I’m not a fan of the transgender blockbuster Matrix. (Except for the suggestion that matrix, from mother, is all about the nanny state, a feminine liberalism that smothers liberty itself.) I’m not a fan of the recent tendency of the online groups who oppose elite liberalism to talk about red-pilling for that reason. (Except to the extent that it’s funny that the transgender blockbuster is now an alt-right meme.) If you want to know more about what’s wrong with Matrix, I wrote about it on its 20th an., before Covid.
I’m a fan of the cult hit1 Dark City, which came out in 1998, a year before Matrix, & offered a much better story about my generation. The core concern of the movies is the fear that some combination of technological innovations & elite social construction would turn our identities inside out & somehow make us into aliens. So it’s a combination of the noir—a detective movie that verges on tragedy, whose protagonist uncovers some horrible secret & possibly a conspiracy—& science fiction—an adventure story about life beyond tragedy, or the possible transformations of mankind in the light of modern science, or applied or practical rationality more broadly. The dominant fear is that the human drama has becomes such that we are completely destroying the possibility of self-knowledge. The purpose of such stories is to create a radical opposition between poetry as the sacred flame of morality & technology as the usurping—modernizing—power of trans-humanism.
Now, the story: An amnesiac (played by Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a terrible predicament, he’s accused of being a sadistic serial killer who preys on women. He cannot remember the woman he’s supposed to be married to (played by the lovely Jennifer Connelly), he’s on the run from a jaded, but very competent detective (played by William Hurt), & he’s being sought out & advised by a crazy doctor (played by Kiefer Sutherland). Soon, our protagonist, call him John Murdoch, realizes he’s in a much worse predicament—he’s being chased by Nosferatu-like creatures with telepathic & telekinetic powers. Fighting them off, he discovers he also has these powers & that these aliens are in control of the dark city, which they refashion, people & infrastructure alike, every midnight, in a crazy experiment. Then he has to deal with all these people & the city & the hive-mind aliens.
The difficulty of the story is the consequences of urgent questions collapsing into more important, but less obvious questions. We start with, is the protagonist a criminal or a law-abiding citizen?, as a way of getting at who he is. That turns out to assume citizenship & therefore some kind of political freedom, which is refuted by “social construction” of the city. But then the powers involved in scientific despotism further undermine what it means to be human. The moral & intellectual questions threaten to lead to something that cannot have a dramatic conclusion It’s hard to follow the movie, but it’s also hard to say what it resolves at the end. The purpose of this sort of writing is to give the audience a correlative of the experience of the protagonist & thus lead the audience to confront a shocking similarity. Our protagonist is an amnesiac, he doesn’t know who he is. We know who we are—but, like him, we don’t know what’s happening to him or what’s about to happen next. Then it gradually turns out we have to ask ourselves whether we really have more self-knowledge than he does…
Maybe the easiest way to come to grips with the story of Dark City is to ask yourself, is Elon Musk the hero or the alien? The amnesiac protagonist of the movie revolts against the dominant theory of our times “social construction,” the attempt of alien elites to redefine human life & its activities. (This is what Marc Andreesssen has popularized as “the current thing,” insisting on the important observation that our elites want us to believe moralistically & indignantly in things that are transparently nonsensical & fashionable.) Elon Musk is leading the rebellion against “the social construction” of “current things:” He bought Twitter, after all, & is trying to blow the whistle on gov’t-media collusion to use it to control our minds… (Granted, he knows nothing about media, so he’s failing at it, but he couldn’t fail if he weren’t trying to do the noble thing in pursuit of freedom.) If the elites get to decide on what basis & within what boundaries the rest of us get to make choices, we are no longer able to make choices; we are not merely the creatures of despotism, but we are so debased that we cannot tell that’s our situation. (This is what the techies call living in a Simulation, a hypothesis that gets its psychological plausibility from the bitter frustration they feel as outsiders in a society that doesn’t make sense to them, but everyone else accepts, & yet which must have some rational basis, that is, technological. The Simulation is the ultimate victory of technology, the apotheosis of the autist, if you will, however damning it might be for mankind…) So Twitter-CEO Elon is the hero of the dark city, he will liberate our knowledge & our memories from social control—he’ll bring back the sun.
But then again, the alien lifeform in Dark City is a hivemind that uses people for experimentation into the nature of individuality & Elon’s neural computing enterprise could be understood in the same way. To get a technological understanding of the human mind might be to destroy it. After all, Elon might think of Twitter itself as a hivemind that’s unfortunately mismanaged, but which could work better—it could become the Simulation we secretly long for.
Dark City is an unusually modern story—all its characters are uprooted to the point where it’s hard to say whether it’s possible, let alone desirable to return to any tradition; its cosmic setting therefore leaves them in a world that’s entirely technological, where there doesn’t seem anything left of nature. It’s hard to say whether the story is about recovering nature or constructing something alike to it, maybe better… It also has a modern drama one often sees in Elon Musk: He believes mankind is risking extinction, but also has the power to fend it off by achieving an astonishing success at spreading out among planets & perhaps one day stars. The possible wins & losses for man are not on a human scale or even the scale of living beings—they are cosmic. Hence SpaceX as a cosmic adventure, but also as the “platform” on which to use all the other enterprises he’s involved in, to construct a a dark city, a new society without the limits of all previous ones. How much optimism is necessary for technological innovation? How much optimism can technological innovation encourage? What would we have to believe to found new communities on other planets or beyond that?
So watch the movie—it’s something worth thinking about—it should be a much better way to think about social media & identity than the red pill from Matrix. If you are interested in a podcast about it, here’s my conversation with Justin Lee:
This podcast should also introduce you to another way of looking at the story of Dark City: In relation to the most famous image in the history of philosophy, the myth of the cave from Plato’s Republic. To what extent is it possible to understand the questionable character of the opinions with which we have grown up? To what extent is it possible to liberate oneself from contradictions & come to ask what the true beings are & what is self-deception?
I’m calling it a cult movie because I’ve watched it a number of times & I know quite a few other young men of my generation who also like it. A cult movie has to have failed (or at least not been a hit) on release, only to then develop a following; cult movies are important not just because they second guess popularity & prestige, but because they point out some important phenomenon; granted, this is as often something pathological as something admirable… Now, what evidence can I offer that Dark City qualifies? When it came out, it not only failed to recoup its ~$27 million budget, it only made ~$14M in America. But on IMDb, until recently the best proxy for what online young men care about, it has a 7.6 rating, averaging more than 200,000 votes. There’s also a Director’s Cut that came out in 2008, which is of course the one you should watch, & further evidence that there’s an audience out there! But test it for yourself—watch the movie, see if you like it, then watch it with friends. Young men especially are the audience of the story, Romantic young men above all—love of the beautiful & its connection to the past is the key to the movie.
I’ve seen Dark City a couple of times too. Fascinating movie. I’ll have to read what you wrote about Matrix bc I thought it was very good, and very pro life. I will never forget the scene of the fetuses in pods being used for their warmth to run the bots.
In answer to your last question, it is only possible as a free choice based on seeking the truth. We are made for truth, and yet settle so often for the lie.
Pagans knew there was something called wisdom. Wisdom at least knows the importance of understanding human nature.
But there is something, someone, beyond wisdom. He called himself the Truth. I’m with him.