Dark City (1998) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Despite all his rage, he is still just a rat in a cage.

Dark City is a strange blend of neo-noir and science-fiction which creates a multi-layered mystery that asks the audience, and the characters, to determine what is reality and what is their imagination. The resolution asks the questions that sci-fi has been asking for decades including why are we here and what is our purpose.

First Impressions

In what appears to be a mix between a horror film and 1950s film noir, the trailer for Dark City provides some incredibly bizarre imagery. Pale, bald men, in leather suits looking like something from Hellraiser literally float through some kind of mechanized space. Separate from them are the human characters in 1950s attire and locations, like a hotel room, a club, or alleyways. There’s not much that the trailer exposes about the film except a particularly dark vibe, and the fact that it stars several well known actors. Next exit, Dark City.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In a dark city, doctor Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) leaves a building, cutting through the alleyways, when his watch stops at midnight exactly. In the bathroom of a generic hotel, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens in the bathtub with no memory of who or where he is. A phone call from Schreber warns him to get out of the room, just as a trio of creepy, pale, bald men in dark trench coats enter the hotel looking for him. On his way out, John discovers a dead woman with wounds in the shape of spirals. He flees to a local automat where he remembers he left his wallet, there he meets May (Melissa George), a local prostitute, who takes him home with her.

Elsewhere, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) is busily working the case of looking for the killer of local prostitutes. He took over the investigation from Walenski (Colin Friels), who has gone insane–believing he, and others, are not themselves. Bumstead is visited by Emma (Jennifer Connelly), John’s wife, who reports him missing for two weeks. They had a fight and he left her. John flees May’s apartment and is confronted by three of these trenchcoat clad men, known as Strangers. They are led by Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien) and attempt to restrain John, but the man uses a telekinetic power on them, called “tuning”, and escapes.

John wanders the always dark city, realizing he is not a killer. He has memories of a place called Shell Beach, which no one seems to know how to get to. John follows Schreber one night and realizes he is working with the Strangers. At midnight the whole city stops and falls asleep as the Strangers use their tuning powers to physically rearrange the geography of the buildings and streets. Schreber uses a syringe to implant new memories in some of the citizens so that the Strangers can discover what makes humans tick. The Strangers want to track down their lost human, even if their leader Mr. Book (Ian Richardson) can’t believe that a human can get the ability to tune.

In order to find John, Mr. Hand agrees to have the memories that were to be implanted in John the evening he awoke, implanted in himself. With John’s memories, Mr. Hand believes he can deduce where this lost man will go. John meets Walenski in the subway by chance. The demented man is ranting about being unable to leave the city, and explains how “they” steal people’s memories and swap them between individuals, just before leaping in front of a passing train. John, still unable to find a way to Shell Beach, goes to visit his Uncle Karl (John Bluthal) as Emma works with Bumstead to find John before the Strangers.

As Mr. Hand and his group close in on John, the amnesiac realizes that everything he thinks, or remembers, is all lies. He turns himself in to Bumstead, but when the Strangers come for John at the police station, the Inspector releases him, finally realizing that there is something weird going on. They pick up Schreber and force him to show them the way to the Ocean. He is unable to, and they end up at the edge of the city, where John uses his powers to blow a hole in the brick wall. Outside the wall is space. They are all contained on a floating space station built to resemble a city. Bumstead is blown through the hole, and John finally surrenders to the Strangers, and sleeps.

Believing John has evolved, Mr. Book tells Schreber to inject John with one final set of memories that will reveal the human soul to them. Schreber quietly switches vials and instead imprints John with a series of memories which include Schreber instructing John how to use his new power to defeat the Strangers. John rises as a new man, and after a telekinetic battle, kills Mr. Book. Using his powers he creates an Ocean, flooding the Strangers workspaces, as well as a way to Shell Beach. He tells Mr. Hand that they went looking for the soul in the wrong place, as he points to his heart. He then rotates the space station towards the light, providing sun for the first time, and sets off to find Emma, now named Anna, who has no memory of their time together. John plans to be in control of his life from now on.

“There is no ocean, John. There is nothing beyond the city. The only place home exists is in your head.” – Dr. Schreber

History in the Making

Did you ever have a dream that you were not yourself? Dark City takes that feeling and plays it to heightened levels. It was the first of several films from the 90s that reimagined the nature of reality and asked the audience to look at their world from a more conspiratorial angle. The film creates a world that is both familiar and yet somehow alien in order to create a mystery for the protagonist to unravel, as the audience also tries to sort it out. Viewers may be more familiar with The Matrix, or even The Thirteenth Floor, as other examples of a similar type of film. All three movies examine the nature of reality and what it means to be human, with each going about it in a unique way.

Not to be confused with a 1950 noir/crime film of the same name (which was Charlton Heston’s first starring role), Dark City takes on a very similar tone, evoking common elements of the noir drama. The film is purposefully set in an anachronistic time that evokes 1950s America as much as any other early 20th Century moments, in order to add a level of mystery to the film. Writer and director Alex Proyas was obviously influenced by these types of films, as well as films like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, in creating this confining and kafkaesque city. He also adds a splash of science-fiction, which ends up permeating the entire film. While the Strangers seem odd and alien to begin with, nothing prepares the audience for the reveal that the strange city is actually an experimental zoo floating in space.

Genre-fication

While there are other neo-noir sci-fi films, Blade Runner being one of the best known, Dark City plays with the genre in order to appear as more of a conventional noir film for much of its runtime. It does not contain the slick, wet-neon look that is associated with the Ridley Scott film. But it, like Blade Runner, evokes the genre of the noir crime drama. These stylistic, design, and thematic choices include a constant state of night, the protagonist being on the run from the law, and the hidden past of the protagonist–which is also hidden from the audience. Classic noir films that inspired this production would most likely include films like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Third Man.

