When I was reading A Scanner Darkly before the movie came out, I remember wondering how they would ever be able to represented the "scramble suit" in a movie, since it was so impressionistic and subjective and mundane looking, that anything you actually drew and animated would be too concrete and objective and freaky looking.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=997

>The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.

>As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next...

>In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless.

When the movie came along, I was disappointed in the scramble suit effect they used, since it looked like a bunch of flickering concrete glimpses of different people, instead of an abstract glimpse of one generic unmemorable person. If somebody looked like they did in the movie, you'd sure notice them in a crowd, which is the opposite effect the scramble suit was supposed to provide.

It was a great try, it looked really cool, but it couldn't work because Philip K Dick wrote something that was easy to imagine, just impossible to draw.

Scanner Darkly Scramble Suit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqWBCsWRdw4

A Scanner Darkly - FX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWne23FfKW8

>They wear these suits called scramble suits, where it hides their identity, and instead replaces pieces of parts. It gives you the idea that you're seeing the person, but you just can't focus on it.

>You read in the novel and it describes it as a vague blur, or millions of different representations of people. That makes sense when you're reading it. But then we have to visualize that, and actually present that, how do you do that? A blue eye for one second, and I'll shift it to a brown eye, to a different mouth, to a mustache, to a full beard, to nothing.

There's just no way to capture the "just can't focus on it" part of the scramble suit on film, because the scrambling on film draws your attention instead of repelling it.

Rare Philip K Dick interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ewcp6Nm-rQ

>The position which writers such as myself hold in America, those positions are very lowly. Science Fiction is considered something for adolescents. For just high school kids, and for disturbed people in general to read in America. So we are limited in our writing to books that have no sex, no violence, and no deep ideas. Just something of an adventure kind of nature, which we call "Space Opera", which is just Westerns set in the future.

I still can't imagine how they could ever make The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, or Faith of Our Fathers into movies. But that's more because of the plots and the subject matter, than the visuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_of_Our_Fathers_(short_st...