Directrospective: DARK CITY (1998)

Notes on the films of Australian director Alex Proyas.

DARK CITY and THE CROW are, I think we can all agree, the Alex Proyas films. Even if five sevenths of his career is not those films, they share such a strong style and sensibility that it’s impossible not to compare I, ROBOT or KNOWING or GODS OF EGYPT to the first two major works. Both follow brooding white men as they stalk rain-slick, permanently benighted cities looking for the black-hearted creeps who did them wrong, both are beautifully shot by Dariusz Wolski on sets that look like Terry Gilliam has played a prank on Tim Burton or vice versa, with effects that have aged beautifully precisely because of their mild jankiness. While THE CROW is probably the aesthetic high water mark of Proyas’s career, I see DARK CITY as the purest expression of his thematic hangups.

Like every Proyas film, DARK CITY is animated by paranoia. In opening voiceover (the subject of some conflict, more on that later), we learn that alien beings known as “The Strangers” control the world with a telekinetic power called “tuning,” using humans as subjects in their twisted behavioral experiments. Our story takes place in a rainy and, frankly, dark city, where it seems to be every year from 1900-1950 all at once. At the stroke of midnight, the entire city - save the mysterious Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland, doing an impression of Malcolm in the Middle’s pulmonarily disabled friend Stevie doing an impression of Peter Lorre) - falls asleep. But a brooding white man, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), suddenly wakes up in a hotel bathtub with a strange wound on his forehead, a murdered woman in the next room and no idea how any of them got there. He’s contacted by Dr. Schreber, who tells him that he’s wanted for murder and better get the fuck out of there. Murdoch is wanted, as it turns out, both by a classic noirish Police Inspector (William Hurt), and by a group of creepy, pale, bald men wearing long, black HELLRAISER cenobite-style getups, which creepy, pale, bald men turn out to be the Strangers we heard about a few minutes ago. Nobody but Murdoch seems to be at all bothered by the fact that he doesn’t remember ever murdering anyone, or that it’s permanently nighttime, or that a woman whom he has never met (Jennifer Connelly) says that she’s his wife, or that nobody can actually remember how to get to Shell Beach. Dr. Schreber is surprised by none of this, but he’s just as shocked as Murdoch is when the latter is able to fend off a gang of Strangers with mind powers of his own. Somehow the universal midnight bedtime doesn’t work on Murdoch anymore, and that’s very bad news for the shadowy cabal that controls everything. There’s a lot of chasing and running and eventually Dr. Schreber spills the beans: he helps the Strangers study human behavior by rearranging society in the middle of the night - a poor couple become millionaires, a regular guy becomes a wanted serial killer, entire city blocks appear and disappear into thin air - and seeing how the same people react to a completely different set of material circumstances. The Strangers handle the reality manipulation with their tuning powers, but they need Dr. Schreber to concoct new memories for the switcherooed citizenry and implant it in their minds with a big syringe full of memory juice straight into the forehead. Murdoch woke up in the middle of such a procedure, which explains his amnesia and small head wound. All of this is happening, we learn, because the Strangers are from a dying race looking to discover something about individual human identity that will save their species. They’re also not really pale old bald dudes, they just inhabit human corpses and that’s how it ends up looking. What’s more, Shell Beach never even existed beyond a ratty old poster on a wall, and when Murdoch rips it away he finds out that his entire world is just a single dark city floating in space! This is some Twilight Zone shit!!

Now the Strangers are really pissed, and they take him down into their underground lair to inject their collective consciousness into his body and live on inside a life-sized Rufus Sewell-shaped Megazord. They fuck up really bad, though, because thanks to some turncoat moves on Dr. Schreber’s part, Murdoch only becomes a fully manifested Brain God, who flies up in the air and turns all the Strangers into alien dust. With his newfound mind powers he floods the rest of the space bubble in which the city floats, darkly, and creates the phony Shell Beach of his memory. Such a powerful Brain God is he that he turns the entire city, which has heretofore been exceedingly dark, toward the/a Sun, and meets his “wife,” who now says her name is Anna when before it was Emma - you gotta admit, those are different names - and walks happily into his new spacetown dominion.

Like everyone else, I can see the obvious parallels between DARK CITY and THE MATRIX, which came out a year later and even used some leftover DARK CITY sets for its opening rooftop chase. Both films are broad metaphors for freeing oneself from the ideological shackles that a powerful elite have constructed to blind the masses to the truth: that cruel overlords exploit us all for their own gain and then toss our withered bodies aside like peanut shells. Each makes ample use of sleep and wakefulness as a symbolic representation of this mental awakening. But where THE MATRIX cites its many sources (e.g., Neo keeping his contraband computer discs in a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra and Simulation and his pivotal mind-over-matter sparring match with Morpheus playing out in a Shaolin temple straight out of a Shaw Brothers picture), DARK CITY’s ideological position is as precise as a stony dorm room conversation about how, like, you ever think about how everything is actually just about making money? Morpheus and Trinity and the gang work as a collective to take down the machine hegemony that has turned all of humankind into an endless field of narcotized living batteries to keep itself running, with the cooperation of the small band of free humans holed up in the underground city of Zion, and Neo, their chosen one who can fully see through the bullshit of the Matrix to the raw code beneath, is a key part of the team but one whose mental transcendence has also turned him into an unrelatable Dr. Manhattan-type weirdo who still needs plenty of help. By contrast, the hero of DARK CITY, John Murdoch, is just some guy with unimaginable power, and we’re lucky that he doesn’t seem to want to be a tyrannical monster about it. He doesn’t share it with anyone, we don’t see him take any action to wake up his fellow dark citizens, and he seems pretty fine with the material conditions of his world as they are, provided the sun comes out sometimes and nobody puts any more needles into his skull. Being secretly controlled by a shadowy cabal is bad, but the world itself is good. The real world of THE MATRIX is an uninhabitable burnt-out shithole nightmare where nearly everyone alive is a hairless meat-battery floating completely unaware in a pod full of goo, and waking up the sheeple to that reality is only the beginning of the fight. Liberation from THE MATRIX is something we are all responsible for achieving together. Liberation from the Strangers is something we should all be very grateful to the nice good man John Murdoch for being so nice to give it to us. What a hero he is, our great Philosopher-King John.

I like DARK CITY a lot. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a wet asphalt at night. I’m a sucker for a sci-fi noir with anachronistic technology. I like a nice grey suit. But all it has to reveal to us is that someone is controlling our thoughts, and that’s bad, because the thought-controlling guy is a bad alien. We need to do everything we can to get a nice guy put in charge of controlling thoughts. Luckily we don’t have to pick between the two, but when you get down to it I think DARK CITY might be the movie that men’s rights psychos think THE MATRIX is.