where's your head at - Scanners (1981)

Art. Sane.

Hope you missed whatever the fuck this is because we are once again So Back, Baybee!

Spoilers, as per usual.

Scanners (1981)

Written and directed by: David Cronenberg

Starring: Jennifer O’Neil, Stephen Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Michael Ironside

Running time: 103 minutes

Original release date: January 14th, 1981 (US release), January 16th, 1981 (Canadian release)

the plot, in brief

It is night, and at an anonymous shopping centre, a vagrant named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) drifts around, picking leftover bits of food off the tables. He sits down for some rest, trying to cope with the voices he hears in his head as a result of his telepathic abilities. When two nearby women start talking about him, Cameron seemingly malfunctions, involuntarily causing one of the women to have a seizure. He runs, but is captured by the private military company ConSec, and brought to the attention of Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan).

Ruth explains to Vale that he is part of a select group, one of 237 super-powered individuals known as “scanners”. As well as telepathy, scanners are capable of empathy, biokinesis, technopathy and psychokinesis. Their powers revolve around “scanning” the nervous system of others, gaining control over their bodies and knowledge of their thoughts. Vale is shortly recruited by ConSec to stop a malevolent underground ring of scanners led by the deeply unstable Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside).

But Vale is in a lot more danger than he anticipated, and ConSec’s motives soon prove to be more nefarious than they let on…

but first

A few weeks ago, I spent a very surreal Saturday morning at a packed BFI Imax for the London Soundtrack Festival. In attendance? David Cronenberg and his frequent soundtrack collaborator Howard Shore, there to introduce screenings of Crash and Dead Ringers.

And let me tell you, seeing both of these films in short succession, for the first time, on the country’s biggest screen, operating on a breakfast one (1) chocolate bar, a small chai latte and the kind of delirious enthusiasm that would lead you to a 10 AM screening of Crash? Instant top ten experience of my life as a cinephile.

five things I rather liked about Scanners (1981)

Cameron Vale goes to the mall

First of all, I am a sucker for good architecture in a horror movie and specifically if it’s a shopping center that looks like a liminal space (then again, aren’t all shopping centers liminal spaces of some sort?). And when we first meet Cameron Vale, he is drifting around exactly that kind of shopping center, looking for any leftover food and trying not to scream because he can hear everyone’s thoughts.

He specifically can hear the two women near him, talking quite rudely about how they wouldn’t want him anywhere near them. Vale, who is at this point neither aware of what his powers are nor in control of them, inadvertently gets into the head of one of the women and sends her into a seizure. He runs, but is caught (WITH A DART IN THE ASS CHEEK) by goons for ConSec, a private military company. The goons take him to Dr. Paul Ruth, who - after tying Vale to a bed and allowing his thoughts to get completely overwhelmed by inviting a room full of guests to sit and look at him - explains to Vale that he is one of 237 people known as “scanners”, meaning he has a number of telepathic and telekinetic powers. ConSec is carrying out a research program into these people, and the doctor is a specialist.

Dr. Ruth injects him with ephemerol, a drug which he explains temporarily inhibits Vale’s scanning abilities, and expresses his desire to help Vale get his powers under control. There then follows a scene in which Vale is brought to sit with a yoga master and nearly scans the man directly into an early grave by getting his heart rate up so high even the yoga master’s l33t powers of being able to slow his own heartbeat aren’t helping.

So yeah, Vale’s powerful.

world’s most spectacularly brutal headache

I think if a scene is so immediately memorable you’re able to use it and it alone as your trailer then you’re absolutely on to a winner.

At a ConSec marketing day, one of the company’s scanners (Louis Del Grande) seeks a volunteer to perform a scan on. A seemingly random man (Michael Ironside) agrees and sits down on stage with him. Over the next minute or so, we and the audience in the conference room watch in increasing horror (well, we as the audience do, the audience in the conference room are slightly more politely baffled to begin with which ??????????) as the scanner starts twitching, convulsing, like an unspeakable power is taking over his body.

And then, his head explodes. Like a sledgehammer to a fleshy watermelon. It’s an image so instantly iconic that even if you’ve never seen Scanners there’s a good chance you’ve seen at least a gif of this scene. Coming to life at the hands of the legendary make-up artist Dick Smith and Lucasfilm’s Chris Walas, the exploding head scene was very much a trial and error based process, with the eventual head of the dummy being a gelatin-encased plaster skull packed with (and I quote) “leftover burgers”, latex scraps, wax and “just bits and bobs and lots of stringy stuff” that would fly through the air better.

