Depth

The 1998 film “Dark City” will be re-released on DVD this week in a new director’s cut that features additional footage. I’ve always felt that “Dark City” never received the recognition it deserved — due in no small part to being overshadowed later by a very similar film, “The Matrix,” in 1999.

What is particularly intriguing about “Dark City” is that it combines many narrative themes specific to science fiction (aliens, space and time travel, and computer technology running amok) with elements of German Expressionism and film noir to create a narrative that provides a unique commentary on the role of technology, including cinematic technology, in the shaping of both the individual and society.

The film’s director, Alex Proyas, ultimately creates a haunting dystopian commentary on today’s media-saturated world.

Tech and The City

“Dark City” vaguely summarizes its story in the opening sequence. The film begins with a shot of a star-filled sky, and one of the characters, Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), provides a brief narration describing The Strangers, a dying race of aliens who think they have found on Earth the solution to their extinction^[1].

The camera cranes down through clouds and into a dark, nighttime cityscape. It stops on Schreber, who is standing on a bridge overlooking the city. He turns to look at his pocket watch, and extreme close-up shots focus on the minute and second hands of the watch as they move ever so slowly towards 12 o’clock.

The film cuts to various scenes of the city, all of which feature some element of movement: subways, trains and long lines of automobile traffic all reflect the nameless city’s seemingly constant activity. The camera returns to a close-up of the watch just when it reaches 12, and the city suddenly begins to shut down. All cars and rail transportation come to a halt, and people everywhere pass out. Only Schreber remains standing and conscious, and he puts his watch away as he walks off of the bridge to do his work.

The presence of machines overwhelms the environment of “Dark City.” While most of the machines in this film are not futuristic in function or appearance (as opposed to the machines in other science fiction films such as “2001” and “Star Wars“), they nevertheless play a dominant part in the narrative. The mechanical artifacts present in the city — conveyor belts, trains, cars and clocks — act as symbols of industrialization.

Of these machines, trains and clocks specifically represent an oppressive force in “Dark City.” The halting of the trains indicates the beginning of a “tuning,” a reality-bending process The Strangers perform to conduct their experiments. Trains also tauntingly represent a false escape from the city. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), the protagonist of “Dark City,” repeatedly tries to get to Shell Beach, a location that is vital to solving the film’s mystery, but the train leading to this destination never stops for anyone; it perpetually runs to its destination without a single passenger.

To further emphasize the oppressive nature of the train, Eddie Walinsky (Colin Friels), a former city detective who is considered insane because of his awareness of reality’s destabilization due to The Strangers, throws himself at the Shell Beach Express in order to “escape” from the city.

Clocks are also seen regularly throughout the movie. Not only do the opening shots show the stopping of Dr. Schreber’s pocket watch (a technological development that helped to bring about standard time in 1883), but subsequent shots show a clock or clocks freezing at 12 throughout the city. A giant clock mounted inside of a statue of a human face, as if the clock were its brain, hangs over the central chamber of The Strangers’ lair, where the aliens gather to perform the tunings. Furthermore, some of the posters for “Dark City” feature a picture of Murdoch screaming as he stands in front of a clock.

The mechanical logic of the nameless metropolis in “Dark City,” an environment that perpetually re-shapes itself through the manipulation, storage and replay of images, is parallel to the mechanics of film itself. Just as film editors assemble and reassemble pieces of film in order to create a complete narrative, The Strangers literally re-edit everything in the city, adding and removing buildings and creating and destroying memories in the minds of people while the city freezes in order to perform their experiments to discover the nature of human identity.

One of the tuning shots is followed by a scene in The Strangers’ underground factory, where the aliens sift through endless conveyor belts loaded with personal items: purses, books, photo albums, wallets, etc. The Strangers prepare these artifacts and props to be edited together into new scenarios of everyday life in the city above. The artifacts on the underground conveyer belts are analogous to the trains and cars on the surface. Just as the cars and trains promote the notion to the city’s citizens that they are traveling to somewhere even though they aren’t, the endlessly recycled and re-edited artifacts encourage the citizens that they are moving forward in time with their lives and personal identities when in fact they are going nowhere.

