A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Rory Cochrane: Charles Freck

Photos 

Quotes 

• Freck : [twitching horribly]  Okay, if you guys are gonna kill eac hother, I'm s-splitting! It's getting very fucked up over here!

  Fred : Freck, the most dangerous kind of person is the one who's afraid of his own shadow.

  Freck : What is that supposed to mean?

  Barris : It means, Freckles, that if you take too much of that stuff, not only are you going to start seeing and feeling buggy bugs all over yourself but you're also gonna start talking like...

  [makes quacking sounds] 

  Barris : And no one can understand you.

  Fred : What did you say, Barris? I didn't understand you.

  [Barris softly quacks to Fred and then louder at Freck] 

  Freck : You guys are fucked up!

  Barris : [imitating Frecks in a raspy twitching voice]  Oh no. It is you ga ga goo that are fuck upted up!

  [Freck leaves and Luckman throws a rock to the ground] 

  Luckman : Go Freck yourself!

  Barris : [in a high pitched voice]  "Don't take the car, you'll kill yourselves! Ye gogh gogh gogh gogh!"

• [Freck turns on the radio] 

  Freck Suicide Narrator : Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening around him, decided, finally, to off himself. There was no problem in the circles where he hung out in putting an end to yourself. You just bought a large quantity of downers and took them with some cheap wine. The planning part had to do with the artifacts he wanted found on him by later archeologists. He had spent several days deciding, much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and an unfinished letter to Exxon, protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way, he would indite the system, and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved. At the last moment, he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the pills with a connoisseur wine, instead of Ripple or Thunderbird. So he set off on one last drive, over to Tiny's Liquors, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of 2001 Azalea Springs Merlot, which set him back almost seventy dollars. Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, and then, with a glass of Merlot, gulped down all the pills at once. However, he had been burned. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed, looking down at him disapprovingly.

  Freck : You gonna read me my sins?

  [Creature nods] 

  Freck : Eh, it's gonna take a hundred thousand hours.

  Creature : Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.

  Creature : [starts reading]  "The Sins of Freck"

  Freck Suicide Narrator : Charles Freck wished he could take back the last half hour of his life.

  Creature : [Creature continues to read]  "... theft of fingernail clippers..." "... you did knowingly and with malice..." "... punched your baby sister, Evelyn..." "... December, theft of Christmas presents..." "... one billion lies..."

  Freck Suicide Narrator : One thousand years later, they had reached the sixth grade, the year he had discovered masturbation.

  Creature : [Creature continues to read]  "... November fourteenth, Percodan... Vicodin... Cocaine..."

  Freck Suicide Narrator : Charles Freck thought, "At least I got a good wine."

• Barris : Gentlemen, you are about to witness for approximately 61 cents of ordinary household materials, the perfect home-made silencer.

  Freck : Barris, the neighbors are gonna hear.

  Luckman : Nah. They only call in murders in this neighborhood.

  Barris : Plus, freckle-deck, it's a SILENCER. They're not gonna hear anything.

  Freck : Well, I'm pretty fucking sure they're illegal.

  Barris : In this day and age, the type of society we find ourselves living in, every person of worth needs to have a gun at all times to protect themselves. And we're off, un

  [points gun at Freck] 

  Barris : , deux

  [points gun at Luckman] 

  Barris : , trois?

  [points gun to his own head] 

  Barris : .

  [Then points gun in the air and shoots. It goes off loudly] 

  Freck : That sure is some silencer.

  Barris : Yes, uh, what it did was augment the sound rather than dampen it. But I almost have it. I believe I have it in principle anyway.

  Luckman : Oh well, the good news is that regardless of what you do next time, it'll be a silencer to us because we're now DEAF!

• [first lines] 

  Freck : [on the phone]  I looked them up. They're aphids. They're in my hair, on my skin, in my lungs. And the pain, Barris, it's unreasonable. They're all over the place. Oh, they've completely gotten Millie too.

• Freck : What do you think about the New Path?

  Barris : While it doesn't matter what I think, I kinda have to tip my hat to any entity that can bring so much integrity to evil. I mean, imagine this: a seemingly voluntary, privatized gulag which has managed to eliminate the meddling middlemen of public accountability and free will and wrap it up in a little bow and give it to the public like a gift. I mean, come on this is...

  [he makes exploding sounds and gestures] 

  Barris : ... this is awe-inspiring stuff.

  Freck : I heard you have to go cold turkey.

  Barris : Cold turkey doesn't even apply to Substance D. Unlike the legacy of inherited predisposition to addictive behaviors or substances, this needs no genetic assistance. There's no weekend warriors on the D. You're either on it... or you haven't tried it.

  Freck : Well, I like it.

  Barris : Yeah. How many caps do you take per day?

  Freck : Hmmm... very difficult to determine. But not that many.

  Barris : Well, like the old-school pharmacopoeia, a tolerance develops, you know. These visions of bugs, they're just garden-variety psychosis, but a clear indication that you've hurdled over the initial fun and euphoric phase and passed on... to the next phase. News from the guinea pig grapevine suggests that whatever it is, we won't know until it's way too late, you see? You see that we're all canaries in the coal mine on this one?

  Freck : Mm. I do think I have another source. That Donna chick.

  Barris : Bob's girl?

  Freck : Yeah.

  Barris : Yeah, "his girl," although I know for a fact he never gets in her pants.

  Freck : Really?

  Barris : Yeah.

  Freck : But he... talks like he does.

  Barris : Oh, yeah. That's Bob Arctor. He talks like he does many things. It's not the same, my friend, it's not the same thing. Donna has an aversion to bodily contact. I mean, junkies lose their interest in sex, you realize, due to organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And I have observed in her an inordinate failure of sexual arousal not just toward Bob Arctor, but to... other males as well.

  Freck : I can't believe she doesn't put out.

  Barris : Well, she would... if she were handled right. For instance, I could show you how to sleep with her for less than three dollars.

  Freck : I don't wanna sleep with her. I wanna buy from her.

  Barris : Donna does coke, all right?

  Freck : Three dollars doesn't get you a line of coke.

  Barris : Ah-ah. That's where you're wrong, pal.

• Freck : The living should not serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead should, if at all possible, be used to serve the purposes of the living.