Patrick and Spencer dissect Dark City (1998), a sci-fi masterpiece using alien memory manipulation to explore identity, comparing it to The Matrix’s thematic echoes amid late-’90s simulation theories. Walensky’s desperate revelations mirror real-world conspiracy theorists like QAnon, whose rigid beliefs—Trump’s infallibility and "secret wars"—distort reality, hindering problem-solving from climate change to governance. The film’s metaphor of trapped perceptions reveals how ideological pride fuels rejection of evidence, while platforms like Twitter amplify illusions of influence without accountability. Ultimately, Dark City exposes humanity’s vulnerability to manufactured truths, whether by aliens or collective delusion. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is trying to define reality in our own little way.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I just came up with that just now.
So I hope it's good enough.
I hope it's good enough as a tagline.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm here today again with Patrick.
How are you, Patrick?
Patrick, who is also trying to define reality.
And, you know, that's a grip coated with varying degrees of grease from time to time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And one wonders if it's been grease been put there purposely for us.
Yeah.
Make things a little slippery.
Yeah.
Yeah.
On purpose.
So we're here today.
We're going to talk about a movie today.
So spoiler warnings for a movie that's 28 years old this year.
Movie's called Dark City.
You watched this, what was it, just yesterday, right, Patrick?
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting movie.
actually i don't know i feel like before yeah Well, yeah.
Or at the very least, I had seen part of it because the initial flashes of the beach.
And I was just like, I don't know.
I had some weird kind of deja vu, but by the end, I wasn't sure what was going to happen at the end or any of that.
So I feel like it's one of those ones I might have started back in the day and got distracted with something.
So what did you, were you able to understand, generally feel like you were understanding what was happening in this movie when you watched it?
By the end, by the time all the blanks were filled, I did feel like I had a relatively good working picture, at least of the context that everyone in the story was living within.
There for a reason.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Good.
This movie is a good movie and it's an excellent science fiction movie.
Right.
So I'm going to explain what that means to me as I say it.
So it's a good movie.
It's enjoyable.
It has attractive people.
They are doing good at this thing we call acting.
The plot flows.
It doesn't, you know, it doesn't have any like obvious, like, why is this even happening kind of moments?
Even though you don't know what's happening, you realize that they're happening because of the mystery that's slowly being revealed.
Right.
And so, and the writing is good, generally better than average, well above average, which is great.
And so this is a good movie just as a movie itself.
But I say it's excellent science fiction because science fiction is when you're using technology or science, like a scientific thing, to try to isolate certain aspects of like the human condition or certain aspects of like a thematic element to highlight it and to make it stand out more, right?
And that's really what science fiction is doing.
Like some people think science fiction is about, I don't know, like predicting the future or whatever.
That's like some science fiction does that, I guess.
But that's not really what science fiction is about.
It's like, like, for example, in this movie, the elements of the science part are being used to zoom in on memories and what memories mean to us as people, how they inform us as individuals, as, right?
I mean, literally in this movie, we have alien creatures who are with the assistance of a human being.
In this case, in my opinion, one of his greatest roles in Kiefer Sutherland, who is changing around people's memories, chopping them up into different combinations to experiment with them, right?
To see if what this does to them as people, what decisions they make, what will they do, what won't they do when they have these other memories in their person?
We see in this movie, all kinds of things happen with people.
We see one man who's working at a hotel early in the movie, and he says some very distinctive lines.
And then through the course of an investigation, what seems like the same day or really night, because everything is night in this movie, we see a detective go there and we see the man declare what he said, except as a whole different guy, but he's saying the same things.
He says, I told him this.
And he gives the same distinctive lines.
And you get the feeling right away.
This is a completely different person who just has the same memories as the person that was in that, you know, in that spot before, running the front desk of the hotel.
And so we think that maybe they're going to make the same decisions because this guy thinks he has the memories of a whole different person, right?
Like, so it's asking this thematic question.
What is it about you that makes you you?
Is it just your memories or is there something bigger than that?
So in that way, it's asking this question.
And I say it's not like really, really excellent science fiction because really, really excellent science fiction won't try to answer that for you.
And this movie is kind of a little bit providing an answer near the end, right?
In just a small way.
