Lives Exchanged Between Shadows

A metropolis of shadows confounds the human hunger for meaning and stability in 1998's Dark City. Director Alex Proyas' artistic instincts, at least, find a worthy home in this visually astounding feature. Combining German Expressionism with an '80s/'90s goth S&M aesthetic, Proyas brilliantly delivers his existentialist rumination on the human soul.

Is there such a thing as the human soul? Well, the answer is yes, if you want to cut to the chase. At heart, this film is considerably more optimistic than its noir influences, particularly 1946's Black Angel. A lot of people talk about the films that influenced Dark City and a lot of people talk about the films that were influenced by Dark City. Roger Ebert, for one, who was a great admirer of this film. He talks about Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M (I certainly agree) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (I think that's a stretch).

I first saw Dark City when it came out in 1998. I have to admit it didn't make a huge impression on me. Within a few years of its release, I started to hear from people insisting I ought to give it a closer look. I promised I would do so, again and again, and really meant it. Finally, I was in the shower last night after playing Arkham Asylum and thinking, "I'd like to see a good movie about some big, stylish . . . dark . . . city." And voila, a mere 24 years later, I finally remembered to give this movie a second chance. And I like it. More than the first time I watched it. Maybe because I was watching the director's cut this time. Maybe I'm a different person. I should hope so. A fella oughta learn a thing or two between ages 19 and 42.

Experiences that became memories have changed me. The argument in Dark City is whether or not memories completely define us. It leaves aside IQ, nutrition, various anatomical characteristics, deciding just to tackle a dichotomy of memory versus soul. So aliens called "The Strangers" fabricated this city and filled blank human vessels with memories. Then, every night at midnight, they change everything around--buildings, cars, streets, people, and memories. Who is a person without a memory? Well, the protagonist, John (Rufus Sewell) accidentally rejects his memory injection and runs off without memories. There's a dead prostitute in the room with him. Did he do it? Is he the killer of a string of dead prostitutes?

Christopher Nolan, according to Wikipedia, cited Dark City, among a number of other films, as an influence on Inception. He said he was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real"

I was thinking of a kind of progression from Blade Runner (1982) to Videodrome (1983) to Total Recall (1990) to 12 Monkeys (1995) to Lost Highway (1997) to Dark City (1998) to The Matrix (1999). Maybe the reason Dark City and The Matrix aren't as amazing to me as they are to many other people is that I was so familiar with this kind of story. There are about a dozen episodes of Star Trek that cover the same territory. Not to mention Doctor Who which literally had a simulated world called "the Matrix" in the 1976 story The Deadly Assassin--which was influenced by The Manchurian Candidate, a story about a man whose memories are manipulated to turn him into a murderer.

Lost Highway was the real next step in the evolution of this kind of story because it took rational explanation out of the equation almost entirely. The nature of the story puts you directly into the perspective of the protagonist with the unreliable memory. In the balance between telling and showing, Lost Highway certainly succeeds brilliantly on the showing side of the scale. And then, of course, David Lynch delivered again with Mulholland Drive. And arguably, Twin Peaks, with its use of possession and doppelgangers, achieves something like this, too.

But Dark City is a perfectly admirable exercise of this kind of story. Frankly, I like it better than The Matrix due to its superior aesthetics. Jennifer Connolly and William Hurt are both great in supporting roles. Hurt in particular really ought to have been the central character--he's much more interesting than John. And I like how Hurt was evidently an actor willing to let a fantastic hat do some of the work for him.

A lot of actors don't like wearing wide brimmed hats because they don't want parts of their faces covered but Hurt goes for it. The hats in this film are particularly broad-brimmed, too.

I've also seen the movie compared to Brazil (1985) (another movie with great hats). I think Brazil has a much better ending. Dark City has a crowd-pleasing ending but the escape Brazil's protagonist achieves is much more realistic. Most people can't achieve total control of their reality, but maybe a lot of people can achieve control of their perception of reality. Which, of course, is not always a good thing.