The Point of the Matter

There comes a moment in Richard Linklater’s A SCANNER DARKLY (2006) that beg the question that until then was quietly simmering on everybody’s mind. And that is when Bob (Keanu Reeves), who’s in love with Donna (Winona Ryder), not knowing that she is also his boss Hank, and being rebuffed due to Donna’s repulsion at being touched, ends up on a consolation sex marathon with Connie (Lisa Marie Newmyer).

Said sex marathon is seen only after the fact, as Bob obsessively fast-forwards and pauses the surveillance footage of his intense sexual athletics. However, waking up from his post-coital slumber, and looking at her exhausted partner sleeping by his side, he seems to see her morph into Donna. Not only her face, but her body as well. And now, back at his voyeuristic observation post, his own identity hidden from his co-workers by means of a scramble suit (like the one Donna uses when being Hank), he freeze frames that fleeting moment when his mate turns into his dream-lover, moving the footage back and forward, back and forward, and even projecting that frame as a hologram for better to study – to worship, to adore? – the naked dream girl.

And it is at that precise instant, with that wonderful freeze-frame of a topless rotoscoped Winona Ryder, that the viewer feels the quiet question pressing the back of his mind, just as if it was the cold barrel of a metaphysical gun; and, just like Bob does, the viewer wonders: is that really Winona Ryder lying there, breasts exposed? Are we really seeing her topless? And, underneath that first, most obvious question, what one's really asking is: what is the point? Why did Linklater go the rotoscopic way?

I wonder if he himself has the answer. Technical showoff, probably. Or because no one had done it before (outside of spaghetti western’s opening credits back in the sixties). Listening to the technicians themselves in the DVD featurette “The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales” one’s puzzlement grows even deeper. Take, for instance, Christopher S. Jennings, who was lead artist in the making of the film: answering his own question – Why rotoscoping? Why drawing over footage? – he has nothing more significant to add than to state the obvious, that it is not Winona Ryder’s voice over the animation, it is really her performance. The actor’s performance. Well, yes. But then, why do it? Wouldn’t one have the same performance without painting over it with computer tools? In the same featurette, trying to voice his wonderment, Woody Harrelson, one of the actors, sounds equally puzzled, babbling about painting over the frame that exists. Well, no shit, Sherlock. But why?

Is it a way of superimposing one’s imagination over reality? Of pimping out the actors’ performance to one’s dreams? Is it really Winona’s tits one’s ogling, or merely the way the animators imagine them to be? Early on on the movie, as Charles (Rory Cochrane) and James (Robert Downey, Jr.) are ordering breakfast on a luncheonette, Charles starts fantasizing that the sexy waitress Betty (Natasha Janina Valdez) makes sexual advances to him while stripping down her waitress’ uniform. As the girl’s breasts come into view, one again wonders: are they really the actress’ or the way the filmmakers and animators imagined them to be? Want them to be? Are we watching drawn-over reality, or just the animators fantasizing the way her breasts look, just as Charles is imagining them to be?

Did Natasha Janina Valdez, or Winona Ryder, or Lisa Marie Newmyer really undress for their performances, or just like many before them, wearing pasties or capture-suits, did they just lend their shapes to be molded by the filmmakers’ minds? And, if so, then, what’s the point? Really. If all of cinema is illusion, what’s the point in adding another tier of make-believe over the actors’ basic performance? It gains nothing but an added degree of scrutiny of the cinematic illusion. Making the viewer even more aware that all that he's getting for his money is illusion? Isn’t that a defeat of the cinematic medium itself?

Like the multi-eyed creature that at one point of the film seems to be checking the inner workings of our reality, the viewer is prompted to challenge the sacred implicit contract which, since time began (cinema time, that is), bound him to believe the lies he's been shown on screen. And he believes, because fulfilling his part of the bargain, the filmmaker strives to make those lies seem true. That’s what we call verisimilitude. And that’s what got lost in the scalpeling of these scenes prompted by their sheer artificiality.

We know Woody Harrelson dind’t turn into a giant bug. That is all special effects. We buy that. But when the filmmakers ask us to believe that all they’ve done is to scrawl over the actual performance of the actors, we wonder not only if those are Winona Ryder’s real breasts, masked by virtual ink, but also about Reeve’s and Newmyer’s sex romp: did they do it? Is that really Keanu Reeves’ post coital dick still erect? Or is that part of the illusion, hidden under the artists' virtual pen?

If it isn’t Reeves’ pecker, or Ryder’s, Newmyer’s, or Valdez’s tits we see there, than what’s the point? If this is some kind of virtual body-double, why go the trouble? Why do you need the actors after all, and not only their voices? Why not use traditional animation, or 3D rendering, to convey your imaginanings? Wouldn’t it be more honest? Wouldn’t the illusion be truest?