Several explosive techniques were tried but failed to provide the desired effect - eventually, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller directed the crew to roll cameras, get inside their trucks with doors and windows closed and crouched down behind the dummy with a shotgun, blowing its head off. One imagines that Zeller at one point did utter the words “oh for fuck’s sake, I’ll do it myself”.

Originally, this scene was at the beginning of the movie but Cronenberg moved it after a number of test screenings and I do agree with the choice because you do need a bit of context to understand what it is you’re looking at here and if this scene had remained as the film’s opening I don’t think it would have been as effective of an introduction to our villain for the remainder of the story.

After the head explosion incident, ConSec and Dr. Ruth wish to recruit Vale in an effort to stop a rogue scanner named Darryl Revok, a former mental patient who was driven to the bring by hearing uncontrollable streams of thoughts. Later, Vale is shown a video of a younger Revok, who, desperate for any form of relief, had drilled a hole in his own head. He is now the leader of a malevolent underground ring of scanners, and ConSec want him stopped.

Dr. Ruth butts heads with security chief Braedon Keller (Lawrence Dane), who is advocating to shut the scanner research program down. Dr. Ruth rejects this notion, as he believes that scanners are the next stage in human evolution and that Revok’s assassination of Mr. No-Name Explode Head (Louis Del Grande is incredibly unhelpfully credited as First Scanner so pardon me for taking artistic license) is proof of this.

What Dr. Ruth doesn’t know is that Keller is working with Revok against ConSec. The film does an incredibly poor job at hiding that it’s Revok who Keller is working with - the two have clandestine meetings at a train station, with Keller taking a seat next to a man who is initially hidden by station architecture.

This could be easily remedied by switching around who is hidden; you can make it so that Revok is the one in view at first, and then make the mystery “who’s the double-agent at ConSec”, which would make the later reveal that it’s Keller be more impactful. As it is, it doesn’t take a genius to work out Keller is working with Revok which to me is a wasted opportunity. You could also just spell it out clearly from the start, because there’s no real need to hide Revok. Like, he seamlessly got into that marketing day and managed to kill someone quite publicly, it’s really not a mystery.

the artist is present

Revok dispatches some of his assassins to follow Vale as he attends an art exhibit by a man named Benjamin Pierce (Robert Silverman), an unaffiliated scanner. Dr. Ruth has informed Vale that Pierce may have more information regarding Revok, but when Vale asks the gallery owner if he can meet Pierce, he is informed that this isn’t possible. Pierce is incredibly reclusive, and will not meet with anyone. While Vale chats with the gallery owner, he is watched by an unknown woman…

Vale does not heed the gallery owner’s warnings (HEED IS NOT BEING TAKEN) and drives to Pierce’s remote house/shack/office of my dreams (DON’T JUDGE ME). Pierce’s house is filled with a fever dream of sculptures (the art is very good, in the exhibit there is a striking piece which visualizes the voices dripping into Pierce’s head and it’s possibly one of my favorite Cronenberg visuals so far?) including a GIANT hollow replica of his head which he uses as a living room/hideaway.

Pierce is, of course, not willing to play ball - Silverman does an absolute sterling job with this one scene, which unfortunately puts into perspective something that I kind of feel bad about pointing out but I can’t really not do so. Stephen Lack? Not good. It helps that everyone else is at least okay to good, but specifically in his scenes with Ironside later on (and that’s because Ironside is so fucking good as Revok, just a ball of anger and resentment with a slightly green tinge to his complexion) it shows. Lack, who to his credit is rather good at the scenes where he’s using his powers, speaks all his dialogue in the pitch of a minor TV movie protagonist. That is when he’s not just using his big blue eyes to stare intently.

Still, he rocks an array of stunning coats and vests throughout so there’s that, I guess.

Anyway, Pierce, not playing ball, Revok’s assassins break in, there’s A Bit of a Kerfuffle (read: just murder, so much murder) and Pierce dies in Vale’s arms. But before he dies, Vale manages to tune into Pierce’s fading thoughts and extracts one key bit of knowledge: the name Kim Obrist.

