What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? Does it see into me? Clearly? Or darkly?

Ive always had a fascination with apocalypse, some way or another individuals tend to push themselves towards to these wicked interests...(sex, death, violence, psychedelia..) Currently, I'm not that really into it as before, but I recall having serious psychological issues at the ages of 10 to 12 thanks to this fetish. Reading McCarthys novel and all the post-apocalyptic embroidered setting I couldn't help the feeling again, the bizarre excitement that it produced.  Although The Road is not a dystopia, some characteristics in its narration make a comprehensible resemblance to the whole futuristic degradation of reality, along with some philosophical underlying meaning: 

"What is this place, Papa?
It’s the house where I grew up.
The boy stood looking at it. The peeling wooden clapboards were largely gone from the lower walls for firewood leaving the studs and the insulation exposed. The rotted screening from the back porch lay on the concrete terrace…. This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy."

 

There's a movie I really like and its called A Scanner Darkly http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/scanner_darkly/. Its affiliation to the novel can be made throughout their main characters, Fred and the man, respectively. I thought of the same type of mental alienation and functionality for both characters, since both motives are alike in the sense that both rise from the decadent reality they live in. Fred from the imminence ofsubstance D and the man from the harsh condition he lives and the responsibility to save his son. There is always an over understood feeling that "happily ever after" for these characters is not a possibility, meaning that an unhealthy curiosity for armageddon to happen lies within the reader, or in this case myself.