Fridge Brilliance
- There's one brief bit of foreshadowing at the beginning: There's a closeup shot of John's shoes just before he puts them on. Why? So the audience can see there's no scuffs or marks on the shoes at all. John's only pair of shoes had never been worn before.
- Schreber claims to be a great judge of character and gives a brief synopsis of Bumstead that seems to hit home. Of course, Schreber implanted that very personality into Bumstead himself, so who would know better?
- One of the more interesting changes introduced in the director's cut of the film is the return of Jennifer Connelly's singing during her nightclub appearances, as she was dubbed over by Anita Kelsey for the theatrical release, and Jennifer's vocals are admittedly rather lackluster in comparison. But then you realize: Emma has probably never sung professionally in her life, and just because she has the memories of a lounge singer doesn't automatically give her the talent of one. It's another layer showing that the Strangers are mixing and swapping memories around with no real regard for their subjects.
- It only makes sense for the Strangers to be afraid of sunlight and water, since these two things tend to spoil corpses very quickly.
- At the end of Emma's conversation with Mr. Hand, he remarks, "Small world!" As we eventually find out, Dark City is in fact a small world: a city-sized civilization in outer space.
Fridge Horror
- The ending:
- So at the end the world is saved, everything is great for humans - until you realize that they are still trapped on a relatively small rock in space. And since they can now freely do what humans do, the place is going to be more crowded than a can of tuna in no time. And then there is the panic that might ensue if people notice that they're, well, living on a tiny rock in space.
- Alternatively, even if John is capable of creating a full fledged planet out of the "Dark City" (and we're given no reason to think he can't), the lives of all the inhabitants are still controlled by the whims of someone else. Though in this case Murdock is obviously a lesser evil than the strangers.
- It's even darker when you consider that humans were totally dependent upon the Strangers for everything, so when John Murdock eventually dies, there will be no one left to provide them fresh air, food, or water.
- I always thought it was horrific that John dooms a species to extinction.
- Except John didn't make them a Dying Race; he just fought back when they tried to avert being one at the expense of another race.
- It's not "at the expense of another race". The Strangers did some unethical (according to human values) experimentation on a relatively small number (one city's worth) of humans. Presumably they just abducted a bunch of people and earth and the other 6.999 billion humans are still out there going about their business as usual, perhaps wondering what happened to the hundred thousand or so who disappeared that one day. The strangers weren't needlessly cruel or anything like that, and they did it in order to save their race from extinction, so you could make a strong argument that the end justifies the means. They didn't want to kill John, or any of the humans necessarily, they simply wanted to merge with him and "share his soul". He would have become one with them. Yes, it would have changed him pretty profoundly, but he would have survived (and would have gained all the knowledge of this ancient and powerful race, and maybe been revered as their saviour). Even if you consider this to be a fate worse than death (I don't, I'd jump at the chance), it's still essentially one man refusing to give his life to save an entire species, dooming them to extinction.
- "We use your dead as vessels"...and all that that implies.
- Every time Dr. Schreiber was speaking with the Strangers, or surrounded by the Strangers, he knew he was talking to and watching moving, dead bodies. No wonder he's so frightened by them.
- The Stranger who looks like a child.
- It is not clear what Mr. Hand did to the prostitute before he murdered her. But if he did do anything, she would have been getting molested by a corpse. And, according to Director's Cut, her child would have been watching.
- Regarding the "nature vs nurture" message of the film, the scenes with the desk clerk (of the hotel where John wakes up) are telling. The white clerk had several unique figures of speech: "We keep our books neat and tidy", "cash on the barrel", and "No time off for good behavior". The black clerk, put in place of the white one, repeats the first two phrases like they're his own indicating to us that he now has all the memories that the white clerk had. But when the white clerk reappears as a newspaper vendor, he repeats his prior catch phrase, "No time off for good behavior", suggesting that this little quirk was him and not just a product of memories. Taken with the above-mentioned ending scene, it would suggest that film is saying that man isn't purely nature or nurture, but a mix of both.
- Throughout the movie Dr Schrieber was constantly pushing on John that it was (like The Matrix which used Dark City's sets) ultimately his choice, to make things better in the space experimental city for humanity. But instead of taking them back to Earth which seems to be the only logical motivation for the shrink, notice his look of fear when he realizes that John can choose to do what he wishes, and indeed chooses to indulge his fantasy as his first act as God. Which further showed me another difference between the strangers and humans; the strangers, aside from Mr. Hand, were seemingly incapable of performing an act purely for pleasure. Mr. Hand has chosen to take John Murdock's memories into himself and is shown to descend further and further into obsession. Humans are neither cold logical patterns taken from memory, nor creatures of pure base instinct but instead are a collection of memories that describe their identity as a person. It could be a commentary that in middle ground of the two lies the truth about the human condition.
- Murdoch can't take the City back to Earth. Neither he nor anyone else knows anything about Earth. The Strangers would but they're all dead and probably wouldn't have helped anyway. All Murdoch could do was make life for the City's residents as palatable as possible.
- Poor Walenski may have known even more than he tells the other characters: he may have had a good idea what the Strangers really are. At least, that would explain why he specifically chose a means of killing himself that was 100% guaranteed not to leave an intact body for them to wear as a shell/costume.
- Unless the Strangers kept detailed logs of their experiment (and considering they were a Hive Mind, they might not have needed to), there's no way to know how long the experiment has been going on. These people have likely been having their memories altered every 12 hours for years.
Fridge Logic
On the headscratchers page.
