JOHN M. GANIARD

DARK CITY (1998)

Dark City. Flat Earth. Third Eye. In a suburban mass build in Omaha two people having an affair are promising each other they will find each other in any lifetime. Simultaneously, two teens promise the same as they exit a Regal Cinemas in the Research Triangle, taking each other’s hands in an emptying foyer near the arcade cabinets, newspapers say Yeltsin has dismissed Chernomyrdin, March 23rd, 1998. Absolute Knowledge replaces Ideology. “This end of History is essentially a Christian eschatology.” The only escape from its anhedonic anti-revelation—sprawled, florescenced, strip malled—is astral, theosophic. Lethal doses phenobarbital mixed into apple sauce or pudding, Heaven’s Gate compound, March 23rd, 1997. Shared dreams, one dream we’re all dreaming, and which is surely dying. Every comic book I bought at Kroger or Dave’s Comics that year had the same movie poster—Rufus Sewell crucified on an art deco clock—full size on the back cover, or as an insert; I was particularly attracted to John Bolton’s art on Batman: Manbat, Kelley Jone’s art on Moench’s Batman run, Kelley Jone’s Deadman covers. An Edwardian Nine Inch Nails video premieres May 13th, 1997: “turn off the sun; pull the stars from the sky.” The first appearances of the Hat Man, a cryptid or folk legend or shadow entity, begin in the suburban United States in the early 2000s. “Oh yes, Mr. Book. I have John Murdoch in mind.” The American Last Man. The perfect drug / the perfect drug. “Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.” On April 12th, 2001, during a broadcast of his show Coast to Coast AM, Art Bell encourages listeners to submit drawings of shadow people. “During the initial phase of a population-based research study of mental and physical health in a socially disadvantaged sample, several participants described experiences with ‘shadow people’ (SP) during a structured psychiatric interview.” Something Awful user Victor Surge first posts the Slender Man on June 10th, 2009. Five years later, two twelve-year-olds lure a friend into the woods near Davids Park, Waukesha, Wisconsin, hoping that a sacrifice will prove his existence. “But in a magical moment it becomes something more than just a clock.” Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, published in 1903, detailed Daniel Paul Schreber‘s ruminations on the order of the world: the “forecourts of heaven,” the universe of the human and material reality, and the souls that populate it, manipulated by God’s nerves. “You don't see shadow dogs or shadow birds or shadow cars. You see shadow people. Standing in doorways, walking behind you, coming at you on the sidewalk.” Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos said one day writer and director Alex Proyas "called me and said he wanted something like an energy that kept re-powering itself, re-creating itself, re-shaping itself, sitting inside a dry piece of human shape.” Spirit Cooking was the first project printer and publisher Jacob Samuel produced with his portable aquatint box, working with Marina Abramović—a performance artist with little printmaking experience—in her Amsterdam studio, in conjunction with a 1996 performance of the same name at an Italian gallery, wherein the artist wrote phrases like “comb your hair with a clear quartz crystal brush, until your memory is released” on the walls, in pig’s blood. On June 18th, 2015, Abramović emails lobbyist and art collector Tony Podesta “I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place.” This correspondence is forwarded to Tony’s brother, White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, obtained in a tranche of emails released by WikiLeaks in 2016, and not only becomes an object of fascination for radio host, John Birch Society disciple, and Occult theorist Alex Jones, but a term of art in American far-right information ecosystems and wellness circles. “I don't care what it has to do with Hillary. I just want to know what the hell it is.” “The night will end with the making of a golden ball, a recipe given to Marina in a Tibetan monastery.” Tulpa, sprul pa, སྤྲུལ་པ. The strangers use the humans as vessels, we are only ever shadowed by ourselves again. An authorless system with no base level. I always expected to be haunted or contacted on a particularly desolate stretch of Oakdale Boulevard, coming back from the movies, nauseated from the artificial butter, simply because Iowa’s flat openness felt like a platform, a conjuring board for metaphysical collapse; headlights disconnected from vehicles, men floating like nightmarish Magrittes until they’re revealed to merely be transformers on utility poles against the distant light pollution. The way the car door closing in the drive echoes off all the garage doors on the block. Was David S. Goyer brought in as a screenwriter simply to provide the ridiculous expository frame, to explain away the too-frightening mystery of a film otherwise set in an unexplained eternal dream? The high pressure sodium lamps, the crickets screaming. “Once in a while someone wakes up; it's not supposed to happen, but it does.” Who converses with the specter—maker or wielder? John Murdoch breaks through the brick wall of one nostalgia and reveals yet another nostalgia; the past or the future past, the limitations of memory embodied. “The idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality.” “You see, death, to us, has nothing to do with the body.” “The self is what takes it back within (zurücknimmt): ‘I’ incorporates the initial incorporation by negating or destroying, by deposing the previous position from its objective exteriority, by de-objectifying the ghost.” The models will always collapse because the recursions can only fail. All of the strangers are men. On March 13th, 1998, the High-Z Supernova Search Team publishes evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate; all of love enduring as a psychic projection of collective memory sent into the stellar void beyond all history and time. 

[Director’s cut]

JOHN M. GANIARD lives and works in Michigan, USA.