The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alex Proyas · a film · 1998 · about 100 minutes · written with Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer
Mode
Noir investigation turned into Gnostic science fiction; mystery, chase and myth of a made world in one
Mythos
The false world made by beings who are not its gods; the man who wakes inside it; the knowledge that frees; the lost paradise remembered by all and reached by none
Phase
A run of nights in a city whose clocks stop at midnight, from a bathtub in a hotel to the wall at the city’s edge, closed by a dawn made by hand
Presentation
Feature film in colour, the 1998 theatrical cut of about 100 minutes, with a spoken prologue; built on stages in Sydney, in brick, iron, rain and sodium light
Register
From a detective at his accordion in a shabby room to buildings rising out of one another above the sleeping streets
Scale
One city, its makers beneath it, and the void around it
Governing Proposition
A man wakes in a hotel bathtub with no memory, a dead woman in the room and a telephone warning him to run, in a city where it is always night and nobody can say how to reach the beach everyone remembers. The wager of the film is that the noir city is itself the prison: that its genre, its night and its amnesia are a made world, that a self is not the sum of its memories, and that a man who wakes without them can see the walls.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The theatrical cut begins with a voice. Dr Daniel Schreber, played by Kiefer Sutherland, explains over the first images who the city’s masters are and what they are doing to it, before the film has shown either. Then a man wakes in a hotel bathtub. He does not know who he is. A dead woman lies in the room, and a spiral has been drawn on her. The telephone rings, and a voice warns him to flee. He goes out into a city where it is night, and where it will go on being night.
The man is John Murdoch, played by Rufus Sewell, and three hunts close on him. He searches for his own past, and for a place called Shell Beach that he remembers from boyhood. Inspector Frank Bumstead, played by William Hurt, investigates the murders. And the city’s makers, the Strangers, hunt him through its streets, led by Mr Hand, played by Richard O’Brien, who has been imprinted with Murdoch’s own memories. The film is a noir in every surface: a detective, a fedora, an automat, a marriage, a dead woman in a hotel room.
At midnight every clock in the city stops. The citizens fall asleep where they are, and the Strangers gather in their hall beneath the city. Then the city is tuned: buildings grow, stretch and fold out of one another, and the sleepers are moved to new places and given new pasts from syringes of memory. When the clocks start again nobody knows that anything has changed. Murdoch is awake through it.
Movement II
Everyone in the city remembers Shell Beach. A postcard of it, a billboard of it, an uncle’s memory of a boy there: the place is everywhere in what people remember and nowhere they can go. When Murdoch asks how to reach it, a man who remembers it well cannot give him directions, and a clerk cannot think about the question at all. It is the film’s quietest passage and its most exact. A world can be manufactured whole while its inhabitants live inside it without seeing it, because they lack only one question, and the question will not stay in the mind.
Murdoch’s wife Emma, played by Jennifer Connelly, remembers a marriage and her own adultery, and a husband she remembers but does not know. Bumstead, working the case, meets the spiral again, scratched by the mad Inspector Walenski, and Walenski’s doubt begins to pass into him. He plays his accordion alone in a shabby room, and his certainty goes slowly. The figures of the noir are all present, and each has a past that has been issued.
Schreber is the guide down. Named for the jurist whose memoir of a God of rays and nerves Freud read, he serves the Strangers, and he limps and gasps through the film as a man who knows. What he knows is what the city is. The Strangers are dying; they wear the bodies of the dead; and they run the city as an experiment, building every citizen from an implanted past and shuffling the pasts to find what a soul is. They have not found it. Murdoch, who woke without memory, and so without the lies the others share, is the one man who can see the walls.
Movement III
The Strangers remake the city by will, and the film calls it tuning. Their hall beneath the streets, with its great mechanism and the face of their machinery, is where the city is set again at each midnight, and here the design shows its full scale: dread built in iron and stone. Murdoch, it emerges, can tune as they do, and the chase becomes a contest over who can make the world.
Everything the first half set down returns as a key. The stopped clocks, the spiral, the postcard, the billboard, the uncle’s memory, the syringes: each seemed a clue to a murder and turns out to be a clue to the world. Bumstead’s investigation, which began as a hunt for a killer, becomes a hunt for the edge of the city, and he goes with Murdoch because he too can no longer answer the question about the beach.
Nobody in the city can remember daylight. The sun never rises until the end, and every daylight image in the film comes either in an implanted memory or in the coda. The city is a noir because it was built, and the genre’s permanent night, its amnesiac hero and its femme fatale are the experiment’s furniture. That is the film’s turn: the conventions are not its manner but its evidence, and the audience’s recognition of the genre becomes the citizens’ false memory.
