WARNING: It’s impossible to properly discuss Dark City without giving away many of its plot twists and developments. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t go any further until you have!
Made a year before the Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), which also features a reluctant hero seeing beneath the skin of his artificially created world and attaining almost messianic status in the process, Alex Proyas’ Dark City shares many of the more fondly remembered film’s concerns (and some of its sets – the rooftops across which Carrie-Anne Moss runs at the start of The Matrix were sets bought from the Dark City producers) and is the better film. More emotionally and intellectually satisfying than the Wachowski’s film – which is still a remarkable piece of work – Dark City is one of the best genre films of the 1990s.
John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes in a bath tub with no memory of who he is, how he got there nor who the dead woman, her body scrawled with spiral motifs, was. Fleeing the police who believe that he’s a serial murderer of prostitutes, Murdoch wanders the city, a bizarre amalgam of various architectural styles that remains in perpetual darkness, and begins piecing together his memories, vaguely recalling fragments of a childhood at Shell Beach and a wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly). With the help of a psychiatrist, Dr Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) and a cop, Bumstead (William Hurt), he comes to learn that the city is a construct, built on the face of a space station deliberately kept in the dark by a race of hive-mind aliens, The Strangers, who are experimenting on their human subjects by implanting memories and reconfiguring both the physical appearance of the city and the memories of its inhabitants in an effort to get at what it is that makes human beings unique. Having woken during an “imprinting” session, Murdoch now has growing psychic powers that come to threaten the Strangers and which could be used to free their human captives.
Film noir is the phrase you’ll most often come across in discussions of Dark City and quite rightly so, but this a vision of film noir as imagined by an alien race. It’s stocked with stereotypical characters spouting cliched dialogue but that’s precisely the point – the Strangers have constructed the Dark City from their synthesized human memories so it’s not surprising that it looks and feels like people are living on a film set, acting out the plots of B-movies. That’s just one of the many clever conceits to be found in Lem Dobbs, David S. Goyer and Proyas’ multi-layered screenplay, a script full of surprises and nuances that aren’t always obvious on first viewing – it’s the sort of film that requires many watches to tease out its subtleties.
As well as film noir – it shares its title with a 1950 William Dieterle noir starring Charlton Heston and Dariusz Wolski’s photography and lighting perfectly captures the feel of the genre – Proyas has admitted to Akira (1988) (the penultimate battle between two psychics while a city crumbles around them) and The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) as influences on the film. While Dark City is ultimately quite unlike anything else, it also bears traces of other influences. Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985) and Metropolis (1927) are all obvious influences on the cityscapes, the art of Edward Hopper plays its part in the film’s look and an early tracking shot into a hotel window is a possible tip of the hat to Psycho (1960).
Rufus Sewell rarely gets due credit for his performance as Murdoch – his transformation from terrified, uncomprehending pawn to god-like superhuman is managed without us ever losing empathy for him, Sewell downplaying his performance even in the most melodramatic of moments. In the psychic battle with the Strangers (during which even city buildings are weaponised), there’s none of that pointless arm waving and posturing that usually accompanies such things. Just Sewell’s intensity and a shimmering visual effect that makes the effect all the more believable.
Jennifer Connolly doesn’t get a lot to do in the film’s least well-written role (the only other female role is a murdered prostitute plated by Melissa George), Kiefer Sutherland affects a peculiar, breathless style of delivery with the faint trace of an unplacable accent and William Hurt gets to play the stock film noir gumshoe. Hurt had originally auditioned to play the leader of the Strangers, the enigmatic and sinister Mr Hand but the role went instead to Rocky Horror‘s Richard O’Brien who takes home the acting honours with the film’s most memorable performance. The Strangers are played by Ian Richardson and Bruce Spense, and Satya Gumbert is properly unnerving as a vicious and sadistic child Stranger.
At the heart of the film is a very Philip K. Dick-like concern – how much of us can you remove before we stop being human? The Strangers – a dying race who all share the same memories and seem to be devoid of any feelings – are obsessively searching for the human “soul” but have so catastrophically failed to understand what that might mean that their entire experiment is doomed to failure. As Murdoch points out, humans are more than just the sum of their memories but constantly tampering with them is hugely counterproductive – the Strangers can never learn anything useful about their subjects as they are constantly being morphed into new personas. They fail to understand that humans don’t perceive time, space and memory the way they do and that if those things can be so easily manipulated their test subjects can never know who or what can be trusted. When Mr Hand implants himself with the memories that were intended for Murdoch, the memories of him being a serial killer, it has a negative effect on the Stranger who is simply unable to cope with the complexities of those memories and the feelings they unleash – “I have become the monster you were intended to be” he tells Murdoch.
At the climax, Murdoch defeats the Strangers, moves the space station so that it’s bathed in sunlight for he first time and reshapes part of the city as the elusive Shell Beach, an entirely fictitious place that never existed. It’s created from his childhood memories which, are of course, completely false, created by Schreber in the service of the Strangers. Is the world he’s shaped going to be any better? Its inhabitants still stuck with their synthesised memories, the Strangers’ vaults having been destroyed so there’s no going back to the people they originally were. Do they care? They’re entirely oblivious to their original lives so whatever they’re carrying around in their heads when Murdoch defeats the Strangers is now and forever who they are. Only Murdoch and Schreber know the truth.
It’s not even clear if the test subjects are even human at all. Schreber, who was allowed to know what the Strangers were up to as they needed his help in creating the fake memories, though he had to agree to having his memories wiped, can’t remember where the “humans” were abducted from. It’s entirely possible that no-one in the film comes from Earth at all, though perhaps that’s a stretch too far…
Dark City is a film that works on so many levels and even repeated viewings can leave you with mysteries to be be worked on – what’s with the preponderance of spiral motifs throughout the film for example? It was all too much for critics and audiences at the time and the film was not a success though it has grown in stature in the years since. It isn’t as hard to follow as some have claimed (you just have to pay attention) and has grown into one of the most fascinating and rewarding of science fiction films.
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