Gnostic Noir: Symbolism and The Dark City
“Can you ever remember doing anything in the daytime?… I think the sun doesn’t exist…”
John Murdoch to Inspector Bumstead, in Dark City
Since before the beginning, over a hundred years ago, science fiction has always been the cinema’s elder brother. Perhaps because the cinema is itself such a science fictional phenomenon. Sitting in the dark with a group of strangers entranced by flickering lights and whispering non-corporeal images would have smacked of witchcraft not too many centuries ago. Now, it’s entertainment. However, the science fictional qualities of the experience remain, no matter how commonplace it has become.
The cinema began on a blustery Friday evening, December 28, 1895, in a basement room, the ‘Salon Indien’ of the Grand Cafe at 14 boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Earlier in the year, the Lumiere brothers, August and Louis, patented a projector designed to illuminate what they called “chrono-photographiques.” At first they tried to find large public venues such as the wax museum, the Musee Grevin, and then the Foiles-Bergeres, but no one seemed interested. Eventually, they rented the Salon and plastered Paris with posters advertising such amazing moving pictures as a gardener being squirted in the face, a baby playing with a ball and the arrival of a train at a station. Perhaps that’s why only about thirty people paid their franc and came in out of the cold that evening.
One of them however was an anonymous reporter for the Paris daily Le Poste. Of the forty-odd newspapers then publishing in Paris, only two sent reporters to cover the opening. The unsung reporter from Le Poste , unlike his colleagues, glimpsed something about the new media of a truly revolutionary character. “With this new invention, death will be no longer absolute, final. The people we have seen on the screen will be with us, moving and alive after their deaths.”
In this realization lies the unique science fictional fact of the cinema. It conveys, on the strangest people, a sort of physical immortality encoded as the play of light and shadow on a surface. Moving pictures took the freeze frame reality of the Victorian photograph, with all of its self-conscious sense of presentation, and gave it an animated vitality. In a truly alchemical fashion, nature had been captured. But it had not yet been transformed.
Despite the initial lack of press coverage, the moving pictures at the Salon Indien became a hit with the public. Within a month, it seemed that interest in the idea was universal. The Lumiere brothers authorized an exhibit in London, at the Empire Music Hall, of various “animated photographs” of such London landmarks as the Marble Arch and Piccadily Circus. By April, Thomas A. Edison had his own version ready and unveiled his Vitagraph process in a show at the American Music Hall, current site of Macy’s department store, in New York City. The craze had begun. The public was hungry for this animated immortality.
April, 1896, also saw the presentation of the first film by Georges Melies, a 34 year old stage designer, actor, magician, and director of the Theatre Robert-Houdin. Sometime during those first weeks at the Salon, Georges Melies paid a visit to the show and what he saw changed his life. Perhaps it took the perspective of a working prestidigtator and scenary designer to grasp the second important science fictional element of the cinema — its ability to re-create reality. The Lumiere brothers had filmed life, but Melies seemed to have instinctively understood that life could be reconstructed by film. With him, the cinema moved from novelty act to art.
When the brothers Lumiere would not sell or rent him a camera, Melies went to London for a bootleg version and was soon cranking out “Views” of Paris crowds and industrial landscapes. They sold well, and by July, Melies had opened the world’s first movie studio in Montreuil-sous-Bois, an old royal hunting preserve ouside Paris. Here, he made the discovery that allowed him to transform reality on film.
It happened while filming a street scene. The camera jammed for a few seconds and when the film was developed and projected, a farm wagon miraculously transformed into a hearse. Melies was delighted and immediately made a film using the same technique in which a young girl is transformed into a skeleton and then restored to her original plumb and clothed condition.
Edison was aware of the technique, having used it in Vitagraph’s tableau on the decapitation of Mary Stuart, but to Edison it was just a narrative device. To Melies it became an end unto itself.
Over the next few years, Melies experimented ceaselessly. Ghosts and multiplying musical chairs, gender-bending wrestling scenes and a shrinking, and expanding, head populated his magical cinema. By 1902, Melies had turned to science fiction. If his favorite image was the magician on stage, then his second favorite was the scientist in his laboratory. He looked up the still living Jules Verne and made his Voyage to the Moon into the first science fiction film. The first big budget, two reel film, another science fiction romp called the Impossibly Dangerous Voyage, came only two years later and was the first international film sensation.
By then, the movies, known as nickelodeons from their price, had sprung up everywhere, from county fairs in Iowa to mining camps in Turkestan. People embraced the cinema as a new way to interpret reality, and while science fiction remained a staple, it would take almost a hundred years before the true science fictional quality of the cinema could be felt. But, by the late 1990’s, the art of the special effect, the ability to warp our visual sense of reality into new cinematic forms discovered by George Melies, had taken the movies deep into what can only be called archetypal territory. The alchemical nature of the cinema merged with the collective unconsciousness of popular culture to produce a perfect gem of Gnostic Noir, a sort of science fictional examination of the gnostic search for meaning in a world of corrupt, and corrupting, matter.
Dark City
Dark City, released in 1998 by New Line Cinema, is that unusual film where subject, symbology and technique blend seamlessly into an overall statement. Its theme, the transcendent journey from darkness into the light, animates the archetypal dreamscape of modern life with all its quiks and paranoias. This sense of surreal modernity forces us to see the medium, science fictional special effects, at the heart of the message. We live in a world of accepted horrific miracles at which we hardly blink, while closing our eyes to the transcendent power of our ability to change our reality. Dark City directs our attention to that lapse and gives us a myth with which to understand it.
The story is simple, almost classical in its severity. The film begins with a creation story. “First there was darkness, then came the strangers,” we hear in a voice over against darkness that slowly resolves into a star-flecked sky. The camera begins to pan as the voice continues, panning down through the center of the Milky Way galaxy and a cityscape, down to street level and the source of the voice, Dr. Paul Schriever.
“They were a race as old as time itself. they had mastered the ultimate technology — the ability to alter physical reality by will alone. They call this ability ‘quning.’ But they were dying. Their civilization was in decline and so they abandoned their world, seeking a cure for their own mortality. Their endless journey brought them to a small blue world at the fartherest corner of the galaxy — our world. Here they thought they had finally found what they had been searching for. My name is Dr Paul Schriever. I’m just a man. I help the strangers conduct their experiments. I have betrayed my own kind.”
He checks his watch: 15 seconds to midnight. The seconds tick off, and at the stroke of midnight, the city falls asleep. And oh what a city! Vaugely 1950’s America, the city exudes a hyper-reality out of Edward Hopper’s “The Night Hawks,” combined with the comic book noir of Gotham City and the prison fantasies of Pirinasi. The movie marquee announces “The Book of Dreams” as a coming attraction while showing “The Evil,” and part of our unconscious accepts it as real, perhaps because we have so often seen it in our dreams.
The film cuts from the good doctor walking in the sleeping city to the credits, which features the endless spiral motif. From the title, the film cuts to a long shot of the cityscape, centered on a towering structure labeled hotel. A slow zoom focuses on the single round porthole-type window half way up the structure. As the viewer passes through the window, we see a green tile art-deco bathroom with a naked man half-submerged in the tub.
The overhead light swings, alternating light and darkness on the man face. Blood trickles slowly from a small puncture in his forehead. Suddenly he jerks awake, reborn into a world where nothing makes sense. He climbs out of the tub, makes his way to the round mirror opposite the round window and examines a face that is completely new to him.
The rest of the film is simply this anonymous man’s existential quest for his identity. A stranger in a world he never made, in search of his soul. This of course is the basic essence of the detective story; the ultimate mystery is ourselves…
Tags: cinema, dark city, gnosticism