You Bet Your Life

Last movie viewed: A Scanner Darkly

This movie gets my vote for best film of 2006. Besides the stunning visual depictions, the story itself was one that deserved to be on film. It is perhaps the best existential tale in recent history and one that is certainly timely in the postmodern 21st Cenutry.

Bob Arctor is not unlike Sartre's Roquentin, who finds contempt in ordinary things and finally reaches a state of pure nausea when he sees the being of existence itself. Arctor, in a moment of clarity, finds himself alienated from his own life, unable to fit into traditional society. But his rejection of its does not alieviate the dread and despair.

"The Pain, so unexpected and undeserved had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs . I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life, my house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change, nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell ugly things and surprising things and sometimes little wondrous things spill out at me constantly and I can count on nothing."

"What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do then I'm cursed and cursed again. And we'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that fragment wrong too."

I'm reminded of the discussion of Zen in Robert Pirsig's Lila: "Zen hell is the world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can't participate in it. You're forever a stranger in your own life . . . You split into two people, who they think you are, and who you really are , and that produces the Zen hell." Like the famous people discussed in this Zen truth, Arctor becomes two people, the one being watched and the one watching himself.

Having become an object to himself, he is unable to see the transcendence of his being. Unaware of who he is, Arctor is not able to understand the facticity of his life, and this inability to take responsibility for it only increases the sense of despair.