Dark City

The Power of the Individual is the source of all that is valuable

Dark City is one of my favorite films in the genre that became defined by The Matrix. I remember how it interfaced with a Philosophy of Mind class I was in at the time, about how we apprehend “reality”. We invest so much in the illusion of reality, however do we actually know reality or do we manufacture it?

Individualists vs Identitarians

My prediction:

The final war will be between those who see themselves as a subjective, individual self, with all the internal conflicts necessarily residing within you, demanding resolution, and by who? You, of course. The individual both IS and transcends itself.

However, having an individual body doesn’t automatically result in a realized, actualized individual self. Its a path you walk, partly out of necessity (otherwise you live in pain, alienated or dissociated from yourself) and partly driven by the mystery of what it means to be. Society doesn’t do a good job at maximizing the potential of the individual, and is getting worse with time. More on this later.

Are you your self, the experiential ground of subjective experience, or are you an amalgam of some affinity group you pledge allegiance to? I hope its a no brainer. We’ll get into the distinctions, problems and solutions so individuals can appreciate the power you have.

I want to: start with a film that lays out the essence of what it means to be human. Not from a deficit side, like “human means imperfect, as compared to God”. But what it means to be made in God’s image. You don’t have to believe in a particular God. God, just as Buddha, refers to the state of unity, the reconciliation of all the duality the human mind mistakes for “reality”.

Dark City:

It’s no surprise that The Matrix stole all the thunder from it’s predecessor Dark City, a neo-noir sci fi flick, ushered in just months before its more Hollywood centric successor. Aesthetically, Dark City is dark. It is a descendant of film noir, and the production reflects it. Then there’s Shell Beach, featuring the uplifting and reassuring palette of nature: a beautiful, clear blue sky, a sunny pier that allows you to get lost gazing into the aquamarine ocean. Everyone “knows” it, however, nobody knows how to get there. Postcards, posters, magnets in taxi cabs, key chains etc. Shell Beach is ubiquitous but only in people’s minds.

Dark City introduces us to an alien race, The Strangers, who are declining, despite the special power they have of “Tuning”, which is the capacity to manipulate the material dimension of the external world. By using machines buried deeply on a subterranean dimension, to transform reality like ever changing movie sets, they are able to conduct experiments with humans, to discover the source of human vitality, or power. They hope this discovery will allow their race to survive.

The Strangers are a dying race, declining despite tremendous powers. The source of their strength is also the source of their weakness. The Strangers share one group mind, a hive mind, which resemble what I call “Identitarians” of our age. (More on my independent thought later). Through their Hive mind, they can manipulate the external world. Their Hive mind prevents any individual to exalt them above their circumstances. They can manipulate the material world, and on a grand level. They cannot transform themselves. Period. End of story. Only an individual can transform him or herself, radically too. The self, when in its whole state, is greater than the sum of its parts. A hive mind is contained and bound by the sum of its parts.

We are introduced to the protagonist, “John”, played by Rufus Sewell (who I’ve nurtured an infatuation with ever since “A Dangerous Beauty”.) John is a human inhabitant of Dark City. He wakes up in the midst of what is unbeknownst to him, a nightly experiment conducted by the Strangers. The Strangers possess the power of “Tuning”. Tuning is the psychic ability to 1) put humans to sleep by a wave of the hand, so they can recreate the landscape to suit their experimental purposes. Entire buildings are replaced, with machines deep underground, that are activated telekinetically to help create the equivalent of brand new, on demand movie sets. At the same time, a human scientist, played by Keifer Sutherland, who was abducted to conduct the experiments, extracts memories that are injected into others, to see how individuals behave. Yet the Strangers cannot individuate. They are strangers, not only because they are aliens. They are strangers to themselves.

No matter their power, they cannot exist as independent subjects. They are like rats on a sinking ship: bound to each other’s failings. Their civilization is nearing extinction because they are tied to the lowest common denominator. No one can rise above their circumstances, as they lack individuality.

Each night, the Tuning commences, in which individual humans (a race built on individuality) are implanted with different memories, the associated identities, to elicit the essence of humanity, aka “the soul”, so the Strangers can learn to survive. The Soul is an individual entity. This is revealed eventually, by the chief antagonist, Mr. Hand.

Pause here. Imagine if you can the difference between individual centric race (humans) vs a Hive Mind, a group centric clan that I call Identitarians. We have more references now than at any other time in my history as to what such a breed could be like, no? Play with this idea. Individuals have the power to. I’ll follow up with my imaginings, soon enough.

The Strangers ( Identitarians) are becoming extinct. If a group, tied together by a common ideology, like a stone tied around one’s ankle, needed to free themselves from that shackle, they could not do so. A hive mind depends on each other and is not able to rise above or differentiate from the Borg. So no one can save them because no one exists outside the HIVE mind.

Desperate, the Strangers begin to experiment with the Individualists, the humans, a separate breed, to discover what makes them so resilient. The capacity for individuality is their chief concern. They think they can find the human soul through it: the seat of Immortality.

John wakes up while he was being imprinted with a new identity: a serial killer.As he awakens, in a state of utter confusion and dissociation (imagine you wake up and instead of being in bed, you find a dead woman in a bathtub and no one else to attribute the death to. In the midst of his awakening, John receives a call from a Dr. (Keifer Sutherland) who advises him to run. “They are coming for you”.  The Strangers are coming for him, to make the experiment right. He can’t know himself, which is also to say, have free will, and remain suitable for their experimentation.

One of the Strangers, Mr. Hand, pursues John, and reveals the importance of humanity for its studies:

‘The capacity for individuality, for souls, makes you different from us. We believe we can find the human soul if we understand how individual memories work.” The Strangers only have the capacity for collective memories.’

Pause. Think about how different these 2 capacities are, experientially.

John becomes an interesting hybrid: he is human, yet he can resist the Strangers ability to make humans sleep, and begins to demonstrate some capacity for Tuning himself.

Mr. Hand is assigned to track John down, once they discover the injection failed. The failure, in part, was due to sabotage on the part of the scientist. John retains his prior identity, also an implant. He recently discovered his wife, Ana, a nightclub singer, cheated on him with a close friend so he left home to sort out his feelings. He was staying in hotels when a serial killer began killing women. The Strangers intended to implant John with the memories of the serial killer.

To track the elusive and surprisingly resilient John, Mr Hand shared the remaining serial killer injection so he could predict John’s next moves. He also becomes a serial killer, leaving bodies in his wake, still trying to implicate John in the human world. Detectives are now pursuing John too. While Mr. Hand finds him, he loses him, and finds him again, to lose him again. John is immune to the Tuning and begins to see the mass manipulation of reality. John is on a quest to discover the meaning of what he’s now seeing and experiencing.

The scientist eventually reveals to John, “They abducted us and brought us here. They mix memories to see what makes us unique. One day an inspector… another entirely different. Will a killer act accordingly or… “

Free will, or the Spirit within, is what the Strangers seek to study, defies the Hive Mind.

More to come.