The film DARK CITY uses aliens, mystery, and magnificent morphing effects to provide some startling insights into the peculiar nature of the human condition at its current apocalyptic crossroads. The truth tends to be more bizarre than fiction, so it requires some pretty bizarre fiction these days to keep pace. . . and this movie fills the bill.

The basic setting, a city where it's always night, was obviously influenced by the "film noir" genre of the 1940s, and the characters wear '40s clothes and drive '40s cars.&mbsp; We soon learn, however, that the city is not in any given era of Earth's history, and in fact is not even on Earth. The inhabitants are all being manipulated without their knowledge by mysterious humanoid creatures who look like a cross between vampires and zombies and wear long black trenchcoats. We are told that these entities are "a race as old as the universe"which has developed godlike powers yet finds itself in decline. The aliens believe that the human soul may hold the secret to this conundrum, which is why they study the people they have abducted and brought to the City.

The aliens can manipulate physical matter by will alone, a power that is called TUNING. The characters all pronounce it with a twang, like "tyuning"; so at first I thought the word was "kyuning", and that it must begin with a 'Q', as a reference to the 'Q' of Star Trek, another race of nearly omnipotent aliens. Be that as it may, there are also some special items of interest for UFO fans. One of the principle characters is a human scientist who has sold out his own kind and works in collaboration with the aliens; his name is Dr. Shreber, played by Kiefer Sutherland, who is made up as the spitting image of Whitley Strieber, and talks in a parody of Strieber's voice. He refers to the aliens as "the Strangers"...whom writer/director Alex Proyas says were inspired by frightening dreams he had as a child, in which "dark figures would come into my bedroom and rearrange things".

The protagonist of the film, played by Rufus Sewell, is a man who begins to awaken from the collective nightmare of the Dark City. Through a series of whodunnit-type plot twists, he gradually discovers that the conscious awareness and identity of all the humans in the Dark City is a false construct implanted by the Strangers. Every night at midnight they shut the Dark City down, all the people fall asleep, and selected persons are given new personalities via the device of a syringe-injection into their foreheads administered by Dr. Shreber under the watchful eyes of the Strangers.  Thus everyone literally has false memory syndrome, and this is how they all function every day of their mix-and-match lives. This plot element was no doubt also inspired by the classic Twilight Zone episode in which the whole world turned out to be the dream of a condemned criminal, repeating over and over. He was executed every night at midnight, at which point the whole world dissolved, and then the next day the same actors and characters reappeared, but with their roles all reshuffled. This is exactly what happens in Dark City

And this brings us to the hard reality behind the fictional facade. Like all really powerful works of fiction in whatever medium, Dark City is a symbolic representation of certain metaphysical/spiritual truths which underlay the human situation. . . as was the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode, and the "Q Continuum" episode of Star Trek Voyager.

The perennial inside scoop on what we're all doing on this dark planet of hard knocks and diabolic underpinnings is perhaps best summed up in the concept of ETERNAL RECURRENCE. We're all trapped in some kind of paranoid plot from hell; we keep going around in circles and can't escape; all the shit keeps happening over and over again, and it seems like no one can stop it. If anyone wakes up to the awful truth behind appearances, it drives him mad. It happened to Nietzsche, and to many other less famous individuals.

This aspect is dramatically illustrated in Dark City by the character Wallensky, a detective who appears to be going off the deep end. He can't do his job any longer, and comes across to the other characters as a raving lunatic; but eventually the plot unveils the fact that Wallensky's ravings are the literal truth. He says: "We've all just been dreaming this life, and when we wake up we'll all be somebody else";  "it's all a callosal joke"; "there's no escape from the City -- they keep us all going in circles forever";  "we're not who we think we are. . . but once in awhile, one of us wakes up. " Wallensky finally finds a way to escape by throwing himself in front of an oncoming subway train. Of course in real life even this wouldn't work, since suicide is just a ticket to another recurrence, and inevitably a worse one.

The protagonist eventually remembers that his name is John Murdoch. He has the unique ability not only to stay awake during the nightly transmogrifications of the City, but also to "tune" to some extent -- he can cause matter to morph by focusing a force from his forehead (i.e., his third eye), and this helps him to escape from several confrontations with the Strangers. He tracks down Shreber, who realizes that the young man represents a new development in the human population of the City, an evolutionary leap which could potentially defeat the Strangers. Shreber has always felt ambivalent about working for the aliens, and now he decides to help Murdoch. The problem, though, is that there is no time for Murdoch to cultivate and master his rudimentary powers, and he is eventually captured by the Strangers.

The aliens realize that Murdoch's mutation is the development they have been looking for in their experiments with the captive humans. They shut down the City for good, and prepare an injection of synthetic memory for Murdoch which will fuse his human identity with the essence of the group-mind of the Strangers, and allow them to meld with him in such a way that they, too, will become human/alien hybrids. This incorporation of the human soul will, they hope, be the key to their regeneration as a race.

It's Shreber's job to inject the memory-serum into Murdoch's forehead, but he switches syringes at the last moment and instead implants a different set of memories which he has secretly prepared in advance. This is one of the most croggling (to use an old "fandom" word) scenes in the flick, as Murdoch's new memory spins out in fast forward. We see him as a boy being covertly tutored by Shreber in various guises. Shreber comes to call as the mailman, and teaches little Johnny how to make a pencil write by means of psychokinesis. He comes a little later as a friend of the family, and coaches teenage Johnny to levitate up the stairs. Etcetera. All this has happened in an instant of real time, and the result is that Murdoch now remembers a lifetime spent in developing his tuning powers, and thus he has full command of them in the present moment. There follows an epic battle with an inevitable result, and a happy ending.

Further clues to Dark City as a dramatization of occult realities include the nature of the Strangers as portrayed therein.  Their behavior as well as their appearance show us that these are demonic creatures, evoking many such classic archetypes.  They are supposed to be soulless, emotionless beings, yet some of them betray fiendish delight and other dark feelings in their interactions with the human characters.  They cannot tolerate the light, which is why the City is in perpetual darkness.

And more. In a piece titled THE ESOTERRESTRIALS, I presented a hypothesis explaining the basic nature of the UFO/ET phenomenon.This can be viewed at: