Category: Film

To say that I liked Volver is not, perhaps, to say very much; since I have long been a fan of Almodovar; I’ve seen all of his feature films, and liked all of them, more or less. As “more or less” goes, Volver is pretty strong among Almodovar’s recent films, it is better than Bad Education (which I wrote about here), and at least as good as All About My Mother; though it doesn’t quite reach the sublime heights of Talk To Her.

Volver, like much of Almodovar’s recent work, is an unashamed melodrama. People who complain that there is less of the campy, perverse, sacrilegious, over-the-top “transgressive” humor here than there was in Almodovar’s early films, or even than in the last few, are missing the point, I think. I love all that fun stuff, of course; but I also feel that it often played the role of a defense, a disavowal, an alibi: Almodovar put it in as a kind of cover, in order to get away with the melodrama that was his real cinematic passion. Far from agreeing with the cliche that his recent films, and this one especially, are more “normative” than all the ones about junkies and drag queens and fetishists, I’d say rather that Volver is more disreputable than (for instance) Dark Habits, or even Law of Desire (which remains nonetheless one of Almodovar’s greatest films), precisely to the extent that it doesn’t hide or deflect in any way its basic melodramatic drive.

Melodrama is one of those things that (nearly) everybody loves, but that nonetheless can never be spoken of approvingly in polite company. For instance, we’ve seen Quentin Tarantino lovingly resurrect such “low” genres as the revenge/splatter film, the blaxploitation film, and the martial arts flick — and even give these genres a “feminist” twist, as he argubly does with Pam Grier in Jackie Brown and with Uma Thurman in Kill Bill — but can you imagine Tarantino giving a similar loving reconstruction to melodrama? I can’t (though, of course, I’d be thrilled if he surprised me). In this respect I think that Almodovar remains the more radical filmmaker, even if his recent films, like this one, are superficially the kind of tony art film fare that people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a theater seeing a “genre” picture can say they like (not realizing, of course, that the “Euro art film” is as conventionalized, that is to say as much of a genre, as any sortt of film out there).

I’ve said a lot about melodrama at various times on this blog (most extensively, perhaps, in relation to Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I’ll try not to repeat myself; I’ll only point out here that, of course, for the last 100 years or so, melodrama has largely been the province of women and gay men. It’s disreputable because it isn’t macho enough. In Volver, Almodovar gives us an almost all-female cast. The films spans intergenerational relations — mothers and daughters — across three generations; and the film concerns the emotional ups and downs of these relationships, bringing them to a kind of resolution or reconciliation (not a redemptive one, but one in which the characters gain the ability to live with what they have felt, and what they have done).

Men are only onscreen marginally in Volver, and the only role they play in the plot, really, is that of the father-as-incestuous-rapist. In expelling this monstrous father from the scene of familial relations, the women in the film literally get away with murder — something which Almodovar clearly presents as ethically justified. I can imagine the Lacanians being up in arms at this, in sheer horror: what could be more narcissistic and regressive and New-Agey? where’s the Law of the Father? etc. etc. But I think that reading Volver in psychoanalytic terms is precisely wrong: any attempt to do so is short-circuited precisely by the way that the familial and “oedipal” dynamics of the film are so upfront, so obvious, so clearly and overtly “citational.” Everything in the film is something we’ve seen before: Almodovar does not proclaim any sort of transgressive liberation from oedipal dynamics, because these dynamics have already exhausted themselves as cliche — they are so omnipresent, so utterly evident, that they don’t even need to be “deconstructed” (deconstruction, in any case, is precisely a strategy of complicity with that which is being deconstructed; Almodovar doesn’t need to perform any such deconstruction of the oedipal, because he has already given plain evidence of its banality. He simply says “of course; so what?” and moves on to something else).

