The Great Movies III

The poignancy of Dark City emerges in its love stories. At a crucial point, John Murdoch tells Emma, "Everything you remember, and everything I'm supposed to remember, never really happened." Emma doesn't think that can be true. "I so vividly remember meeting you," she says. "I remember falling in love with you."Yes, she remembers. But this is the first time they have met. "I love you, John," she says. "You can't fake something like that." And Murdoch says, "No, you can't." You can inform someone who they love, and that is what the Strangers have done with their memory injection. But what she feels cannot be injected. That is the part the Strangers do not understand. Emma has a small role but it is at the heart of the movie, because she truly knows love; John has still to discover it-to learn about it from her.

The Strangers are not evil. They simply proceed from alien assumptions. They are not even omnipotent, which is why Murdoch, Bumstead, and Schreber have relative freedom to move about the city. At the end, we feel a little sorry for them. They will die surrounded by happy beings whose secrets they could not discover.

Notice an opening shot that approaches the hotel window behind which we meet Murdoch. The window is a circular dome in a rectangular frame. As clearly as possible, it looks like the "face" of Hal 9000 in 2001. Hal was a computer that understood everything, except what it was to be human and have emotions. Dark City considers the same theme in a film that creates a completely artificial world in which humans teach themselves to be themselves.

ohn Huston was dying when he directed The Dead. Tethered to an oxygen tank, hunched in a wheelchair, weak with emphysema and heart disease, he was a perfectionist attentive to the slightest nuance of the filming. James Joyce's story, for that matter, is all nuance until the final pages. It leads by subtle signs to a great outpouring of grief and love, but until then, as Huston observed, "The biggest piece of action is trying to pass the port." He began shooting in January 1987, finished in April, and at the end of August, he died. He was eightyone.

All of this I have from The Hustons, by Lawrence Grobel, a biography that charts a scattered and troubled family, yet one that gathered Oscars in three generations, for Walter, John, and Anjelica. John's daughter won hers for a supporting role in his previous film, Prizzi's Honor (1985), and now she was playing the crucial role in The Dead. John's son Tony, then thirty-seven, was nominated for his screenplay for The Dead, and served as his father's assistant, aware of the secret being kept from the world, which was how ill John really was.

Joyce's "The Dead" is one of the greatest short stories in the language, but would seem unfilmable. Its action takes place in Dublin in 1904 at a holiday party given by two elderly sisters and their niece, who have spent their lives performing or teaching music. The guests arrive, we observe them as they observe one another and listen to talk that means more than it says. At the end of the long evening, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), nephew of the Misses Morkan, leaves with his wife, Gretta (Anjelica Huston), to go back to the hotel where they will spend the night before going home to a far suburb in the morning.

All was prologue to their cab ride and an hour or so in the hotel. She tells him a story he has never heard, about a boy who was sweet on her when he was seventeen, a boy named Michael Furey, who died. He was a sickly boy, who stood in the rain on the night before she was to leave Galway and go to a convent school. "I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain," she remembers. "But he said he did not want to live."When she was only a week in the convent school, he died. "What was it he died of so young?" asks Gabriel. "Consumption, was it?" She replies, "I think he died from me." In his final pages, Joyce enters the mind of Gabriel, who thinks about the dead boy, about his wife's first great love, about how he has never felt a love like that, about those who have died, and about how all the rest of us will die as well-die, with our loves and lusts, our hopes and regrets, our plans and secrets, all dead.

Read with me James Joyce's last paragraph: