 Starring: Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard OBrienDirector: Alex Proyas Year Of Release: 1998 Plot: John Murdoch wakes up alone in a hotel bathroom with no memory of who he is. He soon discovers that hes wanted for a string of brutal murders that he cant remember committing. He also realises something very strange is happening, because every so often the entire city falls asleep except for him and strange men emerge, changing the shape and size of the buildings and altering peoples memories. But what exactly is going on, and why cant John get out of the city? |
Ive learned a few interesting things while doing this Movie-A-Day series, and the latest is that theres actually a proper name and philosophical theory about whats happens in Dark City, and its called the Omphalos hypothesis, or more correctly for whats going on in the film, Last Thursdayism.
In case you havent seen Dark City, its a sci-fi neo-noir set in a city where every so often everything, including the human population, shuts down and time more or less freezes. During these stoppages, buildings in the city change size and shape, and some of the people have their memories altered, so that, for example, they might go to sleep as a working class stiff, but wake up as a rich man. However theyve had all their old memories erased and new ones inserted, so to them it doesnt seem as if anything has altered, as they remember an entire life that never actually happened.
While its a pretty cool conceit for a film, the ideas it explores have a long philosophical history. In many way it goes back 2,400 years to when Plato wrote The Republic, which contains an allegory about a cave in which humans are raised from birth and locked up so they cannot turn their heads. The unseen captors then cast shadows (and only shadows) on the wall in front of the prisoners and because they dont have anything to judge it against, Plato supposes that the chained people would come to believe the shadows were real because thats all they ever experience. So, for example, if a shadow of a book passed in front of their eyes, they would believe that is the reality of what a book is, even though its actually just the shadow of it, in the same way that the humans believe in their reality in Dark City, because even though their memories have been implanted, they have nothing else to compare them against.
However Plato was exploring the general way in which individuals experience the world and how they have to interpret it given the evidence they have at their disposal, but while, as in the allegory, the people in Dark City are prisoners of a fake reality that they believe is real, the film more directly relates to the Omphalos hypothesis. This is named after an 1857 book, called Omphalos, by Philip Henry Gosse, which was a response to the growing evidence at the time that the Earth was far older than the Bible said it was.
Gosse argued that in order for the world to be functional, God had to create it with signs that it was actually older than it was. For example, the first tree would have been created with growth rings in it, suggesting it was older than it was. The word Omphalos itself is Greek for navel, referring to the fact that even if Adam was the first man, he would probably have had a belly button, suggesting he had a mother (and therefore that there was history before him, even though according to Creationism there wasnt). From this Gosse argued that no evidence about the age of the Earth and universe can be seen as reliable, because any act of creation of human, animal or plant would “at the instant of its creation present indubitable evidences of a previous history”.
It is essentially a theory that cannot be disproved, because if a God did indeed create the world 6,000 years ago, but gave it all the signs that it was billions of years old, there would be no way to empirically prove this hadnt happened. For this reason its actually a much better argument than many Creationist come up with to explain how God could have made the world come about in six days only a few thousand years ago, even though the scientific evidence strongly suggest its much older than that (my favourite Creationist theory is that the fossil record seems to give a progression of evolution through geological strata, because during Noahs flood certain animals died out earlier than others, so the first to go extinct settled on the bottom, while those that died out a few days later ended up in a different layer of rock higher up in the strata but it all happened in just over a month).
However while the Omphalos hypothesis was originally used to try and provide evidence that God could have created the world 6,000 years ago, other philosophers have since taken the theory further, both to show what it means if you take the argument to its logical end (and therefore into apparent absurdity, even if it remains logically feasible) and also for thought experiments.
The most popular of these is known as Last Thursdayism, and is based on what Bertrand Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind, where he said there is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that remembered a wholly unreal past. You couldnt prove this didnt happen, if everything from our memories to the physical world around us appears to be older, with no clues left around as to the truth that nothing is more than five minutes old. Russell was always interested in hypotheses that were logically coherent but totally un-provable and looking at what they might mean if they were true, and also why some of these theories seem absurd yet were willing to believe others.
It was Russell who came up with idea of the Celestial Teapot, which has become a popular reference in discussions about the existence of God and why we would believe in an un-provable all-powerful being and not other un-verifiable but logically possible things. Russell wrote in a 1952 article called Is There A God?:
| If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion, provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. |
Anyway, back to Last Thursdayism. What Bertrand Russell was basically saying was that there is no way to prove the world didnt come into being five minutes ago, if it did so with people possessing memories of a previous history, and the world around them seeming to back this up (even though all the evidence of a past before five minutes ago would be fake, including our own memories). It means I literally cant prove to an absolute certainty that I wrote this article, because I may have come into existence after I think I wrote it, and therefore my memories of having written it are actually false(although I better not think about that too much, as itll do my head in). Its not likely, but its not logically impossible.
