Dark City Directed by Alex Proyas

 Dark City

Directed by Alex Proyas

Alex Proyas was born on the 23rd of September 1963 in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Ethnically Greek, his father's family had lived in Egypt for generations, while his mother and her family were from Cyprus. He was raised in Australia because his family moved to Sydney when he was three years old (Well lucky he’s ethnically greek, because at that point in time, as I recall, Australia had a white’s only immigration policy.  Now they just lock the brown immigrants in offshore gulags.). When he was seventeen he started attending the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School and was soon directing music videos. He headed to Los Angeles where he worked on MTV music videos and TV commercials. In 1988, however, he released his first feature film Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, a small-scale science fiction film set in a post-apocalyptic Australia about a man fleeing north and his interactions with a pair of adult siblings. While the film received mixed reviews and it is still uncertain how much it earned at the box office due to an uneven release, the film stood out and impressed enough people that Mr. Proyas was given a shot to direct the 1994 film The Crow, a film about a young man resurrected to avenge the rape and murder of his fiancee. It's also known as the movie that killed Brandon Lee. Despite the tragedy or maybe because of it, the Crow was a critical and commercial success and gave Mr. Proyas enough leverage to create Dark City. After Dark City, he directed movies such as Garage Days, I Robot, Knowing, and... Gods of Egypt (Which was a whitewashed abomination.). So let's just focus on Dark City. Just a note, I'm gonna do my best to avoid spoilers but there are going to be some spoilers, go watch the film and then read this review or skip to the final paragraph to see my argument on why you should watch this movie and how it ties into our theme month.

Dark City is a mystery in more than one way. First, there is the mystery of our main character, John Murdoch, who wakes up with no memory of his past or who he is. John isn't given much time to grapple with that, however, as he finds the mutilated body of an unknown woman in the bedroom of the hostel apartment he wakes up in (Really awkward way to wake up with no memory…). He isn't given much time to grapple with that mystery either as he receives a phone call warning him that people are coming for him and he cannot afford to let himself be caught. Fleeing the scene (because what else can he do at this point?) John finds himself trying to work out from a series of clues and interactions with people around him just who he was, who was that woman, what was she doing in that room, who killed her, and why and who the hell is chasing him besides the police? Every answer he gets leads to bigger questions, especially as he tracks down the voice on the phone, the half-mad psychologist Dr. Daniel Schreber played amazingly by Kiefer Sunderland (Who manages half-insane creeper really well.). This leads John to ask questions like what is the nature of the city he is in, why is he being chased, why is it that no one can answer simple questions like how to get to the small nearby coastal village of Shell Beach? (Where is the sun?  Why don’t people have detailed episodic memory?) What's so important about Shell Beach anyways? As a fun fact, Dr. Daniel Schreber is named after a German Judge who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to an asylum.  He wrote about it in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which he wrote during and after his bouts of madness (That must be fascinating…). Also involved in this ever-widening mystery is Mr. Murdoch's estranged wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connolly) and the meticulous Police Inspector Bumstead, who takes over the police case when the last inspector was driven mad by the great implications of it. Emma's biggest role seems to be to force John to decide what is real and what isn't. Is her relationship with John real, even though all the events in it may have never happened? Are their feelings for one another real and does it matter if their relationship never happened?  Do those feelings exist independently of their memories? Bumstead's job in the narrative is to clearly show us the clues and put them together as well as show us the effect that these revelations have on a normal, honest man (Because he is one.  See, he might be a cop, but this is just the Nth time his memories have been reshaped and he never got a say in the matter so…). There's also a series of escalating confrontations with a group of bald, pale men all dressed in black, who seem determined to catch John and are willing to wreak utter havoc in their wake.  Havoc that no one else seems to notice. As John is led to questions about what his life actually is and the very nature of reality, he also becomes increasingly aware of the second more real reality underlying the city and not just his life but everyone's life, Emma's, Bumstead, everyone. While Dr. Schreber offers him answers, John will have to place a great deal of faith in a man who doesn't really inspire it but it might be John's only shot at not just finding answers but preserving his life, autonomy, and very humanity in the face of powers that are actively malicious to those very concepts and might be running everything.

