Water is fear in Dark City. When John Murdoch wakes up in a hotel bathtub with no memories of who he is or how he got there, the first thing he discovers is a nude woman’s corpse. And not just any corpse. This one’s stab wounds are marked in spirals, another powerful – and deadly – motif in the movie.
It’s this brief displacing opening that sets the tone for the entire movie. Water. Death. Sex. Memory. There’s a desperate longing at the heart of Dark City. Yes, Murdoch frantically grabs at anything he believes might lead him back to his memories and tell him if he’s a murderer, but there’s something deeper and more dangerous that encompasses his desperation, and that’s love. His love for Emma, a woman who he might not even know and might never have met, but who looms large in his mind. Emma is what connects him to the rest of the story, the world, and its final revelations.
When Emma files a missing person’s report on Murdoch, her lost “husband,” it puts her in touch with Detective Bumstead, who is already investigating Murdoch for serial murder. Later, when she naively lets Bumstead drive her home, she inadvertently leads the detective right to Murdoch. Though he escapes, after listening to his faltering explanation about what’s been happening to him, Bumstead is even more convinced that Murdoch could be the killer.
Emma also solidifies a connection to Dr. Schreber, who claims to be Murdoch’s doctor and who informs her that he’s had a psychotic break. In this, Schreber is only half-lying. He’s Murdoch’s doctor because he’s everybody’s doctor. Controlled by the Strangers, he, with his memory injections, controls everybody else in the dislocated city. And he’s only half-lying about Murdoch’s break from reality. Because his attempt at injecting Murdoch with new memories failed, Murdoch has truly broken with the reality that he and the Strangers have constructed for all the inhabitants of Dark City. In their eyes, he might not be a killer (yet), but he is a sort of criminal who must be stopped, taken into custody, and examined.
Emma’s actions also, indirectly, lead Murdoch to his first encounter with the Strangers. After escaping from her apartment house, he wanders the city in a panic, eventually breaking through a barrier and finding himself near a billboard for Shell Beach. It’s here that the Strangers first attack Murdoch with psychokinetic Tuning powers, but to their shock and Murdoch’s, he has the same Tuning powers. In the end, the Strangers lose and Murdoch escapes again, leaving two of his would-be assailants dead. It seems that Murdoch is more formidable than the Strangers thought. Just as important is that even a cheap depiction of sun and water – the Shell Beach billboard – is dangerous to them.
From here, Shell Beach becomes another driving force to solve the film’s mysteries. Murdoch’s memories of the place are all sunshine and white-capped waves lapping at the edge of an endless ocean. But are they his memories? They’re the first thing he sees when he wakes up in the bathtub at the opening of the movie. If they’re not his memories, then what are they? In the luggage Murdoch found at the hotel was a Shell Beach postcard signed from Uncle Karl. So, he pursues what appears to be the only key to his past and true identity. But nothing is easy or straightforward in the labyrinthine Dark City. Especially moving from one place to another.
Murdoch tries to travel to Shell Beach by cab but the driver, who assures him that he’s been there many times, can’t remember the way. Later, Murdoch goes to the subway, where he finds a Shell Beach stop on one line. But the train passes him by. A station attendant tells him that it was the express and doesn’t stop there, but he can’t tell Murdoch when it will. Frustrated, Murdoch is approached by a dishevelled man who explains to him that you can’t get to Shell Beach by the subway or road. The man is Detective Walenski, an operative in Bumstead’s department. Unlike Murdoch, Walenski has truly suffered a psychotic break. Not because he’s a madman, but because he’s discovered some of the film’s darkest mysteries. Once he explains to Murdoch that there’s no way out of town and to the shore, he commits suicide by jumping onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train. Sunny Shell Beach has taken another life.
Murdoch eventually tracks down Uncle Karl, not surprisingly, at Neptune’s Kingdom, a rundown water park. After a warm embrace, Karl learns of Murdoch’s amnesia and tries to cure it by showing him a slideshow of his childhood. The images are idyllic and many feature the ocean and water games. However, when Murdoch tries to read the book he created as a child, Guide to Shell Beach, he finds it blank. Yet he remembers writing it. It’s here he finally understands that everything he knows and believes is a fabrication. Water birthed him at the opening of the film and water has now crushed him as he finds himself farther from the truth about himself than ever.
So, if Murdoch’s memories are all lies, where did they come from and why are they there? The answer to the first question is Dr. Schreber. The answer to the second is more complicated. Schreber mixes, matches, and switches people’s memories on a regular basis for the Strangers who hope the experiments will help them become more human, so they can more successfully inhabit our bodies. But there’s another and, perhaps, more profound reason for Murdoch’s false memories.
