high on technology low on memory cultural crisis in dark city and the matrix

High on Technology; Low on Memory: Cultural Crisis in DarkCity and The Matrix

Blackmore, Tim.

Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 34, Number 1, 2004,pp. 13-54 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto PressDOI: 10.1353/crv.2004.0002

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© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 34, no. 1, 2004

High on Technology — Low on Memory: Cultural Crisis in Dark City and The MatrixTim Blackmore

Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was arti-ficial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.

—Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

We have lingered in the chambers of the seaBy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brownTill human voices wake us, and we drown.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Sluicing down our throats, washing through our minds (Eliot’schambers of the sea), the culture’s dataflow surges into usmomently, flushing out what we might have remembered, with theoutput from the socius’ memory factory. The deciphering of history,a gratingly slow process of negotiation and disagreement, isreplaced by a media blitz on events. All we want to know aboutmassive cultural memory haemorrhages like the Shoah and D-Daycan be squeezed into three-hour media bursts, convincing becauseof their technical brilliance, their ability to elicit emotions and to cre-ate in the viewer the conviction that the truth has been determinedand can now be shelved—we are at last done with those crises. What

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streams out with the dataflow are thoughts about who we’ve beenand wanted to be, as a culture, as a society, as a people, in the face ofproblems of technology, faith, and memory. Anxious for optimalthroughput, obeying the urgent pressure of the machine to upgradeto higher processor speeds with greater RAM, we have left ourselveslittle time to reflect, even less to reconsider, and instead leap fromevent to event, frantically memorializing (if not remembering) whatthe past means—a world war, the death of a celebrity, or the deathof the child of a revered president all carry the same valence.1

Around us is the texture of memories, real and prosthetic, producedfor us, by us. We have turned our memory devices (in the industrial-ized world—television, film, video, the Web) into answeringmachines that, on demand, spool out rote solutions to the ontologi-cal, epistemological, and existential issues that produce life’s dread.At the end of the twentieth century, story-telling, especially film,was marked by a confluence of technology, religion, trauma, andforgetfulness: The historical revisionism and high-end computergraphics of Forrest Gump (1994) led to other films, like The Matrix(1999), a religious story designed to assuage our anxieties about theentangling qualities of technology’s web.

Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, we have been inun-dated with memorials and tributes—a tide of memory-related mate-rials, albums, souvenirs, and even beacons of light—all anodynes ofcultural forgetfulness. Why have I chosen The Matrix (1999) andDark City (1998) and not other films? John Sayles has had an aston-ishing career recording the creation of memory: the way it shifts,reforms, and is retold. Whether recounting the story of the Kentuckycoal wars (Matewan); of slavery (Brother from Another Planet); of thecreation of the West (Lonestar), the North (Limbo), the South (PassionFish), or the Southeast (Sunshine State); or exploring a mythical placeof violence and redemption (Men with Guns); Sayles has sketched, inluminous outlines and close detail, the pressures that act to producecultures, cultural groups, and their agreed-upon memories. Alterna-tively, I could turn to the myth machine in full operation: The Indi-ana Jones trilogy, Forrest Gump, or Spielberg’s own historicalnarratives (The Color Purple, Amistad, Schindler’s List, Empire of theSun). If my purpose were to deal only with technology, surely Iwould be well to take up the Robocop trilogy, the two extant (and oneforthcoming) Terminator films, or the Alien series. Finally, if I wishedto discuss memory, technology, nostalgia, and noir, why not thatnow stock (if there is such a thing) postmodern text—Blade Runner?

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The Wachowski brothers’ first Matrix film and Alex Proyas’ DarkCity serve similar purposes: In each, technology is a problem thatneeds resolution. The antagonists are either composed of (TheMatrix), or in control of (Dark City), advanced, apparently magicaltechnologies; these technologies govern closed worlds, imprisoninghumans, who must awaken and escape. In their struggles for free-dom, it is not so much action as the discovery of memory’s powerthat allows the protagonists to bring about resolutions. Each textaddresses the problem of societal memory loss, where the collectivehas forgotten how to remember and, in doing so, has become dis-persed and hopeless. More than these contextual issues, however,are the formal similarities between the texts. While The Matrix faroutperformed Dark City in ticket and video or DVD sales, each filmcalled out successfully to various fan communities (science fiction,music, cult film). Each film, as well, exemplifies a culturally sanc-tioned contradiction in its approach to technology: In criticizing andunmasking technology, it uses some of the most elaborate specialeffects available to create what critics call eye candy. The texts con-struct themselves as resistant, useful to the X (and beyond) genera-tion, to microserfs, information technology slaves, and those whofeel themselves too much part of a panoptic state; yet each film fet-ishizes the very forces it condemns: Should we just dismiss thesefilms as popular, hegemonic entertainments, useful for fertilizingcrops of nerds growing in cubicle farms? To what extent do theseHollywood cultural products address, in a complex fashion, theproblems of memory, technology, and the recreation of the self?Because the two films are perplexing in a way that perhaps only StarWars VI: Return of the Jedi has been (a film that guaranteed a place inHollywood for the wholesale creation of a new, high-tech, special-effects community [reified in George Lucas’ company IndustrialLight and Magic] in order produce an anti-technology myth), I felt itwould be useful to examine the films in parallel, to see where,despite The Matrix’s overt declaration of itself as a religious text, Icould talk about memory, cultural history, the recreation of space ina similar text (like Dark City), without somehow wandering ontoreligious ground. This paper is the result of the attempt to answersome of those questions.

I argue that Dark City and The Matrix are symptomatic of a fearfulculture, telling itself reassuring myths in an attempt to restore aprelapsarian state, what Mircea Eliade would call “in illo tempore”(the original time before time) (Myth 72–3). Both films manipulateculturally familiar myths that are relentlessly Christian, individual-

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ist, and noir. The films are successfully ambivalent about technologyand humans—they use the tools of high tech to advance the myth ofa Christ-like saviour. These are not apocalyptic, secular saviourmyths, like those of the Mad Max films of the 1980s. They are reli-gious, sacred, and technophilic texts, masquerading as secular, tech-nophobic thrillers.

Past Projects

Dark City (1998), directed by Alex Proyas, who also directed the phe-nomenally successful adaptation of James O’Barr’s The Crow (1993),tells the story of John Murdoch, who awakens one night, his mem-ory in tatters. Over the course of the film, the enigmatic Dr Schreberexplains how aliens use human dead for hosts and control the epon-ymous dark city by a form of telekinesis called “tuning.” Everynight, the aliens reorganize (retune) the city and employ Schreber toimplant humans with different memories. Using the city as a humanlaboratory, the aliens hope to discover a way for the alien groupmind to survive. Murdoch, framed as a serial killer, is helped by hiswife Emma, Schreber, and police detective Frank Bumstead touncover the reality of the fake city the aliens have engineered. Aftera pyrotechnic mind battle with the alien leader, John Murdoch liter-ally recreates scenes of his happy youth (a beach, the sun), meets hiswife again, and restarts the human cycle of time. (In the dark city,there has only ever been night.)

The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the Wachowski brothers(Andy and Larry), is the story of programmer–hacker Thomas A.Anderson, whose on-line identity is “Neo.” Anderson is contactedby a group controlled by another hacker named Morpheus, whopromises to reveal the reality of Anderson’s world, one governed bymachines that farm humans for use as a power source. The Matrix isa virtual hallucination shared by its human slaves. Awakened,Anderson is rescued by the “real” Morpheus and his crew on thesubmarine Nebuchadnezzar. Anderson shifts to his hacker identityNeo and trains to fight the Matrix and its programs (autonomousartificial intelligence units called “agents”). Neo (who Morpheusbelieves is a human saviour) visits the Oracle and, consequently,mounts a rescue mission where he uses his new-found powers toovercome the Matrix’s agents. The film closes with Neo’s revival byhis lover Trinity and Neo’s warning to the Matrix that the battle hasjust begun. The film was so successful that its directors and starswere immediately signed for The Matrix II and III (since titled,


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respectively, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions).

In this paper, I wrestle with some of the concepts involved in the ideaof collective memory. Memory is a crucial force in the creation of cul-ture and cultural images; in what we could call a cultural self. Find-ing the location of that cultural memory is arduous. Increasingly,since a great deal of memory resides in cultural artefacts, film hasbecome a memory bank. When film is produced relatively cheaplyand distribution occurs in an open market, as much as such a thingever exists, I might argue that there’s some chance that what isshown on the screen actually has to do with the lives of people livingin the time. But Hollywood film, a myth machine, is a place wherehegemonic forces seek capital: What we see on the screen reflectswhat the culture industry thinks will sell. The cultural discussion welook for in a mass commodity will necessarily reflect a certain kind ofculture, a certain set of memories. The struggle for allocation ofmemory is political, urgent: “When we remember, we represent our-selves to ourselves and to those around us. To the extent that our‘nature’—that which we truly are—can be revealed in articulation,we are what we remember.… A study of the way we remember … isa study of the way we are” (Fentress and Wickham 7).

Dark City and The Matrix are collages of familiar cultural stories.Dark City is a combination of the private detective procedural andthe amnesiac hero’s search for identity in a noir universe, elementsthat appear in The Matrix as well; both films are romances, in accord-ance with American literary critic Richard Chase’s formulation,where plot, not character, drives the narrative, and the hero strug-gles with his surroundings in a “deep and narrow, an obsessive”fashion (12–3); both are romances in that they turn on love relation-ships; both films seek to deal (either directly or whimsically) withexistential and experiential issues; above all, both are religious texts,particularly The Matrix, an overt Christ myth about a hidden saviourwhose appearance is foretold and whose actions proclaim him (nother) as The One. I argue that these texts situate themselves as para-bles about technology and faith. Despite their mass cultural genera-tion, they come under the aegis of what communications scholarMarita Sturken would call “cultural memory,” which is “memorythat is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yetis entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural mean-ing” (3).

These two millenarian texts typify the anxiety of a world that reli-

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gious studies anthropologist Mircea Eliade identifies as profane:Once there was sacred space marked by ritual, now the worldflinches in existential terror because we have entered a new profanetime, “a moment when history could … wipe out the human race inits entirety—it may be that we are witnessing a desperate attempt toprohibit the ‘events of history’ through a reintegration of humansocieties within the horizon … of archetypes and their repetition”(Myth 153). The denial of the “events of history” is enacted by masscultural artefacts like these two supremely popular films. We revivenarratives that have proven successfully reassuring and recast themin a punk noir sensibility, and distribute them so aggressively thatthey cannot be avoided. (Their distribution is quintessentially capi-talist; The Matrix, a film that declares itself to be about humans over-coming technology has become the poster child for the Digital VideoDisk [DVD] and has been used to sell that new technology to con-sumers.) Perhaps millenarian stories should be complex, intricate,dangerous, and difficult to navigate, but anxiety brings about amyth comfortably familiar in structure, one that Eric Davis identifiesas “a conspiracy-minded tendency to intensify ordinary powerstruggles into Manichean battles between good and evil” (110). DarkCity and The Matrix are part of a memory project that begins with theissue of forgetfulness, something that usually accompanies trauma.

