A Scanner Darkly recalls Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky in that both novels focus on white men who are reduced to the level of racialized farm workers. Arctor's new status as a farm worker is visually emphasized in the animated film version of A Scanner Darkly, which was partly filmed in the agricultural fields near Dick’s Orange County condo. It concludes with scenes of Arctor, played by mixed—race actor Keanu Reeves, wearing a pesticide spray pack and walking through a cornfield when he sees a carpet of blue flowers amid the rows of green. He stoops to examine them when he is interrupted by the farm director. In contexts where life chances are unequally distributed, and, in particular, where farm workers are disproportionately vulnerable to premature death, Heinlein and Dick both zero in on the prospect of white masculinity brought low. 

But whereas Heinlein narrates his hero’s downward arc only to stage white transcendence in ways that denigrate actually existing, nonwhite farm workers who do not similarly rise, the future represented in A Scanner Darkly leaves no room for fantasies of white progress. The manager and director look at each other and then “down at the kneeling figure, the kneeling man and the Mors ontologica planted everywhere,” as if their mutual recognition of each other required looking down on the farm worker amid the visual field of death. These hierarchical relations of looking are well represented in the film version, where the image of Bob kneeling is presented in a high angle shot, as if from the standing perspective of the condescending farm director. A Scanner Darkly thus presents a devastatingly lucid representation of processes of abjection in which farm workers freeze into the “living dead” under an agribusiness gaze. In response, farm-worker activists and artists have cultivated a dereifying gaze in order to combat the deathly looking relations of agribusiness.