Dark City
Emotion/Theme: Self Concept, Attack, Forgiveness, Metaphysical, Secrets, Signs and Symbols
Genre: Metaphysical, Science Fiction, Remember Who You Are
Summary: In a world of darkness, controlled by time, images and roles shift and change in an ongoing nightmare as if part of a mad experiment. Everyone seems under the spell of sleep and forgetfulness, just vaguely remembering a distant memory of light and home, but unable to remember how to get back there.
Commentary by David Hoffmeister
Love does not make the world go around! It is spun around by fear and guilt. Instead of trying to find happiness in the world we must learn to turn within.
In the movie Dark City the inhabitants are all put to sleep to make them forget the “Real World”. Time and memories are warped. The ego breaks everything up into minutes, seconds, days, weeks, years, decades, centuries etc, but this segmenting is simply part of the ego’s misperception. We have ego concepts in this world called “reincarnation” where it seems as if we incarnate and re-incarnate as a different person, with different life circumstances, different memories, and so forth.
In this movie the dark ones (ego) are purposely using false memories to make everybody confused about their identity. Everybody thinks they are somebody they are not.The mind always has the power to forgive and have everything healed, but in this movie the world is dark because it has turned away from the Light. The same world will be perceived completely differently when it is turned around and bathed in Light.
One of the main characters is an inspector who uses the analytical ways of the world to attempt to understand what is happening. When we try to find out who committed the crime it simply reinforces our belief in victimization; that some people steal and murder and some people are victims. We keep the guilt recycled forever. The Inspector investigates so deeply that he finally realizes there is no way out; there is no way to escape this world!
Jesus talks about this in A Course in Miracles, where he says “The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way except the pathways offered by the world. And learning they led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they could have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go beyond it.” (T-31.IV.3)
The Mind can only rest when it realizes that there is no hope of finding Peace in the world of form, it must turn inwards where the Kingdom of Heaven is. To this end this movie is excellent as a mind-watcher. As a psychologically “violent” movie it provides an opportunity to flush up the judgments and the opinions that we hold about violence, torture and cruelty that seem to be happening in the world. The real violence is the ego world of judgment, anger and projection.
A great metaphysical movie, it has many insights into how to escape from the world by facing the ego and pulling your mind away from it by giving up “attack thoughts.” The attack thoughts in the movie are represented as the “dark forces” that control the world and put the inhabitants to sleep. This is what ego wants for you, to sleep and forget the Truth. It is always trying to interpret everything from its point of view, of death and vengeance.
Ego is single-minded and you can never make friends with it because it literally wants you dead! It wants your mind to be caught up in guilt forever in its own terms. You can simply expose it and release it.
The ending of the movie is the forgiven world, turned back toward the light instead of away from it. It is quite spectacular.