Dark City’s Dr Schreber, psychiatrist and chemist, guards human-ity’s collective memory, seeking a hero who can destroy humanity’salien captors. He chooses John Murdoch and alerts him: “You havelost your memory. There was an experiment, something wentwrong. Your memory was erased” (Dark City 04:50). The memoryerasure precipitates the hero’s descent into the underworld, wherehe must recapture his soul and those of his people. Murdoch is atrauma survivor who suddenly bobs into the stream of conscious-ness, returned without warning to the self. The trauma is madepresent by absence; where there were events, there is now anopaque screen that obscures what was, leaving behind a psychicallynumb, alexithymic survivor (Einspruch). Trauma’s reappearance isstartling, terrifying: “[T]he impact of the traumatic event lies pre-cisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in itsinsistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place ortime” (Caruth 9). Taking on a life of its own, trauma drains into sub-conscious crevices and then unpredictably froths up again because“the traumatized mind holds onto that moment, preventing it fromslipping back into its proper chronological place in the past, andrelives it over and over again in the compulsive musings of the day


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and the seething dreams of night. The moment becomes a season,the event becomes a condition” (Erikson 185). We could understandDark City as a reflection on therapeutic process: The language of thepsychoanalyst is similar to that of the detective thriller. Both thera-pist and detective search for an event, only the symptom of which isclear (Erikson’s “condition”); friendly and unfriendly witnesses arecalled in a progressively revelatory process; the doctor must havethe witness–patient’s help to heal the truth.2 Interpreted in a Freud-ian way or not, memory recovery requires a shift into the “dissoci-ated realm of the traumatic unconscious [that] is a metaphoricalspace into which the patient is accompanied by the therapist. Thedissociated memory is akin to a long-lost part of the soul floatingsomewhere in real space where, with the aid of the diviner, it can betracked down and recaptured” (Kenny 161).

Murdoch awakens naked in a bath, a dribble of blood on his fore-head. (The new umbilical has just been withdrawn.) He is reborn—jittery, cold, disoriented.3 Probing for his past, he discovers onlyuseless fragments: He is in the survivor’s position of “starting ‘fromscratch.’ … He or she is always on the line, always being pushedback again and yet again to the outmost edge of existence” (Des Pres216). Murdoch’s bath is both amniotic and baptismal (the opalescentwater is proleptic of the gelatinous fluid filling Anderson’s pod inThe Matrix): “[I]mmersion in water signifies regression to the prefor-mal, reincorporation into the undifferentiated mode of pre-exist-ence” (Eliade, Sacred 130). Both Murdoch and Anderson have beendrowned and brought back to life. Things that seem to be alive, likewater and fire, are signs, in the sacred world, of the liminal zonebetween chaos and human life. To return to water is to return tochaos and to look into the abyss from which we were resolved. Afew seconds after waking, John Murdoch, apparently a murderer,picks up a goldfish that has been left drowning in air and lets itswim out of his hands into the bath water he stepped from (DarkCity 03:55). The camera looks up through the water, as the rippled,distorted image of newly created human hands plunges toward us,opening to release the bright fish that swims off. The world is clearonly from underwater. The poetic shot signifies Murdoch’s life,future, and memory. Murdoch, a saviour not a killer, follows thefish: Like the fish, Murdoch has been released into life (by Schreber’shands); like the fish, his path into the water of his future is unpre-dictable; like the fish, his memory vanishes, to resurface elsewhere.The water of creation is a pool of collective memories where Mur-doch must come to himself and restore the surviving humans to

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themselves.

The search for self plagues The Matrix’s Thomas Anderson, too. Hedrifts through life, apparently untouched by the people or eventsaround him. Our first view of Anderson shows him asleep in hismedia womb, headphones blocking the exterior world, a technologi-cal sac of monitors, data processing units, keyboards, CDs, and aweb of cables entangling him. Anderson the programmer fallsasleep bathed in the wash of his computer screen, but it is Neo thehacker who awakens. Like Murdoch, Neo seeks answers despitewarnings and questions what he has been told to leave alone:“You’re here because you know something,” Morpheus, god ofdreams, tells Neo. “What you know you can’t explain, but you feelit” (Matrix 26:58). Awakening in the midst of the institution (Mur-doch, to a tiled bathroom that belongs in a mid-century asylum;Neo, to the techno-fetters of the digital age), the two heroes begintheir projects of discovery, memory.

Heavy Sleeping, Light Waking

The sleep described above must be understood as a lifelong condi-tion, broken only by accident and necessity. Dark City and TheMatrix participate in a cultural form Davis identifies as “techgnosticmyth [that] resurrects the dark figures of the demiurge and hisarchons, who reemerge in the popular imagination as those vasttechnocratic cabals who deploy ersatz spectacles, surveillance tech-nologies, and an invisible calculus of media manipulation in orderto control society and keep individuals asleep” (101). Both filmsprize alertness about conspiracy: Murdoch must see through atrumped-up murder charge and false world; Neo must recognizethe uselessness of his existence as a drone in a corporate hive(Anderson hasn’t understood the irony of working for a softwarecompany called Metacortex) and follow Morpheus in rebellion. Thecamera stops hovering over Neo’s techno womb and draws levelwith the screen, which clears and then displays, “Wake up Neo …The Matrix has you” (Matrix 07:18). We are aligned with Murdochand Neo—the screen is meant for us.

Awakening occurs because the collective memory is endangered.Ready or not (typically, not—the training is never complete), thehero must be awoken to begin the struggle. For Caruth, the awaken-ing is about transmission of the cultural story as much as it is aboutthe hero: “In opening the other’s eyes, the awakening consists not in


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seeing but in handing over the seeing it does not and cannot containto another (and another future)” (111). The job of seeing and remem-bering is too big for one person, no matter what strength of mind shepossesses: Memory must be transmitted to the next watcher. DrSchreber literally injects Murdoch’s memory, a jolt that is assisted bydetective Eddie Walenski, who witnesses more than he’s meant to.Like Tiresias, Walenski hands his secrets over to another, tellingMurdoch, “Once in a while one of us wakes up while they’re chang-ing things. It is not supposed to happen, but it does” (Dark City47:34). Walenski appears to Murdoch in the underground, a place ofthe dead, directs Murdoch to Shell Beach (a place of light and life),then throws himself in front of a subway train and is killed. Mur-doch’s attempts to take a train to the elusive Shell Beach are frus-trated: What Walenski has told him makes only partial sense; it is ahalf-heard tune that Murdoch struggles to complete. As long asMurdoch is separated from the collective memory of the humancommunity, the melody will evade him. Maurice Halbwachs articu-lates the lost being’s mute position: “[A] certain number of conten-tions no longer make sense to him, even though he knows that theyexist and tries in vain to conform to them. A word heard or read byhim is not accompanied by the feeling that he understands it[s]sense; images of objects pass before his eyes without his being ableto attach a name to them” (43). Murdoch is what Victor Turnerwould call an edge-dweller, someone who exists on the verges buthas presentiments of enormities approaching and passed (128).Until the edge-dweller returns to the sacred place and is recognizedby the tribe, there exist only stray pieces of memory, shreds of real-ity, whispers of being. Those mind tatters produce the frustratingconviction that a revelation floats perpetually out of reach: Mor-pheus tells Neo, “You have the look of a man who accepts what hesees because he is expecting to wake up” (Matrix 26:30). Until the“real” reality presents itself, the memory victim stumbles throughthe simulation, trying to discover its edges, watchful for ruptures inthe narrative. The story so far must do until the complete one fol-lows.

Waking is an agonizing step toward the collective conscious of thetribe: “The point now is that like each morning’s waking, thesemoments of return to the world are psychic acts of turning, from pas-sivity to action, from horror to the daily business of staying alive—as if one turned one’s actual gaze from left to right, from darkness topossible light” (Des Pres 98). The act of psychic revolution Des Presdescribes requires the repeated and fearful choice of looking ahead

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to what might be, turning away from what was. As soon as he is ableto walk, Murdoch confronts himself in the mirror, that trope both ofdoubling and realization (Dark City 03:34); in The Matrix, a mirrorskin coats Neo’s hand, slithers up his arm and down into his mouth,silvering his body until he wakes up in the machines’ pod. Themoment Neo becomes aware of his state, his amniotic sac is brokenand he is flushed into a huge underground waste river where he isreborn (Matrix 32:00–34:30).

The existential load the being joltingly returns to is enough, as it isfor Henry Adams in the Gallery of Machines, to snap the subject’shistorical neck: “What does it mean ‘to be born again’ for man? Itmeans for the first time to be subjected to the terrifying paradox of thehuman condition, since one must be born not as a god, but as a man,or as a god-worm, or a god who shits” (Becker 58; original empha-sis). Coming alive means being infused with the unmediated knowl-edge that death is the end of the equation called life. Inherent in theweakness of the body, a tender container that must frequently bepatched until its skin is too fragile to hold life, is not only humanimperfectability but the certainty that, against entropy, no body canendure. At the very best, the human is only “a god who shits.” Theoverpowering sense of death, the nearby abyss, can cause the indi-vidual to despair that the collective is unimportant. In Dark City, onedetective tells another:

Bumstead: You’re scaring your wife to death, Eddie.

Walenski: She’s not my wife. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know who any of us are. (Dark City 28:00)

The city’s labyrinthine passages (and their existential implications)suffocate Walenski. It is better to grasp death soon because then, atleast, memory will cease.4 In the face of a death-inscribed world,where death programs life, the survivor must make connectionswith other living beings and, through those connections, realize andfurther the memories of the whole:

The child emerges with a name, a family, a play-world in a neighbourhood, all clearly cut out for him. But his insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxi-eties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty, majesty, awe, mys-tery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols. (Becker 29)


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Culture is ready to ease the new being’s terror of death. Story-tell-ing, whether religious or not, explains those things that are “clearlycut out for” the human. Stories reassure us that living, while full ofdread, also contains victories (even if they’re transitory); they social-ize us into modes of action and perception; they provide templatesfor the structure of shared memories; they delineate the spheres ofpower between individuals, groups, and groups within groups. Thegroup’s stories collect in a central repository, a city in the humanmindscape.