There's a small moment where there's a thing where he's just kind of, you know, he has his kind of moment of a drop the mic moment at the very end, you know, Mr. Hand, the sort of a primary alien that's that's been running around doing bad things in this movie.
He's dying and he's the last of their kind who's there.
And he just, you know, in his last moments, he kind of just wants answers, right?
And our hero says, you went looking in the wrong places.
You were looking up here and you should have been looking somewhere else.
And he's kind of referring to like the soul, the human soul, but he can't really point to a spot because there's no spot to point to.
There's no, you know, like, where would you say your soul is?
Is it in here?
Is it in your chest?
Is it in, is it behind your eyes?
Is it, you know, like we don't know where the soul might be?
And if it is somewhere, it probably is in your brain.
So it seems weird to say that you wouldn't look there.
Just follow the sound of rattling.
Yes.
Yeah, right.
So, yeah, he does kind of provide some kind of answer there, which is, which is a sort of a letdown, I think.
For me anyway, it's a letdown because I think it would have been better overall if he didn't try to answer that and therefore just left everyone kind of with a thought to try to answer that themselves instead of going home with a feel-good sense of, yeah, that's right.
I know who I am.
I'm I'm more than just my memories.
I'm I'm also a good person that would make all the right decisions despite any memories I have, which is, I don't know.
But he's also, he's also not definitive.
But yeah, he's only just said you didn't go looking in the right place.
Well, that still leaves the viewer to be like, oh, if I need that level of specificity, I can define that for myself.
And if not, then at least I can walk away, you know, satisfied that maybe one of the core essential facets of humanity is the mystery of existence, right?
Whatever it is, it's that undistillable je de sequa.
Yeah.
And like I say, like you're right.
He didn't really hammer it home.
He didn't like go into a huge long, you know, Shakespearean speech about it where he, you know. goes on and on about it.
He just said a one-liner, much like a he also really wanted to get to the beach, right?
Well, also, yeah, but he kind of wanted to say an F you to the alien on his way out the door because it's Hollywood movie, right?
Yeah.
And you kind of have to have that moment of final conflict at the end, you know, face-off moment after the action of, yeah, I win and you die.
And on that.
It kind of puts an earnest face on that alien race, right?
You know, at the end, they're not spouting any sort of like vile wish for the, for the guy, like, you'll die anyway.
He's just like, what was it?
What was it really?
Like they just really, really, really wanted to know, you know, in their last attempt to survive.
And maybe that's what we all want in the end.
Sometimes maybe we all look a little ugly when we're trying the hardest we can to try and go down the wrong way of figuring something out, but we're still doing our best.
Yeah.
And in that way, we do kind of rub up against what's probably, you know, the point of the movie if there is a moral to be had from it, which is that not everything that's done in an effort to do, you know, do science is necessary something that we should do.
For sure.
We should maybe be a little cautious of some of the lines that we might cross.
It's the idea that you did it just to find out isn't enough of a reason necessarily.
And so, yeah.
Mr. Hand and by extension, the rest of his alien, I have to call them aliens.
They're never given any other name.
They are clearly not human.
And they're in a spaceship.
So it's kind of.
And we never know, we're never given other names for them, right?
The name of their species is never said in the course of the movie.
And thankfully, no one ever tried to build an entire extended universe around this film.
It gets to be just its own standalone thing and they move on.
How brilliant is that?
Why can we move back to that?
The one and done.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Like the Dark City 2 and then the new aliens show up.
Even darker.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Turn the planet back upside down.
Face it again away from this.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So we never get a name for this alien species, but we have this moment where of showdown at the end.
And we, yeah, we say F you to the aliens because you shouldn't be doing this.
This is inhumane to do to people.
So we should get down to the, because we're, I'm, I'm saying that I'm doing this not just because I want to talk about movies.
I do want to talk about movies, Patrick, but we want to be doing this in relation to how it relates to conspiracy thinking, conspiracy mindsets and conspiratorial thinking.
And I think clearly this movie is, for many people, is fairly clearly has those elements, right?
But first, I think we should mention the comparisons that are often made between this movie and The Matrix.
Okay.
These movies, it might not seem obvious at first, but this movie is so similar to the bare bones part of the plot of The Matrix that some people have even said that The Matrix ripped this movie off.