Movement IV
Murdoch and Bumstead go to Shell Beach, which is to say to the picture of it at the end of a street. Behind the picture is a brick wall. They pound through it, and beyond the brick there are stars. The wall breaks open onto void, and Bumstead falls out through it into nothing.
The camera draws back. The city is a raft of streets floating in space, its edges ragged. Everything the film has shown, every hotel, automat and street, sits on this slab. It is the summit of the film and the moment its myth is complete: a false world made by beings who are not its gods, a man who wakes inside it, and a knowledge that frees, which is the sight of the void.
The last contest is a duel of tuning between Murdoch and Mr Book, played by Ian Richardson, above the city, buildings rising and walls splitting. It is the point where investigation turns to combat, and it runs past what the meaning needs: loud rather than high, with computer images of uneven quality that date it to its year. Murdoch prevails, and the power that made the city passes to him.
Movement V
Murdoch makes a sun and a sea. For the first time the light rises on the city, and water lies where there was none. After the whole film in the dark, light on water is a real release.
At Shell Beach, on a pier, he meets the woman who was Emma. She has another past now, and another name, Anna, and she does not know him. The film ends in daylight on a shore that exists because he has made it.
The ending does not settle the film’s question; it hands it on. The man who woke without memory, and so saw the walls, has become the maker he fought. He has given the woman he loves a new name and a new past and meets her on a beach of his making. Whether that is freedom or the Strangers’ tyranny under a kinder hand the film does not say, and that question, with what Schreber’s guilt amounts to, is what keeps it open. What it has shown is a made world and the one man in it who could not be made from his memories: a self that is not their sum.
Act III · The Twelve
The design is economical where it matters. The stopped clocks, the spiral drawn on the dead woman and scratched by the mad Inspector Walenski, the postcard and billboard of Shell Beach, Uncle Karl’s memory of a boyhood, the syringes of memory: each element set up in the first half returns as a key in the second, and the billboard’s last use, a painted wall that breaks onto void, is the hinge of the film. Bumstead’s accordion and his slow loss of certainty pay into his fall. The subtractive test still finds slack. The prologue states the premise before the film lets it be discovered; Schreber’s explanations restate the experiment; the final duel runs past what the meaning needs.
Score: 7.9 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. A self is not the sum of its memories: the makers build every citizen from implanted pasts and never find the soul by shuffling them. And a world can be manufactured whole while those who live in it, lacking one question (when was daylight? how does one reach Shell Beach?), never see it. The second disclosure is rendered in image with real force: a man who cannot give directions to a place everyone remembers, a clerk who simply cannot think about it. What holds the axis: the disclosure is an idea about consciousness more than a lived condition, carried by plot through figures who are ciphers by design.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation is frequent and mostly visual, and it recurs. The first midnight, when the city stops, the sleepers are moved like furniture and buildings grow, stretch and fold out of one another, is the film’s signature height and returns with each tuning. The hall beneath the city, its great mechanism and the face of its machinery, is dread on an architectural scale. The summit is the wall: brick broken behind the Shell Beach picture onto stars, a man falling out into nothing, and the camera drawing back to show the city as a raft of streets in space. The dawn of the coda, light on water after a film of night, is a real release. The duel above the city is loud rather than high.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The archetypal structure is built, and every turn of the plot is a turn of the myth. It is a Gnostic myth carried whole: a false world run by dying beings who are not its gods, as archons run the lower world; a man who wakes inside it without memory, and so without the others’ lies; a knowledge that frees, the wall and the void; a paradise remembered by all and reached by none; and the awakened man become demiurge in turn. Schreber, named for the jurist whose memoir Freud read, is the guide down. What holds the figure short of the top: Murdoch is more function than person, and the coda solves the myth by making its hero a god.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is plain and acknowledged: German Expressionism and Metropolis (1927) for the city and its underworld; the noir of the 1940s, its detectives, automats and fedoras; Hopper for the empty diners and streets; Brazil (1985) and the films of Jeunet and Caro for the retro-modern machinery; Proyas’s own The Crow (1994) for the rain-dark city. The turn is to make the noir city itself the artifice under investigation, so that the genre’s eternal night, its amnesiac hero and its femme fatale become the makers’ construction and the conventions become the plot’s evidence. The stake was real: an expensive, uncommercial studio picture, which lost money. Most of the surface is borrowed, and the swerve lies in the premise more than in a new way of making film.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge depends on the noir form being the prison. Shot in the genre’s idiom, with a city of permanent night, costume of no exact period and a detective plot, it can reveal that idiom as manufactured, and the audience’s recognition of the genre becomes the citizens’ false memory. The tuning sequences, in which architecture moves, make the instability of the world visible as no other medium could. Told as straight science fiction in a future city, the film would be a conspiracy thriller and lose its argument. What holds the axis: the theatrical cut’s rapid cutting and its prologue press a film whose meaning needs slow discovery into a chase.