Souvenir City

The city is, at once, a machine and an organic human creation: In theindustrial era, the city has become a production engine, a landscapeof power (Zukin 16); the city is also a lattice of connections—humansconstructing a cultural hub, one which is, perhaps, now being dis-torted in time and space by another lattice—the World Wide Web.The city is both an old and new sign for collective memory, a cogni-tive site where “people normally acquire their memories” (Hal-bwachs 38). When thrown into a city or onto the Datanet, how arewe to distinguish between what is agreed-upon memory and whatprivate fantasy? Halbwachs answers, “We ask how recollections areto be located. And we answer: with the help of landmarks that wealways carry within ourselves, for it suffices to look around our-selves, to think about others, and to locate ourselves within thesocial framework in order to retrieve them” (175). In Halbwachs’universe, there is an essential self that fixes the culture’s compass,and if that self is damaged, we need only search our surroundingsfor clues (“to think about others, and to locate ourselves within thesocial framework”). The city provides the necessary sign set weneed to navigate the world; in Dark City, the metaphor Halbwachssuggests is reified in stone: “There’s no escape,” one of the alienstells Murdoch. “The city’s ours … we made it. We fashioned this cityon stolen memories, different eras, different pasts, all rolled intoone. Each night we revise it, refine it, in order to learn … whatmakes you human” (Dark City 59:10). The city, a postmodern collage(“stolen memories, different eras, different pasts”), reveals thehuman interior in its variety, conflict, personality, habit, and ritual.There is no escape from the memory city, except in personal forget-fulness. The cultural stories housed in cities include both approvedand apocryphal or pseudo-epigraphic narratives.

When recall is paramount, the city is in and on our minds:

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‘Artificial memory’ was the memory of ‘places and things.’ Ora-tors were trained to fix in their memories some stretch of extended, real space—such as a row of shops. This would serve as a mental space in which to hold a series of invented mnemonic images. These images mapped out points that the orator wished to make. As the orator spoke, he would imaginatively proceed along his remembered promenade, noticing the images that he had previously placed there. This allowed him not only to remember all the points he wished to make in his speech, but also to remember them in their proper order. (Fentress and Wickham 11)

The city is that “real space” that corresponds to the imagined spaceinscribed in the cortex. (The memory theatre is similar to the walkthat Fentress and Wickham discuss [12].) Using a concentrated signsystem, the memory subscriber encodes visual and tactile objectswith compressed abstract thoughts. Buildings are resignified withthe multiple, complex meanings the orator desires, where limits tothe resignification exist only in the orator’s mind. In the 1920s, neu-rologist A.R. Luria discovered while working with a famous mne-monist that the city was the ideal repository for information:

[H]e might also select a street in Moscow. Frequently he would take a mental walk along that street … slowly making his way down, ‘distributing’ his images at houses, gates, and store win-dows. At times, without realizing how it had happened, he would suddenly find himself back in his home town (Torzhok), where he would wind up his trip in the house he had lived in as a child. The setting he chose for his ‘mental walks’ approximates that of dreams, the difference being that the setting in his walks would immediately vanish once his attention was distracted but would reappear just as suddenly when he was obliged to recall a series he had ‘recorded’ this way. (Luria 32)

The city is a metasite, a trope of tropes, a place where the mapmeans reminiscence.

The city and nature seem to be at war: John Murdoch drives himself,and those chasing him, out of the labyrinth city, with its false memo-ries, toward his bright, hazy (implicitly real) memories of ShellBeach. The narrative will resolve only when he reaches the naturalplace that contains his true memories. Neo must realize that his cityis a construct, a fluid glitter of numbers cascading over hexadecimalmachine architecture. Only the wasteland—which must be restoredto its prelapsarian state—is real. The places Murdoch and Neo seek


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are invested with memory that transcends the personal: They areplaces with a life of their own.5 Courted, but not won, by Trinity andher friends, Neo opens the car door to leave, looks down an endlesswet street in an industrial wasteland, and is persuaded by Trinitythat that’s “not where you want to be” (Matrix 23:30). The physical isan evocation not only of emotional atmosphere (greenish streetlights, wet pavement, solitariness) but also of empty memories, aprosthetic recollection, where what is recalled has no depth, no emo-tional valence. A dead-end street is a street that has no living memo-ries tied to it; is a memory theatre without a play.

John Murdoch is directed to the local automat to recover his walletand, with it, his identity (Dark City 12:37). The automat is a crudememory bank, a series of glass pigeonholes in which the attendantplaces labelled contents, changing the contents when a customerremoves something. The attendant recognizes Murdoch andpromptly puts the wallet in a pigeonhole where Murdoch cannotretrieve it. He surveys the bank of compartments in a panic: Thecontents of his mind are exposed to a public that seems to knowmore about him than he does. The automat is proleptic of John’sexperience with a city that not only hides his memories, butexchanges them—moves and removes them each time he turnsaway. The city traps Murdoch as the Matrix holds Neo: “The Matrixis everywhere, it is all around us, even now in this very room. Youcan see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on thetelevision … . It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes toblind you from the truth” (The Matrix 28:00). The word “matrix,”which we now use almost as frequently as “Net” and “Web” to dis-cuss our world, is derived from the Latin for womb, with its conno-tations of generation, protection, the organic. In the early 1980s,Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson began to describethe world of the matrix, relying heavily on biological metaphors.(Gibson, particularly, made use of biological language, somethingthat John Brunner, one of cyberpunk’s fathers, had discussed almosta decade before, in his novel The Shockwave Rider.)6 While the word“matrix” is colonized by the machine, Neo will force the Matrix toreveal its noumenal self. (The machine is also biological.) Where theMatrix is not, Neo will discover not only what Is, but who he is. DrSchreber, tending a maze full of white mice, tells Murdoch’s wife,“Wherever your husband is, he is searching for himself” (Dark City9:21). The image of the labyrinth rotates through both texts. In DarkCity, Eddie Walenski obsessively draws spirals; the camera looks upand down tall apartment stairwells, as if seeking answers. (These

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shots recur in The Matrix.) Shots are framed by circles or open circu-lar passage ways; shots of clocks (time labyrinths) dominate DarkCity. The memory city is the place where all answers will be found,but only after circuits are completed and repeated. The city is a placefor memory but also an engine of false memory: The seeker may findthe cultural memory that will restore the self but also may drown inthe collective. The ambiguous significations of signs like “city” and“matrix” suggest that these two films are not clear about their inten-tions, as I will show when I look at their representations of technol-ogy.

Black Leather Smith

Both films fetishize technology. While, in The Matrix, we are toldthat thinking technologies are the enemy, Morpheus’ crew uses agreat deal of high technology to fight the Matrix. (Morpheus showsNeo a Duracell battery to explain humanity’s purpose in themachine; Neo is half-affectionately, half-deprecatingly referred to as“Coppertop” [Matrix 43:27].) But when Neo and Trinity engage inthe penultimate shootout with the Matrix’s agents, three things areremarkable. The first is that the technologies the humans choose(leathers, guns) are local; they are about personal power. The secondis that the battle in the machine is understood as a shootout, not as astruggle between lines of computer code or various pieces of soft-ware. (While two chips battling, silicon to silicon, hardly seemspromising visually, such a fight could, given the current range ofcomputer generated images [CGI], be powerfully drawn—it doesn’thave to be a Western.) And the last is that Neo and Trinity equipthemselves from the world of fetish (sexual and otherwise)—full-length black leather coats, leather boots, muscle shirts (for Trinity, aparticularly tight glossy leather tank top), and dark glasses (alreadylampooned by Men in Black [1997], now for sale again “as seen in themovie”). Morpheus’ crew’s clothing is about our culture’s ideas ofwhat constitutes cool rebel power. Had this film been made in thelate 1960s or early 1970s, the rebels would have worn considerablydifferent clothing, as did Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in EasyRider (1969). Rebels in The Matrix are as addled by technology astheir enemies and, the proliferation in The Matrix of styles in currentfashion suggests, so are we. Black leather is polysemic: Biker gear,riding coats, police leathers, goth dress, Batman’s cape, and theHugo Boss leather coats worn by the Nazis are a few possible signifi-cations.7 (The Matrix coats are not belted or cut straight, as the Nazis’coats were.) Leathers are not enough, however, and must be accom-


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panied by, as Neo says, “Guns. Lots of guns” (1:38:36). An infinitearray of virtual weapons surges past him, literally blowing his hair.The clothes and guns signify human power as The Matrix, and thisculture, understands it.

In Dark City, as in The Matrix, the technology humans must seize ifthey want to control their world is something we can call “the worldmachine.” Dark City’s world machine, which stops time and allowsthe city to be altered, is signified by a huge clock, hidden behind aclassical Greek mask. The aliens also control the technology of mem-ory, represented by the baroque syringes that Schreber wields.These alarming syringes are part glass; part lacy, metalwork wings;and part drill. (The camera focuses on the syringe point as it whirrstelescopically toward us.) Against these things, Murdoch has onlyhis partial wits, faulty memory, dubious friends, and barely under-stood telekinetic power. Dark City appears less fetishistic about tech-nology than The Matrix, in part because the costumes, music, andsets suggest Dark City exists in America in the 1940s, but Schrebermust rely on memory technology to restore Murdoch to his fullpowers, and Murdoch has to master (and maintain) the worldmachine to revive his childhood places. What Cecelia Tichi wouldcall the mechanical, “gear-and-girder” technology in Dark City (xiii),like the digital technology in The Matrix, must be used against itself:Humans use the engines of their own destruction to save them-selves. Images of technological reappropriation (human use of inhu-man machines) combat technophobia: When a human soul steers themachine, no force is apparently stronger. Bruno Latour asks impa-tiently, “How could the anthropos be threatened by machines? It hasmade them, it has put itself into them, it has divided up its ownmembers among their members, it has built its own body with them.How could it be threatened by objects?” (137) Latour pushes asidethe problem that Mark Seltzer has identified as the “double logic ofprosthesis”: Technology produces exhilaration, because it enhanceshuman power, but also panic, because technology appears to have alife of its own (160).