A further connection to film technology (and subsequently videotape) is symbolized by the spiral shape seen throughout “Dark City”: it is carved into the bodies of dead prostitutes, scratched onto various walls and surfaces, featured inside of Dr. Schreber’s office in the form of a mouse maze and displayed inside one of the chambers in The Strangers’ lair. The circular path to a central point reflects the movie’s plot structure, where images and sequences are seen again and again but never quite the same way. Like film and videotape reels, “Dark City” unravels layer after layer of footage in a circular motion until it reaches the end in the center.

On a more direct level of association, a shot in the opening sequence shows people fainting as they walk out of a movie theater showing a film called “The Evil” (a poster of this film briefly appears in the railway station when Walinsky commits suicide), while the film shown after the climax of “Dark City” — when the sun begins to rise and people start to wake up from the seemingly endless night — is called “Book of Dreams.”

German Expressionism and Early Film

The reference to aliens in the opening narrative suggests that “Dark City” is a science fiction movie and its plot shares similarities to other contemporary science fiction films and television shows^[2]. However, much of its visual style harks back to earlier silent cinema. Instead of looking like a city of today or tomorrow, the metropolis of “Dark City” appears to be wedged in some muddled, unspecific year between 1930 and 1960. The overall look of “Dark City” imitates the visual style of German Expressionism, which lasted roughly from 1919 to 1927. Originally an avant-garde movement in painting in 1910, Expressionism stressed the artist’s emotional attitude towards himself and the world; theater, literature and architecture later employed this style.

The first German Expressionist film was “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) and, like an Expressionist painting or woodcut print, the images within the film are heavily stylized. To emphasize certain moods, shapes are distorted and exaggerated unrealistically; to compliment the visual distortion, the actors wear heavy make-up and move in abrupt or slow patterns. Overall, each element of the scenes’ compositions interacts graphically to create a unified composition, making the characters forms of visual elements that merge with the setting, as opposed to individuals that exist within a setting.

“Dark City” follows these conventions closely: while the human characters act in a confused, laggard pace, The Strangers effortlessly float among the streets, like living, oppressive shadows cast over their human test subjects. The Strangers’ appearance — bald, thin, deathly pale ghouls who wear large black fedoras and floor-length trench coats when lurking the streets — is reminiscent of another German Expressionist horror classic, “Nosferatu” (1922).

Both the human and alien characters function as visual elements that move in and around the city itself, which constantly changes throughout the film. Full-sized buildings shift, twist and erupt from underneath the pavement; doors appear and vanish while staircases expand and contract like living muscles. Like the protagonist in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Murdoch must navigate his way through these literal expressions of confusion and fear to understand the truth behind both this twisted world and himself.

Staying within the conventions of Expressionism in a scene that both shocking and literal, “Dark City” reveals the secret of Shell Beach. Dr. Schreber guides Murdoch and Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt) on a boat trip through what appears to be wreckage and waste from the city (including buildings half submerged in water) as he explains to them what The Strangers are. They stop at a long, dark hall, which Murdoch enters, followed by Bumstead and Schreber. At the end of the hall is an empty room, with a wall-sized advertisement of Shell Beach stretching over Murdoch.

Murdoch briefly examines the ad, and then begins to tear it down only to find a brick wall underneath. Unsatisfied, Murdoch picks up a sledgehammer and begins to swing at the wall. Bumstead soon helps him, while Schreber can only watch in nervous anticipation. This sequence of shots also features rapid cuts: a frantic series of close-ups of hands clawing at the wall, hammers making impact on the bricks, and close-ups of Murdoch and Bumstead as they avidly chip away at the enigma of Shell Beach.

Such a quick montage builds up to the climax, a medium shot of Murdoch and Bumstead looking away from the camera and at the wall when it is finally breached. However, instead of the bricks falling down, they are pulled even farther away from the camera as they are sucked into a large, black space.

