Channeling la Pucelle

Scanner Darkly and Miami Vice aren’t very accurate diagnoses, but they are pretty good symptoms. A dementedly blurred distinction diseases those of us who live in a society where the difference between work and time off is rapidly disappearing. Vice and Scanner are movies about work that looks like hanging out. In Vice, Sony and Tubbs have no lives outside of their work which is basically to jet-set around occasionally wasting a drug lord, and in Scanner the main character’s work as a nark contradicts the junkie life he has had to embrace to do his job. The two films cover the two dominant responses to what old folks still call alienated labor: total identification with work or radical dissociation and psychological disintegration. In Vice, Sony and Tubbs don’t exist outside of what the cops on NYPD Blue used to call THE job. In Scanner the contradiction between the main character’s life and his job is so extreme that he spies on himself for a living. Our fantasy about post-industrial society only involves three kinds of jobs: managers of money or symbols, gangsters, and cops. These professions blur together, and in both Vice and Scanner gangsters and cops are also quite literally moviemakers who make tapes and holographs to keep an eye on each other. We need a fix just to see straight.