The anthropos’ panic in the face of technofetish is something thatshakes Eliade, especially the extent to which the anthropos has “putitself into” machines. Eliade argues that “there is no longer anyworld, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amor-phous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutralplaces in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligationsof an existence, incorporated into an industrial society” (Sacred 23–

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4). For Eliade, unfettered technology precipitates a crisis of memory,centrality, connectedness, and control, producing a panoptic laby-rinth through which humans must run. In Dark City (a cityscape ofEdward Hopper’s haunted absences), buildings extend and shift asMurdoch moves around, the stairs double and double again night-marishly as he runs up them (58:08). Using a cellular phone to issueinstructions, Morpheus guides Neo through a maze of office cubi-cles. Briefly controlling the panopticon, Morpheus knows every-thing about Neo’s reality, appearing only as a disembodied voice(The Matrix 13:05–16:35). In both films, mirrored surfaces draw ahard bright line between the biosphere and the mecanosphere.When Trinity plans her escape, she surveys her convex motorcyclemirror (The Matrix 16:40) and sees the whole of the Matrix setting atrap for her. Television screens watch everything, even if no onewatches the television. Nine surveillance cameras are trained onNeo in detention—the viewer sees all nine screens (17:04). Cypher,Morpheus’ Webmaster, sits at a curved, womb-like bank of moni-tors, reminiscent of Anderson/Neo’s apartment.

Acceptable technology begins, in Eliade’s view, with alchemy,magic, mystery, and craft (mastery of tools). In The Forge and the Cru-cible, he argues (as has Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature[1980]) that early tool makers embrace their connections to theEarth—ores mysteriously grow underground, smithing replicatesthe Earth’s generative powers: “The furnaces are, as it were, a newmatrix, an artificial uterus where the ore completes its gestation”(57). The smith is a midwife who assists the ore’s birth. Working onthe Earth’s skin with magic substances taken carefully from theEarth’s body, the smith establishes a link with heaven: “[T]he storm-gods strike the earth with ‘thunderstones’; their emblem is the dou-ble axe and the hammer; the storm is the signal for the heaven–earthhierogamy. When striking their anvils smiths imitate the primordialgesture of the strong god; they are in effect his accessories” (Eliade,Forge 30). Somewhere in the continuum between the simplest tooland the self-replicating technological matrix (what Félix Guattariwould call “machinic heterogenesis” [39]), technology assumes ashape no longer recognizable to humans and proceeds according toa logic of its own. The more we push and are pushed by technol-ogy’s logics and agencies, the more it seems like a distant foreignforce. We stop using fearsome myths of thunder gods and anvilsand reflect on technology in its own terms: We build informationsuperhighways, not arteries, and talk about the technological core,not the heart. (We also use, as I point out above, biological meta-


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phors that are perhaps even more alien, translating machines intobuggy, virus- and worm-ridden objects.) Arguing that the techno-logical elite (related to the clergy) have dedicated themselves to aworld no longer human, historian David Noble warns, “Like thetechnologists themselves, we routinely expect far more from ourartificial contrivances than mere convenience, comfort, or even sur-vival. We demand deliverance” (6). The deliverance we demandstarts with release from the urgency of the physical world (the vicis-situdes of labour and its concomitant lethal industrial processes);continues with a request for the abolition of pain, the enhancementof the body, and new and better prosthetic devices; and ends, pre-sumably, with a call for immortality (a salve for existential terrors)or at least for an end to the problem Becker identifies as death anxi-ety (27). Both Dark City and The Matrix explore the idea of deliver-ance, and both engage two things crucial to Eliade’s assessment ofthe sacred world, which he sets in opposition to the overly techno-logical profane one: sacred places and sacred times.

At First Site

The Matrix’s establishing shot of Neo asleep in his technologicalwomb is an attack on the post-industrial world’s wired lifestyle, anexhortation that we unplug, become more human and less“machinic” (to use Félix Guattari’s word [54]). Neo supplies illegalvirtual environments to the underground, keeping his “drug” stashin an appropriately hollowed-out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simu-lacra and Simulation (Matrix 08:18). Hyper-real pleasure gardensmust be cut down, says the text. Then the film falters. Unlike 2001(1968) and Tron (1982) where the technological message was clear,The Matrix is murky. The reason for The Matrix’s immediate successhas to do in part with the quality of its eye candy and actionsequences (themselves a sort of vision machine). The immediatecommission of two sequels to The Matrix is most likely related to theroughly half-a-billion dollars the film, not including video and DVDrentals and purchases, generated for its producers. But The Matrixfetishizes, even as it condemns, technology, and while it offers itselfas a pro-human text, it is still invested in looking chic and perform-ing in a slick manner. Noble reminds us that “modern technologyand modern faith are neither complements nor opposites, nor dothey represent succeeding stages of human development. They aremerged, and always have been, the technological enterprise being,at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor” (4–5). Technol-ogy is religion, which explains how a data-hacker can be a Christ fig-

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ure. (Christ hacked into Mosaic law, rewriting the biblical codesgiven in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.) While Eliade distinguishesbetween the sacred (religious) and profane (technological), Nobleargues the two are coterminous. (Henry Adams ponders, “No morerelation could he discover between the steam and the electric currentthan between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were inter-changeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat inelectricity as in faith” [919].)

Known space (Neo’s Matrix, Murdoch’s shifting city) is a hostilereality, bounded by an abyss or wasteland, “uncosmicized becauseunconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extent into which no orien-tation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure hasyet arisen—for religious man, this profane space represents absolutenonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptiedof his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in chaos, and hefinally dies” (Elaide, Sacred 64). A world without epistemologicalsense, what Eliade calls structure, is a threat to being. Those whoslip into chaos are either consumed or expend their energiesattempting to fashion a new reality. The struggle is between the bio-sphere and the mecanosphere: In The Matrix, Morpheus and hiscrew lurk fearfully inside the machine, waiting for their saviour;Dark City’s Eddie Walenski, who sees too much of the claustratinglabyrinth and the abyss outside “dissolve[s] in chaos,” and kills him-self. The hero, one of Turner’s edge-dwellers, is the one who will notonly venture into chaos but also establish a place of human sacred-ness there. Neither of Neo/Anderson’s identities seems real: “Itseems that you’ve been living two lives. In one life you’re ThomasA. Anderson program writer … . Your other life is lived in comput-ers where you go by the hacker alias ‘Neo.’ … One of these lives hasa future, and one of them does not” (Matrix 17:42). Each life has afuture, but in different worlds; Anderson’s future negates Neo’s,and if Neo is to become real, Thomas Anderson must be declaredvoid. Similarly, John Murdoch struggles to divest himself of a pastconstructed by the aliens and refresh one made up of fragments ofhis “real” existence. Releasing the memory construct lets Murdochleap from one reality to another. Neo and Murdoch teeter on theedge between the worlds, at the threshold that is “the limit, theboundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds com-municate, where passage from the profane to the sacred worldbecomes possible” (Eliade, Sacred 25). The membrane is a terrifyingplace, a border, a perpetual twilight of two creations, a place where


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sets of memories compete and coexist. Emma Murdoch searches forprecisely those edge places—where she hopes to discover her hus-band’s memories—and meets an alien who is bent on the sameproject:

Mr. Hand: We’re very lucky when you think about it … to be able to revisit those places which have meant so very much to us.

Emma: I thought it was more that we were haunted by them. What brings you here?

Mr. Hand: I met my wife at this place.

Emma: It’s where I first met my husband.

Mr. Hand: Small world. (Dark City 49:06)

Does one haunt, or is one haunted by, the sacred place? The firstassumes agency, the second unwanted attention. “What brings youhere?” Emma asks of her fellow memory traveller, suggesting theplace, not the person, is the agent. The public dock, a night scene fullof reflected light, is a magnetic site (although it does not carry thekind of clout Sethe’s rememory has in Toni Morrison’s Beloved). Mr.Hand’s closing comment that it is a “small world” is doubly ironic:The world the aliens have constructed is a physically small laby-rinth; but the sharing of emotions over space is also small. Two peo-ple with the same memories of the world sit a few feet from eachother, but those few feet can constitute an abyss.

If memories left some kind of visible film over a place, presumablymany public places would be fogged into invisibility. People cometo the same site and take away similar, never identical, memories.They may remember what they thought and felt, whom they werewith, what signifying power the place had. While the memories arenecessarily different, presumably there is enough commonality forus to draw out a picture of something in the centre. These memoriesare not so-called “flashbulb memories” (Conway 35–6), which Idon’t believe exist as the brightly lit-up, frozen events the flashbulbmetaphor implies. I am proposing a site that is visited physicallyand emotionally over the course of years by the culture’s inhabit-ants. The visits and revisits create a place that gradually solidifies asa memory site. (For Halbwachs the first such site is home—Schrebertells Murdoch, “The only place home exists is in your head”[DarkCity 1:16:10].) The person becomes the repository of a specific placeand the cluster of events surrounding it. (This is the place and theseare the events that occurred for that person alone—the experience is

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only crudely transmissible.) A place fraught with anxiety may beavoided, perhaps buried: “When this virtual space is imagined as asocial landscape, memory remains accessible. When the costs of rec-ollection seem catastrophic for self or others, memory may besequestered in a virtual (mental) space that is asocial, a space thatcloses in on itself through the conviction that no telling will ever bepossible” (Kirmayer 189). Even a small group can help the individ-ual lift the memory burden and keep the site current, despite thepain it carries. But, when the memory load presses on an individualwho has been abandoned, then what Kirmayer calls “accessibility”is likely sealed off by silence. In sacred spaces and at sacred times,memories that have been sealed off, stuffed behind false panels inthe mind, emerge.

Showing Neo the remains of a blasted Earth, Morpheus concludes,“Welcome to the desert of the real” (Matrix 41:10). The real is pro-fane, a place untouched for over a century by human creation.Humans have been living either inside a machine construct (theMatrix) or inside a ship (the Nebuchadnezzar—the Babylonian kingwho was guided by Daniel to Yaweh) that floats in the machine’swaste disposal system. The Nebuchadnezzar is an ark of humanitythat will carry the sacred to the site of renewal: “If the world is to belived in, it must be founded—and no world can come to birth in thechaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space. The dis-covery or projection of a fixed point—the center—is equivalent tothe creation of the world” (Eliade, Sacred 22). The tribe seeks a newcentre, often a high place or mountain, that puts it closer to god.There in Eden (a state of being rather than a physical place), the newhumans are born as Tank is: naturally (no metal plugs). He is, hetells Neo, a “genuine child of Zion … . The last human city; the onlyplace we have left” (The Matrix 47:20). Zion, originally a geographi-cally specific place, now signifies the ultimate meeting place of thefaithful, those true believers who have survived the struggle. Heightis an allegory for exhilaration, rapture, omniscience, where there isonly what Is: “The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred powermeans reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity”(Eliade, Sacred 12). The sacred implies endlessness, an infinite safety,and an end to fear; a site of clarity and understanding and a com-plete vision of the territory rolling beneath.