So spoilers, much like Adjustment Tale, the city is being adjusted by a shadowy force that changes not just the layout of the city but in the very memories and lives of the people who live there (And they are super fucking creepy, and needs must be destroyed.  Not because they’re creepy, but because they treat human beings as playthings.{Seriously, the idea of simply asking humanity for help doesn’t even occur to them}). This is done to such a depth that most people don't even realize that they haven't seen actual sunlight in years nor do they realize that they all pass out at midnight without fail. Also, like our last three stories, the mystical elements are stripped away in favor of corporate or pseudo-scientific trappings. In Dark City, this means using exaggerated medical and industrial equipment to affect the actual changes (It amplifies the beings’ psychic abilities.). However, the creatures do have certain powers that while not supernatural are at least preternatural, that is to say, powers that are beyond our understanding but aren't presented as supernatural in nature.  Much like Ed, David, or Gabe, John is drawn into this by getting caught in the gears of the underlying, more real, reality. Unlike our past protagonists who whatever their social status were normal men, John is decidedly not normal as his mind holds the potential for the same abilities as the creatures who are dictating these changes on an unaware and helpless population. Additionally, his getting caught in the gears is no accident, but a play by Dr. Schreber who is outright enslaved by those same creatures. Dr. Schreber is forced to rewrite the minds of his fellow humans by these creatures and was forced to destroy his own memories of his past (Imagine erasing every aspect of yourself but your profession.  Literally Alienated from your life.  I feel like there is a marxist read of this film…{Do you even have a life in this situation?  Or do you just have an oversized role?  A part you play for an audience who has no idea if you’re even doing it well...} For a second I thought you were asking if I have a life.  The answer is no of course.  But then I realized that you were referring to people in this film.  The answer is the same.). So unlike our past stories where the beings doing the adjustment could make an argument of benevolence or indifference, in Dark City there no argument to had, the powers that be are malevolent and harmful to the average person (Even after people die!). The stakes here are also both grand and personal. For David and Gabe, their goals were intensely personal and somewhat small in scope, both revolved around keeping their free will which is by most measures incredibly important but the immediate reasons - David being able to maintain a relationship with the woman he loved and Gabe being able to decide his own fate - were rather small in effect. For John, the stakes are his very existence as well as his free will and the freedom of every person he knows from having their very lives rewritten on the whim of hidden masters. So the stakes are honestly grander here.

Dark City also features two Initiate's Journeys here for the price of one! The first being poor Dr. Schreber, forced to submit to what are basically powers of darkness but scheming to win his freedom and revenge for his own destroyed life and being forced to conduct atrocities on his fellow human beings. Dr. Schreber gives us an example of basically being kidnapped into that secret reality against your will, like the old stories of people taken by faeries or spirits or modern ones of alien abduction. Unlike Ed, whose submission was of his own will and given out of awe, Dr. Schreber's submission is enslavement and forced through brutality and punishment (Poor bastard…). Like in real life, forced submission or enslavement leads to resentment and covert resistance which in the story leads us to John. John's own journey is in a lot of ways the product of Dr. Schreber's actions. Having found a man with the gifts to destroy his enslavers, Dr. Schreber affects John's contact with the underlying reality of Dark City and covertly mentors and encourages John's resistance until such time that John is strong enough to destroy the beings that have tormented him. Meanwhile, because of his greater abilities, John can reach a better level of understanding of that underlying level of reality than Dr. Schreber and as such, takes over it. Which is a greater level of interaction than we've seen so far. Of course, we're left with the question of what should John do with his new power and understanding? The film doesn't answer these questions because it's more interested in answering the question of how we become who we are and if our memories are the only way to get there. The movie answers this through the relationship of Emma and John. Where John decides that it doesn't matter if his relationship with Emma never actually happened or that his memories are false. His feelings for Emma the person, whoever she happens to be, are real and he is going to pursue them. Everything else is left to the audience to decide. Which I found wise because the question of how much should John reveal to the average person and what he should do with his newfound power is honestly too big and complex to deal with in the five to ten minutes of the film close.

So my argument for reviewing Dark City, is that it shares much of the same themes as Adjustment Tale. That there is a second underlying reality that is more real than the day-to-day experience and thus can overwrite it. That there are powers who run this reality who can be resisted, reasoned, or bargained with and that our protagonist must make the decision of how he will relate to those powers and what his goals are. I'll admit there's also some shared ground with We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, with the malleability of memory and the question of whether your memories make you who you are as well, but I think Adjustment Team has more in common with Dark City. Now there are powerful differences in the nature of those powers and their goals between Dark City and Adjustment Tale and I am not saying that Dark City should be considered an adaptation of Adjustment Tale but rather an example of how the story elements and themes of Adjustment Tale have spread and influenced other stories. As a film, Dark City is a fantastic watch, well-acted by a strong cast, well written and visually interesting if incredibly dark (by which I am referring to light level here, the movie is set exclusively at night and most of the sets are very dimly lit. Watching in a dark room would be a bit of a mistake I think). I strongly encourage everyone to seek out the director's cut however because the theater release spoils the greater mystery in the first two minutes. That was an incredibly dumb idea and was forced on Mr. Proyas by the studios. If your story is a mystery that peels apart gradually, don't tell us the central layer upfront, let us take the journey with your characters. If it has to be explained, explain it at the end. Anyways I'm giving Dark City the Director's Cut an A. I hope you watch it.

I also really liked it.  I last saw this movie twenty years ago, and admittedly I was too young - and at that moment attempting (unsuccessfully) to mate - to appreciate it fully.  However, now that I am older and not addled by my limbic system, it was a fantastic film and I would recommend it to anyone who likes cerebral science fiction.  As such my grade is an A.

Thus ends 2021's Philip K Dick month, I hope you enjoyed it! Next week our ever-wise patrons have chosen GI Joe Vol VIII after that we'll likely be doing Conventions of War by Walter Jon Williams assuming there aren't any last-minute changes in the vote. If you like to have a vote on what we review, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you get a vote for as little as a dollar a month! Until next week folks, stay safe and Keep Reading!