Dark City Thoughts

[wolven7]

We 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 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.

Comments

Re: A scattering of thoughts inspired by your post

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I think he successfully programmed his first reëdited version of himself to think in a way that would lead inevitably to him creating an awakened Dark Citizen

I think you're onto something, here, because, without that impetus, without that knowledge in the re-imprinted self, then Blank Schreiber would have just as easily thought about the Strangers as his natural masters.

I think that actually serves as a final puzzle piece, rather than a counter. :)

I didn't like the science fictional implications that the Strangers were simply space aliens

Yeah, I do think that if the only view of them we ever saw was when Mr Quick bites it, it could have been much more subtle. Especially with Hand's line "We Use Your Dead As Hosts."

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, unhapplily the need to justify things as psuedo-plausibly happening in our real world is an element of the SF tradition that has bled into popular culture, when more important elements of the tradition haven't been picked up. I'd have been much happier if Dark City simply was what it was, operating by its own unique rules, without having to justify itself as being populated with people from our world abducted by space aliens. It really undercuts my pleasure in the ending.

This also has me thinking that fantasies ending in apotheosis suffer in film because they rhyme confusingly with the conventions of the Hollywood happy ending. “The Matrix” suffers from this, too. The ending does say something real, but between the weak execution and the similarity to unearned happy endings you've seen elsewhere, it falls on its face.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

I can see that.

In all, I think the one piece missing from The Matrix was the mechanism of his apotheosis. Just show me what makes him understand that death is meaningless (rather than "The Power Of Love"), and we're all good.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Certainly the Power of Love was a problem. Indeed, the love between Neo and Trinity is a problem all around. As so often in movies, I find myself asking why these lovers like one another, aside from the fact that they look like movie stars.

A bigger problem for me, though, is the theme of “choice,” which is metaphorically rich in principle but hollow in the way it actually plays. The choice the Architect offers Neo is so muddled that it's hardly a real decision at all. And Neo telling Smith in their final confrontation that he chooses to live is meant to be a contrast with Smith's soulless viral impulse to life and replication, I guess, but the film doesn't show it, so it becomes a distinction without a difference.

(I cannot help but think of the hollow conflicts in Lost, in which the characters argued about entirely arbitrary decisions based on no information about what to do in a random environment. Locke says turn left, Jack says turn right, everyone takes sides, people draw guns, but since anything can happen at any time, what's really at stake?)

Also, the Matrix Machines' motivations are just too opaque. They aren't intriguingly alien (like, say, the angels of The Prophecy or the Strangers in Dark City) or a true Mystery (like the faun in Pan's Labyrinth) — no, they just Don't Quite Add Up.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Oh, see, I just meant the very first one. I try not to think about the wasted potential of the later two theatrical releases, and focus on the Animatrix.