Searching for answers in an aquatic park called “Neptune’s King-dom” (memories are underwater, floating in the ocean where Mor-pheus’ Nebuchadnezzar sails), John Murdoch finds his


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wheelchair-bound uncle, whose memory is as impaired as his body(Dark City 50:45). The huge sculptured head of Neptune that loomsover the aquarium is analeptic of the head masking the aliens’ worldmachine. The heads emphasize the site where both the aliens andJohn assume memory exists—the cortex. In Neptune’s Kingdom,John grasps the final keys to hitherto resistant locks and the vault ofhis memory creaks open. There he discovers that he must create, notrecapture, the future: “We should feel prepared, as Emerson onceput it, to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no oneelse existed. The thought frightens us; we don’t know how we coulddo it without others—yet at bottom the basic resource is there: wecould suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves as Emersonwanted” (Becker 2). According to Becker, the trauma survivor mustput faith in the individual first, the community second. The commu-nity shows the survivor where to build, but the actual building mustbe accomplished by the individual. In both The Matrix and Dark City,the emergence of personal power and sacred space begins with anew vision of time.

Moments between Time

Film is intimately involved with temporal ruptures, disturbances onwhich trick films (late-nineteenth-century animations) reflected.Early animation illustrates how much film is about the erosion andreformulation of time (Crafton 35–57). Signified by the film runningthrough the camera, time is a scroll sliced into discrete moments,each containing an action. In The Matrix and Dark City, time isstretched both physically and psychologically. Using a techniquedubbed by its creators “Bullet Time,” characters in The Matrix movein space while the background appears to freeze.8 The technologyrecalls Muybridge’s motion studies: An array of forty or more cam-eras is constructed on what Bullet Time creators call a Timetrack.The actor moves on a central stage, the array of cameras captures themotion, the series of discrete images is then composited and the in-betweens are interpolated by CGI technicians. (The animationmakes it seem as if the camera moves.) The most dramatic first useof the paradoxical time-freezing, motion-flowing technique is whenTrinity kills, with what appears to be great leisure, a number ofpolice who apparently have her trapped (The Matrix 11:40). BulletTime is used near the film’s climax when Neo literally dodges bul-lets (hence the technique’s name). Bullet Time is a new technique,paradigmatic of my argument as a whole: In order to show the mys-tical manipulation of time (something that, in Eliade’s sacred space,

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only magicians and sorcerers can do), the highest of technologiesmust be summoned.

Setting aside Bullet Time, The Matrix is full of pauses, hesitations,freeze-frames. From the beginning, we are shown that Morpheus’crew can manipulate time, and apparently their physical selves, inproportion to the extent of their belief—the more they believe, themore they can do. Time is permeable, flexible, a phase in percep-tion—time is magic time: “This attitude in regard to time suffices todistinguish religious from nonreligious man; the former refuses tolive solely in what, in modern terms, is called the historical present;he attempts to regain a sacred time that, from one point of view, canbe homologized to eternity” (Eliade, Sacred 70). The Matrix’s time-shift requires high technology that moves the characters (and byextension some viewers) into sacred time. Miracle, the epitome ofbelief’s power, does not and cannot exist in the stream of logical,Hegelian time where history is progressive. Magical time meansthings repeat, are re-seen and revised. Linear time is carved up bythe spinning disk of sacred, cyclical time. When Morpheus takesNeo to see the Oracle (a version of Pythia, the medium for Apollo atDelphi), she looks into the parallel worlds of time and spooks Neo:

Oracle: … and don’t worry about the vase.

Neo: What vase? (Neo turns, knocks over a vase that breaks)

Oracle: That vase … . Would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything? (Matrix 1:12:00)

From magical time, the Oracle utters quintessential Delphic conun-drums about the future, gesturing to the Möbius strip of fate andfree will. The Oracle’s powers intrigue the non-believer, desperatefor answers, who is now willing to consider shifting from profane tosacred space, where time is flexible, magic is real, and oppositescoexist. The profane seeker suffers intense anxiety, as the Oracleknows: “As soon as you step outside that door you’ll start feelingbetter. You’ll remember you don’t believe in any of this fate crap.You’re in control of your own life. Remember” (Matrix 1:16:36).Stepping into magical space seems, to the Cartesian Thomas A.Anderson, an excessive act—for Neo, it is appealing.

Meaningful time produces not units of industrial labour but theworld: “Through repetition of the cosmogonic act, concrete time, inwhich the construction takes place, is projected into mythical time,in illo tempore when the foundation of the world occurred” (Eliade,


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Myth 20). In sacred space, the world reveals itself, and original time(in illo tempore) becomes the only time. At the beginning of reality, itis light; in profane space, it is always dark. Even the angels are dark-ened and don’t see or remember all they know: “I don’t under-stand,” frets Murdoch; “How can it be night already? Whathappened to the day? How’d I miss it?” (Dark City 55:40). Day is astate, a condition of wakefulness, the province of a magical realityand revelation. Darkness is a trope, not only for ignorance, but alsofor dulled contacts with times and memories, loss of the past, brokenconnections. Only memories of the original past, the first time, haveany light in them. About the beach he knew, Murdoch says, “It’s sobright there”; to which Carl adds, “Brighter times I guess” (Dark City53:01). Carl, one of John’s Oracles, makes the link between space andtime. In a different place, which is also a different time, things werebetter, brighter, more real. The place and time together recall a cer-tain state of being. Lamenting the extermination of sacred time andspace by a profane industrial present, Eliade argues that, even in theworst of sacred times, there are at least ritual explanations for disas-ter, homologies that reassure the tribe it will survive; in machinetime, Eliade sees no chance of reassurance. The narrow vision oftime presented by the historical world creates panic: “When it is nolonger a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hencefor recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it isdesacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle for-ever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity” (Eliade, Sacred 107;original emphasis). Confronting a future robbed of ritual meaningmeans ontological terror, a cycling time engine that rotates us pastthe chance to return to the real. Telling stories is one of the ways notonly to reduce fear of the relentless present but also to recall, and indoing so, recreate, the world. In sacred time, the past and present areknown; the future guarantees a return to the real. Such stories arenot only eschatologically reassuring but also—that is, if packaged asguns-and-leather thrillers— tremendously successful. Something inthese texts reassures the collective during its millennial existentialshakes.

Separate Collections

In Maurice Halbwachs’ construction, “collective memory is essen-tially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present,” imply-ing a community that performs that reconstruction (34). What is theprocess of collective memory formation? Does the collective mem-ory represent the community’s voices equitably? What version of

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events has the collective chosen from its memory well? Has the finalversion come about more through negotiation in the community orby dictation from the power elite? In what ways has the collective’sversion been altered—is it even open to revision? Is the orthodoxaccount paralleled by the heterodox one? Arguably, the moment wecan consider an event a memory, it has been affected, at least once,by interpretation. The communal forge begins to smelt the material,using interpretation to cast memory (or a series of memories) in anarrative mould, a casting that preserves meaning. What happenswhen the individual finds the collective memory full of error, vagueon key events, or forgetful altogether? Where is the individual to gowhen the collective either cannot recall, or worse, denies what was acanonical narrative?9 Impurities in the metal of recall can signify aculture that is being shattered: A cabbie—populist cultural reposi-tory of communal maps and spaces—cannot remember how to getto Shell Beach (Dark City 25:10). John Murdoch finds himself amongforgetful deniers who believe they remember: Even when faced bytheir forgetfulness, they shrug off anxiety. Because Murdoch’s cul-ture is low on memory, it faces being recast in diminishing versionsof itself until it disappears entirely. Murdoch knows the key to hisidentity is at Shell Beach, which he uses like a litmus test for the col-lective around him: If none can answer him, he reasons, somethingterribly valuable, or destructive, or both, is at the beach. The culturehas lost its way, its souvenir, in the memory city; Murdoch is the lastrepository of a tattered cultural memory. Eliade sees the rites ofmemory and memory itself as fused: “The memory reactualized bythe rites … plays a decisive role; what happened in illo tempore mustnever be forgotten. The true sin is forgetting” (Sacred 101). What isforged in illo tempore is a cultural key that opens the lock to a site ofmemory treasure. When he finds his own past, Murdoch realizes, hewill also discover the pasts of those around him who operate in aprofane world of half-light, dulled knowledge, and carelessness.

In The Matrix, collective memory appears to be species-wide (in theOracle’s lobby, an Australian aborigine sits with his religiousobjects; upstairs, children of all nations train to save humanity[Matrix 1:08:46]); Neo seems to float in a common multiculturalmemory pool not unlike Jung’s collective unconscious. If it is a pool,then, as the Oracle understands, Neo comes from the shallow end.He is a Cartesian Westerner rattled, as other human cultures mightnot be, by what the Oracle calls “that Fate crap.” Neo and Murdochare involved in a crisis that has altered the community’s memory;for Anderson and Murdoch, the Matrix and Shell Beach, respec-


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tively, have been forgotten: “[C]ollective memory survives and indi-vidual memory can find a place (albeit transformed) within thatlandscape. If a family or a community agrees that a trauma did nothappen, then it vanishes from collective memory and the possibilityfor individual memory is severely strained” (Kirmayer 189–90). Theindividual’s story is never solely the individual’s. Dissonant posi-tions about memory have to be negotiated within the community; ifthe community refuses to remember events, then the individual haslittle against which to create a counter-narrative. Ontological terrorpervades such a position—when the individual tries to recount apersonal, non-canonical narrative, the culture rejects it as fanciful, ifnot insane; those who persist with insane counter-narratives will bepushed to the margins, where they can be comfortably forgotten.Neo finds himself, but for Morpheus’ crew, alone with his version ofthe world and ponders “these memories from my life—none of themhappened. What does that mean?” (Matrix 1:08:00). Neo hovers overthe abyss: How can everything that was apparently real suddenly bedeclared profane, and the new sacred real be almost unattainable?He must fight hard to become a human, according to Trinity, who isoptimistic that exposed false memories will leave the human mem-ory space for self-determination. Neo’s path is fearful, delicate: Pro-fane memory at least appears solid and comforting; the risks inforfeiting profane illusions are extreme (what Eliade would callontological annihilation). In a culture that loves detective storiesabout the self, we seek narratives that support the value of exchang-ing appearance for reality—as long as it is just a story. What’s atstake for the viewer is cultural identity: “It is possible for a collectiv-ity to have as its object of commemoration the past itself rather thana specific past event. What is recalled is not an event, whether genu-inely historical or mythical, but the feeling that the collectivity pos-sesses a history” (Billig 62). Part of what makes the individual strongis the awareness that the group has a centre, a set of memoriesthrough which it holds onto the present and makes sense of a fearfulfuture.