But I need to be clear that that did not happen.
This movie was released in 1998.
The Matrix was released in 1999 and had a much longer time development time.
So these movies would have been written at around the same time frame.
And actually, like what we know of the Wachowskis and their process for The Matrix was that it was actually most of it was written quite a bit before, many years before that took them a long time to get The Matrix made, right?
And they made some changes in the writing along the way, but Matrix was probably technically written first, but you didn't, you don't, I don't think you have to stretch to come up with the bare bone structure of these two side by side without like, I don't think it's a sign that they copied each other's notes to get here.
Like this, the place where both of these are is similar places because of the way we were as a society and the way we write stories.
I mean, this is just a classic story of a person that knows nothing and has some secret power and therefore has to save the world.
I mean, essentially, that's also the plot of nearly every fantasy fiction we've ever had.
It's a plot of Star Wars.
It's the plot of Lord of the Rings.
It's the plot of Dune, right?
Wheel of Time.
Wheel of Time.
Right.
All of these other great stories that we have, that's the essential bare bones part of that plot.
The only other ways in which these are also similar is that, okay, they are an entire population of humans trapped by an alien force that they have no idea about.
And they're in what's like a simulation.
So, yeah.
Okay.
But that was easy to come to in 1998.
I mean, there was a couple other movies, and I'm not going to name them right here, that have similar themes.
And we were coming up to is the whole all of existence, a simulation.
That idea was coming up in our general zeitgeist much more often in the 90s.
And this is why it comes up as themes in many movies of that time.
Well, I think the theme had been alive in print for decades.
But the advent of the rise of computation and the proliferation of computers in the home and things like that really started to be like, well, where does this go?
Because we are definitely on a trajectory of sorts.
Yeah.
It provided a believable framework for us to buy into a story that had that as its plot element, right?
Trajectory Of Knowledge00:15:43
The McGuffin.
This one is, oh, yeah.
Well, this one, like with the science fiction end, it's not just the injection and retrieval of these memories.
It's the way they are able to stop time for a period of time and the way they, you know, he begins to manipulate, you know, the whole idea of tuning really starts.
Well, bullet time, it's like bullet time, I understand, right?
Because he's become a greater part of the code.
Yeah, exactly.
So if you're on the rails and you just make your engine go faster, you get somewhere faster.
But in this, the whole thing of tuning, by the end, I didn't realize that or even that I didn't feel like I was like, oh, yeah, that all makes sense.
Like Matrix did feel a lot tidier in that regard for.
Yeah.
I mean, tuning is.
Like it was the beach.
It was the beach outside the door that I was just like, oh, okay.
So he's basically just gone through the door of godhood, right?
Because we saw the city.
Yeah.
And one imagination.
We saw what the detective saw when he spun out into space there, too, right?
Like we saw the perspective of the city.
We know what he walked out through that door to see was not a possibility of that physical construct.
So what has taken place with him, you know, the end of that movie just really just started to explode.
Yeah, he's, he has essentially ascended to godhood.
He can make an entire sea appear at the edge of the city and that was not there before.
Before it was just an empty wall and no one even knew how to get there.
Yeah.
But I felt first I needed to point that out and point out that it is ridiculous.
There is it's not it's not a conspiracy that these movies were similar in theme or in plot element, I should say.
They're actually much different in theme.
But some of the plot elements are similar, but that's just because of the time in which they were made.
Coincidence still exists.
Sorry.
It's yeah.
Yeah.
It's a bigger coincidence.
People are talking about perception in general, right?
So yeah, there's always going to be elements of overlap with that, you know, like that structure, like you said.
You know, both both protagonists are start off completely at the mercy of captors who rely on remaining undetected.
Yeah.
Then they escape that captivity and then they gain powers and then they it's a hero's journey, right?
It's just a hero's journey.
That's what it is.
It's the same thing that's been happening since ancient times.
So yeah, but I want to talk about a couple elements here.
I have a couple moments.
We're going to do a couple of audio clips for anyone who's watching on YouTube.
I'm only going to do the audio clips.
I don't like the mean messages I get from the YouTube algorithm that tells me all kinds of things about, you know, if someone doesn't like this, it's going to come down or you blah, blah, blah.
