply engrained with “val­ues” and “moral­i­ty” that will­ful igno­rance has become some­thing worth cel­e­brat­ing, it will fall on deaf ears. Per­haps more impor­tant­ly, it points up how films like The Crow, Sin­gles and Real­i­ty Bites will be viewed. The cin­e­mat­ic state­ments from the ear­ly to mid-nineties that start­ed to express in casu­al, apo­lit­i­cal terms the prob­lems faced by Gen­er­a­tion X seem almost quaint now. So is it as bleak as Dick pre­dict­ed? Are we but agents pro and con­tra, all at once, self-destruc­t­ing in a brief arc?

Flam­ing Lips — “Pom­peii am Götterdämmerung”

Ghost­face Kil­lah — “Kilo”

Son­ic Youth — “Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion”