| Summary: | In Dark City (Alex Proyas,
1998), people live in a city that is
constantly in the dark. The city is in
fact a laboratory constructed by a race
of Strangers who live below the urban
surface to do experiments aimed at
discovering what makes human beings
human. The Strangers will survive only by
becoming like them. To find out what
humanity is, but assuming it is
essentially related to memory, every day
they paralyze all human activity, extract
memories from individuals, mix them, and
inject them back. When people wake up,
they are totally different persons – but
do not know it. This article examines
how, starting with such a situation, Dark
City explores the role of memory in
personhood, the problem of authenticity,
and the status of “false” memories in
making the self, and how the connect to the experimental psychology and the neuroscience of memory.
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