Dark City as Film Noir
Dark City shifts our focus from aliens (the characters) and the film’s narrative to its setting—all because the Strangers’ study of humanity occurs in a 1940s noir city rather than a site contemporary to the film’s date of production. This noir setting is meticulously staged, from the interior and exterior mise-en-scene with its low-key lighting and stereotypical noir figures like the detective, the femme fatale and the hero/victim to the low angle deep focus camera shots so prevalent in film noir since Citizen Kane(1941). All these noir elements of the mise-en-scene are contrasted with the Strangers themselves and their habitat—shot, lit and staged in horror style—and with the Shell Beach scene Murdoch creates, complicating views of constructed versus natural space, as well as genre. As in film noir, the most prominent characters in Dark City reflect a nearly hopeless world: the displaced hero/victim, the femme fatale, the detective.
It is style, however, that sets film noir apart from earlier detective films. Stylistically, the film acts as homage to noir. Shooting styles draw on those perfected in Citizen Kane, which Andrew Sarris sees as one of the first and most influential noirs, calling it one of the “two-pronged noir breakthrough[s]” (104). Low-key lighting, extreme camera angles, deep focus, wide-angle lenses, and depth of field are all drawn from Kane and the later noir films it inspired. The arched rooms and hallways shot from low angle camera positions recall Gregg Toland’s cinematography in Citizen Kane’s varied locations. And the figures, buildings and interior props—all precisely replicating a 1940s milieu—are dramatically illuminated to maximize cast and attached shadows, including those figures shot in silhouette. Noirs are shot mostly at night in a decaying—and wet—urban milieu. Many scenes are shot from low angle camera positions to further set the mood with wide-angle lenses that increase depth of field. Many of these techniques are drawn from German Expressionism, emphasizing the chaotic world in which trapped characters seek meaning. Dark City’s city setting fulfills all aspects of this description of film noir.
The city duplicates the 1940s urban noir atmosphere with its dank, dark and decrepit streets and buildings and sleazy interior hotel rooms and night clubs. Noir figures abound in this dark city, beginning with John Murdoch, the mentally displaced hero/victim in search of salvation and self-realization. Women figures, too, take on the noir roles of either torch singing femme fatales like Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and prostitutes like May (Melissa George) or virtuous virgins like Anna (also Jennifer Connelly), even though the female roles are so flattened in this constructed space that they look almost sexless. As in many noir films, a police detective, Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt), serves first as Murdoch’s (the hero’s) pursuer, and then as a source of his salvation. And even Dr. Schreber’s character aligns with the corrupt doctors of noir who drug heroes like Phillip Marlowe (Dick Powell) in Murder, My Sweet (1944).
Sound, too, in this cityscape, brings to mind noirs like Fury (1936), Kiss of Death(1947), Out of the Past (1947), They Live By Night (1948), and Gun Crazy (1949). Characters’ speech patterns follow those of noir figures, since their reactions to horrific events are almost emotionless. Nightclub music, too, harks back to 1940s and early ‘50s jazz. Background effects sound hollow and muted, as if heard through penetrating thick fogs and continuous rains.
Dark City’s cityscape and the narrative surrounding it most resemble that of films
like On Dangerous Ground (1952), a Nicholas Ray film in which Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Because Wilson, a hardboiled police detective, has become embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld, he begins beating his suspects and is sent away from the city to the “country” to pursue a young girl’s killer and curb his violence. In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted.
The earliest views of John Murdoch in Dark City set him up as a lost noir hero/victim in search of himself, a character-type who recalls Jim Wilson. He wakes up in a seedy hotel room, parallel to noir openings in which heroes awaken from drunken stupors and wonder, what happened to me? The interior landscape he views reinforces this noir mise-en-scene that includes noir costuming and interior setting, including his 1940s overcoat and the beat-up interior of his hotel room. An arch dominates the scene, another noir motif repeated in the film, especially in the many low angle shots of hallways lit from the side as in films like Crossfire (1947) and T-Men(1947).
Camera shots of Dr. Schreber in the phone booth, too, highlight the noir style with its depth and shadow detail. Here lights go on and off for even more dramatic effect. And in Schreber’s office, too, lighting and camera angles enforce strong silhouettes. The police station where the Inspector and Emma discuss Murdoch’s case also draws on the noir style, this time because hot lights are always in full view, never blocked by the figures, for a forced perspective of frames within frames shot from extreme low angles. This meticulous set design continues even in shots of the prostitute May’s seedy apartment where we see beaded curtains casting moving shadows and, in earlier shots, May’s lined stockings casting shadows that look like bars. All these scenes, even though shot in color, simulate the black and white of noir by finding patterns of dark and muted color that amplify the noir mood.
But like Jim Wilson, John Murdoch seeks to escape the decay of the city and the empty seediness of his role there. Like many characters in film noir, Murdoch feels trapped by forces beyond his control, in this case literally trapped by the city the Strangers have constructed to study him and the other captured humans. And like Jim Wilson, Murdoch seeks solace in a non-urban setting, the Shell Beach depicted on the post card he finds in his suitcase. Devoid of memories and, it seems, of a sense of self, Murdoch, like Wilson, frantically battles the city and its makers while searching for salvation outside the city and its underworld. As in On Dangerous Ground, a virtuous woman contributes to the salvation Murdoch eventually gains, but unlike Wilson, Murdoch must create the “natural” ecosystem that eventually saves him and the rest of the city’s inhabitants, a change that puts the eco-edge on this multi-genre film.
The battle Murdoch does eventually win, however, forces him into another ecosystem that proves unsuccessful, the underworld of the Strangers that draws on the visual motifs of the horror genre. In this realm, faces are lit from below and colors of the lighting change from browns and yellows to ghastly blues and greens, and other darker tones, exaggerating the whiteness of the all-male Strangers’ faces. This underworld, with its assembly lines and baroque torture chamber wheels out of a Frankenstein lab, draws on both German Expressionist films like Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927) and Hollywood’s Frankenstein, (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Science fiction plays a role in this realm, as well, since the Strangers act like the parasites depicted in films like The Hidden and control humans through the technology of their machines and their memory-filled syringes, but the underworld still looks like a horror film, perhaps as a way to highlight the Strangers’ alien presence. Yet both the noir and horror settings prove to be ecological nightmares for the Strangers seeking rejuvenation through their human studies.
