For some reason, Dark City remains little revered or appreciated not only as a standalone film, but as something of the unwitting source material for The Matrix. While the plotlines are theoretically “different,” ultimately the Wachowskis borrowed heavily (even if unintentionally) from the themes explored by Dark City director Alex Proyas (who co-wrote the script with Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer). Granted, Dark City was released just one year prior to The Matrix, so it could have been sheer coincidence that each “team” happened to have a similar style and narrative thread.
After all, it’s often believed that the collective consciousness is tapped into the same zeitgeist at the same moment. And in the late 90s, the internet was becoming an increasingly prevalent and insidious force to be reckoned with (as no one could better attest to than Pamela Anderson). Whether they were fully aware of it or not, that “new reality” seemed to be weighing on both Proyas and the Wachowskis in various ways (not to mention Andrew Niccol, whose The Truman Show [released in 1998 as well] also mirrors Dark City at a particular moment when the protagonist reaches the end of the “city’s” limits). This being showcased through their brooding “anti-heroes,” John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) and Thomas “Neo” Anderson (Keanu Reeves) as they navigate through a world that, quelle surprise, proves to be a simulation.
In Dark City’s case, the simu is created by a group of Hellraiser-looking aliens who want to understand if memories are what make a human, well, human—or if they’re fundamentally who they are no matter what memories they have. This experiment is conducted by swapping out each human’s “memory set” every night at the stroke of midnight via inducing a mass slumber (in such a world, Taylor Swift might never have created her concept album, Midnights). This means that no matter where a person is, or what they’re doing, they’ll fall asleep so that “the Strangers” (as the extraterrestrials are called) and their go-to human henchman, Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland, getting as close to playing Igor in Young Frankenstein as he ever will), can “imprint” them with a new memory a.k.a. a new identity. For who are we if not the sum total of our memories?
Unfortunately for Schreber, he’s dealing with an anomaly of a human in John, who wakes up in the middle of being imprinted with the identity of a murderer, prompting Schreber to flee. Coming to fully in a bathtub, John has no clear memory at all thanks to the interruption of the procedure. In this way, he becomes a “glitch in the matrix” that is the Strangers’ universe. Or rather, their patch of city in an infinite universe, as we eventually come to find out. With John in the Neo role in terms of taking on a sinister entity that wishes to keep humans in the dark (very literally in this scenario) about the true nature of their (non-)reality, both Dark City and The Matrix effectively remake the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic. Fittingly, that allegory is placed after the analogy of the sun. As for the cave allegory, it essentially speaks to what Plato’s mentor, Socrates, said at his trial: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To remain in the dark might feel comfortable (in a comatose sort of fashion), but, in the end, it’s a vegetative state. This allegory was repurposed by the Wachowskis in the form of red pill/blue pill, with the former color leading one out of the darkness of their ignorance, no matter how painful it might be to deal with the knowledge they had previously been able to block out.
John and Neo are both “inconsistencies” in the world that’s been built for their kind by the overlords that control it all. As such, they differ from their fellow humans in that the latter has no desire to leave their prison, just as the people chained in the cave, because they have no idea that another form of existence can be possible. This is the only “reality” they’ve ever known, so why would they try to alter it? Once the knowledge of the false reality is gleaned, however, one can start to make their way out of the cave and into “the light.” For John, that light is realizing that they’re in a manufactured city floating in the ether of space and, for Neo, that light is realizing his body has been marinating in a pod while being harvested for bioelectric power by artificially intelligent machines as his mind is placated with the false reality (“the matrix”) shared by all the other humans in their pods. Again, the cave dwellers in the allegory might argue that remaining in the dark is preferable. To this end, one might say The Matrix isn’t an unintentional rip-off of Dark City, so much as both movies are riffing on what Socrates and Plato were saying centuries ago.
As for the similarities in theme and aesthetic, Peter Doyle, the visual effects colorist who worked on both films, laughingly recalled, “…I do remember sitting with [the Wachowskis] after they had just been shown Dark City. Because when they came through town with Barrie Osborne, the producer, the film hadn’t quite been released yet, so they’d set up to have a look. And then everyone just sitting around laughing, realizing that they’re just about to make Dark City again but called The Matrix instead.” So yes, they did see the movie while in the process of making The Matrix, but no one thought much of it. After all, a genre like that was so niche, the assumption was that nobody would complain about having another film of that “breed” added to the scant pile (“beefed up” in 1999 with David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor, released in rapid succession right after The Matrix). As it turned out, no one in the U.S. would really complain, for Dark City was destined to become an obscure 90s gem compared to the blockbuster status The Matrix would achieve in said country, parodied and copied ad nauseam over the next decade.
In addition to the aforementioned titans of Greek philosophy, the influence of The Twilight Zone on Dark City can’t be underestimated either, with said show often presenting narratives where the reality experienced by the lead character was a fabrication of some kind (including the very first episode, “Where Is Everybody?”). As for the fabrication that is Dark City, Schreber explains to John and Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt), “When they first brought us here, they extracted what was in us, so they could store the information. Remix it like so much paint, and give us back new memories of their choosing… Your entire history is an illusion, a fabrication—as it is with all of us.”
With this in mind, the set design was key to giving audiences that “remixed memory” feel the population is experiencing. Per production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, “The movie takes place everywhere, and it takes place nowhere. It’s a city built of pieces of cities. A corner from one place, another from someplace else. So, you don’t really know where you are. A piece will look like a street in London, but a portion of the architecture looks like New York, but the bottom of the architecture looks again like a European city. You’re there, but you don’t know where you are. It’s like every time you travel, you’ll be lost.” In other words, since everyone is everyone (with “memory sets” being swapped back and forth all the time), then everywhere might as well be everywhere, too. As it increasingly is in “real life” thanks to the unremitting effects of globalization. Perhaps that’s how the Wachowskis also chose to view the similarities between their film and Proyas’ precursor to it: “every late 90s sci-fi neo-noir is every late 90s sci-fi neo-noir.” And yes, as though to highlight that point, they used some of the same “everywhere is everywhere” sets from Dark City for The Matrix.
