1998 in Review: "Dark City"
and what makes a perfect movie, anyway?
Warning: Spoilers follow.
At the turn of the 21st century, there was a preponderance of films designed to mess with your head. It was the era of the twist ending, when movies made you question your reality and looked good doing it. Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Vanilla Sky. Strangely, Dark City is the one that got lost to history. Cinephiles and sci-fi fans worship it, probably in part because Roger Ebert did. He named it the best film of 1998 and even recorded a commentary track for the DVD. His championing of the film gave it a spotlight it desperately needed. Dark City made a meager (for those days) $27 million at the box-office and was nominated for exactly zero Oscars. It was Ebert who turned me on to Dark City. I read his books obsessively as a kid and tuned into his TV show whenever I could. So when he talked about this little sci-fi film as if it mattered, I listened.
Ebert was right. It’s one of the best twist-ending, reality-bending films of its era, and in a sense, it’s a Hall of Fame for the genre’s best tropes. The arc of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a man who wakes up in a strange city with no memory, tracks closely to The Matrix’s Neo; he’s a regular guy who discovers—spoiler—a secret race of aliens controlling his world, and over the course of the film learns that he alone has the power to defeat them. Also:
The aliens have a fear of water, a trope later used by M. Night Shyamalan in Signs, as well as Unbreakable (although in that one it’s the hero who’s afraid).
The film uses the image of a spiral to symbolize a descent into madness, just like in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi.
The aliens have an ability to telepathically rearrange the city at night—it’s part of their grand experiment—which leads to awe-inspiring sequences that will seem familiar to fans of Inception.
The closest comparison might be with The Truman Show. Both films are about men trying to escape a confined world created as a human experiment, and each climaxes with their heroes desperately breaking through a fake wall of blue sky to see what’s waiting for them on the other side.
Some of those films came out after Dark City, while a few came out the year before. Which is to say director and co-writer Alex Proyas should neither be given credit for inspiring the future nor blamed for ripping off the past. When this many films in a short period of time bend towards the same themes, you can throw authorial intent out the window. It’s an expression of something in our culture that is screaming to be let out. But what exactly? There are lots of theories, but I link these tropes to interconnected anxieties over the turn of the millennium, the earth-shattering possibilities of the internet era, and advances in computer-generated technology that, for the first time in history, allowed us to fully create our reality. Add them all up, and that’s a lot for the human race to deal with. I’m still not entirely sure we were up to the task.
You could make a case that Dark City is actually about these very anxieties, particularly the last one. As we watch The Strangers—weird, jellyfish-looking aliens that have adopted human forms to comfortably move about the world they’ve created—remake the city, turning brownstones into skyscrapers before our very eyes, or transforming a working-class couple in a tenement into a pair of snooty one-percenters in a cavernous dining room, it all starts to feel like a comment on the digital age itself. Perhaps it’s even a warning. On the DVD commentary, Ebert praised the visual effects, arguing that Dark City was a rare case of technology being used to support the story, instead of just dazzling the viewer with virtuosity or trying to get butts in the seats. It’s fun to think about Dark City as both a formal example of effects done right and a narrative premonition of what happens if you give them over to the wrong people. We might forget who we are.
Dark City uses them well, by supporting its dazzling visuals with the sturdy conventions of a classic genre. The opening scenes in which Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in an unfamiliar apartment with no memory gives him (and us) a series of clues with which to work: a postcard, a suitcase bearing the initials K.H., a dead woman with a spiral carved into her chest. It’s a typical set-up of film noir, a genre in which the film invests heavily. Murdoch follows the clues to determine who he is, and whether he’s actually capable of murder. He stumbles through a restless city that feels cribbed from any number of great noirs. There are tough dames and unforgiving hotel clerks. Everyone feels hardened by a brutal world. An early scene even takes place at an automat. The gritty production design is complemented by Dariusz Wolski’s chiaroscuro photography, with shadows that draw the eye and let your imagination run wild with the evils that could be hiding there. Film noir was heavily influenced by German expressionism (Fritz Lang’s M is the key film here), and the plot of Dark City feels designed in a lab to highlight that lineage.