So far I haven’t been as clear as I would like. I said that Volver is citational; everything in it is something we’ve seen before. I should add, heard before: since Alberto Iglesias’ score is so self-consciously reminiscent of Hollywood non-diegetic music (particularly, perhaps, of Bernard Hermann’s great scores): the music doesn’t make us feel joy or sorrow or relief or tension and suspense, so much as it makes us self-conscious about the fact of hearing movie music that is supposed to signify and induce such feelings. That is kind of what I mean by “citational”: it applies to the screenplay and characters, and to Almodovar’s camera movements, as well. This heightening of a certain generic quality is itself one of the mechanisms of melodrama; emotions aren’t singularly personal, as much as they are transpersonal and enacted. They are states of mind, or (more physically) costumes and systems of posture and gesture, that the actors “put on” when they inhabit their roles; and that we the audience “put on” as well when we watch the film, identifying with those generic roles. And this kind of “dress-up” and obvious taking on of superficial roles is a way to inhabit emotions in their pure state: before they have been personalized, and given the heavy meanings and entrenched limitations of the oedipal drama. Melodrama, in this sense, is precisely the way out from tragedy. Tragedy is meaningful, and oedipal, and eventuates in catastrophe; but melodrama is entirely passional — and thereby, however painful, also purely transitional, rather than conclusive. (This is why melodrama is so familiar to us as a never-ending serial form, as with daytime soaps and Latin American telenovelas). There is always another act, another twist. Volver means “to return,” and the film’s conclusion is really just a situation where life will go on, with doubtless more twists and more convulsions. (There will always be more fathers, and they will always have to be murdered anew; but this is precisely why the oedipal drama is too banal to govern the film’s situations with some sort of Symbolic meaning; and why the relations of mothers to daughters are always ones of reconciliation, resignation, and continual renewal, rather than some sort of Imaginary reflection and fixation).

The film’s two divas, Carmen Maura and Penelope Cruz, are both as prickly and annoying as they are charismatic, and this itself is part of the charm of Volver. Roles are fluid, emotions are as fickle as they are overwhelming, and even though acts always have consequences, these consequences are themselves negotiable and mutable. Almodovar invests everyday life with unaccustomed emotion; but he also renders emotion in so light and airy a way that — even at its most negative — it seems more an adventure than a burden.

Nightspore describes Michel Gondry‘s The Science of Sleep as “a mixture of Godard and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, as directed by Terry Gilliam,” with which I am inclined to agree. But he adds that this mixture is “to the detriment of all three”; to which I can only respond that I liked the film far more than he did.

I tend not to care much for whimsy; and The Science of Sleep is nothing if not whimsical. But as Blake wrote, “if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise”; and Gondry, similarly, pushes his whimsicality to such extremes that it is transmuted into something else entirely: call it a kind of hyperbolically airy and insubstantial surrealism. (The Science of Sleep is to Un chien andalou, perhaps, as Ecstasy is to LSD). The film has a crazy intensity that derives from the fact that it goes too far, pushing its regression (in the psychoanalytic sense), infantilism, and narcissism to a point of no return. (This is the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse aspect of the movie, though Gondry is, alas, far straighter than Pee-Wee).

The plot, such as it is, involves a would-be artist and inventor, Stephane (played by the lovely Gael Garcia Bernal, speaking a mixture of accented French and accented English, and only occasionally his native Mexican Spanish), who develops a crush on his next-door neighbor Stephanie (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is every bit as wonderful and wise and irresistible, in a totally down-to-earth and non-sex-kittenish way, as the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin ought to be). They don’t ever connect, largely because Stephane lives too exclusively in his own head: that is to say, in his dreams, which (literally) occupy most of the length of the film.

This means that Stephanie’s otherness forever remains opaque to Stephane. Not that this matters, exactly, since Stephane’s erotic frustration — if we can even call it erotic, which I am not sure we can — is less an impediment than it is the necessary condition and the fuel for his fantasy life. For this fantasy life (the only life he has, actually) revels in its own repetitious failure to make it past the preliminaries of an encounter that is never consummated. In other words, Stephane is a figure, not of desire, but of what Lacan and Zizek call pure drive: “we become ‘humans,'” Zizek says, “when we get caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it” — finding satisfaction precisely in the failure ever to attain the supposed object of satisfaction, in the act of circling around it again and again without ever attaining it. Stephane, in a sense, is entirely beyond desire — and thereby almost sublime — precisely in his disconnection from others, and his failure to distinguish reality from fantasy. (I believe that I owe to Nightspore, too, the insight that seeming to be beyond desire, untouched by desire, is precisely what makes a person, or a figure, seem sublime to us — though Nightspore said this in an entirely different context: referring, I think, to Paul de Man and Andy Warhol rather than to Gondry’s film). And this sublimity, this sense of being beyond desire, is why neither Garcia Bernal’s endearing charm, nor Gondry’s whimsicality, ever becomes cloying, for all that they are both laid on so thick.