In more recent times this inability to prove a prior history has become known as Last Thursdayism, referring to the fact that the world could have been created last Thursday (or by implication any other day), and we wouldnt be able to prove it wasnt. According to Wikipedia (and therefore probably not reliable at all), the term emerged in 1992 in a UseNet talk.original post called Last Thursdayism Proven!, which was a response to an apocalyptic prediction. This read, As everyone knows, it was predicted that the world would end last Wednesday at 10:00 PST. Since there appears to be a world in existence now, the entire universe must therefore have been recreated, complete with an apparent “history”, last *Thursday*. QED.
It is basically this Last Thursdayism idea that Dark City explores, set in a world thats ever changing and where peoples memories are constantly being replaced, but because they think they remember an earlier life (which never actually happened), they dont know anything has changed. The film posits that the people in the city are aware something isnt quite right, but because their memories have been manipulated they have no way to know what the problem is (except for one man whos got it figured out but has been driven mad by the knowledge). The fact is though, in reality there is no way to 100% prove that Dark City isnt closer to the truth than we might like to think.
If we were constantly being given new lives and complete sets of fresh memories of our entire lives, and if all those around us also had new memories that matched up to ours, we would literally have no way to know this is what was happening. If there were a powerful enough force or being behind it, yesterday we could have all been cavemen and tomorrow well be living in the future. For that matter, yesterday we could have all been aliens and tomorrow well be vampires. Or perhaps today is the only day youll ever actually exist, even though you believe youve been alive for years and expect many more. Theres absolutely no empirical way we could absolutely prove this isnt whats happening, even though it seems absurd. If the fiction was convincing and complete enough (as in the Matrix, where people are batteries but their minds are placed into a created reality that they believe is the normal world), this could indeed be whats happening and we wouldnt have any clue about it.
Its one of those things that starts to be slightly unsettling once you think about it, because you realise how much of our experience of the world is based on trusting that things are the way we think they are, even though we cant 100& prove it. Its this rich philosophical heritage that Dark City taps into and explores, asking whether there is something immutable about each human existence, or if we are in theory utterly malleable. Could, for example, you change someones memories so they believed they were married and passionately in love with someone, who in reality theyd never met or seen before, or would they somehow be aware there was something not right about what their brain was telling them was the truth?
Ultimately it is the scary result of what Rene Descartes explored in his 1641 Meditations On First Philosophy. Although he was trying to create an argument about the existence of God, all he really managed to do was pick apart what we could absolutely know about our own existence. He came to the conclusion that there was only one thing we could absolutely know the famous I think therefore I am but even this is normally taken to mean more than he actually meant.
Descartes said that in essence the entire world could be an illusion, as could our histories, our ideas of ourselves, our bodies and just about everything else. The only thing that can be relied upon is that because you are aware of your own existence, there must be something at this precise moment (and not necessarily before or afterwards) that exists and which relates to you I think, therefore I am. However that doesnt mean you are who you think you are, or that you can absolutely prove anybody or anything else genuinely exists, as they could be some sort of ridiculously convincing delusion.
Theres no way prove you exist in a four-dimensional universe either (or however many dimensions superstring theory is having us believe there are today), or that your friends and family are real only that because you as an individual are aware of your own existence, there must be something relating to you that is real. Your real existence could be something so far from the realm of how we experience the world that our brains may not even be capable of comprehending it, but there must be something that is you. And this knowledge only ever exists in the absolute present, at this precise moment, because we have no way to know the past is real or ever happened.
Everything else about the world and exactly what it is that relates to your existence has to be taken on trust, including our own memories, and indeed that the entirety of creation didnt come into being last Thursday, or that aliens arent making us fall asleep even so often and changing our memories of who we think we are.
Dont think about it too much, or otherwise youll just have to go to bed and stay under your bedclothes for the rest of your life (or at least what you think is your life), worried that everyone you know and perhaps the world around you doesnt really exist, and that even if it does, your memories of it might not be real, and that yesterday you might have been somebody completely different.
Dark City may just seem to be a rather cool and weird sci-fi flick, but it actually has a far richer philosophical heritage than you might expect, and posits a reality that it would be a lot more difficult to disprove than you might expect (in fact you couldnt ever 100% disprove it). Although I feel fairly safe in saying that were not living in a world where aliens are putting us to sleep every few hours to play with our memories, the scary thing is, neither you nor I can prove it isnt happening, because wed have no way of knowing the truth if the new realities were convincing and complete enough.
PS. If youre thinking all this sounds a bit Matrix-y, youd be right, as while the Wachowskis insist they didnt know about Dark City while they were writing their movie, the two flicks share many common philosophical and plot ideas, although in my opinion Dark City is actually the more interesting of the two.
TIM ISAAC
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