Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark?

Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark?

Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), opens in darkness, in a space lit only by stars and patches of blue that represent the blue world Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) claims the “Strangers” invaded to save their race. This long shot of outer space cranes downward from that blue patch of light to an artificially-lit night-time noir cityscape crowded with cars from the 1940s and 1950s and lit by a cinema neon sign announcing film titles that serve a prescient role: The Evil and Bo_k of Dreams [sic]. Movement from the hollow emptiness of space, a pristine natural cosmos, to a cacophonous city devoid of nonhuman nature startles us both visually and aurally with its clashes—both of space and of genres. Between the pristine and the decadent constructed spaces, outer space of science fiction meets the noir of the dark city, and the organic galaxies traced in white and blue natural lighting meet a luminescent shadowed urban world devoid of nature other than that created and inhabited by the Strangers.

In what looks like an homage to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the opening to Proyas’s film, like many openings to science fiction and noir films, introduces us to its settings and chief themes through visual effects and, as a parallel to Metropolis’s epigram and inter-titles, a voice-over, this time through the narration of Dr. Schreber. But it also highlights the most important element in the film, its representation of ecology, literally “the study of homes.” The shift from a traditional science fiction setting to one indicative of a carefully laid-out 1940s or 1950s noir world coincides with a swing from the pristine to the decayed and, in a parallel binary, from a natural to a constructed environment. The film seems to agree with Alexander Wilson’s assertion (with a few changes) that “the culture of nature—the ways we think, teach, talk about, and construct the natural world—is as important as the world itself” (11). To paraphrase, the culture of the world of Dark City, the way this noir world is thought about, talked about, and constructed becomes more important than the world, if it is a world, itself.

Like Dana Phillips’ article, “Is Nature Necessary?” Dark City offers a space where whether nature is necessary can be explored, especially in relation to the idea of ecology as the study of homes, a place where nature and culture interconnect rather than conflict with one another. The film allows us to examine at least three constructed settings—ecosystems—as possible homes for humans (and, perhaps, alien) survival, but the film demonstrates that only one of these three provides any promise for humans, as natural beings, to thrive—the constructed setting in which “nature is necessary.”

The film, Dark City, is about a dying race of aliens, the Strangers, coming to a blue planet, presumably Earth, and capturing some humans in order to examine what makes them able to survive as individuals. The Strangers share a collective mind that is in terminal decay. To study these captured humans, the Strangers construct a 1940s-style city and, in a way, construct their humans by implanting different memories into their brains. To see how these humans react in different situations and with different memories, the Strangers change both the city and its inhabitants’ memories each night at midnight, with the help of Dr. Schreber—a human forced to serve them—all while the humans are hypnotized into sleep by the Strangers.

Because these Strangers have an aversion to light, however, the city and its inhabitants never experience day. Within this context, one of the humans, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), evolves into a super-human, who can resist the Strangers’ will, stay awake and even change the shape of his surroundings in Dark City, just like the Strangers. When John Murdoch first resists the Strangers’ will and stays awake, he also resists the implantation of memories, so without memories, Murdoch must search for an identity. While Murdoch searches, however, the Strangers attempt to capture him and use him as their sole source of life. In the end, Murdoch claims his name, “saves” Dark City and its human inhabitants, and defeats the Strangers because they make a series of mistakes. Ultimately Mr. Book (Ian Richardson), the Strangers’ leader, fails to notice that Dr. Schreber has switched syringes and implants memories other than the collective memories of the Strangers into Murdoch’s mind. This seemingly “simple” story, though, occurs in a mixture of settings that serve as more than mere backdrop—especially the noir city that seems to pop out of the cosmos and the Shell Beach setting John Murdoch creates to replace the dark unnatural world of the Strangers.   But Dark City shifts our focus from the aliens (the characters) and the film’s narrative to its setting—all because the Strangers’ study occurs in a 1940s noir city rather than a site contemporary to the film’s date of production.

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. Shifts from outer space to the constructed spaces of the city and the underworld controlling it demonstrate that these Strangers are dying, and this death state is emphasized by the Strangers’ choice to inhabit only male human corpses, seemingly avoiding female bodies with life-giving reproductive capabilities.

Nature in a Lifeless Constructed Space

The shift in the film from the natural but inscrutable emptiness of outer space to the constructed space of the dark city and its underworld underlines perhaps the most important role conflicting settings play in the film—a marker of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. In alliance with this natural world, Shell Beach and the sea it lines serve as symbols of the life-sustaining power of water and, ultimately, of irrational nature, the only successful ecosystem presented in Dark City. The noir cityscape fails both the aliens and the captured humans. The underworld and its machinery fails the Strangers, since they cannot control the one life force that might save them with their technology—John Murdoch. Only Shell Beach brings hope to the captured humans as a source for their own survival as a species with free will and agency.