The visual non sequitur of the imploding brick wall is jarring to see, but consistent with the narrative’s secret: Shell Beach at its core is nothing but an empty void (hence the name “Shell”), as are the memories of everyone in the city. The following shots show that even the city is not really a city at all, but a fabricated habitat floating on a platform in the middle of deep, dark space — no geographic location, no past, no future.

This gargantuan, floating city evokes comparisons between “Dark City” and another Expressionist science fiction classic, “Metropolis” (1927)^[3]. In the future world of “Metropolis,” the leisure class live in towering skyscrapers, hold parties in lavish ballrooms and gardens and travel in air vehicles and futuristic cars, while the tired, anonymous working class toils endlessly in the deep underground section of the city, running the machines that make the city function. In contrast, The Strangers are the underground working class in “Dark City,” making the city run and fulfilling their agenda, while the tired, anonymous surface-dwelling human population lacks a firm identity and awareness of their own.

Flashbacks and Photographic Memories

“Dark City” uses a series of flashbacks as a temporal device in the film’s narrative. According to Maureen Turim in her book “Flashbacks in Film,” the general concept of a flashback is an image or a filmic segment that is realized as representing events that are anterior to the events that preceded it. To be more exact, flashbacks often operate on two levels, portraying the large-scale social history of the world in which the film takes place through a single individual’s subjective memory.

Turim’s etymological investigation of the term “flashback” reveals it to be unique to film because of this technology’s ability to suddenly, forcibly insert out-of-sequence events into a narrative, a jarring mechanical technique that is absent in novels and stage drama.

The Strangers literally manifest this kind mechanical disassembly and reconstruction of subjective time through the tuning process, which they use to disassemble and reconstruct the city and the minds of its inhabitants^[4].

Other science fiction movies such as “Blade Runner” (1982), “Robocop” (1987) and “Artificial Intelligence: AI” (2001) also portray a search for and validation of identity, an identity that is either compromised by technological manipulation or is completely manufactured, with an industrial metropolis serving as the backdrop. Of these three films, “Blade Runner” is the most obvious counterpart to “Dark City” for several reasons. Both “Dark City” and “Blade Runner” employ plot devices similar to detective film noir, such as a deadpan voice-over, a pivotal character who is an investigator/detective (Deckard (Harrison Ford) in “Blade Runner” and Bumstead in “Dark City”), and a narrative structure that parallels a criminal investigation. But the search for self-identity is the strongest link between these two films and Giuliana Bruno details this aspect in her essay, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and ‘Blade Runner.’”

In “Blade Runner,” a group of replicants, human-looking androids, wants to understand who and what they are by searching for their origins on Earth. The replicants are superior to human beings in many ways, but their shortcoming, as Bruno explains, is their fragmented sense of temporality: They look human, but their pasts are pure fabrications and their life spans are perilously short. This lack of stable time results in a “schizophrenic condition that is characterized by the inability to experience the persistence of ‘I’ over time. There is neither past nor future at the two poles of that which thus becomes the perpetual present.”

They try to validate their pasts through photographs: one replicant, Leon, keeps a collection of pictures, while another, Rachael, uses a photograph of a mother and daughter to convince herself and others that she is a real person with a real past. The employment of photographs as a plot device that the characters use to discover and confirm their pasts reflects how much trust contemporary society puts in the photographic image.

The replicants’ conviction that they are real if they are in a work of photography (a medium perceived to be capable of collapsing the signified object and its referent into each other) bears similarities to how current individuals are determined to capture many personal memories on film and video tape in order validate their experiences. However, as Bruno concludes, this over-reliance on photographs to record and confirm the past has turned history into a collection of photographic, filmic or televisual images mechanically dissociated from their original source material. This fragmented past of the replicants parallels the landscape they inhabit: a perpetually dark, futuristic Los Angeles that is a hodgepodge of architectural styles and diverse crowds of faceless people, where consumerism, waste and recycling coexist simultaneously.