However: that last metaphor I just used — “laying it on thick” — is precisely why I am not satisfied with the psychoanalytic reading of The Science of Sleep that I sketched out in the previous paragraph. For such a reading misses what’s most important about the film: its materiality, which might also be called its affective density. This has to do with the portrayal of Stephane’s dream life. The film is every bit as visually inventive and provocative as one might have expected from Gondry’s music videos (not to mention Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). There are all sorts of bizarre little models and mockups and rear-presented backdrops, visual non sequiturs, knit objects that take on an animated life, pastel color schemes gone amok, and so on. Not to mention the little gadgets or machines that Stephane is always inventing (whether in dreams or in “real life” is never clear). Most notably, there is the “one-second time machine,” which jumps you one second into the past or the future: meaning that, in the film we are watching, we see either a stuttering repetition of frames, or a jump cut. (We can call these effects and gadgets Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘desiring machines,’ as long as we remember that “desire” in this sense has nothing to do with “desire” in the psychoanalytic/Lacanian sense: they are transversal cuts in the film, heterogeneous assemblages, producing transformations or “becomings” that are both childlike and childish).

I call all these effects and devices the “materiality” of the film because they are what’s visceral about it, what grabs you with corporeal force, what you are forced to feel, and forced to remember — and it’s an amazing accomplishment to make a film whose visceral force comes precisely from its most impalpable and evanescent elements. Also, these elements — effects or machines — have an odd sort of displacement to them, which comes from the fact that they are both, at the same time, objects within the diegesis, and aspects of the film’s technique or formal strategy. That is to say, they are both content and form, and they blur the distinction between content and form.

These devices are also all quite ramshackle, and ostentatiously retro. Stephane’s dreams take place (if that is the right phrase) in a fantasy TV studio, complete with tacky talk-show furniture, and an old-style television camera made out of cardboard. Gondry is known for his penchant to replicate what seem to be digital effects through in-camera, or otherwise analog, means. I suspect this is indeed the case for most of the effects in The Science of Sleep — at least it looked like Gondry was using rear projection and stop-time animation, rather than digital compositing. And correspondingly, within the diegesis, Stephane writes on a manual typewriter, rather than a computer; and his gadgets are made from mechanical parts rather than integrated circuits. Everything in The Science of Sleep cuts against the sleek, cyborgian look that is now the cliche of contemporary culture at its most supposedly forward-looking and innovative; but also against the distancing nostalgia that has been the unchanging look of dystopian speculation for almost a quarter century now (ever since Blade Runner). Gondry creates a new look, which isn’t the future, any more than it is the past — it’s rather a kind of displacement-in-place — can I say a displacement-in-time-in place? — a rupturing of the present, something that tears apart the present moment, multiplies it within itself, yet without pushing it either towards an impending future-as-potentiality or a hauntological past. (In this way, The Science of Sleep is sort of the flip side, or the riposte and counter-statement to, the deeply hauntological Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

The Science of Sleep is like gossamer; it dissolves in your hands when you try to grab hold of it. This is why so many viewers and reviewers have dismissed it as insubstantial; but for me, that is precisely its triumph. For Gondry, dreams are not depth psychology. They are rather, precisely, the superficiality that displaces, replaces, and dissolves (if that is not too much of a mixed metaphor) the anguished depth that our conscious selves wallow in, that belongs only to self-conscious reflection. Thus alone (to paraphrase and pervert Nietzsche) is the innocence of becoming restored…

Robinson Devor’s Police Beat, with a screenplay by my old friend Charles Mudede, is a lovely and strangely disorienting film: too laid back and withdrawn to be mind-blowing, yet too jagged and disjunctive to be comforting. Despite its low budget, it was shot, not on digital video, but on 35mm film, in ultra-widescreen (though I only got to see it on DVD). Its Seattle settings — verdant, but diffusely lit under cloudy skies (I think they may have used filters as well to capture that muted Seattle lighting) — are so gorgeous that they actually made me nostalgic for Seattle, where I used to live (this is the first and only time I have felt this way, in the more than two years since I moved away from it). For Seattle is more than just a backdrop to Police Beat; it’s one of several superimposed layers whose juxtaposition drives the film.

