In a flash of breakup sadness and/or menstrual cycle induced madness I’ve re-upped my long defunct Criterion Collection subscription. On one hand, so much for my no making financial decisions while on my period. On the other, I finally watched Scanners!!
Telepaths occupy an interesting place in the American imagination. A mainstay of sci-fi for decades, you really don’t see them anymore. Probably because we know that’s all pseudo-science now so it doesn’t have that thrill of cutting edge possibilities but they’re so delicious as a metaphor. Here, they’re serving, at least in my interpretation as a metaphor for disabled/mentally ill people, and the double bind in attempting to navigate society with a mental disability.
Cameron Vale is troubled, the constant noise that surrounds him causes him great pain. He is treated as sub-human for this, is confused about his own history. Stephen Lack delivers his dialogue in a stilted, almost painful way, as if Vale is unaccustomed to using language at all. He’s plucked out of obscurity and ‘helped’ by handlers who openly refer to it as ‘indoctrination.’ His other options for help are Daryl Revok, who turns people into ‘robots’, as per another scanner, and is tied to the corporation who uses Vale for their own ends in ways we never fully learn the extent of, and a woman who runs a group that, while clearly helpful, is also incapable of defending themselves against the corporate, weapons manufacture interests. Does it matter who’s making the soldiers, in the end?
That both Dr. Ruth and Revok end up being Vale’s family only drives home the reading, for me. You are the problem child until you are useful. You are useful until you are disposable. Your brother might say he loves you while trying to ‘suck your brain dry’ because what else are you good for, if you can’t be useful, in the end.
There are other readings for this movie, I’m sure. Probably smarter critics saying the same thing. But I have always been drawn to telepaths as a thematic device for this reason. You can root for a telepath, find a certain power in them that you can’t find in yourself, in the real world. Sometimes such things come across as an ‘oh boy imagine if the crazies could actually hurt us’, but Scanners never does. Cronenberg always has a much deeper respect for his troubled souls than that. It more just feels like his movies always do: a tragic spiral the characters are incapable of preventing both due to outside forces and their own internal problems. His heroes never have a chance, and Vale less so than any of them.
Anyways, I liked it!! Dead Ringers is still my favorite Cronenberg, and still my go to watch when I’m sad movie, but this was a solid watch, a good reason to re-up my Criterion collections, and had some truly incredible sound design.
What am I inspired to write now: Been kicking around an alt history thing that boils down to ‘what if all that 70s pseudo science ended up being Real’. Maybe I’ll track down a bunch of telepath stories and Familiarize myself with the genre conventions.
Anybody have recs there? Lemme know!
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 