Review: Dark City (a film by Alex Proyas, 1998)

The noir cult classic Dark City (1998) is one I've been thinking of recently, as I've begun to see time out of joint. There is the ongoing revelation of the Real as decomposition and growth; manifesting as those who remain in solidarity holding the knowledge of this in the face of and despite forces that we may not yet understand. Then, on the flip-side, there is the continued search, a scrambling for a non-existent singular Truth, one that never rests in its shifting. And they are not one and the same.

Dark City may help explain what I mean through its narrative, visual and verbal. The city, the urban landscape, is presented as a trap, one in which people wake up and go to sleep blindly, go to work and go home in a daze of repitition. They have the same dinner every night with their spouses and chat idly. They have no idea whatsoever as to what makes the entire place tick; no idea where its "engine" is. And they do not question this. They lead half-conscious, unexamined lives.

However, there are individuals who are abruptly awoken and see the place for what it is: a dark, run-down, decrepit, dirty city of cockroaches and filth, where people are put to sleep at random times, awake at random times, where architecture and interior designs change their facades and styles as if jigsaw puzzle pieces placed together and rearranged by an unknown force. Dark City is a place where the night never ends and where the sun never comes up. One of the people who unexpectedly wakes up to realize this is a man named Eddie.

Eddie is found in his bedroom that has also become his jail cell. The detective/policeman of the film, Bumstead, sees Eddie as merely a psychotic madman, no longer capable of understanding "reality". His walls are covered with notes, newspaper clippings, and obscure drawings. When questioned, Eddie yells at the detective: "There is no way out! It's all just a big joke."

Another man who awakens is our main character, the protagonist John Murdoch.

John Murdoch awakens in a sickening bathroom, naked, everything covered in slime. He is distraught, confused, and has completely forgotten his identity. The phone rings and Murdoch answers to a Dr. Schreber on the other end, who explains that he knows something about what's actually happening to the world.

So that is one layer of the narrative; that of the unconscious horde of bodies that go about their days as if nothing is wrong and nothing strange has or will happen as well as the individuals that wake up to find that something is indeed very wrong and everything about it is strange.

The layer that adds complexity to this is another landscape of bodies all their own, that of a group of men given the title The Strangers, who go by names like Mr. Quick, Mr. Face, Mr. Glove, Mr. Shade, and Mr. Hand. These are the men who are behind the facade of the Dark City, who run the show, who put the public to sleep, who wake them up, who change their surroundings, homes, and identities too. The audience finds out that these Strangers are jealous of the souls of humanity. Not only that, they need their memories and experiences to survive and so feed off of them. It's no accident that they all look the same, dress the same, act the same, and speak the same way. This group of men may be addressing the idea of some singular concept of group identity - a manifestation of a Truth - that binds all of us.

Thus, Dark City may be understood as simply an iteration of the old philosophical question: Are we simply cogs in a wheel or do we have our own free will as individuals? The film seems to advocate for the latter.

But there is another, more interesting question here as well, a question concerning what is shown quite explicitly. In revealing a horde of bodies - The Strangers - behind the idea of totality - the city (for example), what does this say about how we understand life itself? Do we really believe there is a massive group of people (or aliens, or the Strangers, in this case) that construct the built world and have power over our emotions and memories? I don't think we do believe this. Rather, we question the idea of finding a totality at all where the naming of things is simply a transmission of data from one point to the next. The knife cuts through this view by the conception that the answer is in the question; and as Murdoch tells one of the strangers, they were looking for the answers in the wrong place. The Strangers, in not caring one whit for their subjects, lose their ability to actually Tune In (as they attempt to in a process they call the "Tuning") accurately because they use humanity simply as a means to an end, rather than understanding what humanity, in actuality, really means.

A late introduction but nevertheless an important one, is studying the character of Mr. Murdoch's wife, Anna. Anna lives within the Dark City as well and begins a search for her husband when she realizes he has been missing. Murdoch searches for his identity as he searches for her, and Anna searches for him, knowing full well who she is... or at least not questioning it as obstinately. As their brains crumble and all reason falls apart, something tugs at the both of them, something deep within that cannot be understood by memory nor experience, but by a fundamental force of recognition that finds its source somewhere beyond the physical body, no less the eyes it holds.