“Dark City” frequently uses photographs to create and recall memories. Just as a postcard of Shell Beach triggers the first of a series of flashbacks for Murdoch, his subsequent exploration into his past triggers more incomplete memories that have been injected into his mind by The Strangers.

In a pivotal scene, Murdoch visits his Uncle Karl (John Bluthal), who owns and resides in Neptune’s Aquarium, to learn more about his past. Karl shows him a series of slides from Murdoch’s childhood and provides a narrative account of what these slides are supposed to mean. According to Karl, he raised Murdoch in Shell Beach after his parents died in a fire (although neither Karl nor anyone else can remember exactly where Shell Beach is). However, none of the slides match the reality Murdoch inhabits: the burn scar he sees in one slide on his teenage arm from the supposed fire is not on his own arm, and the coloring book in which his childhood self was drawing in another slide is filled with blank pages when he finds it in his room later^[5].

Such incongruities lead Murdoch to conclude that the parents he saw in the slides were no more real than Rachael’s photographed mother in “Blade Runner”; in a disturbing twist, the humans are to The Strangers in “Dark City” what the replicants are to the humans in “Blade Runner.”

In contrast to the several replicants trying to find their origins in “Blade Runner,” thousands of people who have a vague grasp on their pasts populate “Dark City,” thus conveying a dreamlike state to film’s visual style. Even though Murdoch desperately tries to discover who he is, most of the other characters in the film behave uncertainly without any long-term memories, as if they are acting out their lives instead of truly living them.

Murdoch’s wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), is a lounge singer, but her performances are very stiff and mechanical. Bumstead, the city inspector who investigates a series of murders that are somehow connected to Murdoch, appears to be fashioned after the lone detective character that was popular in 1940s pulp fiction. However, some of Bumstead’s behavior, such as his emotional attachment to an accordion, is atypical for what he is supposed to be^[6].

Like “Blade Runner,” The Strangers’ city reflects its inhabitants’ vague grip on identity: While it clearly appears to be a 20th century post-industrial metropolis, its specific time cannot be denoted. Cars from various eras, color photography, slide projectors and automats all inhabit the same space, disappearing and reappearing depending on The Strangers’ plans. As one of The Strangers summarizes, “We fashioned this city on stolen memories. Different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one.” Furthermore, the city is perpetually in a state of night throughout most of the film, lending yet another element of film noir to the story.

While time travel does not literally happen in “Dark City,” the manipulation of the memories and images that were originally stirred in Murdoch’s mind through postcards and slides eventually rewrites his sense of subjective time. In the climactic moment of the film, The Strangers capture Murdoch and plan on imprinting him so that he can become one with them, sharing both his human traits and his unique telepathic powers in order to save the aliens from extinction.

But when it comes time for Dr. Schreber to imprint Murdoch, he inserts his own syringe into Murdoch’s head. What follows is a rapid series of flashbacks to Murdoch’s youth, complete with rapid editing, blurry edges, and a background noise on the soundtrack that sounds like music being played backwards. In these new flashbacks, Schreber appears over and over again in different forms: an ice cream man, a mailman, a teacher, a fireman, a sales clerk at Neptune’s Aquarium, and a rose peddler all bear the face and knowledge of Schreber as Murdoch recalls his new past.

Through the injection, Schreber has rewritten himself into Murdoch’s past to teach him how to use his latent telepathic powers to overcome The Strangers, “giving you a lifetime of knowledge in one syringe.” Even though Murdoch goes on to defeat The Strangers by turning their tuning technology against them, Schreber has essentially become Murdoch’s father, a parental figure who raises Murdoch into the man he wants him to be, all in a second. Schreber does not need to physically travel through time to rewrite history; instead, he uses technology to change the personal, subjective past of a key individual and in turn changes the future for everyone.

