Fear and Loathing in Alex Proyas’ “Dark City”
Dark City, like its enigmatic setting, is the product of a convoluted architecture, at once contradictory, fractured, and yet — somehow — whole. Like the ever-shifting bricolage that makes up its murky skyline, its most interesting narrative inventions form and collapse in fits and starts: ideas rise up like grand spires before quickly shrinking down to hovels, doorways to understanding appear and disappear, ornate structures are devised, only to be tossed aside or smashed into one another, reduced to a toppled mess.
Dark City never quite knows where to place its feet in this shifting landscape, and it shows: its central conceit is audacious but underdeveloped, its cast is talented but squirming under a sometimes-wobbly script, and its ultimate conclusions are too mawkish to be satisfying (or comforting).
I know that doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, but stick with me: Not only is Dark City not a bad film, it’s also one of the most exciting and inventive fantasy/sci-fi movies of the 90s. Its practical flaws exist, but they also don’t matter — the film consumes and incorporates them, adding to its mystique. Are its claustrophobic soundstage exteriors the result of budget constraints? Or are they meant to evoke the artificiality of its world? Are some of its performances (particularly among the movie’s bit players) so uninspired because of poor casting choices? Or do they serve to heighten the unreality of a city located outside of time and space? Are the central mysteries at the core of the story the result of sloppy screenwriting? Or are they intentional, furthering the film’s strange, unearthly atmosphere? The answer to all of these questions is yes.
All of this may sound like the worst kind of back-handed compliment, as if the filmmakers were idiot-savants who made a good movie in spite of themselves. But Dark City would be nowhere near as entertaining as it is if it were simply a happy accident — a mistake that panned out. The film has plenty of high-minded intentions, and even if it only flirts with its most resonant ideas, what ends up on-screen is more than enough to spark the imagination, particularly given the film’s studio constraints and its rather unwieldy melding of two disparate ideals: popcorn action movie and ambitious think piece.
Speaking of that (very limited) genre of “philosophical action movies,” Dark City almost always endures comparisons to The Matrix, which followed it into theaters a year later and which shares a certain visual similarity (both films were shot in Australia, and The Matrix incorporated some of Dark City’s still-intact sets). There are thematic parallels as well: a man discovers that his world is not “real,” but is instead a prison constructed by a secret cabal of powerful beings. The heroes of both films steal fire from the gods —acquiring the superhuman capabilities of their captors — and they ultimately return the gift to their people, freeing them from illusion and suffering.
Even so, Dark City is done a disservice by a direct comparison with The Matrix. The latter is the more confident film —its script is sharper, it’s more thoroughly considered the implications of its premise, and it does a better job of integrating philosophy 101 with explosions and fight sequences (an admittedly narrow objective that, over twenty years later, has still not been bettered).
Where Dark City improves upon The Matrix, however, is in the strength of its Lovecraftian atmosphere — the city feels damp, suffocating, insular — its permanent midnight evoking something closer to the actual horror one might feel in existing in someone else’s nightmare. More than anything, the experience of watching Dark City is profound. Much like its better-known cousin, you can’t be told what it is — you simply have to see it for yourself.
Following a short opening narration that explains the entire plot (mercifully excised from the 2008 director’s cut) Dark City begins in earnest with John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) waking up in a grimy motel bathtub, confused and disoriented (this is one of the earliest references to water in the film — an elemental representation of life which within the city’s walls exists only in a confining, stagnant form — Murdoch in the dirty bath, the goldfish in a bowl, the city’s still, dark canals). Remembering nothing of his past, Murdoch discovers a suitcase that ostensibly belongs to him, and a postcard from a place called Shell Beach, which he has only vague childhood recollections of. Suddenly, he receives a phone call from a man who claims he can help: one Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland, whose staccato vocal performance lands somewhere between Igor and Peter Lorre after having climbed several flights of stairs). Schreber warns Murdoch that he must flee from the people who are coming for him “even as we speak,” but Murdoch soon has bigger problems: he discovers a dead woman on the floor, bloody spirals carved into her body in a seemingly ritualistic mutilation. Startled, he flees, and the confusing blur slowly begins to focus into a horrifying clarity: if he is, in fact, John Murdoch, then he may be a murderer, too.
Dark City thus begins as a detective film with a twist: the detective himself is the very mystery he’s trying to solve. With only a few possessions and his disjointed memories of Shell Beach to guide him, Murdoch must uncover who he truly is in order to have any hope of clearing his name, much less of escaping his possible nature.
But time is running out, and the complications are multiplying. Murdoch is a man pursued: by Schreber, by his estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and by dogged police investigator Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), who believes Murdoch is a serial killer. If all that weren’t enough, an even more sinister party is hot on his heels: a strange group of pale men (and one creepy kid) dressed all in black, known only as “the strangers.”
With the strangers, the mystery reaches cosmic depths. These men, we soon learn, are not men at all, but alien beings cloaked in the bodies of the dead. Even worse, the city itself is entirely their creation, a prison constructed for the sole purpose of experimenting on its human captives, who have been brought there under mysterious (and never explained) circumstances. This experimentation takes the form of mixing and matching the memories of the city’s population, replacing life histories at whim: one night a man may remember himself as always having been a street-sweeper, the next, he’s always been the CEO of a bank. Even the physical structure of the city is malleable: the strangers can use their psychic powers to alter buildings as easily as they do memories. The result is a strange architectural mélange that leaves the city outside of time: it is every place — and no place — all at once.
