Camera Obscura: DARK CITY

Camera Obscura: (Latin: “dark chamber”) is an optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. The following films penetrate the modern psyche through an all too clear lens–its iterations, ethos, phobias, catharsis, and moreover, crisis. With stunning clarity, these masters peered into a void and showed us the contemporaneous man in all of its conflicting form before our eyes.  

Every time I read or watch narrative subject matter about modern life, I’m reminded, like others, of our former observers’ clarity. Yes, they had unstoppable imaginations lit on fire, but as fantasy bleeds into reality it’s the warnings that leave a knot. We know they’re there, but our modes of modern catharsis are only synthetic and soon we won’t know what’s real and what’s not. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) doesn’t know, violently waking supine in a water-filled bathtub as a dingy ceiling light undulates above. More so, he awakens with no memory to an Art Deco nightmare where, in the words of “The Strangers”, “All times and no times are blended together.”

Dark City is Alex Proyas’ modern camera obscura, an achievement of visual texture evocative of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Not to mention, the Strangers have an implication of the vampire in Nosferatu as they psychologically catheterize the human inhabitants. John Murdoch serves as a retrofitted examination of the modern man against a stark urban landscape reminiscent of Edward Hopper paintings, namely, “Nighthawks.” He’s alienated and devoid of memory and purpose.

Dark City’s virtuoso lies in its vision of modern society’s collective consciousness expressed through a rich visual tapestry. Recycled memories are carouseled from skull to skull as The Strangers try to understand the human specimen before their existence perishes. The film’s thesis examines whether our humanity is preordained by our pasts. They’re testing whether people can will themselves out of their rigid biogenetic code and make choices that are inconsistent with their internal mapping.

This is Dr. Daniel P. Schreber’s (Kiefer Sutherland) purpose, who serves as kind of a micro god with the ability to genetically alter people. The Strangers needed a Frankenstein for their experiment, but Schreber had to sell off his memories in order to keep his scientific prowess. Dr. Schreber was designed to question this egomania, but the film strips away his duplicity leaving his hope in the promise of our human abilities as the final thought.

Although Murdoch is the common man, he possesses the unique gift of “tuning”, the ability to physically manifest something by will power; he and Dr. Schreber know it exists, but Murdoch doesn’t know how to channel it. But he, like every other dweller, is trapped in a lost, cosmic, grotesque, city dungeon as people’s souls, their memories, are sadistically spliced and violated by these urban monsters.

Murdoch personifies the modern, collective, existential dread we face floating around in a vast ether trying find a tangible permanence. The aliens not only soul search through swapping personal histories, but alter people’s extant lives as well, shifting the city’s environs around like a Rubik’s cube adding another layer of dementia and vertigo. Everybody is willed to sleep as they “tune”, but nobody is ever really awake either; they just exist in an interminable comatose. Thus, the true beauty of The Stranger’s villainy is “Shell beach”. Everybody knows about it but doesn’t how to get there; it’s the dream, on it’s last exhale before oblivion as the urban shadows quietly lay it to rest.

The moment is punctuated as Murdoch and Detective Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) arrive at the sinister poster dangling above the inhabitants. And right behind the dream lies the darkness–there’s nothing behind the wall, only infinite space. A bleak realization, but nonetheless, a necessary one.

Dark City ties up its thesis with a decisive point of view. Yes, Murdoch murdered those women albeit his actions were influenced by another’s memories; yet, he’s saved by them through Dr. Schreber’s self-implantation into Murdoch’s memories to help develop Murdoch’s tuning gifts. He uses his gift of willing to alter an austere world into a new hopeful creation. There’s nothing out there to save us or a secret nirvana to flee to. Our existence depends on us alone.

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