I don't care.
I just want to get the point across that this was the moment we're talking about.
If you haven't even seen the movie, I don't even know why you're here.
Sorry.
Sorry.
We're spoiling the entire movie.
Yeah.
And it's an excellent movie.
I think everyone should watch it.
It's an it's enjoyable for sure.
Yeah.
Yes.
Load up the popcorn.
Let's go.
So loading up the popcorn, we're going to load up our first clip here.
This is fairly early in the film.
And very good actor William Hurt is also, I think this is one of William Hurt's best roles.
I've found him to be rather bland in a lot of movies, actually.
I've heard he's a really nice guy, but, you know, good actor, but often seeming like he's just doing the same role over and over again.
But this feels like it's still a much different role than all the others.
And so I like it a lot more.
I like to give William Hurt a little bump every now and then.
I think he's probably done acting now.
He's very, very old.
But I think this is one of his best.
I think what he was doing really came across in this film.
So here we go.
This is probably going to come through with the audio feedback thing.
So if you talk, then you'll probably hear your voice twice, just so you know.
Here we go.
Whatever kind of cop Walensky once was, he let drift a long time ago.
Let me talk to Bonfess!
Frank!
Frick!
Whoa!
Get us off!
They're watching us!
On your feet!
There's no way out!
Can't you see?
Let it go!
Let it go!
I'm not going to work here!
What was that?
Wolensky.
Yeah.
So that was Walensky.
That was the moment in the picture where they have a detective.
He's shown up to a murder investigation.
There was a guy that worked on this murder investigation before.
His name was Walensky.
And then he just bursts into the middle of this scene, raving, seemingly raving lunatic and trying to tell everyone about what he sees as the truth, which is not what anyone else sees as the truth, right?
So immediately we have this idea of conflicting realities.
Walensky's reality, seemingly, is that he is living in a fake world in which there's no way out.
You can't leave the city.
There's other people of some kind that are doing this, inflicting some kind of obscene control on everyone.
And to everyone else, everyone else is just working the night shift, man.
They're just doing their jobs.
They're investing, you know, William Heard is investigating his murder case and he just wants to, you know, find the killer and go home.
He's very good at his job.
He thinks that his whole life has been living up to this moment where he's slowly gotten good at his job.
And in fact, he's just had memories of another person who went through all that stuff that injected into his mind.
And yeah, but this moment of Walensky, this is sort of like the view of the conspiracy theorist, the person that's trying to tell everyone what they see as the truth.
And then the truth that no one else sees, right?
And I am always somewhat fascinated by this notion that a person that feels like what we see as a person who's entered into this sort of conspiratorial thinking.
Once a person crosses a certain threshold and they feel like they've gained some like secret knowledge about the nature of how reality exists.
And that knowledge is much different than what they feel everyone else thinks is the real way everything exists.
And they feel that they know the thing that no one else knows.
Once they get past a certain threshold, I feel like it's very, very common and almost like part of the equation that they feel compelled to tell as many people as possible.
They're almost unable to contain it in a way that would be different than like, you know like.
If you felt, if you felt that you knew the future and you knew what the lottery numbers were for the upcoming draw, you could for sure keep it to yourself, like you might brag that you know them, but you would never tell anyone the numbers, right?
No no, because the numbers represent some kind of gain for you, A singular gain that I can't multiply by telling people.
Well, if 20 people all had the numbers, it would just divide the race, which I could do having the numbers by myself if I really wanted to.
I could just divide it in 20 and give it away.
I don't know that.
See, okay, so if I was going to look at this.
Maybe it's not a perfect metaphor, right?
Maybe what I just came up with there wasn't a perfect metaphor, but if you knew something that gave you, like you would feel like if you knew that there was, if you were in Dark City and you were Walensky and you some, you know, you knew that there was an other, there was a creepy series of aliens that were reprogramming people or whatever, and also that you were trapped in the city.
There was no way out.
That we're all trapped in the city, though.
Well, that's the truth that we'll leave.
No one else feels trapped because they don't ever try to leave.
Right.
They're deceived.
Right.
They're living deceived.
Yes.
That would be an advantage for you that would be because you know things that no one else knows.
