The sur­re­al, styl­is­tic bril­liance of Dark City

At first glance, Alex Proyas’ Dark City is lit­tle more than a glo­ri­fied pas­tiche. A man named John Mur­doch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bath­tub, not know­ing who he is, how he got there, or how the woman in the oth­er room end­ed up dead. Mur­doch fran­ti­cal­ly departs the scene before police arrive. We’ve seen this premise count­less times before in film noir, just as we’ve seen the mut­ed 1940s cityscape that Proyas recre­ates in sweep­ing detail. As the man­hunt for Mur­doch esca­lates, how­ev­er, the real­i­ty of the world around him, as well as the genre through which his sto­ry is being told, comes undone.

In a supreme­ly bizarre turn, Mur­doch learns that the epony­mous city is being con­trolled by alien beings called Strangers, who rearrange the sur­round­ing archi­tec­ture and implant their human sub­jects with false mem­o­ries to study them. Mur­doch proves immune to these implants, and uses his new­found tal­ent to escape beyond the city’s for­bid­den walls.

Effec­tive­ly lay­ing any notion of pas­tiche to bed, this turn makes explic­it the film’s dual­i­ty. The rest of the sto­ry breaks into dis­tinct yet inter­de­pen­dent halves: the first being a clas­si­cal film noir, a search for the cul­prit behind the open­ing mur­der. The sec­ond, and far more ambi­tious, being a decon­struc­tion of the genre itself, with sci­ence fic­tion ele­ments allow­ing the char­ac­ters to ques­tion and even­tu­al­ly recog­nise the arti­fice of the stylised world around them. What is cin­e­ma, after all, if not the per­fect medi­um to inspect real­i­ty up close?

These meta­tex­tu­al (or meta-noir) themes inform the film’s intri­cate visu­als. The city simul­ta­ne­ous­ly func­tions as a real-life set and as the fic­tion­al set upon which the Strangers have arranged their own human per­form­ers. It is said be made from ​“stolen mem­o­ries, dif­fer­ent eras, dif­fer­ent pasts, all rolled into one,” a rather fit­ting descrip­tion giv­en Proyas’ homage to clas­sic tech-noirs like Blade Run­ner, Brazil and Aki­ra. He takes the metaphor­i­cal oppres­sion of the city in these films and depicts it lit­er­al­ly, with entire blocks that shift and trans­form to height­en the para­noia of its inhab­i­tants. Every street Mur­doch tra­vers­es is unfa­mil­iar; every alley­way pos­es a threat. It’s through these dis­ori­ent­ing touch­es that Proyas cap­tures the mad­ness of what liv­ing in a film noir might actu­al­ly be like.

There’s a sim­i­lar decon­struc­tion with regards to nar­ra­tive. Stock genre char­ac­ters are pro­vid­ed, from the stut­ter­ing infor­mant (Kiefer Suther­land, doing his best Peter Lorre impres­sion) and the smoul­der­ing femme fatale (Jen­nifer Con­nel­ly) to the hard­ened police­man (William Hurt), but they’re invert­ed to reflect a world where the ​“unre­li­able” pro­tag­o­nist is think­ing clear­ly, and it is every­one else who is lost. ​“How do you think I could for­get a thing like that?” Hurt mus­es, upon fum­bling the details of a cher­ished mem­o­ry. The moment caus­es a rift in his psy­che, and a real­i­sa­tion that, per­haps he’s more than the sto­ic flat­foot he’s been tasked with play­ing. Here, the rejec­tion of false iden­ti­ty and the rejec­tion of noir cliché become one in the same.

The film’s sci-fi trap­pings even­tu­al­ly take over in the finale, with Mur­doch assim­i­lat­ing the tele­ki­net­ic pow­ers of the Strangers and destroy­ing them in spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion, but the after­math is more appro­pri­ate­ly down­beat. While Mur­doch suc­ceeds in his rebel­lion, nei­ther he nor any­one else learns their true iden­ti­ty. They are all stuck with the iden­ti­ty arbi­trar­i­ly assigned to them by the Strangers. The per­for­mance goes on. If we are to go by media pro­fes­sor Ken Hillis, how­ev­er, who states that ​“noir pro­tag­o­nists reflect an exis­ten­tial aware­ness of the impos­si­bil­i­ty of their own enlight­en­ment,” than Mur­doch, who will­ing­ly embraces his remod­elled utopia, has found the next best thing: the illu­sion of enlight­en­ment. In keep­ing with the film’s dual­i­ty, Proyas’ end­ing is both hope­ful and hope­less regard­ing the human condition.

Dark City failed to gain much atten­tion upon release, over­shad­owed, like so many films, by the box office stran­gle­hold of James Cameron’s Titan­ic. It quick­ly gained a cult fol­low­ing, how­ev­er, and its influ­ence on con­tem­po­rary sci-fi and film noir has been exten­sive. The Wachowskis’ sem­i­nal Matrix tril­o­gy is the most obvi­ous, recy­cling not only sto­ry beats but the very sets that Proyas designed, while Christo­pher Nolan and Rian John­son have mined it more sub­tly in tri­umphs like Incep­tion and Loop­er, respectively.

That the film has main­tained its appeal in spite of this is a tes­ta­ment to its sin­gu­lar bril­liance. Twen­ty years on, it con­tin­ues to defy easy cat­e­gori­sa­tion, equal­ly com­mit­ted to hon­our­ing cinema’s past as it is in unrav­el­ling it.