The film includes a protagonist who is on the run from authorities for a crime that he did not commit (but early on, even’s he’s not certain that he is innocent). He is pursued by a single-minded authority figure, in Frank Bumstead, who believes that he is in the right, with reality meeting his perceived expectations. There is also the femme fatale figure, a sultry nightclub lounge singer, and wife of the accused murderer, Emma. She seems to understand implicitly that John is innocent, but Bumstead fears for her safety, even as he chooses to bring her along on his investigation. Her character is the one that helps to begin unraveling Bumstead’s world, as she convinces him to look deeper into the ritualistic killings, and her husband’s innocence. If this was all there was to the film, it would firmly be considered a classic noir movie. That’s where The Twilight Zone-like twist comes into play.

Like a classic Rod Serling TV episode, Dark City takes an unexpected turn when it reveals that the characters are not crazy and their reality is in fact the experiments of a series of strange, humanoid aliens holding them in a space zoo. Alien experimentation on humans is a tried-and-true element of science-fiction films as well as in urban legends. From Mars Needs Women to Mars Attacks, aliens cannot seem to leave humans alone. The strange ineffable quality of mankind is something that aliens from sci-fi films are always trying to capture, reproduce, or stomp out. As usual, that same quality in humanity is one that manages to stop the aliens in their tracks, and teaches them that they will never be able to understand humanity, as we often don’t completely understand ourselves.

Societal Commentary

Dark City returns to the core themes for some of the best science-fiction stories, mainly ‘why are we here.’ With John awakening at the start of the film with no memory, the audience goes on the journey with him to understand about the world he lives in. To both him and the viewer, this world is familiar yet foreign. Certain elements do not seem to coincide with reality. The observation of reality begins to change that reality, as John begins to peel away the layers in order to understand the true nature of his existence. His situation was created by the Strangers who wanted to find the “soul” of humans, by swapping memories between various individuals and seeing how each person reacts to the same stimulus, memories, and ideas within their head. But as John points out, humanity’s soul is not in its head, but inside its heart.

The main reason for the Strangers weird predilection with humanity, as described by Mr. Hand, is due to them having a collective consciousness and memory between them. They are fascinated by the individuality that they see between the humans in their zoo. Each person has their own compartmentalized view of their lifetime, while the Strangers lack this. In essence, even though humans are shown as technologically inferior, their emotional strengths balance the scales in their favor. Dark City presents this power rift by the Strangers as a conspiracy fueled rant by Walenski. He raves like a lunatic about the lives that he’s lived and the aliens that control his thoughts. And while he sounds crazy, in the end he’s correct. The Strangers “sedate” the humans by making them sleep, which is a thinly veiled metaphor for either lacking awareness or critical thinking about the nature of their reality.

The Science in The Fiction

The nature of memory is one of the main themes for Dark City. Many of the characters have specific memories of their past. John vividly remembers Shell Beach, which serves as the emotional link to a past he cannot fully remember. This drives him to unravel the Strangers’ schemes as he attempts to discover the way back to this memory, which of course doesn’t exist–since all his memories are a fiction created by Schreber and implanted in his brain. Bumstead has an accordion that he values, a final gift from his mother before she died. It’s a strong connection he has to this object, however, he cannot remember when she gave it to him. The instrument serves as a totem of the past, illustrating how humans prescribe lots of sentimentality and emotional weight to their possessions. He knows what it represents, but not specifics of why it represents those things. Almost a nightmare version of life, where someone runs through the process of their existence by rote, but without the actual understanding of why.

John represents the dramatic evolution of the species, like Neo would later do in The Matrix. The experimentation on him caused some elements of change in his body allowing him to be able to tune, the word that the Strangers use to indicate their ability to control people and things telepathically. At least the film makes it seem like a dramatic evolution, but it’s unclear how many lifetimes John may have lived through while these powers grew within him. His powers might also have been an element introduced by Schreber into the mix as a way to escape his endless servitude to the Strangers. Once John understands the tuning process, via the doctor’s memory-filled injection, he chooses to dismantle the oppression by the Strangers and create a world based on the imagery they gave him. Turning the powers of the enemy back onto themselves is an ongoing theme in sci-fi and fantasy films. He chooses to turn the light back on, an obvious metaphor for enlightenment about his predicament, and create a real Shell Beach where he can go and get to know Anna, which is Emma’s new persona, and perhaps start a new life with her.

The Final Frontier

In the end, John is recreated in the image of the Strangers, but uses his powers for purposes to further humanity, or at least his own desires. It becomes a happy ending, or at least as happy an ending as can be expected given that the hundreds of people living in the dark city are on a floating disc somewhere in space. Of all the films about changes in reality, and dystopian regimes unknowingly controlling the protagonists, Dark City seems the most like a metaphor for actors in a play or in a movie. The set pieces slide around an transform each night (the city’s buildings, the memory totems), different people are brought in to play the same roles, such as the serial killers (John being the next in a line of participants) or the desk clerk at the hotel, who was replaced by another person “performing” the same line, and yet they all perform the same actions on another “day.”

Maybe this is the holidays talking, but watching the film this time Doctor Schreber seems like some perverse Santa Claus as he visits sleeping people at night and injects new memories into their heads. Maybe some of those memories are dancing sugar plums! Fans of this film can watch another film by director Proyas that is a more traditional sci-fi film. I, Robot is his loose adaptation of the Isaac Asimov book that defined the famous laws of robotics, and fueled many further advances in mechanical characters in both literature and film. Overall Dark City is an interesting example of an entirely new tonal approach to science-fiction. While The Matrix gets much of the credit for the virtual reality craze of the 2000s, Dark City should not be overlooked, as it was an influential entry in the late 90s for a series of similar stories in the early 21st Century.

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