Like he gains nothing by trying to tell it by trying to tell this to everyone.
But in fact, he gets a loss from trying to tell everyone because they think he's a lunatic of some of some description, right?
He loses his job.
He can't function anymore.
He's not able to participate in all the regular things because he's too focused on the fact in his mind that it just doesn't matter.
None of this matters, right?
Well, I don't know that he's saying that none of it matters, but I do feel like he's engaging in a trade that blends both, or at least considers both the moral outcome and the comfort of existence, right?
So like you said, he's taking losses by trying to bring this to people's attention.
But in his own essence, the cost to his own sense of being would be a higher cost to pay keeping quiet about it and accepting a greater level of comfort, right?
So he's making the exchange knowing that he's risking his ability to exist and survive.
But maybe he's also hoping that by doing what he considers is the right thing is that increased numbers of people waking up, so to speak, out of this delusion, then improve his chances of living in peace or actually feeling like he's apprehending reality the way it is.
But, you know, we all get something from a sense of community by sharing that same sense that we're all looking at the same thing here, right?
Not every single value has to be aligned, but at least that consensus reality taking place is the underlying bedrock of anything that emerges into a sense of community.
Yeah, but I think Personally, I think that, and this is sort of an idea in development in my mind, this idea that the people who sort of come across this knowledge,
this what they feel is like special knowledge of what they would call the true nature of the world, they feel like that knowledge is special and precious and denying it in any way is some kind of,
it would be akin to a highly devout person denying the existence of God, essentially, because they place it with that level of importance in their mind.
And this is sort of an idea I've been toying with a little bit.
I am still kind of working on it.
It's not totally a thing yet, but I do see this in some people where they appear to be unable to not give the answer that leads to a social negative for them.
I'm sorry.
I need a little help with that one.
Like, okay, like Walensky in this case, right?
Like if people were asking him about the nature of what he thinks is real with regard to their existence in a city, he would be, we imagine, unable to tell them any answer other than like, oh, we are definitely not who we think we are.
We are chopped up memories.
We are rewritten nightly.
We are living in a city that we can't get out of.
There's no way out.
Aliens come by and inject us with things that give us memories, things like that, right?
And I see this when I interact with people who are, as the saying goes, pilled, you know, under the idea that they have a different reality than I do.
I see this with some things.
And it's really stark with something like, like, it's been noted by people who do this, that many people who, for example, feel that vaccines are harmful also feel that the Holocaust didn't occur the way that history says it occurred.
So we have these two very different ideas that are both unreal.
One being anti-vax and the other being Holocaust denial.
And you don't really, it's not in any way clear why you might have to, why the belief in Holocaust denial could ever help you or lead you in any way to further belief in anti-vax ideas, right?
Which I put it that way, because other pairs of ideas, there is a direct connection.
So something like flat earth and denial of the moon landing, there's an obvious connection.
Unreal Beliefs Connection00:10:32
In order to want to believe the earth is flat, you also pretty much have to believe that we did not go to the moon.
So a belief, a denial in the moon landing is a belief that assists in belief in flat earth.
Yeah, they're complementary in that.
Well, you don't need the earth to be flat in order to believe the moon landing didn't happen, but you pretty much have to believe the other way.
So you pretty much, it would be extremely rare, and I've never found it, that a person believes the earth is flat, but also believes we went to the moon.
Yeah, they pretty much have to believe the other just to just to assist believing the one.
But that's not clearly not the case with anti-vax beliefs and Holocaust denial.
They're so far separated from each other in aspect and plot and theme and all the other things that make up a conspiracy story that there's just no connective tissue, except that very, very often when I find someone who's very, very strongly anti-vax and I ask them what happened to the Jewish population of Poland in World War II, I very often get the wrong answer.
as in the answer that's not historically correct.
And this is also a case where the answer that's the right answer, the answer that's historically correct is very well known.
It's, it's, you know, in the Western world, it would be extremely unlikely that someone didn't really know what they should say.
But it's like, and they know that there's, you know, they're maybe arguing for their anti-vax views at the time, and they're pushing for it to try to convince people that vaccines are bad.
But then you ask them this question, and many of them seem almost unable to give you the answer that they believe is true.
It's like certain software only runs on certain computers.