At the memory factory, with its alien assembly line, Dr Schreber sur-veys objects from the collected human past affectionately, notingsadly, “These do bring back memories,” while an alien’s voiceinstructs the workers, “Tonight’s requirements are: twelve familyphoto albums, nine personal diaries, seventeen love letters, assortedchildhood photographs …” (Dark City 29:50). The aliens work atcasting and recasting the collective memory, hoping that some newarrangement will yield the secret of human existence. The mobile

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city becomes a landscape, like the theatre, of memory: “Landscapesof memory are given shape by the personal and social significance ofspecific memories but also draw from metamemory—implicit modelsof memory which influence what can be recalled and cited as veridi-cal. Narratives of trauma may be understood then as cultural con-structions of personal and historical memory” (Kirmayer 175).Metamemory is both set and site for Dark City and The Matrix, whichseem to present the culture with ways of remembering across sacred(ritualistic), rather than profane (machine), space and time. The twoDark City detectives, agents in the identity search, represent differ-ent moments of curiosity about what they can and cannot recall.Walenski, near to suicide, muses “I’ve been trying to rememberthings, clearly remember things, from my past. But the more I try tothink back, the more it all starts to unravel. None of it seems real. It’slike I’ve just been dreaming this life and when I finally wake up I’llbe somebody else, somebody totally different” (Dark City 28:31).How much do we know our pasts? How much could we reconstructif we were pushed out of the memory theatre, our aides-mémoiresconfiscated? If we discover that our memories are corrupt, how willwe effect their restoration? How will we know what constitutes acomplete memory, let alone memories that produce truths? Beinglow on memory produces a crisis in both the personal and the publicsphere.

Reminders of Forgetting

Each text offers a world where human time and memory have beenaltered almost beyond repair, ravaged by biological or machine Oth-ers. Mr. Book’s command to his fellow aliens to “shut it down”refers to the world machine that governs the labyrinth and also tothe process of human history and memory (Dark City 32:25–34:00).Schreber explains to Murdoch why the Others have memory prob-lems: “All they have are collective memories. They share one groupmind” (Dark City 1:12:41). An old science-fiction trope has it thatindividual minds are more robust than the group mind, which,when it runs out of storage capacity, faces permanent erasure. (DarkCity, certainly a vessel for nostalgia, looks back fondly at the way thefuture was in 1940s and 1950s science fiction.) The machines in TheMatrix see humans as “a virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancerof this planet. You are a plague. And we are the cure” (Matrix1:38:00). The Matrix’s agents understand human memory as a threatto machine space. The machines need power, lots of power (to para-phrase Neo), to keep their memory banks accessible. Organic and


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machine memories are not only incompatible but inimical. Accord-ing to Morpheus, the Matrix’s agents are “Sentient programs … .They are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors. They areholding all the keys” (Matrix 57:30). Morpheus’ use of the presentcontinuous suggests that, while the agents, currently, “are holdingall the keys,” this is a temporary condition, rectifiable by humans.The agents are ghosts in the machine, its protectors and reminders,but humans have begun to remember themselves.

Dark City and The Matrix are decidedly pro-human: In both cases,the Others are a combination of coelenterate and insect—tentacledand odious, consuming dead humans (Dark City) or live ones (TheMatrix). Both films view human memory as superior to other forms:“It is our capacity for individuality, our souls, that make us differentfrom them. They think they can find the human soul if they under-stand how our memories work” (Dark City 1:12:36). The hero is thesupreme individual, whose task it is to revive the nearly extincthuman race: His is a Christ-like venture of redemption and recrea-tion, not a Mosaic one of exodus. Noble, quoting Michael Benedikt,looks nervously at present-day religions that subscribe to a virtual,on-line existence: “Religions … fueled by the ‘resentment we feel forour bodies’ cloddishness, limitations, and final treachery, their mor-tality. Reality is death. If only we could, we would wander the earthand never leave home; we would enjoy triumphs without risks andeat of the Tree and not be punished, consort daily with angels, enterheaven now and not die’” (159–60). At first blush, the machines inDark City and The Matrix appear poisonous, fatal. But both filmsglory in the use of technology, depicting mechanically adepthumans who apparently have souls—and are also good with tools.

These texts are warnings about memory to a culture that is forget-ting itself. Halbwachs suggests that, if we reject one form of mem-ory, it is “in order to find ourselves among other human beings andin another human milieu, since our past [is] inhabited by the figuresof those we used to know. In this sense, one can escape from a soci-ety only by opposing to it another society” (49). The two texts arefantasies, but they are also cultural artefacts, that, like any other cul-tural artefacts, are diagnostic of the ways we reflect on ourselves.They are reminders of “figures of those we used to know” and pro-pose memory projects for us, opposing ugly forms of forgetfulness(alien group minds, sentient hunter-killer programs) with sacredforms of memory. After all, each text presents us with a survivorhero who is, as Des Pres suggests, “a disturber of the peace. He is a

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runner of the blockade men erect against knowledge of ‘unspeaka-ble’ things. About these he aims to speak, and in so doing he under-mines, without intending to, the validity of existing norms” (DesPres 45). What is the message such a blockade runner will bring us?What form will the message take?

Saving Culture

A young male hero leaves a meaningless existence, survives fearful,near-death conditions, endures strenuous physical and psychologi-cal training, and becomes a confident solitary champion. This is oneof our favourite story grids, and in The Matrix, it is presented in arelentlessly Christian, patriarchal fashion. In both films, there arenods to differences in belief, race, and gender, but it is clear who theheroes are: white male Christians who will effect redemption andspiritual reawakening. Morpheus, like John the Baptist, tells Neo,“You are the One Neo. You see, you may have spent the last fewyears of your life looking for me, but I have spent my entire life look-ing for you” (Matrix 22:18). The actors enunciate their lines aboutNeo clearly enough that we can hear the capitalization—the One (ananagram of “Neo,” the newborn) is a Saviour, something we’re toldproleptically, if ironically, early in the film: “Hallelujah. You’re mysaviour, man. You’re my own personal Jesus Christ” (Matrix 08:36).In a formalist sense, we know Neo is a saviour because he’s playedby Keanu Reeves, but the text also tells us directly that he is theinheritor: “After he died, the Oracle prophesied his return, that hiscoming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bringfreedom to our people” (Matrix 45:00). The aborigine and multicul-tural daycare in the Oracle’s apartment are scenery, as is LawrenceFishburne, who, in this film, can only ever be Neo’s right-hand man.In Dark City, John Murdoch and his guides are all white men. Thewomen are either battered wives, whores with hearts of gold, orunfaithful tramps who must reaffirm their marriage vows. Mur-doch, whose name has Celtic roots meaning “sea warrior,” is still aspiritual leader, if a less overt Christ figure (Murdoch). He lecturesthe vanquished aliens: “You wanted to know what it was about usthat made us human. You’re not going to find it in here [taps fore-head]—you went looking in the wrong place” (Dark City 1:31:43).Drawing strength from his heart, Murdoch proceeds literally toremake the world, causing the sun to rise for the first time and shineon his much-loved Shell Beach. (Eliade notes, “One of the paradig-matic images of creation is the island that suddenly manifests itselfin the midst of waves”[Sacred 130].)


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Both films conclude as the heroes become world shapers. Neo bendstime even more than the Matrix’s agents are capable of bending it,easily destroying them in the process. Murdoch bests the alienleader and then pours out the waters of creation on the void. Theirgenerative powers are magical, exhilarating, and—in culturalterms—worrisome: “Realistically the universe contains overwhelm-ing power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can’t really domuch about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we canendow certain persons with it” (Becker 145). Existential terror is eas-ier to bear if we can put stories of heroes between us and what wefear. Neo and Murdoch both take leaps of faith (they fly from andabove rooftops [Matrix 54:00; Dark City 56:00]) and land believing inthemselves; we are intended to accompany them, to believe that,despite malignant opposition, these men can wish a sacred realityinto existence: “The initiate is not only one newborn or resuscitated;he is a man who knows, who has learned the mysteries, who has hadrevelations that are metaphysical in nature” (Eliade, Sacred 188).

Becker argues that it is easy to tell stories, harder to deal withunpleasant reality. The more unpleasant the reality, the more pow-erful the myths become: “To tell a myth is to proclaim what hap-pened ab origine. Once told, that is, revealed, the myth becomesapodictic truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute” (Eliade, Sacred95). It would be overstating the case to suggest that recent, highlypopular films can exercise the lasting cultural authority of an origintext like the Iliad or the Bible, but both films discussed here partakeof the power of those myths. (Arguably, the soon-to-be six Star Warstexts have begun to gain some of that reassuring power.) If millenar-ian fears and self-doubts are extreme enough and ontological quea-siness bad enough, familiar myths will be performed repeatedly:“Reenactment is a cathartic means for people to find closure in anevent. It is not clear whether this sense of healing involves an eras-ure and smoothing over of difficult material or a constant rescript-ing that, like memory, enables an active engagement with the past.Memories and histories are often entangled, conflictual, and co-con-stitutive” (Sturken 43). The Matrix and Dark City first satisfy formal-ist demands: They are thrillers, involving physical chases that end inmale-on-male, David-and-Goliath violence, where the fighter withthe most faith wins. These particular films re-enact the story ofhumans, memory, and technology in the second half of the twenti-eth century.10 Recent fears about furiously quick, networked tech-nology recall the probably mythical Ned Ludd’s panic over earlynineteenth-century Britain. The more we weave machines into our

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nervous systems, introduce them under our skins, and work insidethem; the more nervous we become. The Matrix and Dark City re-enact not so much battles we have experienced as ones we fear wewill face. In watching The Matrix and Dark City, the viewer is com-forted by the difficult, but convincing, victory of the human mindand soul over alien memory systems. Simultaneously, the films cele-brate the technology of virtual reality and of film making, in itsmachine-special-effects glory. This paradox makes the films “entan-gled, conflictual, and co-constitutive.”