The setting — semi-bucolic Seattle — is the first (or deepest) layer. Next, or above that, comes the series of bizarre crimes and incidents (mostly taken from actual Seattle Police reports, via Mudede’s “Police Beat” column in The Stranger). Three dudes are drinking and playing with a pistol, and one of them manages to blow his head off. A man is trimming a large hedge, and discovers a street person asleep inside. A woman complains of an assault, but the assailant turns out to be a dead tree. A man bursts into a woman’s house, masturbates in front of her pet, caged bird, then leaves without uttering a word. A man stands in his front yard sharpening his machete, which a neighbor finds threatening. And so on. This all might sound like we are entering David Lynch territory; but the incidents are so underplayed, often in dispassionate long shots that distance us from the action, that they come off seeming everyday and humdrum.

The third and top layer is the story of Z (Pape Sidy Niang), the Seattle Police officer who comes upon most of the aforementioned incidents. Z is an immigrant from Senegal, working as a uniformed bicycle cop, and yearning for promotion to a squad car. Like the camera, he only reacts dispassionately, and without much engagement, to the scenarios he comes across — he doesn’t even seem to regard them as particularly strange. Instead, he obsesses endlessly over his relationship with his girlfriend, who has gone out of town on a supposed camping trip with another man. Though there are occasional flashbacks to the girlfriend, or brief scenes in which Z imagines what she is doing, mostly this obsession is conveyed through Z’s voiceover narration, spoken largely in Wolof, his native language, with English subtitles. Niang, a professional soccer player with no previous acting experience, has a powerfully charismatic onscreen presence. This is appropriate, because Z, caught in obsession, is unable to do very much in the course of the story; he is just there to be looked at, and to be listened to. His inner monologue turns and turns around, and goes nowhere — as is always the case with romantic obsession, all the more when the love object is absent.

What makes the film work, and gives it its strange beauty, is the juxtaposition of these three layers — I was going to write “interaction”, except that the point is precisely that the layers do not interact, or redound upon, one another. They are co-present, but incapable of affecting one another. Z doesn’t see the crimes he comes upon as metaphorically related to his romantic despair (though if we wish, we are of course free to read them this way); they are just chores he has to muddle through while his mind is elsewhere. And the sordid and somewhat ridiculous Seattle whose social dysfunction is revealed through these bizarre events is only arbitrarily related to the gorgeousness of the physical city and its natural backdrop. For his part, Z doesn’t seem to notice, much less comment upon, the scenery through which he rides his bicycle, and within which he confronts or comforts people; his body may be objectified for us (the viewers) as part of that landscape, but his consciousness, his subjectivity, is elsewhere. What I am calling the film’s three layers work together precisely by the fact that they have no links, nothing in common from one to another. Their mutual non-relation, their incessant simultaneity and disjunction, is the real subject of the film. This non-relation is what Deleuze and Guattari call a “disjunctive synthesis,” the collocation of nonlocalizable connections, elements “holding together only by the absence of a link”, inextricably co-present without being related to one another — which, they point out, is how Lacan and his followers define the ultimate elements of the unconscious, and also how Spinoza and Leibniz define the ultimate attributes of the one real Substance (Anti-Oedipus 309).

Police Beat works primarily on an affective level. By this I do not mean subjective expression — since the whole point is that Z’s subjectivity, expressed in voiceover, and for the most part in a tongue that will be foreign to most viewers of the film, is continually accompanied and shadowed by visuals that do not echo it or even refer to it. The film is often comic, and its emotional tone is primarily quite cool. But the film’s very distance — or perhaps I should say the space it creates between the three planes it presents to us — is itself equivalent to a kind of free-floating, not-quite-subjective affective tone. It is rooted in space (in the specificity of the Seattle landscape, in the particularity of the grotesque and unlikely crimes depicted, and in the narrowness of Z’s longings and obsessions), but also mobile and unanchored. This affective tone is a postmodern intensity: too muted to be called anxiety, too formless and all-embracing to be called alienation (since there is nothing left to be alienated from), but nonetheless undefinably uneasy and edgy (Z’s onscreen calmness, stolidity even, doesn’t detract from or hide, but actively expresses, the sense of being adrift that we get from his voiceover).