And those certain computers seem to have overlap.
My current thought is that, like, and there's a lot of thought into why they would run across Holocaust denial beliefs while they're looking at anti-vax stuff.
And there's been a lot of work on that.
But I think there's also something to the idea that they're almost compelled to give the Holocaust denial answer once they believe it.
Because these things, these parts of their own subjective reality that are different from objective reality, what I call unreality, are things that become sacred beliefs in their mind.
And in doing so, it becomes what would amount to like a sin to deny them.
Like you or I could lie.
Like if we were, I don't know, let's say we were some alternate universe.
We were, I don't know, trying to infiltrate.
Let's say there was an anti-vax group that was also, you know, terrorists and we were spies and we were undercover trying to infiltrate this group.
And we knew that they had answers that the answer they would give about Holocaust denial would be that they would deny the Holocaust.
To us, we believe that the Holocaust happened.
When we're infiltrating that group, we're perfectly able to lie about the Holocaust.
It doesn't hurt us in that context to lie about and tell them when they ask us about what happened to the Jewish population of Poland in World War II.
It wouldn't really harm us or our souls or any other part of our psyche to say, oh, I'm not sure I believe that.
That's blah, blah, blah.
And give all the wrong answers, as I say.
But it appears like it's like, and these are people who are like, I talk to on Twitter, they're random.
They don't have any real social stake in the situation, but they do know that they lose a lot of clout in the argument by giving the wrong answer on the Holocaust, but they do it anyway.
So it feels like a situation where they would be giving up on a sacred belief by giving the answer that they don't believe is true.
And that's sort of where I'm at on that.
It's like I say, it's an idea that I'm still kind of working on making sure I can, I'm able to properly get, you know, and fully articulate in all the aspects.
But I think that's sort of where it sits.
And this is what I see with Walensky when I watch things like this, where it fits with he's a fictional person, but he's unable to give the answer other than like, no, no, we're trapped.
We're trapped in this city.
We can't get out.
There is no, you know, he would give all the answers that he knows the other people around him think are the wrong answer.
But he's almost compelled to try to tell them this, even though it will lead to all the negatives in his life.
So, yeah, I think that I think there's something about these unreal beliefs that lead to this, this terrible thing.
And I think that I, I mean, I think it's a obviously it's a, it's a very good thing that we should try to push back on them because it would lead to very bad outcomes for just a, now a staggeringly large percentage of the population, really.
Yeah.
It seems like every day the stakes are higher.
Well, yeah, stakes politically higher, but like imagine trying to train up an army of like, let's say the people who truly believe in all of the election denial narratives and also all of the, as part of that, all of the bigoted culture war narratives and racist narratives and all that stuff.
Imagine trying to help all of those people back to reality and thinking that you might need each of them to see a psychologist.
We're not going to have nearly enough psychologists.
We're never going to be able to train psychologists fast enough to ever have enough of them to ever do that.
We need another way.
In order to bring that many people back to a place where they are having, they're able to access like deal with objective reality in a way where they're not just ignoring it.
They're going to need, we're going to need another way to do that.
We're going to need another way to reach them.
Yeah.
So, and the what appears to be maybe, you know, some level of true psychological damage from just rejecting reality in this way.
You know, this becomes then the epidemic.
I mean, this is the mind virus.
This is as much as Elon Musk will say that, you know, empathy for trans people is the mind virus.
The willingness to give up reality is the mind virus, if there is one.
And so, yeah, I already already got up on a soapbox here.
Wow.
That's a good soapbox.
I think, yeah.
And I think that I also think that no other large problem will ever be able to be solved if objective reality doesn't sway opinions.
Like try to solve any climate problem if showing people the real climate data doesn't sway them.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And we are seeing that, right?
We're already seeing that.
Yeah.
It requires accuracy.
It requires precision.
Right.
And that's just efficient resource utilization.
Well, also, it requires them to just not just dismiss it as soon as they see it, which they're already doing.
So, I mean, it's not a future time that I'm looking at.
I'm not predicting the future here.
I'm reading the present.
It just really seems like everything is based on what timeframe we're applying things to, right?
People who are very concentrated on the near future, the next five years, 10 years exclusively have a vastly different view about the reality they're looking at because different views of reality would not support a hundred year or thousand year view of like, you know, the long-term considerations, right?