Dr. Schreber implants Murdoch’s past to educate him, but more importantly, to help him develop the power to Tune so that he can fight back against the Strangers. This ability is something Schreber must have spotted in him at a young age because he appears to Murdoch throughout his life via the fabricated memories, which are the only way they can communicate without the Strangers knowing. That the memories are linked primarily to Shell Beach and water isn’t a coincidence, but more of a clue to the Strangers’ greatest weakness.
If Murdoch was supposed to murder Emma, it doesn’t happen. And whatever the Stranger’s original motives, what they produced was a desperate longing between two people who are strangers, but still profoundly drawn to one another. When Murdoch is in police custody he talks to Emma about the possibility that they really aren’t husband and wife and might not have even met before Murdoch found his way into her apartment. Even Emma has to admit that when they first saw each other she felt that she didn’t know him at all. But she also cares for him saying, “I love you, John. You can’t fake something like that.” When Murdoch replies “No, you can’t,” he uses his Tuning ability to shatter the glass security barrier keeping them apart. Their following kiss is genuine, signalling that no matter how much the Strangers try to rearrange their minds, there’s a core attraction that can’t be denied.
The Strangers soon invade the police station looking for Murdoch but Bumstead, who’s unsure about everything at this point, helps him escape and they go to the hot water baths where Schreber spends so much of his time. When the doctor tries to force Murdoch to inject himself with new memories, Bumstead appears and the two of them force a reluctant Schreber to lead them to Shell Beach, the one place Murdoch is sure will provide all the answers he – and now Bumstead – need.
After traveling by car, it’s not surprising that Schreber’s directions lead them to a dead end. What’s different this time is that, after Murdoch threatens him, the doctor continues with them on their journey, this time over water – the symbol of death in the world – in a small rowboat. Schreber is terrified and tries to get the men to turn back, but they’ve come too far for that. And finally, their journey ends, not at a sunny shoreline, but in a dirty alley at the end of which is an old door. It’s through the door – bursting through another forbidden barrier, just as Murdoch burst through the glass at the police station – that they find the ultimate truth about Shell Beach and their world.
It’s something that only the Strangers and Dr. Schreber knew up until this point: that Shell Beach is a lie. It’s simply a room with a bright Shell Beach poster on the wall, nothing more than a comforting dream for the lost inhabitants of the city. However, as shocked as they are, Murdoch and Bumstead don’t give up their search for the truth. They rip down the Shell Beach poster and break through the brick wall underneath.
Only to find themselves nowhere.
Beyond Shell Beach, the very edge of their world, is nothing but stars and empty space. The promised sunny shores are just another cheap fabrication. In fact, their world isn’t even a world, but just a vast spiralling mechanical maze where they are the rats and the Strangers are the scientists running them around eternally, knowing they can’t get away, and watching their reactions to their imprisonment.
But the lie of water and salvation becomes secondary to the truth of love when the Strangers appear in the Shell Beach room with Emma. Murdoch’s first reaction is to fight them by Tuning, but he allows himself to succumb to the Strangers sleep powers when Mr. Hand presses a knife to Emma’s throat.
The Strangers take Murdoch deep underground, into the bowels of the city where the Strangers manufacture every aspect of human life through an enormous machine they control with their Tuning abilities. With Dr. Schreber’s help, Murdoch is able to escape his confinement and engage in a final, massive, Tuning battle with the Strangers leader, Mr. Book. By the end of the fantastical fight, most of the Strangers are dead and Murdoch has seized control of their reality-manipulating machine. With it, he begins remaking the Dark City into the comforting one from his memories. Soon, a sun appears, filling the city of perpetual night with light and warmth for the first time. But more important than even light, Murdoch brings forth water—enough for a whole ocean—signalling the end of the Strangers and their control of this small world.
It’s implied that when Murdoch seized that machine, at least some of the population’s implanted memories were destroyed. We learn this when Murdoch and Emma meet at a pier by the newly created ocean and she doesn’t recognize him. Yet, standing in the sun they’re still drawn to each other. And when Murdoch asks Emma if she knows the way to Shell Beach – the real one he’s just manifested – they walk there together, easy and comfortable in each other’s presence.
Water forms the bookends of Dark City. For much for the film it’s seen as a source of death, mystery, and horror. Murdoch was born in water like a child, naked and confused, at the beginning of the film and the whole world is reborn at the end when he and Emma meet. Fear and desperate longing are finally brought together and when they collide at the pier, they become their opposites. The dark city’s future still isn’t certain, but it isn’t always dark anymore. And now its inhabitants can finally find their way to Shell Beach and, perhaps, a small kind of salvation.
