Dark City and the dark cinema of the 90's

The late 90's were kind of a blur. The technology that had been imagined and sometimes used in some sense was now coming around into everyday use. Cell phones, the internet, even cloning was real. The future was here. Or was it? People were still wearing jeans, rock and roll was still popular, but somehow the world was struggling to deal with it all. The world was moving faster and faster. For the first real time, computers were being outpaced at faster rates than consumers could purchase them. And all of a sudden in the world, a person alone could be in so many places at once and almost be no where at all. This is the time  frame that brought us a new range of film that like previous generations was struggling to cope with the world around. Some of the questions were the same; why am I here, who am I, what does it all mean. These questions have been asked since story crept into film, but now something new was happening. Filmmakers started questioning man's very existence. Where are we? Are we even we? These films weren't just thinking outside the box, they were questioning the very box's existence.

The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Dark City all landmark this trend, that has seen American film make the transition into the 21st Century, asking the questions that true art should be asking, and asking them in new ways.

The Truman Show was ahead of the reality show curve that came at us later in the 90's, took over in the 00's and hasn't left us still. Truman is a man who is living unawares in a tv show based all around him, where everything is fake; from his friends, to the town he lives in, to the sky above him. His first clue is a studio light falling from way up above. His world is literally coming down around him.

In The Matrix, the world as we know it is actually a computer program that we're plugged into to feed machines off our energy. In the Truman Show at least what he was doing was real, the world he knew was real, it was just fake. And outside his studio home, the world existed normally. In The Matrix, the whole world was fake. But still, you had your identity, you were still you, just an imagined self image, with flaws and talents. And again, the world outside The Matrix was real, albeit a futuristic wasteland.

In Dark City, mysterious aliens control a city, which is set in space, where they experiment on humans to try and find out what makes them unique; swapping out their memories and cycling them through endless cycles of lives. They not only control the city, by shifting building and streets to their choosing, they shape the lives of the people, changing jobs, spouses and sometimes circumstances and situations. In Dark City, the place isn't real. The world outside that place is empty. And your identity isn't even real. Where are you? What are you doing here? And most importantly, who are you?

A look at the evolution of Dark City's influences will help shed light on both social history and it's ties to the cinema that was made at the time. The most obvious influence to Dark City is, of course, Metropolis. (One of my favorite films of all time, and partially the reason I'm in the film industry.) The allusion to Metropolis is most obvious in it's production design and apparent themes. Metropolis is about a society literally split in two, where the upper half controls the lower half, literally. The poor live below and the rich live above. We can look at the simplicity of the film and laugh, but early cinema was by it's nature, and by necessity, very simple. What's so very clear in Metropolis is who is controlling the city and it's inhabitants. It's simple class struggle, but set in the distant future. It's social commentary about class warfare was fitting to it's time. In Dark City, class structure is joked about in one sequence, where the "Strangers" are placing lower class people into a rich person's setting with new memories of that life. But they know nothing of the switch, and the film moves on. What was so obvious with Metropolis, the idea of a whole society taking back control, basically through revolution, is still present with Dark City, but it follows one man. This one man is a theme shown in many of the modern science fiction films, dating from even Star Wars on to The Matrix, The Truman Show and Dark City. This one has the power in him all the time, but he's got to learn to control it, and with that power he can change everyone else's lives. Even in The Truman Show, where everyone knows the truth but him, he triumphs and allows everyone else to triumph with him and see that you can break the shackles.

Metropolis also brings in the expressionist motif and theme; the world around is distorted and dark. It doesn't always end up like it should, just like it doesn't look like it should. In Dark City, the city is ever changing, even the walls can turn into doors. Both sides, the humans and the Strangers, are somewhat at a loss for what's real. The Strangers keep changing the city and the memories, but the Strangers are also at a loss for what's inside the human's mind and soul. They can't seem to figure out what makes the humans tick, and they especially are at a loss when Murdoch begins using their powers.

The other great influence to Dark City is film noir. The film has all the trappings of a great noir; the hardened detective, the singing dame, the man waking up over a dead body not knowing what happened. Blade Runner is often touted as the great mix of Noir and Sci-Fi, but I don't think it fits so well as with Dark City.
These three science fiction films are the pre-cursors to the first genre films of the 21st Century. By the 2000's we were no longer questioning technology, and by extent science fiction films went back into asking the same questions science fiction had always been asking, what will we do when...we can clone, when zombies take over, when AI will kill us? Superhero films and merging of sci-fi and disaster films have taken over, i.e. Transformers and Cloverfield. It will either take another science or technology breakthrough to jolt the minds of filmmakers or a new set of filmmakers to begin asking real questions again to make the genre new and relevant.