As Murdoch uncovers more of the truth, so do we. The residents of this city are being imprinted every night with new memories created by Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a human enslaved by the aliens. The Strangers are seeking what makes us human, hoping that by throwing new identities into human bodies every night they can find something ineffable in the human soul. It’s a simple premise that plays around with some of the best “stoned dorm room” questions we could ever ask. Are we more than a collection of our memories? If you were given the memories of a serial killer, would you become one? Does the past really exist, or are we just living in a perpetual now? In a sense, Dark City is designed to be a 19-year-old cinephile’s favorite film. It has a mind-blowing twist. It’s great to watch stoned. It’s tinged with elements of classic cinema, which makes it feel substantial and adult. And its plot is airtight, with nary a wasted moment. Pretty much every moment in the film unlocks another piece of the puzzle and moves the film forward. When I was young, that’s what I considered a perfect film. Efficiency.
Now that I’m older, efficiency isn’t my lode star. Some of my favorite films are loose and dreamlike. They have some space in them, and if parts of them seem disconnected from other parts, well, I’m happy to live in that ambiguity and keep watching and rewatching to see if I ever figure it out, or if it’s not meant to be figured out. Either way, Dark City still works. As a man approaching middle-age, I connect not with the dorm-room philosophy but with its insights into the existential battles of growing older. I relate to the moment in Murdoch’s journey when he reaches the end of the road and realizes he can’t go back to the place he grew up. That his memories aren’t real. Instead of feeling despair, Murdoch feels empowered by it and—spoiler—realizes it’s better to create a new future than try in vain to return to the past.
None of these epiphanies and revelations would have hit me (at any age) if the idea of Dark City weren’t girded by such strong craft. Its ideas are complex and specific, and that requires the cast and crew to all be pulling in the exact same direction. The cinematography, production design, and costumes are all meant to evoke a fictional bygone era. “We fashioned the city on stolen memories,” admits one of the Strangers, but they didn’t know that humans remember their past from the movies as much as they do from real life. Jennifer Connelly, playing John’s wife, seems to be imitating the role of the femme fatale who gets her husband into trouble by desecrating the bonds of her marriage. William Hurt’s Inspector Bumstead is a cliche of a ‘40s-era police detective, all gruff wisdom and snappy comebacks. Their performances have a slightly detached quality that hint at the fact that the characters have only recently been imprinted with these roles. They’re not yet comfortable in their new identities—they’re acting—but as they uncover the truth, their humanity starts to emerge.
Even the Strangers are afforded some humanity. Mr. Hand (played by Richard O’Brien, better known to many as Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) imprints himself with Murdoch’s memories so that he can better track him. They’re the memories of a serial killer—that’s the scenario Murdoch was placed in before he woke up during imprinting—but even he slowly becomes more human, showing violent rage, vengeance, and even joy, in a flickering moment or two. All in all, the aliens aren’t completely unsympathetic. Their species is dying, and this experiment is a last-ditch effort to learn more about another race that seems to be thriving. They have no individuality, and they want to learn about ours. In essence, they’re no different than humans who try to live longer and better by experimenting on our own lower beings. A throwaway shot of Dr. Schreber toying with rats in a maze gives it all away.
That’s one of the most fun things about Dark City on a rewatch. You see how it gives it all away to you in the first few minutes. If you’re paying attention, you’ll learn why the sun never shines there, how there’s no way out of the city, and that it’s all just an experiment. You'll even see a blueprint for the coiled city itself. Gratefully, it saves one big twist for the climax-–no spoiler here—but it doesn’t really matter. The beauty of Dark City is that it can be solved like a puzzle or enjoyed for its human drama, gaped at by slack-jawed young cinephiles or received with the knowing nods of a wise, old man. A successful experiment, either way.
Next up in 1998 Year in Review: The Big Lebowski