Philip K. Dick is the Poet Laureate of false memories and fake experiences.
~~ Andrew M. Butler

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car.
~~ Philip K. Dick

I couldn't believe my eyes. I knew already that Hollywood has been "borrowing" from legendary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick for years. There were the major "adaptations" that you may have seen: Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1992) and Screamers (1995). If you enjoyed The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999) or Fight Club (1999), then you have been privy to some very Phildickian characters and worlds. Even Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise are getting in on the act: they are filming Dick's short story Minority Report.

I took a deep breath and looked again. Yes, what I was reading had been confirmed by several independent sources. Emma-Kate Croghan was slated to direct A Scanner Darkly, Dick's finest anti-drug novel "as psychotic warfare."

Suddenly I felt, not for the first time in my life, that I had passed through an invisible barrier, and was now living in a Phildickian universe. Cognitive dissonance redux.

The Evolution of a Vital Love

Emma-Kate Croghan is an Australian film director who pulled off an audacious project, after graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts called Love & Other Catastrophes (1996). Love & Other Catastrophes is the Antipodean equivalent to Gregg Araki's credit card films, Kevin Smith's micro-budget effort Clerks (1994) and Robert Rodriguez's El Mariarchi (1993). The film was described by Australian Film Commission (AFC) marketing director Sue Murray as a "middle class kids screwball comedy."

The production fine print reveals the truth behind the auteur mythology (take note, aspiring directors). Film researcher Mary Anne Read revealed in her book More Long Shots: Australian Cinema Successes in the 90s (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1999) that Love & Other Catastrophes was originally shot on Super-16. The film's $25,000 shooting budget had grown to A$45,000 by the end of the three-week production shoot. The AFC gave Croghan a completion budget of A$500,000 that "covered 35mm film transfer and blow-up, paying outstanding deferrals, international legal rights, and a $45,000 marketing loan," Read noted.

Love & Other Catastrophes was the success story of 1996, and Croghan looked to the Cannes Film Festival, the American Film Market and the prestigious Sundance Film Festival for international exposure. Australia's Encore magazine rated Croghan, in a 1999 industry survey, as amongst the twenty most important Australian film directors. Her follow-up, Strange Planet (1998), was an octane-paced study of Gen X in search of love and employment in cosmpolitan Sydney.

Life Out of Joint

Croghan, who has been attached to the project since 1997 (during the buzz generated by Love & Other Catastrophes), may appear at first to be an unusual director for A Scanner Darkly.

Dick's novel was loosely based on his experiences in late 1960s Berkeley, and the fate of several close friends. Set in a near-future California, A Scanner Darkly explores the paranoid world where an unspoken totalitarianism reigns - of a complex drugs bust gone wrong. Undercover narcotics agent S.A. Fred has been assigned to a household to keep surveillance on Jim Barris, a dealer of the highly addictive drug Substance D (Death). Fred has secretly assumed the identity of Bob Arctor, who spends most of his time having existentialist conversations and taking drugs with Barris, house-mate Ernie Luckman, friends Charles Freck and Jerry Fabin, and his girlfriend Donna Hawthorne. Fred's superiors ask him to keep an eye on the new drug dealer Arctor, who in turn suspects that someone is out to get him. Arctor/Fred is suffering side effects from the insidious Substance D: his left and right hemispheres are out-of-sync. He doesn't realize that he is keeping surveillance on himself.

As A Scanner Darkly progresses, Fred loses grip on reality and, his identity further blurred by a scrambler suit, descends into psychosis. Dick's payoff was vintage Gnosticism with a twist.

Dick combined tragicomic dialogue with some prescient thoughts about the War Against Drugs: Arctor's girlfriend is also an undercover agent, and the treatment facility supports itself . . . by harvesting Substance D.

Croghan was, however, attracted by the black comedy elements: "It is a kind of departure and it isn't. It deals with the kind of caustic, loser sense of humour that you see in Dick's writing but hasn't made it on to the screen. If anything it reminds me of [comic strip artist] Robert Crumb."

There's hope yet that Croghan and Jersey Films may capture Dick's elusive personality instead of the hyper-violent entertainment or postmodernist pin-up attempts to bring him to the screen to date.

We Can Film You (Simulacra)

Croghan, has, like Fred/Arctor, mastered the art of hiding the concealing of personal identity. Love & Other Catastrophes propagated a production mythology that was perfect for a New New Hollywood marketplace where the auteur is as much marketing hook and product as talent.

Croghan's study of directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese, who all existed outside the Hollywood studio system, has paid off. Like many film school graduates, Croghan had "no other avenue" to make films, she told interviewers, if she didn't use 'guerilla' film techniques. By embedding her films with genre conventions and film references, Croghan mirrors Dick's sampling of late 1960s counterculture. She advised filmmakers to develop self-discipline, echoed by co-writer Stavros Kazantzidis: "make it low-budget, under $50,000."

Good advice for filming A Scanner Darkly, which relies on dialogue and characters. There are no stereotypical aliens.

The Truth Is Within Us All

Well, apart from a humorous sequence during which a character spends eternity having his sins read to him (it takes 11,000 years to get to his discovery of masturbation at age eleven). But like Fred/Arctor, Croghan also disbelieves her own advice: she looked to George Miller's Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and Alex Proyas's Dark City (1997) for inspiration.

Australian film has been described as possessing a "purgatorial narratives", yet A Scanner Darkly is a very "purgatorial" story.

With Emma-Kate Croghan at the helm, maybe Hollywood might get a Philip K. Dick film right this time (The Real Third Secret: "Ex nihilo nihil fit").