Dystopian Disneylands

“Dark City” depicts a machine-run living environment capable of endlessly reconfiguring itself to provide its inhabitants with new ideas of space, time and identity. Scott Bukatman explored the implications of such environments and the thinking they promote when he examined Disney theme parks and their visions of future communities in his essay, “There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience.”

Disney’s Tomorrowland and the Future World exhibit at the EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) center personify utopian futures that emphasize the use of the machine in living environments. In these scenarios, benevolent corporations plan and build cities, providing practical population control, unlimited consumer goods, and the promise of technological infallibility, while the citizens remain passive spectators of such magnificent works.

Yet for as much as these visions hype future technology, the machines in these exhibits carry a strong element of nostalgia and user-friendliness; almost all of the technology remains hidden behind ordinary walls and plants or encased in a friendly-looking animatronic robot. The technological developments foreseen by Disney lack social implications, so whether humanity colonizes space or builds living environments under the sea, the machines in Disney’s future will never disrupt the white, middle-class nuclear family.

To make these predictions more convincing, Disney carefully structures its exhibits (and the rest of its theme park rides) along the lines of a narrative, guiding tourists through discoveries and resolutions that have already happened. The parks were even designed to look like movies: The features on the buildings conform to the sequence of establishing shots, medium shots, and close-ups, while the rides permit the occupants to see exactly the way a movie camera sees.

The Disney theme parks and their ideal futures maintain centralized control of their environments, while at the same time providing the illusion to the tourists that they have autonomy. Thus, “Dark City” is a harsher but no less similar counterpart to Disney. Like tourists trapped in a floating theme park, the inhabitants of the city go about their lives thinking they are in control but are in fact living out narratives predetermined by The Strangers, who carefully keep their advanced technology hidden from prying eyes.

Movies have told various stories of centrally controlled high-tech environments gone awry, such as in “Westworld” (1973) and “Jurassic Park” (1993). On this level, the closest cinematic counterpart to “Dark City” was also released in 1998: “The Truman Show.” The basic premise is similar: a man (in this case, Truman Burbank) realizes one day that his entire life and the world in which he lives are complete fabrications, manufactured inside a large, city-like machine, for the purpose of observation. Like Murdoch, a centralized authority that hides its high technology (such as five thousand cameras) behind walls, buttons and other familiar, everyday objects controls Truman’s actions, and it is only when the system falters that Truman becomes aware of his situation and can rebel.

Even though “The Truman Show” maintains a much lighter visual tone than “Dark City,” both have a sense of timelessness. While “Dark City” features an exaggerated film noir landscape from the 40s and 50s, Truman’s “island hometown” of Seahaven deliberately re-creates a sunny suburban paradise comparable to the setting for many TV shows and movies from the same era. In this way, Seahaven is similar to Disneyland, where there is no crime, no vandalism, no poverty, and it is populated predominantly by white middle-class citizens.

Furthermore, the synthetic world of “The Truman Show” and the people who inhabit it form only half of the film’s narrative; the other half consists of the viewers of Seahaven’s inhabitants, who in this film are other human beings. Throughout the story, the film cuts to scenes of television viewers at home around the world as they watch Truman go about his daily activities.

Just as The Strangers in “Dark City” store, observe and manipulate the memories of people such as Murdoch, the viewers in “The Truman Show” buy videotapes of past episodes, which are in fact Truman’s personal memories, and other merchandise consists of duplicate photos from Truman’s own photo album. To complete the sense of intimacy, the producers of the Truman television show regularly play back past video footage for the viewers while Truman is contemplating certain issues, so they can literally watch Truman’s mind at work.

The overall comparison between “Dark City” and “The Truman Show” is that the relationship between The Strangers and Murdoch is similar to the relationship between the television producers and viewers and Truman. In other words, “The Truman Show” suggests that people are capable of behaving like The Strangers, willing to trap an individual within a completely artificial environment with no authentic sense of history, all in the name of fulfilling some vaguely defined ideal.

