This article aims to encourage a comparative approach to studying literature and film focusing on the decontextualizing, as well as recontexualizing of masculinity. It emphasizes on gender anxieties represented in male characters of Philip Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977) and Richard Linklater’s adaptation (2006). Within a comparative framework, it draws on the sociocultural and political similarities men encounter in the time of novel’s publication and its adaptation. Although the novel has many themes, Dick’s depiction of men and his critique of traditional masculinity motivate Richard Linklater to adapt the novel almost thirty years later (2006). Interestingly, this crisis is traveling from one medium, literature, to another, movie. What Dick reveals about masculinity in novel has been concealed for three decades in Hollywood. In the end, it is concluded that, the sociocultural similarities in the setting are the cause of this adaptation and Linklater’s alterations.

Keywords