I’ve been having trouble writing about Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. It’s a great film, as well as being surprisingly faithful to the Philip K. Dick novel on which it is based, and from which much of its dialogue is taken verbatim. But it’s a subtle film, and it kind of sneaks up on you, even if you are familiar with the novel (as I am) and know in advance everything that is going to happen. (So there will be MAJOR SPOILERS in the following discussion, stuff that I already knew to expect from reading the novel; I have no idea what sort of effect they might have on someone who comes to the film without knowing the novel).

A lot of the film is just hilariously addled druggie talk (though hilarious in a dry and deadpan sort of way); and it’s only gradually, and as if by inadvertence, that its genuinely tragic elements become apparent. This is in full accordance with Dick’s novel, surely the least moralistic “anti-drug” tract ever written — something that is only compounded by the fact that Linklater uses some of Hollywood’s most notorious druggies (Winona Rider, Woody Harrelson, and the always wonderful Robert Downey Jr) for his supporting cast.

The protagonist, on the other hand, is played by Keanu Reeves, who here (more than in almost anything else he’s ever been in) turns his congenital inexpressiveness into a virtue, as his character slips (without quite realizing it) into an ever-more-befuddled state of paranoia, cognitive dysfunction, and split personality (as a result of Substance D, the illicit drug that is the focus of the narrative, his two brain hemispheres become separate and competing entities). Keanu plays a narc who has gone underground: he’s taken on the identity of a drug-using social dropout, Bob Arctor, and gets addicted himself to Substance D in the course of trying to track the source of the drug. To his police colleagues and superiors, this narc is only known by the pseudonym “Fred”, a double-blind precaution taken to keep his true identity hidden. This identity confusion is only compounded when Fred is ordered to run surveillance upon Arctor. His time is divided between sitting around his house, getting stoned and hanging out with his junkie friends, and sitting in front of multiple monitors, watching surveillance tapes of himself thus sitting around and consuming Substance D. Since the drug itself is personality-disingetrating, no wonder he has increasing difficulty keeping track of his own identity.

These convolutions all come straight out of the novel, which is fairly unique among Dick’s writings for the way in which the usually Dickian theme of ontological (and not merely epistemological) slipperiness and instability collapses back upon the self, becomes a structure of subjectivity as well — so that the protagonist is not simply (justifiably) paranoid or adrift or trapped, but himself becomes a kind of black hole into which all substance, and all contradiction, implodes and disappears. What Linklater adds to Dick’s depiction is a more externalized and political sense of how the downward and inward personal spiral of addiction is formally identical to, and seamlessly connected with, the ascending, and always more-widely-encompassing spiral of surveillance and “war on terror.” In both the novel and the film, Arctor wonders whether a scanner (surveillance camera) sees as “darkly” and confusingly as Arctor sees into himself, or whether it provides a greater clarity. In the novel, Dick is of course echoing the Bible (“for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face”), and foregrounding the irony that, for the damaged Arctor at least, self-examination or introspection is the least reliable way of knowing himself, in contrast to the more objective insight that the scanner might be hoped to provide. In the film, the nuance is slightly different, because of the way there is more emphasis on the scanner — the surveillance apparatus — itself, as a manifestation of the society of control of which drug addiction is just another facet. Here there is no sense of the scanner’s possible, or hoped-for, objectivity, since it is part of the mechanism for producing the hallucinatory breakdowns which it then proceeds to record.

The main formal innovation of the film is the rotoscopy technique that Linklater previously used for Waking Life. The scenes of the film were first shot, with live actors, in digital video; then the footage was converted to animation, by being drawn over frame by frame. In the first place, this animation allows for the film’s most memorable “special effect” (which is also the most science-fictional aspect of the original novel): the “scramble suits” worn by narcotics agents to conceal their identity. This is a device that, when worn, projects outward (to quote the novel) “every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure,” all of these changing many times a second, so that the wearer is “Everyman and in every combination… during the course of each hour.” Protected by the suit, you have no distinct personality — to everyone looking at you, you are just a “vague blur.” Linklater’s animation realizes this vision (multiculturalism pushed to its absolute point of absurdity?); often he cuts back and forth between full-body shots of the suit, and close-up head shots of Reeves/Arctor inside, his gaunt and tired face, suspended somewhere between angst and blankness, standing out against a field of gray. The “scramble suit” works throughout the film as a metaphor of the breakdown of personal identity as a result of both the chemical shocks of Substance D and the relentless process of surveillance. (I also see it as an image of the infinite modulation that Deleuze sees as characteristic of the society of control: “like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point”).

