When two vaguely defined pharmochemical corporations conspire against each other to out manufacture the antidote for telepathic self-immolation – you know you’ll have to pick sides. Infiltrating each other’s organizations with the most woefully psychotic crew of scientists and artists ever to grace the screen – you’re in for a bumpy night. Who will you pick? How will you celebrate?

Picture this. Canada. 1981. You are a humble patron of the contemporary arts scene. While browsing a gallery of oversized plaster casts affixed to mutated nervous systems a pair of green cat eyes haloed by a salt and pepper coiffure stops you in your tracks. Maybe her name is Cassie. She looks like an older Cassie anyways and she recognizes you for the previously feeble-minded bum with no memories but now somehow versed in emotional nuance telepath that you are. She is beautiful. They cannot touch her. In the end after all this is over and the finest stream of blood pierces the skin of a most expertly placed bladder you will have a chance to build a life together. Albeit a life with some sacrifices to your body vehicular, but a life just the same. The mole on that face designed to inspire hatred in an audience confused about the veracity of their chosen path will not have been placed in vain. 

Scanners, after all, inhabits a society where the brightest minds are employed by institutions that despise and fear them because of their overwhelming pretension and inaccessibility, whereby relegating them to a more comfortable position for the audience; where everything they do – while in the real world take responsibility for the alleviation of suffering – exist in the film world as everything mysterious about the potential terror of a future dominated by technological progress and the realization of secular authenticity. Instead of the pursuit of understanding, tis much easier to blow motherfuckers away. This turgid discomfort so earnestly embraced as the ultimate foil by Cronenberg results in the brutal extermination of all fakery writ large. But when this blissful release finally makes egg – everything seems to turn out just fine. It shows us that yes you too wish that everything trying to force a better life on us would just shut the heck up for a second. Go ahead and celebrate with your fist up. Not up there sweetheart. Just in the air.

At an evil board meeting discussing the infiltration by a rogue scanner (Michael Ironside – retroactive Oscar anyone?) during their pitch to military contractors, an aggressively Freudian dude says he has a plan. From there ze doctor seeks out his abandoned experiment of a son (not revealed until the end of the movie – gee whiz) and gives him a syringe full of clear liquid so he can stop “scanning” and do his bidding instead. And so the back and forth continues, a la the process of creation, ostensibly for our benefit.

Computer scientists develop the software to make our lives less hatefully inconvenient and to organize the medical records of our parents. But in Cronenberg’s Canada they exist as hunched over dinner plate glasses wearing plebian shufflers. As if everything they do is a secret and has no value except to expedite corporate greed. By the way they don’t believe in what they do because god knows they just need a job. Sound familiar world gulp gulp?

Take for instance the moment of reckoning where the suit and tie man orders the head geek on campus to set off the self-destruct sequence within the company’s mainframe. Having realized moments prior that our main scanner is attacking the computer via a pay phone, the ultimate leap of logic occurs. Obviously the nervous system (as he calls it) of the computer is strikingly similar to that of a human being. As such our hero finds the Achilles to take down the behemoth. One of many broad strokes of movie logic leveled upon this (at the time) nascent technology, one can forgive the fear and revenge hurled at this harbinger of sin. Indeed, like swine, computers occupy a place of fascination and repulsion (Christopher Hitchens where you at?) in both eastern and western mono-worshiping cultures. But instead of providing utility through blindingly delicious pork intake and instilling revolt after primal death screams, computers speed up the math necessary to take us to the edge of Creation but also expedite our obsolescence. Heck if that were the case we might pull a gun on a dorky fella too. Luckily we don’t have to because he does everything we say and seems totally cool with it.

Artists challenge the aesthetic status quo, deconstruct the narrative myths responsible for our chronic misery, and throw the occasional kick ass party. But again, in this movie, they are highly loathsome creatures who affect the “faggy” stance permitting no outsiders while remaining oppressively critical and totally useless. In other words they are something to be feared as vain, time wasting, and antithetical to the real work of deciphering pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. Eventually they form a support group, hold hands, talk about how sweet they are, then get walked in on by a black guy and swarthy fella who proceed to blow them away pretty harshly. Yay!?

Ironically the scanner artists are also destroyers of their own world, cannibalizing the main dude’s lair by literally picking apart the plaster casts with machine guns. Watching the slow-motion fragments shatter through the air as though it were the literal human flesh of their own kind creates one of many confusing catharses. Reckon with that.

What started the brutal showcase of close range gun executions used in so many 80’s action movies anyhow? Was it the advent of exploding bladders and passable goopy makeup? Was it the demand from countercultural boomers seeking entertainment to keep away the conformity previously obscuring the rampant domestic violence behind the veneer of post war tranquility? Thinking back on Terminator, Diehard, and McBain we remember that the closer a gun came to someone’s face equaled direct proportionality to just how bad the shooter was. This shift in acceptable gun to body proximity happened quickly in mainstream cinema and before the initial shock wore off we were already culpable for the knee-deep glut of expendable prequels.

Then we have the fresh off the assembly line glisten of primary-colored plastic mall food courts and the antiseptic squeak of corporate hallways. We are invited to bathe in the last gasp of pro-positive postindustrial mass consumerism – the colors of the malls and computer labs inform the cleanliness of order only to be deconstructed by the same primaries exploding and oozing out of the victims. The reds-yellows-and-blues not only inform the conformity of order but also the brutality of the grotesque, paired together to emphasize inescapable symmetry.

If everything about Scanners real world counterparts ring true, that is, making the future easier and uncovering the lies of the past, this miasma of resistance to said future takes the form of the movie’s title. The tightening pulsing palsy pulled off with varying degrees of indulgence by the players. Now even though we are dealing with a movie that’s half B and half legit, this combo works together in surprising ways, not the least being the multiple interpretations of scanning as suffered by perpetrator or victim. There wasn’t a mold for this acting. Cronenberg didn’t say, “ok people, gather round, this is what it feels like to be telepathically invaded.” More likely he just said, “do it however you want, just gimme some verve.” As such everybody does it so differently and with such intensity that the forced nature of each performance remains jarring enough to jolt the viewer into a voyeuristic moment with each actor.

David Foster Wallace interviewed a cop for his piece in Consider the Lobster. The cop said it best when he described why he watched porno. Disengaged from the balls and whistles of the main action the cop would wait for the moment of (not necessarily) climax when the actor – previously engaged in fuck me now hijinks would let their guard down enough to allow for at least a second’s worth of facial expression akin to something like honesty. Only then would he truly appreciate the show. The faces. The faces.

Watching these folks show us what it’s like not only on the inside of their minds but also the roadmap to get there proves itself initially ham-fisted but eventually intimate. And even though they’re mostly dead we feel like we might’ve played a small part in their journey. For this we remain grateful. Next time you intend to say hello to that shattered person on the street hoping they take the bait, go home and pop in Scanners instead. You’ll be less let down that way.