THE BEACH AND THE LABYRINTH: EXPERIMENTAL URBAN LANDSCAPES OF THE HUMAN (DARK CITY, 1998)

• Main Author: Vidal, Fernando
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: S&F_scienzaefilosofia.it 2015-06-01
• Series: S&F_scienzaefilosofia.it
• Subjects: dark city; scienc; philosophy
• Online Access: http://www.scienzaefilosofia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/res692069_14-VIDAL.pdf

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.