As well as being Christ myths, the films are romances. Trinity, whosereligious name suggests she will become the mother of Neo’s child ineither Matrix II or III, tells an apparently dying Neo, “I’m not afraidanymore. The Oracle told me that I would fall in love and that thatman, the man that I loved, would be the One. So you see, you can’t bedead … because I love you. Believe me, I love you” (Matrix 2:03:00).Trinity, the tough killer with a heart of steel, packs enough power inher sacred kiss (“Believe me, I love you”) to raise Neo, the sleepingbeauty. Trinity’s devotion (even the loss of cultural memory cannotdilute the love of a good woman), her fairy-tale actions (battling fate,awakening the dead prince), make her redemption of Neo anotherstitch in the fabric of reassuring myth that Dark City also uses. Sepa-rated from each other by a thick pane of jailhouse glass, a distraughtEmma can’t believe her love for John is a construct: “But how canthat be true? I so vividly remember meeting you. I remember fallingin love with you. I remember losing you. I love you, John. You can’tfake something like that”; to which John answers, “No, you can’t,”shatters the glass with his newly found telekinetic powers, touchesher hand, and is redeemed (Dark City 1:05:56). Love is apparentlypart of the human faith that machines and lost memory cannot affect.Both films make connections between what was (an ideal, prelapsar-ian condition, when things were softer, lighter, and more loving) andwhat is (an apocalyptic industrial wasteland, devoid of human con-tact). Images of memory wastelands are sent to warn us: “Thepresent and past are conjoined by learning how to tell a story whichlinks them together in a new and morally significant way” (Kenny161). The story must be familiar: We must remember Eden if we areto return there. Eliade is pessimistic about our chances of re-estab-lishing a human world:

And in our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of his-tory—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhis-


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torical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the “liberties” that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history? (Eliade, Myth 151)

The Matrix and Dark City are success narratives about humans in his-torical time, reconstructing meaning in sacred space and time. Neois reborn, eliminating microserf Thomas A. Anderson. Now the One,Neo threatens the Matrix: “I know you’re out there … . I know thatyou’re afraid … . I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going toend. I came here to tell you how this is going to begin” (Matrix2:07:00). It is the beginning of the end of the machine world, the startof Zion’s resettlement. Murdoch is more laconic, reminiscent ofChandler’s Marlowe, or Clint Eastwood:

Schreber: What are you going to do now, John?

Murdoch: I’m gonna fix things. (Dark City 1:27:40)

The hero battles the corrosive forces that have attacked the sacred rit-uals of humanity: Restoration begins as the losses are put aside; whatis left of the past is cemented into the present. This is the site thatfuture generations will understand as the golden age of creation,when time was established and thought became light, then earth,then flesh. The restoration narrative is part of what Erikson calls,

One of the crucial tasks of culture … [which is] to help people camouflage the actual risks of the world around them—to help them edit reality in such a way that it seems manageable, to help them edit it in such a way that the dangers pressing in on them from all sides are screened out of their line of vision as they go about their everyday rounds. (194)

Eliade believes the screens must exist if sacred places and times areto be constructed by ritual. But the screens suggest blindness toworld events, unwarranted reassurance that dire problems can besolved only by outside agencies, extra-human forces, and godlikepowers. Becker does not believe self-knowledge leads to what mightbe called happiness (Maslow’s self-actualization), and is convincedthat we must face, nakedly, the terror of death. Death-obscuringmyths, Becker suggests, dangerously squander our time. What thenare we to make of these two successful, popular texts, which appearto be pro-human, pro-memory, and anti-technology, yet conveytheir messages using one of the most forceful technological, hegem-onic narrative forms?

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The Velocity of Myth

Supercompetent heroes who, because their hearts are pure, over-come forces demonstrably more powerful than themselves, are signsof our culture’s understanding of personal paralysis. The amountwe enjoy power myths is diagnostic of our sense of helplessnessbefore structures we little understand (governments, corporations,economic forces, other ethnicities and races). Philosopher MorrisBerman warns, “Charisma is easy; presence, self-remembering, isterribly difficult and where the real work lies” (310). In fact, no onehuman can be the focus of the group will and, with a few deftstrokes, reconstitute the original world for us. We have to do it, ifthat is what we wish. When we accept action-thrillers that have aphilosophical ring to them, we first accept an action story and itsattendant pleasures. If The Matrix were a exploration of memory inthe way that Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Stalker and Solaris or Ber-trand Tavernier’s Death Watch are, there would certainly not behalf-a-billion dollars in worldwide revenue to collect. The Matrix is aconsumer fable for our times; so the film itself tells us,

Neo: What is this place?

Morpheus: More important than what is when.

Neo: When?

Morpheus: You believe it’s the year 1999, when in fact it’s closer to 2199. (Matrix 37:30)

Released in the spring of 1999, The Matrix is apparently about us—if“us” is defined as yuppie cubicle-working microserf hacker-pro-grammer technophiles who believe in the anarchical freedom of theNetizen. The black mystic teacher, the supportive woman whosepurpose is both redemptive and sexual, are familiar props in a char-ismatic fantasy about white men wearing black leather and packinga lot of heat as they lead the revolution against corporate bosses whowill finally pay for their lack of hacker vision. It is a fantasy aboutwalking into a space outside human scale or texture, like the lobbyof Metacortex—or any faceless corporate hive—and shooting thefake marble and recessed lighting into rubble, so that humans canreclaim the world from the suits who have leached all creativity andjoy from programming, wipe out the enemy using her own tools,then play (properly) with the tools. Neo and Morpheus don’t putaway their toys so much as improve on and internalize them. JohnMurdoch, too, learns alien tools in order to overpower the aliens.


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His memory proves to be the conquering, creative one. John Mur-doch is now the repository of cultural memory, the source of all thatis new. Desperate to save what is left of the tribe, Schreber choosesone who will carry the burden and create a launching pad forhumans travelling into the universe. The memory of Earth is gone,but the ocean where we all started still remains in John Murdoch’sgenerative memory.

The Matrix and Dark City are screen memories about what we face atthe beginning of a new millennium. They are cultural notes aboutthe loss of memory, the rise of technology, and the dangers of rely-ing on technological artefacts for the storage of human thoughts andfeelings. They are also myths about human supremacy, myths thatexist because, in reality, a human-run world, where the consump-tion machine roars at full throttle, is steam-rollering the environ-ment and the world’s fauna, which we believe to be less importantthan we are (a judgment we make based on animals’ apparent lackof ability to store high-level declarative memory). There is a preju-dice in the human community in favour of those with declarativememory, and these films privilege that memory. The Matrix andDark City pretend to address the problems associated with the lossof collective memory in the face of machine–alien memory thatexcludes the idea of the soul. Do they, in fact, address the point, orcover it? “The concept of a screen memory is particularly useful inthinking about how a culture remembers. Cultural memory is pro-duced through representation—in contemporary culture, oftenthrough photographic images, cinema, and television. These mne-monic aids are also screens, actively blocking out other memoriesthat are more difficult to represent” (Sturken 8). To return to an ear-lier point, it is hard to watch Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, not onlybecause the film is long, but because it refuses a certain kind ofaction and resolution. Lanzmann’s painstaking exploration of Euro-pean deportation must be juxtaposed with screen memories of theShoah, at once romantic and full of redemption. Schindler’s Listexchanges the reality of incomprehensibility for the fantasy of expli-cable evil. If Schindler’s List didn’t completely settle collective mem-ory about the Holocaust (due to the happy appearance of theSchindlerjüden at the “real” end of Spielberg’s film), then certainlythe light comedy of the Holocaust fashioned by Roberto Benigni inhis 1998 film Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella) seals the vault for Holly-wood, the chief (screen) memory producer for the Western world.

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Film is useful, powerful, often resistant. But Hollywood film bearsthe Aristotelian burden of catharsis. Does watching an emotionallydifficult text let us off the political hook? Some films suggest ecologi-cal and political action, even if indirectly (Godfrey Reggio and PhilipGlass’s Koyannisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi trilogy, as well as RonFricke’s Baraka). But with texts like Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful,the audience is apparently to feel turmoil and relief, sighing withgratitude that finally these unsavoury chapters can be closed (and,with trembling lower lip, recalling educative adages and improvingmottoes [“Never again”; “None is too many”]). Sturken warns that

[r]eenactment is a form of reexperiencing; within the codes of realism, viewers are allowed to feel that they, too, have under-gone the trauma of the war by experiencing its cinematic repre-sentation. Categories of experience become confused; the directors and actors of these films claim to have experienced the war on the battleground of film making. (96)

Sturken’s comments point to such film makers as Oliver Stone (themethod he used to train his soldier–actors for Platoon), Steven Spiel-berg (Saving Private Ryan), and Francis Ford Coppola, who saidfamously about Apocalypse Now!, “My film is not about Vietnam, myfilm is Vietnam” (Hearts of Darkness). Sitting through The Matrix orDark City, buying The Matrix soundtrack, DVD, posters, glasses,coats, and other merchandise, and following the on-line discussionof The Matrix and the probable direction of The Matrix II and III donot shift our attention to human forgetfulness, the loss of humanmemory, or the dispersion of human community that Eliade details.I am not arguing that art’s principal task is political—but that weneed to be alert to the fact that an apparently resistant text may do agreat deal to relieve the pressure of our anxieties (in the same waythat Jonathan Edwards’ furious sermons to Puritans in the earlyeighteenth century employed fear to create reassurance that life wasbeing lived properly). Science and religion are sister narratives (ifnot identical twins): “Regardless of how secular this ultramoderncondition appears, the velocity and mutability of the times invokes acertain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part,through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouseof the archetypal imagination” (Davis 1). The Christ story of TheMatrix draws on the “storehouse of the archetypal imagination” tofashion a myth about controlling time. In a clear time, there will be anew space created: In the case of The Matrix, it will be Zion, the last(and first) human city; in Dark City, it will be Shell Beach, that placeof remembering, light, and love.


