DARK CITY (1998)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*  

Even seeing DARK CITY in its theatrical release-- 11 minutes shorter than the version I just screened, though without any major plot/character alterations-- I thought it would have been a smash success if it had starred, not the skilled but relatively unknown Rufus Sewell, but a major star like Bruce Willis or even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unfortunately, though many critics liked CITY for its dense symbolism, it proved a box-office bomb. The failure didn't end the career of CITY's director/co-writer Alex Proyas, who'd scored a breakout with the similarly themed 1994 CROW, but it looks to me like he never made another film to equal of either of his ventures into "cities of dreadful night."

 In such cities-- not least Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS-- the protagonist is often a helpless victim, harried by authorities from pillar to post, as inimical forces seek to turn him into just one more cog in the city's great machine. But this CITY mixes scenarios of disempowerment with those of a corresponding empowerment, as if Proyas were seeking to cross METROPOLIS with Kubrick's 2001. Consider: when we first see John Murdoch (Sewell), he awakens, naked in the waters of a bathtub, his mind a tabula rasa. Except for his being a fully-grown man, it's a perfect intrauterine fantasy. And there's even a doctor in attendance, sort of. Once the "newborn" is out of the tub, the phone rings, and a man claiming to be Murdoch's doctor tells him to get out before certain enemies overtake him. Fortunately, despite not knowing his own name or history, Murdoch at least remembers how to dress himself-- not to mention knowing what a phone is-- and leaves. On his way out he does see a murdered girl in his room, which convinces him that someone's out to get him.

 The amnesiac hero wanders a city where the sun never seems to come up. Murdoch barely manages to dodge another scenario that comes close to involving him in another woman's murder. Police Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) seeks Murdoch as a suspect in past murders, and by seeming coincidence meets Murdoch's wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly). Her husband John left her after she (supposedly) had an affair, which seems to be someone's setup for the narrative that Murdoch became a serial killer out of sexual frustration. As Murdoch wanders about, he's cornered by pale-fleshed men in fedoras and trenchcoats, who attack him. But unlike many a noir protagonist, conflict brings out new power in Murdoch: a power to control the realities of the Dark City. It's as if Murdoch's encounter with mysterious beings encourages him to develop transhuman powers. However, in marked contrast to the way Astronaut Bowman develops power thanks to alien manipulators, Murdoch develops his strange reality-warping abilities despite the overlords.

  Murdoch never precisely regains his memory, as would a film noir protagonist. Instead, what he learns is that everyone in the City has been programmed with fake memories by The Strangers. Though they appear to be pale-skinned humanoids, it's eventually revealed that they belong to a dying race, whose true form-- that of "energy bugs"-- is seen only once. The Strangers inhabit and revivify the bodies of dead humans, seeking a way to preserve themselves by studying a collection of humans-- implicitly taken from Earth, whose environs were duplicated by the Dark City-- in order to learn some secrets of the human spirit. This is not an overly original idea, but Proyas gives it great mythic dimension by his depiction as a world where time becomes frozen and human histories can be endlessly rewritten by memory-manipulations. The use of particular symbols-- both natural ones like spirals and artificial ones like clock-faces-- contribute to the sense of The Strangers' domain as a domain where all should abandon hope of independence.     

 To be sure, Murdoch has help getting out of the box intended for him. Once he meets the woman who claims to be his wife, he doesn't so much remember her as to fall in love with her through her act of loving him. Inspector Bumstead's resolve to understand all of the City's mysteries also proves a useful ally. But the doctor who wants Murdoch in the film's first scene-- Doctor Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) -- is eventually revealed to be responsible for Murdoch's empowerment, having taught the man how to attune himself to the machines that maintain the city, so that he can alter the City's reality as much as the Strangers do. This culminates in a bang-up psychokinetic battle between Murdoch and the Strangers-- though the emotional climax is Murdoch's decision to recover the life he never had with Emma, even though it was a false scenario created by the aliens. I should note in closing that Murdoch puts an end to the Strangers by bringing the Dark City into full sunlight, which destroys them just as light is said to banish nightmares. Despite Proyas' many references to noir cinema-- not least having chanteuse Emma sing the song "Night Has a Thousand Eyes," composed for the 1948 noir movie of that same name-- CITY proves to be the place where hope is kindled into new being, rather than being abandoned.