What was going on in the late 90s? Forgive me for asking, it’s just I was sentient blob of an infant at the time, which is a state of being that doesn’t really lend itself to deep thinking about media analysis. I ask because, a quarter of the way through this cult classic I learned about when Amazon recced it to me an hour and 45 minutes ago, I thought ‘wait. is this a Matrix rip off?’ Nope! Matrix came out 1999. And the, half of the way through, I thought, ‘surely this movie is beholden to the Truman Show.’ Nope. Came out the same year. Even my thought ‘Wait. Is this….a more complicated take on Cube?’ is likely inaccurate, Cube came out in ’97, when Dark City could’ve been in development.
My reason for bringing these all up is they are predicated on the same core themes: you are trapped in a mysterious world created by forces outside your knowledge and barely within your ability to comprehend. With the exception of Cube, you most first slowly understand that the world you are in is the false world, then learn its secrets, and then learn to master it and its keepers. Cube of course jumps right in at point two.
Popular opinion now is that the Matrix is an extended gender dysphoria metaphor. And it is. But it also exists in this wider milieu of movies with thematics. A creeping sense of doubt. A fabricated world that feels at terms hyperreal and unreal. Distrust in authority and a desperate grab for individuality. I don’t know enough about the social politics of the 1990s to understand what this all Means, because I was an infant and because my personal historical politics knowledge is basically only the McCarthy era, but if I hazard a guess I would say it’s something along the lines of: social progress had not caught up with technological process, and this discrepancy led to a deep cultural sense of alienation.
Which also makes Dark City stand out among its peers. Because Neo gets out of the Matrix. Truman gets out of Seahaven, and out of the show. Even the Cube leaves one survivor, who is then able to escape the cube. But nobody actually gets to leave the Stranger’s little ‘zoo’, as one character calls it. Murdoch adds an ocean, a seaside paradise, and brings sunlight back to the city, sure, but they’re still stuck there in a film noir space station. Nobody remembers their old lives. They can’t. Said memories were destroyed in the final battle.
Which makes the film, despite its attempts at cheery ending with its rousing music, Murdoch’s statements about the soul not residing in the mind, and the reunion between Murdoch and his wife who no longer remembers him, feel much bleaker than its compatriots. Nobody’s out, not even the chosen one. You win and what do you win? Control of a prison, floating through space. The system still exists, it just belongs to you now. You can’t free anybody. Not even yourself. The most you can do it make it a little nicer.
Which: no wonder this was a box office bomb. No wonder it was a cult classic. It takes the late 90s paranoid sci-fi thriller and says: ‘yes, but.’ Yes, individuality is better than conformity, but what will it get you. Yes you can break your chains, but only to a certain extent. Yes you can even win back your own life, but you are still trapped, to some extent. Yes you can free yourself, but never all the way. Yes there is hope, but don’t get ahead of yourself.
Which is wild. The whole thing is wild, the set design, the aliens, the reveal that it’s just floating in space. But American sci-fi rarely ends on so bleak a note, on such ambiguity, on such strangeness. This movie isn’t perfect, but when it’s good it feels like a relic from another world, one with a much stranger, and maybe better, output of sci-fi nonsense. Absolutely recommended.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 