In general, and aside from its use in this special effect (and several other special effects that specifically depict drug-induced hallucinations), the rotoscope animation of A Scanner Darkly helps to define the look and feel of a world of (again, both) addiction and surveillance. There was a certain exuberance to the look of Waking Life that is entirely lacking here. The animation here is grim and depressing in terms of its generally washed out color scheme, whether it is depicting the run-down, filled-with-junk quality of Arctor’s druggie house, or the whitewashed anonymity of police headquarters and of the offices of New Path, the creepy corporation that rehabilitates victims of the drug. At the same time, facial features and other important visual details are sharpened, with the exaggerated iconic simplification that cartooning in general so frequently provides. This gives an eerie sense of identity as merely a mask or a performance (I couldn’t help being reminded, a little, of the mask Hugo Weaving as V. wears through the entirety of the otherwise live-action, although comics-derived, V for Vendetta). We think of schizophrenic hallucinations as being disturbingly mutated or mutable, and video surveillance as being grainy and low-resolution; the animation here suggested both of these at once. These images are rooted in the indexical reality of actors and objects before the camera, in a way that purely computer-generated imagery is not. Yet at the same time, Linklater’s images are not photorealistic or hyperrealistic in the ways that state-of-the-art CGI, whether in animation (Pixar) or summer blockbuster special effects (as in, I presume, the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, though I haven’t seen it yet) strives to be. Rotoscoping, at least in Linklater’s use of it, is rooted in the real, but the real has been somehow displaced or distorted — with the implication that this displacement and distortion is itself, in a deeper sense, the bedrock Real of the society of addiction and control. (This could well be a Lacanian or Zizekian formulation, of course).

In this way, the “look and feel” of the rotoscope technique is itself the real meaning of the film. We get immersed in the world of the film thanks to this look and feel; gradually, it “naturalizes” itself in our perceptions. The first scene of the film (as of the book) shows a man hallucinating bugs crawling rapidly over his skin. We “see” the hallucination, but the blatantly cartoony look of the bugs helps to clue us in to the fact that it is just (just?) a hallucination. But eventually this sort of distinction becomes as uncertain, and difficult for us to make, as it is for the characters themselves. There’s a quietly terrifying scene (again, taken directly from the novel) where Reeves/Arctor wakes up, and finds himself next to a woman whom he had enticed into his bed with the offer of drugs; as she sleeps, her body metamorphoses into that of Donna (Winona Ryder) — the unattainable woman (she won’t let him touch her) Arctor really desires — and then back again. Arctor goes to the surveillance room, and (as Fred, in a scramble suit) watches the incident on video replay — and the momentary metamorphosis takes place on the tape as well. The hallucination has been objectified: it plays out for the scanner, as well as for Arctor. This is kind of what happens for the spectator, over the course of the entire film. Angela was right to suggest (on the basis of seeing the trailer) to say, “I see grim hyper-realism. Not crayon drawings.”

The work done by the rotoscoping is what allows Linklater to make the film itself (in terms of narrative unfolding) so low-key, and (in terms especially of Reeves’ performance) so low-affect. Arctor doesn’t understand what’s happening to him, as it happens; and neither do we, except more or less subliminally through the effect of the animation. The downward spiral (which also turns out to be a kind of solipsistic circling in a void) only becomes apparent towards the end, when Arctor is checked into the New Path rehabilitation center. It’s as if we could only really notice it retrospectively. And by that time — since there is no Outside to this self-enclosed world of addiction/surveillance, which is also the world for which rotoscopy is the proper expression — it is too late, and we’re trapped. In this sense, the film’s (and the novel’s) final revelation that New Path itself grows and produces Substance D, the very drug whose victims they treat, is entirely logical. Consumerist hedonism and repressive surveillance join hands; chaotic self-destruction and therapeutic rehabilitation are parts of the same process; rigid social control, and the incitement to expend oneself heedlessly (the superego command of enjoyment, as Zizek might say) are facets of the same strategy of capital accumulation.

(I should add: the only aspect of the novel that I felt was missing from the film was the final portion, in which Dick goes into great detail — which Linklater entirely omits — about the procedures and ideology of New Path, their devotion to a religiously-mandated death of the spirit. This adds another dimension to the analysis of the society of control, one that I wish Linklater had paid a bit more attention to).