Can you imagine what it's like to erase your own past?

[sovay]

At the very beginning of tonight's movie, I said to Caitlín, "I'm glad to see this director likes German Expressionism." Near the very end, I said, "That is the best film I have ever seen about the process of apotheosis." Both of these statements are true; neither is going to convey how much I liked Dark City (1998), which begins like a solid little film noir and ends like Gnosticism. And of course it recalls Metropolis (1927) and M (1930) and Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920) and even some films that aren't in German, chiefly Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995), but I am not sure I had ever before seen a street scene simultaneously evoke Franz Kafka and Edward Hopper and you know, they're a natural fit. I can't imagine how the theatrical cut was supposed to work. I've had it explained to me, but I still can't imagine it; I don't know what it is about thoughtful science fiction that makes studios want to tack on idiotic voiceovers, but I hope it's not some kind of actual, contractually-obliged law. And even if one could make a convincing case that the central mystery of Dark City is less compelling than the characters' actions once they figure it out, I still can't figure out why any of the deleted scenes were, because one of the neatest things about the film as it stands is its three-dimensionality, the sense that any of its characters, John, Anna, Bumstead, Schreber, even Mr. Hand, might be the protagonist: and so, by turns, they all are. Take out certain lines, conversations, even reaction shots, that depth of field is lost. God, I bet this is how you jinx a movie, taking Fritz Lang as your model. At least Alex Proyas didn't have to wait eighty-plus years for the restoration.

. . . It's mostly the hair, and a little of the cheekbones, and the eyes, but I kept looking at Rufus Sewell as John Murdoch and being reminded of Michael Cisco. This comparison may haunt me for years. Then again, any film that contained multiple shout-outs to Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) would probably remind me of Michael Cisco all by itself. I still wonder if this explains anything about the world.

In other news, we did not, unsurprisingly, finish line-editing Two Worlds and In Between; I'm staying until Wednesday. I'm very tired. Funny how you write that at four in the morning and it's still true the next day.

Comments

[sovay]

--and yes, there was so much more to him, and he's not a grotesque. He's a person who we are allowed to mistake for a grotesque

It took me until tonight in the shower to articulate it, but Dark City is metafiction. Its people are endlessly shuffled between one identity and the next, picked up and replaced into never-finished stories that run only as long as the Strangers' desire to see what happens next, discarded or rewritten once their most immediate purpose is played out. Murdoch would never really have been a serial killer; he would have been someone's idea of a serial killer. (All those memories of idyllic Shell Beach are attached to postcards and billboards because that is exactly the depth they possess, quite believable as an outsider's construction of a happy childhood.) Schreber is a grotesque because he is a character: all other dimensions were taken from him. It is only when he stops performing that familiar role of creepy scientist around the edges of the narrative that we can see he's still, or he becomes again, real. When Bumstead stops tying his shoelaces so precisely, it's the sign that he's moving away from his imprinted characterization of the cop who lives for his job, into someone who can be a little bit slipshod, and curious about more than the dry facts of the case, and rewarded with the wonder of knowing the truth even as he dies for it. Anna was never meant to start investigating her husband's disappearance; she was only supposed to be his murderous trigger. And Mr. Hand consciously takes on a part that was written for someone else, a string-puller stepping onto the stage, and his poignancy is that for all his curiosity, he never does attain humanity, only a reflected-back composite of what his species imagined it would be like. All of them together, but especially Schreber and Murdoch, they break the story. The city's inhabitants can have lives now, not just a series of unwitting scenes. And if I was right to be reminded of Gnosticism, then I suppose we should come away thinking about gods and demiurges and free will, but I think about story before I think about religion; and what I think is, now the characters can start being people. And it cannot be accidental that this global freedom from narrative is accomplished by Schreber rewriting the story of Murdoch's life.

—Actually, that's very clever: we are told that the Strangers are attempting to study individuality by testing whether the possession of certain memories will dictate a subject's behavior from then on ("Will a man, given the history of a killer, continue in that vein? Or are we, in fact, more than the sum of our memories?"), and it is this proposition which the human characters consistently refute. John Murdoch may be a mostly blank slate, but when he finds himself in the plot-position of a jealous husband and a murderer by all circumstantial evidence, he conducts himself like neither. Anna is supposed to be his woman in the refrigerator, Bumstead a cog in the machine that brings him in. There should be nothing left of Schreber but his skill with a neuron and a syringe. None of them, ultimately, play out their assigned parts, however terrifying the alternatives. It is only Mr. Hand who, on finding himself with the somewhat lurid backstory of a serial killer (his wife cheated on him, so he kills prostitutes—seriously, that is about as sophisticated as psychology got in the B-movies), actually goes out and murders someone. We get an answer to the experiment. The answer is that it's not a simple thing. I should think about this more in the morning.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

In fact, the very first thing Murdoch does is save the goldfish. Yes, I think are right exactly. We are more than our roles, the narrative says.

It's such a wonderful movie.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Very well said, yes. They are all in the process of becoming more than their roles, but I think that even extends to Hand (as I said over at my place :)), in that to even begin to seek that facsimile, that chimera of humanity which the Strangers have generated, he has to transgress his prescribed role As string-puller, and allow his strings to be pulled awhile.

You're right: such a great film, and such amazing depth...

[sovay]

in that to even begin to seek that facsimile, that chimera of humanity which the Strangers have generated, he has to transgress his prescribed role as string-puller, and allow his strings to be pulled awhile.

Agreed: just that desire to know what it's like has already differentiated him from the hive-mind of the Strangers, even if it leaves him ultimately stranded between two worlds (a fish in air), burning in the sun.

You're right: such a great film, and such amazing depth...

As I said to mswyrr: I want someone to edit a book of essays on Dark City. I'd read it.