Dark City: The Ante/Anti-Matrix

Like the The Matrix a year later, writer/director Alex Proyas’ Dark City offers up his take on Neo-Gnostic savior mythology, but shuns the Wachowskis’ intersectionalist/ queer-theory approach in favor of the fertility symbolism of the ancient Mystery cults.

Alex Proyas was born September 23, 1963 in (of all places) Egypt, and would direct his first film in 1980 at the age of seventeen. He would score his first major hit in 1994 with the cult smash The Crow, a film that became somewhat of a watershed moment for GenX, with its blend of goth culture and comic book aesthetics.

Like The Dark Knight 14 years later, The Crow swept over the culture like a tidal wave when its young star Brandon Lee was killed before the film’s release.

Proyas then leveraged the success of The Crow to make Dark City…

A voice-over by by the expositional Doctor Scherber (played by Keifer Sutherland) sets the stage: a race of aliens called the Strangers had mastered time and the physical world, but were dying because they did not possess souls.

The Strangers are devoid of that vital essence, so they created a simulacrum of a world to imprison and study the human soul, in hopes they could ultimately become one with it.

Like the earlier Talosians from Star Trekº and the later Agents in The Matrix, the non-individuated Strangers were the direct descendants of the Archons from Gnostic mythology: wardens of an illusory prison-world.

Conversely, John Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewall) is the man who wakes up to the scam — in a bathtub, no less — but he’s also man without memories...

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