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Films like these are not only reassuring re-enactments of storiesabout human transcendence but also

mythological charters for the whole national community, of course, and are intended to define that community; but this defi-nition will include a legitimation of its structures of political and economic dominance, by which the elite justifies itself as an elite. They are thus hegemonic, and totalizing: alternative memories are to be regarded as irrelevant, inaccurate, and even illegitimate, though the harshness of this delegitimization will vary according to the intolerance of the national culture and the degree to which it has, on any given occasion, been challenged. (Fentress and Wickham 134)

As I have suggested, while critics may hail counter-memory texts,like Tarkovsky’s, Lanzmann’s, or Sayles’s, as more fully coun-ter-hegemonic, these texts will not be given the kind of distributionthat hegemony can muster.11 Texts that question technology, sug-gest that technology is killing us, and show that slow murder in theleast technological ways (Tavernier’s Death Watch) are texts that fewwill know about, even fewer have access to. They do not take part inthe story of technology, which is, according to Noble, “The millenar-ian promise of restoring mankind to its original God-like perfec-tion—the underlying premise of the religion of technology.” Thisstory “was never meant to be universal. It was in essence an elitistexpectation, reserved only for the elect—the ‘happy few’” (201).Noble’s “happy few” are Fentress and Wickham’s “national com-munity,” always already limited to those who have access to thelevers of distribution and production. The Matrix and, to a lesserextent, Dark City are part of the narrative Noble describes: “A thou-sand years in the making, the religion of technology has become thecommon enchantment, not only of the designers of technology butalso of those caught up in, and undone by, their godly designs”(207). The more we are caught up in speed, in rendering power, inthe depth and breadth of SDRAM and VRAM, of gigahertz and tera-bytes, the less we have time for problems that are slow to resolve—perhaps, have no resolution at all. The more tangled our interlacingwith technology, the more we measure human progress by our tech-nological advances, the more ambiguous our relationship to technol-ogy becomes. That ambiguity is ill-served by fast, muscular, visuallyslick stories about patriarchal superiority, especially when those sto-ries are powered by the same technology they pretend to question.Industrial globalization and the move into what Guattari would callthe “mecanosphere” (51)—with a “workforce”12 that is not so much

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downsized as eroded and rendered invisible—make the technologi-cal landscape terrifying. Even in the world of the microserfs, whohave apparently adapted to the necessity of telecommuting fromcontract to contract and of living as if there were an endless supplyof health and “spare” time (human time that has been colonized bythe corporation), the spectre of the future is unsavoury. The fantasyof the hacker–avenger who rides in on a few lines of rebel code and,with some swift binary sharp-shooting, brings down the dominantnetwork is a screen for what will really happen to us as we continueto build a world that is high on technology, low on memory.

Notes

1 As of this writing, the industry surrounding the death of Princess Diana has only shown signs of increasing production, and the coverage of the death of John Kennedy Jr. in the summer of 1999 assured us that people who are of no real importance to the culture as a whole can take on mythic proportions if handled properly as media subjects. In 1997, Dur-rants Press Cuttings noted, “There is no other subject in our archives to compare with the volume of newspaper coverage devoted to Diana’s death, funeral and subsequent stories … . Major news events, like the assassination of President Kennedy, the shooting of John Lennon, pale into insignificance in terms of column inches in the press.” The coverage of Diana’s death also exceeded that of World War II (“Diana’s Death”).

2 In this formulation, Murdoch’s wife’s unfaithfulness causes Murdoch’s trauma and forgetfulness. He lapses into a murderous fugue where he kills prostitutes (his wife’s unfaithful doubles). His mind creates an alien force that is a metaphor for the unheimlich in humans. After his descent into the dark pit and his victorious battle with his dead father (the alien leader), Murdoch establishes a dream reality where his wife is faithful. But such an interpretation is narrow and predictable. Schreber is a cover: His guidance through the film is not Freudian analysis, nor does the film effect a transference for the viewer.

3 In Alex Proyas’ The Crow, the protagonist Eric Draven returns from the dead to avenge his murdered wife. His rebirth (he literally digs himself out of the grave) is marked by the same kind of stumbling disorienta-tion John Murdoch suffers in Dark City.

4 Robert Frost outlines the struggle for dangerous knowledge beautifully in his 1945 poem A Masque of Reason, where, after centuries, God asks Job for forgiveness. Job, a thoughtful Frost farmer, is now more worried about what has been revealed about existence than about past sores and boils. Job ponders,

I’ve come to think no so-called hidden value’sWorth going after. Get down into things,It will be found there’s no more given there


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Than on the surface. If ever there was,The crypt was long since rifled by the Greeks.We don’t know where we are, or who we are. We don’t know one another; don’t know You;Don’t know what time it is. We don’t know, don’t we?Who says we don’t? Who got up these misgivings?Oh, we know well enough to go ahead with. I mean we seem to know enough to act on. It comes down to the doubt about the wisdomOf having children—after having had them,So there is nothing we can do about itBut warn the children they perhaps should have none. (280–94)

5 In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe tells her daughter, Denver, that spe-cific memories invest particular places. “Some things you forget,” she tells Denver,

“Other things you never do … . Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world … even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place it happened.”

“Can other people see it?” asked Denver.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away … if you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.” (36)

Morrison’s characters’ concept of memory is so powerful it becomes metamemory, or “rememory,” a sort of active creation, a generative thought. Memory takes on its own life (existing “out there, in the world”) and continues, despite its creator’s death. Your own thoughts may be those of someone now dead or silent (“And you think it’s you thinking it up”). The idea of a memory so robust that it is self-sustain-ing is in direct conflict with the concepts of memory and forgetfulness espoused by Claude Lanzmann, author and director of Shoah. In Shoah, Lanzmann takes survivors to places that have been not only forgotten, but deliberately eradicated.

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Standing in the ruined gas chambers at Treblinka, Lanzmann asks his interviewees to point to geographical nodes, to describe the physical workings of the death camps as specifically as possible. Less than fifty years after the fact, not much memory, let alone evidence, remains in the land. The people, especially the survivors, are the repository of the excruciating particulars of the events at Treblinka, as well as the other ruined camps, purposefully destroyed by the Nazis as they began their last desperate retreats. If the untutored viewer were to come to the site of the selektion ramp at Treblinka today, he would find a peaceful stand of tall firs, planted by the Nazis. Without the collective memory, or any touch by the media about the Shoah, the land would remain, as the per-petrators wanted it, mute. While many cultures subscribe to the con-cept of the spiritual dowser who somehow knows that something is amiss in a given place, most humans seem to walk past killing grounds without a flicker of memory (as long as they have no prior hint that “something bad happened here”). The concept of rememory, then, is key to counter-memory, to resistance to the hegemonic forces that enslave and murder and wish to cover up the acts. Rememory is a forceful wish that suggests that, even when all the people who belong to the collective have been wiped out, their experiential legacy contin-ues. While Morrison’s characters subscribe to such marvellous powers, the likelihood is that Lanzmann, particularly because of his nine-and-a-half-hour film about the Shoah (the length suggests that leaving out a single word means a forgotten memory, where a forgetting means a death), would not. The land doesn’t have memory—the collective does. And even there, the collective must be squeezed for its stories; survi-vors, perpetrators, and bystanders alike must exert themselves to reclaim memories many hoped would be lost forever.

6 “If you’re acquainted with contemporary data processing jargon, you’ll have noticed how much use it makes of terminology derived from the study of living animals. And with reason. Not for nothing is a tape-worm called a tapeworm. It can be made to breed. Most can only do so if they’re fertilized; that’s to say, if they’re interfered with from outside” (Brunner 250).

7 The police leathers in Electra Glide in Blue (1973) come to mind; Batman wears a leather cape in Tim Burton’s 1989 film.

8 “Bullet Time” makes reference to at least two cultural markers: The first is the hero’s ability to “dodge a bullet,” and the second is, presumably, Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the famous scientist at MIT who created stro-boscopic cameras so fast they could take (among other things) pictures of bullets passing through the edge of a playing card, a balloon, or an apple.

9 Some of the most illuminating discussions about cultural forgetfulness have, in the last thirty years, come from Germany. Michael Verhoeven’s brilliant The Nasty Girl (Das Schreckliche Mädchen [1990]) and Norbert Kückelmann’s troublesome Man under Suspicion (Morgen in Alabama


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[1984]) both present individuals who become possessed by the need to discover what has been deliberately omitted from their communities’ orthodox memory. The more the protagonists search, the more trouble and denial they find. Even when it appears that the collective has been made to face what it wishes to forget, there are subtler ways of forget-ting (in The Nasty Girl, the town denying its Nazi past makes a hero of the individual so that she will finally stop asking them awful ques-tions).

10 In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the post-apocalypse story of the dis-covery of the computer is retold in a sort of Punch and Judy show car-ried on between Eusa, the personification of America, and Mr. Clevver, technocracy embodied:

Persoon Eusa comes up agen this time hes got like a iron hat on his head. 2 long wires coming out of the top of the hat and littl pegs on the ends of the wires. Plus theres a cranking handl on the side of the iron hat … .

Eusa says, ‘2 heads are bettern 1.’ He takes them 2 wires coming out of his hat and he pegs them into the hoals in the box. He says, ‘Now Iwl jus input a few littl things in to my No. 2 head.’ Hes terning that crank on his iron hat. Rrrrrrrrrrr …

Mr Clevver he says to Eusa, ‘Thats a guvner lot of knowing youre inputting in to that box… . Whynt you keap it in your head wunt it be safer there?’…

With that he takes holt of the cranking handle on Eusa’s iron hat which the hat is stil on Eusas head and the wires peggit in to the box. Rrrrrrrrrrrr. Mr Clevvers cranking that handl 10 times fast-ern Eusa ever done… . Mr Clevver says ‘Wel Eusa old son les see how much you know now. Can you tel me the Nos. of the rain bow and the fire qwanter?’

Eusa he says, ‘I never heard of nothing like that Guvner.’

Mr Clevver he says, ‘Wel never mind about them how about 2 plus 2 what wud that come to?’

Eusa says, ‘I wunt know Guv I realy cudnt say.’

Mr Clevver says, ‘Very good Eusa my boy now jus 1 mor thing. What’s youre name?’

Eusa says, ‘I dont know.’ (47–9)

11 As if in an endless spiral of reduction, the Academy Awards for 2003

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signalled how one memory can screen another more dangerous one. In the year when The Pianist, a superb and difficult film about the Shoah, won three top Academy Awards, not only was The Quiet American (about America’s war in Vietnam), which could be understood as indi-rect and savage condemnation of the United States’ Geneva-conven-tion-contravening war on Iraq, delayed in release; it was then scarcely seen and only its leading man (playing a sympathetic British character) was nominated for an Academy Award. The disappearance of The Quiet American would be less surprising were The Pianist’s director, Roman Polanski, not a long-time fugitive from American justice for the alleged crime of child sexual assault. Despite American loathing for Polanski, his film suddenly became attractive in a cultural climate of denial about ugly, illegal, colonial wars.

12 The word “workforce” itself is perhaps too ironic to use: How much longer will workers have any real force?

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high on technology low on memory cultural crisis in dark city and the matrix

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