James Bond supervillain aesthetics

Vale finds Kim Obrist at her apartment - she is part of a group of scanners opposing Revok’s group. They have sensed Pierce’s death and are wary of Vale’s arrival, a wariness which is proven right when Revok’s assassins strike in the apartment and kill everyone apart from Vale and Kim. By setting them on fire. To quote my other half, who was present in the room for this scene: “they’re on fire. they are in fact on fire.”

Vale and Kim escape and I do apologize if the next few paragraphs sound like absolute brain melt because the plot veers into James Bond-style shenanigans (including some angular Ken Adam-style visuals and henchman costumes!). Vale forces one of the assassins to show him the vial of ephemerol he is carrying, which displays the logo of a pharmaceutical company, Biocarbon Amalgamate. Vale discovers Revok is using the company to distribute large quantities of ephemerol under a ConSec computer program called RIPE, and when he and Kim return to ConSec to investigate, Dr. Ruth reveals that he was the founder of Biocarbon Amalgamate (my head hurts).

Vale cyberpathically scans the ConSec computers, while the building explodes and Keller and Ruth die, and while Vale nearly doesn’t survive, he manages to download a list of ephemerol recipients…

the final of the world stare-out championships

After Vale and Kim visit a doctor who’s name Vale saw on the list of ephemerol recipients. While Vale is in with the doctor, Kim sits in the waiting room with a pregnant patient, and rather unnervingly, is seemingly scanned by the unborn baby. When she relays this to Vale in the hallway, he shares his findings that the doctor has been using ephemerol on pregnant women, effectively turning unborn children into scanners.

Outside, Vale and Kim are attacked, and Revok captures them, bringing them back to the Biocarbon Amalgamate James Bond Lair. It’s here that we get a fittingly James Bond-style Reveal of the Villain’s Motives: Revok tells Vale that he is actually his brother (what) and they are both children of Dr. Ruth (pardon?). Dr. Ruth learned about ephemerol’s side effects during his wife’s pregnancies, using a prototype dosage on both children before abandoning them.

This would explain why Dr. Ruth was so keen on bringing Vale in but nonetheless, WHAT.

Anyway, Revok wants to take over the world with a new generation of scanners, Vale refuses to join him, accusing him of being like Dr. Ruth, and then the two have a final confrontation that can only be described if “what if the world stare-out championship sketch from the cult 90s British sketch comedy series Big Train was a psychic gorefest”.

It’s a lot of very aggressive staring and noises leading to some insane effects, as both brothers (AGAIN, WHAT AND ALSO WHY) use their powers to basically melt each other’s flesh. It’s a delirious Cronenberg body horror spectacular and I can’t help wanting more of it because it’s insanely well-done (props again to Dick Smith who also helped pull this scene off).

Vale’s body is incinerated, and when Kim wakes up and walks in from the next room, her horror at discovering his remains is palpable (the remains themselves look disgusting, well done). Imagine then the horror that follows, as she discovers that Vale in fact survived by taking over Revok’s body, with the film leaving us on that gruesome note.

Scanners is by no means a perfect film, but as a foundation for Cronenberg’s later work it’s an important text, exploring bodily autonomy through the lens of cold science fiction. Production on the film was fraught, with the script not fully finished when pre-production began. Cronenberg dubbed it one of his most difficult movies to make, mainly because of the situation with its funding. As per Wikipedia:

most Canadian film productions of the 1970s and the early 1980s were funded through a 100-percent Capital Cost Allowance tax shield for investors passed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1974, and the film was rushed into production without a finished script or constructed sets to claim the subsidies

The first day of filming was, according to Cronenberg, a disaster as aside from there being nothing to film, a distracted truck driver watching the film crew caused a fatal accident. There is a tension to the film that betrays the circumstances under which it came to be; the script gets itself in knots, especially near the end when the truth about Revok’s connection to Vale is revealed.

I wonder what would have been if Cronenberg was given more time to develop this idea, because the bones of it are definitely intriguing, and the idea of what ConSec might do with any scanners under their thumb if their program was left to develop frightens me. It’s not hard to think of scenarios where they shape them into some kind of super soldier, yet another piece of technology for their military goals, their humanity stripped away.

Hang on what do you mean they made multiple only vaguely related sequels to this film??