Just as The Strangers perpetually reshape human memory and watch the results so they can discover what it means to be human, the people in “The Truman Show” watch Truman on TV because he acts as a surrogate for the kind of model human life they do not have. Truman represents the American dream that actually came true: the loving, hard-working husband who never falters; the son who never was disobedient; the stable, functional man raised in a stable, functional world.

Masters of Machines, Machines as Masters

By using imagery reminiscent of German Expressionist and film noir narratives, “Dark City” literally expresses what all the other films (”Blade Runner,” “The Truman Show”) have only suggested, that the machine-produced photographic and cinematic image is so malleable and disposable that it can both manipulate time and alter one’s sense of identity and history.

Thus, most of these films dealt with the issue of finding the true nature of one’s origins. The replicants from “Blade Runner” and Truman Burbank from “The Truman Show” each struggle amidst the visual flotsam of disassociated and reconstructed yesterdays to find out who they are, each with varying outcomes: death, murder or escape. In contrast, there are other characters in these films, such as Deckard in “Blade Runner” and the television producers in “The Truman Show,” who seek to prevent the truth from being found.

In “Dark City,” The Stranger who is assigned to capture Murdoch, Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien), goes so far as to inject into himself the memories with which Murdoch was supposed to be imprinted, becoming a sort of surrogate Murdoch to better predict Murdoch’s actions. How this adversarial relationship ends and the ultimate fate of Murdoch and the citizens of “Dark City” speaks to the status of our own technological, urbanized world.

After defeating The Strangers, Murdoch uses his telepathic powers to improve the city. He moves it closer to a sun to bring the city out of eternal night, and he surrounds the city with water and a beach, finally making the elusive Shell Beach a reality^[7]. Before he enters his sunshine-filled world through the same dark passageway he originally used to find the truth behind Shell Beach, he encounters Mr. Hand, the last surviving Stranger:

MR. HAND: I’m dying, John. Your imprint is not agreeable with my kind. But I wanted to know what it was like. How you feel . . . .

MURDOCH: You know what I was supposed to feel. That person isn’t me. He never was. You wanted to know what it was about us that made us human. Well, you’re not going to find it (motions to his forehead) in here. You were looking in the wrong place.

Unfortunately, Murdoch does not say what the right place really is. The film implies that this intangible quality is love, since the film ends with him being reunited with his “wife,” Emma. However, Emma the lounge singer is no longer Emma; she was imprinted one last time by The Strangers, changing her into Anna, a box office attendant at a movie theater who has no memory of Murdoch. Whether Murdoch remains in love with Emma/Anna is never explained.

Furthermore, despite the sunshine and newly formed beach, everyone is still stuck in a space-faring city with false memories, and the only people who understand what has happened are Schreber and Murdoch. If they inform their fellow inhabitants of the true nature of the situation or if they end up becoming like The Strangers themselves, using the city and its citizens for their own purposes, is likewise never explored.

The denial of escape from the mechanical city recalls Bukatman’s observations of the Disney amusement parks. People may fear technology and the intimidating, impersonal world of the city, but no one can leave them behind because these tools and environments have become so immersed in popular culture and personal identity. No one wants to think that human identity can be imprinted by the endless stream of images that erupt from cameras, movie screens and television monitors, but no one can turn away from the alluring pull of these devices. Murdoch’s uncertain victory is comparable to Bukatman’s comparison of how the future is portrayed by Disney and how it is foreseen in the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk.

While Disney sees the future of corporate-run centralized control of urban living environments and technology, cyberpunk envisions a tomorrow where technology has its own agenda and people maintain their individuality by outwitting the oppressive bureaucratic order. What both of these narratives have in common is that they each detail the existence of the individual within a technological system that penetrates the minds and bodies of its inhabitants. Cyberpunks may rebel and fight, but they can never leave the machine.

Disney, on the other hand, provides a technological environment that promotes the feelings of reassurance, belonging and control, making its theme parks attractive to people who feel alienated in today’s computerized culture. Hence, even though Murdoch has defeated The Strangers, he and everyone else’s memories are still fabrications, and they remain reliant upon a giant, reality-bending machine floating in space for their survival.