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Twenty-eight years of return are evidence. The film has been re-examined beside The Matrix (1999) as its near twin; taken into teaching on personal identity and memory, where its premise serves as a thought experiment; opened shot by shot in Roger Ebert’s commentary; reopened by a director’s cut in 2008, which made the question of what the film is a live one; and kept as a design text. Its open questions persist: whether Murdoch’s final making of the world repeats the tyranny he overthrew, since he meets a woman with a new name on a beach he has made, and what Schreber’s guilt amounts to. Held because much of the return is to the design and to other films, and the central idea, once grasped, gives less on a second viewing.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The film joined noir to Gnostic science fiction and made the manufactured world the subject of a studio genre picture, in the year of The Truman Show and a year before The Matrix, eXistenZ and The Thirteenth Floor. It did not originate that strand, which Philip K. Dick had long supplied, and it did not change how films are made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: commercial failure on release, then a cult following that has lasted; critical defence, Ebert naming it the best film of 1998 and recording a commentary for it; and a lasting place in the discussion of the films of the simulated world. A film that anticipated more than it redirected.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the theatrical cut survives whole and circulates, and nothing of it is lost; but a director’s cut of 2008 now circulates beside it and partly displaces it, a modest charge. Presence across twenty-eight years: continuous on home video and in revival, sustained by a cult following and by critical defence, but not presence of the widest kind. Fabric: the photography and design age well, being already retrospective in 1998, while the computer images of the tuning and the final duel date the film to its year more visibly. Twenty-eight years earn the step below the usual band, where the charges on surface and on the second cut set it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Read to the same anchors as the elder desks, the making is load-bearing in design and photography. Patrick Tatopoulos and George Liddle build a city of brick, iron and rain that is one place from automat to underworld; Dariusz Wolski lights it in sodium and shadow with a consistency that is itself part of the argument; the practical miniatures and sets carry the world without apology. Rufus Sewell carries a blank role with presence, and Trevor Jones’s score is serviceable and loud. The costs run through the film: restless, fragmentary cutting that gives many scenes too little time; the prologue; Kiefer Sutherland’s mannered, gasping Schreber; the Strangers’ make-up and playing, of a single note; and a closing duel of computer effects of uneven quality.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Bumstead at his accordion in a shabby room, hushed and doubtful, and the duel of wills above the city, buildings rising and walls splitting. One law covers them: the city is a made thing under its makers’ will, and both the detective’s quiet doubt and the duel are expressions of who controls the making. The tuning is established at the first midnight, so its use in the climax is no new physics, and the range is wide, from chamber noir to cosmic myth. The law bends where investigation turns into superhuman combat, a change of register the logic permits and the tone does not fully absorb, and where the coda’s sunny sea answers the dark with a wish more than a consequence.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 100 minutes holds, the orders are many and one premise binds them. Consciousness and memory stand at the centre; the marriage, with Emma’s adultery and a husband she remembers but does not know; the city as society, its police, hotels, automats, a prostitute and a doctor; the state as total power, in the makers’ rule over time and place; history, held negatively, as a past erased and reissued; the cosmos, in the city adrift and a sun made by hand; the sacred, in Gnostic outline. What holds the axis lowest: the social orders are present as decor rather than lived, with no labour, no family beyond the couple and no community, so the encompassing is diagrammatic, many orders named and few inhabited.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.4 and The Sublime at 8.2. A Gnostic myth carried whole, every turn of the plot a turn of the myth; a film that survives whole through twenty-eight years and a later cut; and an elevation that recurs, from the first midnight’s growing buildings to the wall breaking onto stars.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: many orders named and bound by one premise, few inhabited, with no labour, no family beyond the couple and no community. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.5, a film that anticipated more than it redirected, and The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 7.6, a borrowed surface turned by a single premise and a return that goes as often to the design as to new meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Unconcealment at 7.7 eight tenths short, The Swerve at 7.6 nine tenths short and Pressure on Tradition at 7.5 a full point short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.0 from a sum of 95.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Dark City in its theatrical cut, released by New Line Cinema in February 1998, about 100 minutes, with Schreber’s spoken prologue, from the prologue to the pier: directed by Alex Proyas from a screenplay by Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, on a story by Proyas, photographed by Dariusz Wolski, edited by Dov Hoenig, with music by Trevor Jones and production design by Patrick Tatopoulos and George Liddle, shot on stages in Sydney. The director’s cut of 2008 is not the object; it is weighed only on The Imperishable, as a question of which version survives, and nothing in it is credited to the theatrical cut. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the budget, the running time and contents of the director’s cut, the voice in which the nightclub songs are sung, how widely the later cut is preferred, and the reuse of the film’s stages and sets for another production, are not given.