There's a lot of assumption that that can, if it's getting kicked down the road, it's because they put a lot of work into that road to have that can go forever.
But it's it's a it's not a great assumption, right?
Because it does not allow us to be effective.
Yeah.
I mean, the ability to the ability to show someone something as proof and that they understand that that is proof of the thing.
That's a essential part of communication that is in jeopardy now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's just so tough to get people to even approach anything with an open-mindedness towards, you know, because I always try and approach things with an open-mindedness.
If there's something that I'm not thinking about correctly, I really want to be corrected.
I get over that shit in a hurry if it's the case that I was wrong, because then the me that's now right gets to, you know, advance into a better future.
But a lot of people are just, they're never, ever going to get over their pride.
And you see them get caught like dead to right being wrong about shit or being unable to produce anything like evidence to support their positions.
And they just double down in the next most inflammatory direction while they try to kick up enough dust that eventually you don't even know where they're touching down.
It shares the truth enough that they feel like they, you know, blended it in enough that it, you know.
A Moment in Dark City00:06:16
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's really sad.
It's sad to see.
Like it's, it's aggravating for people.
It's frustrating for people.
For me, when I see it, it's just like, oh, this, I don't like this person's chances, right?
Like, what are they using to make the rest of their decisions?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're going to, we're going to circle back to the actual podcast that we're doing here, which is about Dark City.
Well, we were using Dark City to talk about life, and now we're going to go back to Dark City.
Yeah, right.
So it can happen.
Yeah.
I have another clip that was a moment from the movie that reminded me of an aspect of conspiratorial thinking.
So we're going to just, we're just going to play it.
Here it is.
So that was a moment in the film.
Our hero, the man with no memory of anything because he was never given any, is, you know, and his name is John, conveniently.
And he's also the only person who doesn't fall under the spell of the aliens as they're doing their, you know, what must be seemingly twice daily routine of resetting the night,
Where they stop time and then wander out into the city to, you know, reprogram memories and change what buildings look like and and uh, they take at that moment where they're doing that they really neat moment.
They take a family, this a couple that's poor and arguing over how often the the husband has to work night shift to and eating like what looks like very low brow food and wearing very low brow clothes, and they turn them into a rich couple that's.
That's talking about all the rich hoity-toity stuff and they rewrite their memories and that's all a very interesting scene that it adds to the theme dramatically.
But uh, in this exact moment we have uh sort of a crossover.
We we saw Walensky, who was a person who ostensibly knew that the programming was happening and that you're trapped in the city, and now we have this hero character learning more about how this works and he's learning.
You know what this is and he's banging on all the cars in the street telling everyone to wake up, and so we get this direct metaphor.
I mean, the whole movie is a metaphor right, Dark City.
It's a metaphor for the light being a revelation, a revelatory force.
When you're in in the darkness, you don't know things.
At the end of the movie, he flips the spaceship around, so it's facing the sun and you get the day again and everyone knows things.
Now finally, it's a it's it's a little on the nose actually, but whatever, it's a nice little name uh, but he's, he's here this, this other metaphor is, of course, the ever-present metaphor about knowing things, and not knowing things is that of being asleep.
Things can happen while you're asleep that you don't know about.
In this case, the whole city is asleep at the same time and everyone doesn't know what's happening.
And then they wake up and they just carry on about their uh night essentially and um, they never, ever see the day.
Uh they, they never, never know what's really happening, and that's the how that works.
So he's trying to wake them up.
I mean, he's literally trying to wake them up because maybe he thinks that it's bad for them to be asleep, but he's also metaphorically trying to wake them up because he wants them to know the same things he knows.
He wants, as you say, like what Wilensky was probably trying to do, get assistance in learning more about the nature of the existence, if he has uh um allies, if he has other people that see things the way he sees them, then they can collectively work together to work more on how they're the aliens are doing what they're doing.
Um, he's essentially going to be leading up to the same thing.
How is he going to do this, right?
How is he going to?
As you say, this is also uh, his way of finding out that they are not merely sleeping, you know, because people who are merely sleeping will wake up when you scream in their face, no yeah right, right.