Why do they do it? The strangers need data, apparently: their species is dying, and they believe that the key to their salvation is in understanding how humans tick — figuring out what, exactly, makes a person an individual. The strangers, we are told, are in search of nothing less than the human soul, and they believe that the key to its understanding lies within the memories of their unfortunate test subjects.
This is well-trod ground in Science Fiction; pondering what it means to be human is one of the genre’s favorite pastimes. This study is most often presented from the perspective of a non-human outsider — a defamiliarizing technique unique to Fantasy & Sci-Fi that allows it to explode even the most basic assumptions about human nature in a quest to understand it. Often these interrogations take on a tone of bemused indifference, hatred, or even pity for what they reveal, but they are just as often presented as a kind of reverence: the robot who longs to be a man, the aliens who desire to understand the apparent irrationality of human affairs, the beings far more technologically advanced who nevertheless see in humanity some “extra” spark absent from themselves.
The strangers, certainly, fit into this last mold. Theirs is a collective consciousness, and they believe that human individuality is the key to saving their kind. Why this should be the case is never explained: one can imagine the strangers desperate (or the film’s screenwriters overly enamored with their own species) but the point remains — there is something ineffable, something not easily available to scientific understanding, that makes humans special.
In Dark City, that special something is not anchored to memory. As director Alex Proyas states in the commentary track for the film:
For me the question is, if there was a man and a woman who were in love who were married let’s say, and who had been together for a very long time, if by some strange procedure they could have their memories erased, and then they would re-meet, would they fall in love again? Is love some kind of a force that rules us beyond our identification with each other and ourselves? My feeling is that’s probably the case.
What does it mean to be you? Are you only your memories — the eventuality of all the things that have happened to you? If those memories were taken away, would you be the same person? If so, then — absent your memories — what is it that remains that makes you that same person? It’s no surprise that the answers to these questions have proven evasive, with both philosophy and science weighing in. Dark City, at least, would seem to side against the idea that we are only what we can remember, arguing that what’s left when our memories are vanquished is something else entirely — something immutable and indissoluble — that might be called the soul.
But there’s another twist, of course: in the city, your memories aren’t even your own. It’s one thing to lose one’s past, but it’s another thing entirely to have it replaced with someone else’s. What then? Is the human soul a lump of unmolded clay, waiting for the guiding hand of experience to shape it into a recognizable form? Or is it solid from the start, unmoved by whatever life can throw at it? How are our inherent natures altered by the vicissitudes of fate?
This is something like the nature vs. nurture debate, and Dark City’s take on it — like with most of the questions the film raises — is brief and ambiguous. When one of the strangers, Mr. Hand (The Rocky Horror Picture Show creator Richard O’Brien, in a fantastically unsettling role) injects himself with the memories of a serial killer, he certainly begins to take on some of the characteristics of a murderer, but then maybe the good Mr. Hand always nursed an interest in slaughter? He is in any event not human, and the film’s more relevant case studies — Murdoch, Emma, Schreber, and Bumstead — don’t reveal much. Their behaviors appear awkward, almost performative (another meta-narrative twist) perhaps some left-over confusion from having already “lived” a hundred different lives between them, or perhaps something closer to Sartre’s “bad faith” — the strain of being defined by whatever new job or societal role the strangers have devised for them.
Dark City only hints at such possibilities. It’s editing is jarringly kinetic, and it rarely stops to catch its breath before it’s on to the next scene — we spend precious little time lingering on the thoughts of any one character. As such, it’s hard to argue that Proyas’ film has much at all to say on the subject of personal identity, beyond the fact that it — somehow — persists. This decided lack of confrontation is, ironically, the only straightforward statement Dark City cares to make on the subject. Proyas doesn’t want to engage with his film’s thesis so much as flee from it, to dissolve it in the bright, blue ocean just beyond the city’s borders (as happens, predictably, in the final scene). It’s almost as if, like Murdoch, the film itself is frantically trying to escape the portent of the cerebral horrors it’s uncovered, to find the exit, to burst through the walls and leave the complications of difficult philosophical questions behind.
And yet the film can’t quite escape the weight of its premise. Through it all the city remains: stifling, labyrinthine, and all-encompassing, rendering every attempt to flee its bounds a circular journey deeper into its depths. The city in Dark City is not only the stage on which the film’s events occur, but a physical manifestation of memory itself, of a history at once tangible and obscure. Like real cities, it is caught in a ceaseless swirl of creation and dissolution, mirroring the strange burden of remembrance, different eras standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a pastiche both dead and alive. All the while it becomes more elaborate, more laden with the physical and psychological detritus of its history. The city feeds back on itself in an endless loop, always in a state of becoming — creating something new out of, and amongst, the remainders of its past, but never fully emerging from it.
In the end Murdoch wrests control of the city from the strangers, destroying them in the process. He bathes the dark city in light, and even forms an encircling ocean, remaking the world according to his desires. He again finds Emma, who — having had her memories erased — is now Anna, and we are made to believe that the two will nevertheless fall in love again, that Anna’s heart has not forgotten Murdoch even if her head has. Here again, Dark City is unnerved enough to dispense with complexity in favor of sentiment, but maybe that’s for the best — the light can conceal, too, and perhaps there are some dark places that are better left unexplored.