Humanity’s relationship with machines and its impact on how humanity sees itself will provide science fiction cinema with commentary for years to come. “Dark City” presents many of its ideas through experimenting with generic expectations and cinematic conventions, employing flashbacks and vivid symbolism to tell as story of confusion, paranoia, and isolation. Despite its seemingly upbeat ending, the concluding message of “Dark City” is bleak: for as dark and malevolent as technology can be, humanity (at least as we understand the concept of ‘humanity’) will never be free from it.

Technology rearranges environments, alters histories, and rewrites memories and identities without anyone giving a second thought, and it is only when the technology falters or suddenly changes the status quo that people begin to understand how powerful machines really are. Murdoch does not defeat the machines by destroying them, but by mastering them; thus, heroes like Murdoch are created to make the technophobic members of the viewing audience feel better about themselves.

Nevertheless, as long as pop culture unquestioningly uses technology to document and validate our identities, our sense of self will always have the potential to suddenly vanish into the darkness.

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FOOTNOTES

1. According to Roger Ebert’s commentary on the “Dark City” DVD, this voice-over was inserted on the insistence of the studio executives, who feared that no one would understand the movie without it. This is similar to Harrison Ford’s voice-over narration in “Blade Runner,” which was likewise added to the film in post-production for similar reasons.

2. Other examples of science fiction narratives that deal with the questionable nature of subjective memory are “eXistenZ” (1999), “The Matrix” (1999), “The Thirteenth Floor” (1999), “Total Recall” (1990), and “The Cage” (1966), the original pilot episode of the “Star Trek” television series.

3. The city’s overall design of an isolated metropolitan living environment also makes it appear to be a darker counterpart to Cloud City, the futuristic colony in “Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back” (1980).

4. Because of its reliance on flashbacks in its hero’s quest to find the truth, “Dark City” makes some nods to the classic drama “Citizen Kane” (1941), another film which generously utilizes flashbacks to explore the identity of a dead man whose final utterance, “Rosebud,” forms the basis of an investigation. (Note that Murdoch’s accidental shattering of the fishbowl in the beginning of the film appears similar to Kane’s accidental shattering of a snow globe in the opening shots of “Citizen Kane.” Likewise, just as the images of snow and sleds play a recurring symbolic function in “Citizen Kane,” so do the images of water and sea life in “Dark City.”) In contrast, Murdoch’s investigation is to find himself and the significance of Shell Beach, the “Dark City” equivalent of Rosebud.

5. In a somewhat disturbing parallel to real life, experiments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist in Seattle, Washington, involved the use of relatives in creating false memories. She invited people into her lab and chose to create in them a “memory” of being lost in a shopping mall as a young child. None of the subjects were ever actually lost this way, but their relatives participated by “reminding” the test subjects of the event. Later, the unsuspecting subjects “remembered” the events vividly and, even after Loftus tried to debrief them, some continued to believe this memory actually happened. More details about this kind of research can be found in Susan Blackmore’s article, “Alien Abduction,” in New Scientist, 19 November 1994, 29-31.

6. Even though “Dark City” eventually explains why such a dreamlike state pervades the film, some critics of this film disliked the fact that many of its central characters were so sparsely written and vaguely acted. For example, Patrick Lee wrote in his review for SCI FI Weekly, “Key scenes between Murdoch and his wife play flat, and the dialogue is awful . . . the other actors sleepwalk through their performances,” while Maryann Johanson at “The Flick Filosopher” site commented that the film “doesn’t give you any compelling characters to care about.” However, such a lack of realism in the characters’ behavior is a key theme of “Dark City” and is consistent with the unreal, dreamlike world they inhabit.

7. When Shell Beach forms, a large lighthouse appears at the end of a jetty. This is a not-too-subtle phallic symbol of Murdoch’s new source of power.