Dark City Thoughts
Mar. 15th, 2011 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7We are talking about the movie. If you've not seen the movie, and want your first time untainted by knowing the events of it, read no further.
Here are my previousl extended thoughts on the architecture of memory and apotheosis as presented in Dark City: http://wolven.livejournal.com/955794.html
I bring this up because of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast relating sovay's reaction, here: http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/738585.html
And I have to tell you, having seen both versions, MANY times? Only Ever Watch The Director's Cut. That being said, let's talk about some of what Dark City is about.
It's about memory and Becoming. It's about individuality and what must happen when Who We Are is confronted with who we were "supposed" to be. There is much, here, about essence, and about the construction of the self out of the tools we are given.
Mr Hand's conversation with Emma at the riverfront shows that he needs to be the only John Murdoch, needs to be a Self, an Individual, and so his search from the point of his imprinting with "Murdoch's Memories" is driven by that need. in addition, this is a need which would have given the Strangers all they needed, to continue living: A sense of singularity within the totality of their collective consciousness. The ability to bound their collections of thoughts, each from each, and to continue evolving.
Mr Hand and the "Real" John Murdoch are approaching the same goal, (Becoming a Self), through different applications of the same process. John is a human, retroactively taught how to Tune, and Hand is a Tuning Stranger, retroactively taught how to become human. His humanity doesn't last, though, and it kills him, Yess? And his Stranger qualities begin to take hold, again, as he dies. He seeks to make a shared-consciousness connection with John, asking him "Are we sure [this is] what we want?" But John Rebuffs this, saying, basically, "You Are Not Me. You're what I was supposed to be, but I am what I have decided to make me."
Yes, Schreiber tried to control John, played him to create an enemy capable of standing up to the strangers, and it could have been anyone, couldn't it? Well... could it? There is something about John Murdoch's structures of thought, something about his brain/mind which allows him to "Wake Up," as Eddie Walenski puts it. Some of them just... See. And, if they're unguided in this seeing, they go immediately or slowly mad. The likelihood is high, isn't it, that Schreiber began to recognise the kinds of individuals for whom the likelihood of this kind of Awakening was high, and to seek one out? At which point he puts specific pressures and triggers on his awakening, and begins the process of trying to run down the hill of this conspiracy fast enough to not fall over. He leaves Detective Baumstead and Emma and Carl in tact, "for the sake of understanding the experiment," and seeks to bring John to an understanding of how to save them all. It's John's brain that allows him to be woken up, as quickly as he is, and it's Schreiber's training that allows him not to go as mad as Walenski, when it happens.
Walenski's only way out is death. To shed the meatsuit and free his mind from the torment of these archons. But John understands that there's a better way (heh). That we have to take control, to understand the mechanism and the machinery of control, of creation, of Self, and to make with it what we will.
One of the last images is of the Sun rising over Dark City, of daybreak at Shell Beach. We do not know if that Sun was always there, and John merely turned the world toward it-- "Showing Us The Light," as it were-- or if he could, at this point, Fiat Lux. In the end, I don't know that it matters. I think that, either way, he has the tools to make sure that no one in that place is ever again a slave to anything but their own will.
I like to think that that's what he and Anna go about doing, after the credits start to roll. That they go and teach others to shape the machinery of the world.
Here are my previousl extended thoughts on the architecture of memory and apotheosis as presented in Dark City: http://wolven.livejournal.com/955794.html
I bring this up because of
greygirlbeast relating sovay's reaction, here: http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/738585.htmlAnd I have to tell you, having seen both versions, MANY times? Only Ever Watch The Director's Cut. That being said, let's talk about some of what Dark City is about.
It's about memory and Becoming. It's about individuality and what must happen when Who We Are is confronted with who we were "supposed" to be. There is much, here, about essence, and about the construction of the self out of the tools we are given.
Mr Hand's conversation with Emma at the riverfront shows that he needs to be the only John Murdoch, needs to be a Self, an Individual, and so his search from the point of his imprinting with "Murdoch's Memories" is driven by that need. in addition, this is a need which would have given the Strangers all they needed, to continue living: A sense of singularity within the totality of their collective consciousness. The ability to bound their collections of thoughts, each from each, and to continue evolving.
Mr Hand and the "Real" John Murdoch are approaching the same goal, (Becoming a Self), through different applications of the same process. John is a human, retroactively taught how to Tune, and Hand is a Tuning Stranger, retroactively taught how to become human. His humanity doesn't last, though, and it kills him, Yess? And his Stranger qualities begin to take hold, again, as he dies. He seeks to make a shared-consciousness connection with John, asking him "Are we sure [this is] what we want?" But John Rebuffs this, saying, basically, "You Are Not Me. You're what I was supposed to be, but I am what I have decided to make me."
Yes, Schreiber tried to control John, played him to create an enemy capable of standing up to the strangers, and it could have been anyone, couldn't it? Well... could it? There is something about John Murdoch's structures of thought, something about his brain/mind which allows him to "Wake Up," as Eddie Walenski puts it. Some of them just... See. And, if they're unguided in this seeing, they go immediately or slowly mad. The likelihood is high, isn't it, that Schreiber began to recognise the kinds of individuals for whom the likelihood of this kind of Awakening was high, and to seek one out? At which point he puts specific pressures and triggers on his awakening, and begins the process of trying to run down the hill of this conspiracy fast enough to not fall over. He leaves Detective Baumstead and Emma and Carl in tact, "for the sake of understanding the experiment," and seeks to bring John to an understanding of how to save them all. It's John's brain that allows him to be woken up, as quickly as he is, and it's Schreiber's training that allows him not to go as mad as Walenski, when it happens.
Walenski's only way out is death. To shed the meatsuit and free his mind from the torment of these archons. But John understands that there's a better way (heh). That we have to take control, to understand the mechanism and the machinery of control, of creation, of Self, and to make with it what we will.
One of the last images is of the Sun rising over Dark City, of daybreak at Shell Beach. We do not know if that Sun was always there, and John merely turned the world toward it-- "Showing Us The Light," as it were-- or if he could, at this point, Fiat Lux. In the end, I don't know that it matters. I think that, either way, he has the tools to make sure that no one in that place is ever again a slave to anything but their own will.
I like to think that that's what he and Anna go about doing, after the credits start to roll. That they go and teach others to shape the machinery of the world.