He's discovering that everybody This is more than just being impacted by a force.
Yeah.
Yeah, that this is more than that.
And of course, he's also in some ways learning about the things that can be done with this tuning, as it's called, which is an extremely simple name.
To me, it's very, very obvious that the power that's had through tuning is not really the point because they didn't try to work on the you know Star Trek lab manual version of exactly how the tuning occurs.
It's just whatever.
The aliens just do stuff, call it tuning.
That's not the point.
The point is that, you know, is it your memories that make you a person, right?
If everything was different and you were tricked into not knowing it, would you really pay attention, right?
So yeah, that's just was a moment to me that brought about this idea of the one person that knows the secret and is trying to let everyone else in on it in this weird way.
How did this moment grab you, Patrick?
Oh, you know, it's just the standard issue of powerlessness.
Detective's First Meeting00:04:09
Right.
And he's just, he's, he's coping with that fact the only way he knows how by, you know, exercising the loudest thing that he can be, which is this yelling man in the street.
Right.
But it's also, I think, you know, anybody really confronts that for the first time, there's going to be an element of panic because that's very, very strange thing to be witness to, right?
But it is also, he must go through this learning curve to then discover that, oh, okay, well, these agents are able to move around when all this is happening.
And of course, you know, it begins many different kind of little chase scenes with the hidden doors and whatnot.
But you know, he's he's growing into awareness of this world and all these mechanizations.
Learning slowly.
And through him learning it, we're learning more about it too, right?
That's also an aspect.
We learn about it through his perspective.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
I think I need to dwell too much on that.
It was even as it was, it was itself almost on the nose.
He's literally just yelling, wake up, which is the metaphor for, you know, realize the situation you're in, right?
Yeah.
It's today's conspiracist playbook, right?
Yeah.
Because yell wake up at everyone.
Yeah.
When will you wake up?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think we'll go on to my, I only have three clips, just one more.
Okay.
We're going to jump to it here.
And do I need a setup for this clip?
What?
Oh, right.
This is the this movie, this, this movie, I'm going to close that down again.
This movie has this interesting element where there's a large number of sort of one-on-one conversations.
So you get like the one moment where the detective first meets John.
And you also get the moment where the detective first meets Kiefer Sutherland.
And you also get the first moment where Kiefer Sutherland meets the wife, Jennifer Connolly.
And you also get the moment where the detective first meets Jennifer Connolly.
And then you also get the one-on-one moment where John finally meets his own wife, ostensibly his own wife, Jennifer Connolly.
And you get these all these many, many one-on-one moments that are really actually really well-written, good dialogue.
I can't remember the name of the person that wrote this movie.
He is famous, but not like famous like Quentin Tarantino or anything.
But he is a well-known writer and director.
And he made, wrote all these, and they're all very, very good.
This is one of those.
Okay.
This is the moment where Walensky meets John.
So ostensibly.
Oh, down in the subway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So essentially, like these three clips kind of nicely run together.
We have Wolensky being the sort of like craze lunatic.
And then we have John having his moment of, I wouldn't call it insanity.
He's more like just heightened worry, trying to wake everyone up.
But in so sort of mirroring what we saw from Walensky, where Wolensky was like wanting to let everyone know what the secret of the world was.
And in this moment, we get the two of them meeting, right?
So let's just get to it here.
Here we go.
Hey, how come the train didn't stop?
That's the express.
Conspiracies and Dead Ends00:04:05
There's no way out, you know.
You can't get out of the city.
Believe me, I've tried.
New Murdoch, aren't you?
The one they've been looking for.
For you, used to be a cop.
At least, in this life, I was.
They steal people's memories, you know.
Then they swap them around between us.
I've seen them do it back and forth, back and forth, till no one knows who they are anymore.
How do you know all this?
Once in a while, one of us wakes up while they're changing things.
It's not supposed to happen, but it does.
It happened to me.
They'll come looking for you, Murdoch.
Just like they'll come looking for me.
But that's okay.
I figured a way out.
Oh, pour one out for Walensky.
Mm-hmm.
Goodbye, sweet soldier.
Yeah, he figured a way out.
He took the one choice that was fully open to him.
It was kind of sad.
Man, that was pretty urgent.
It would have been very considerate of him to stop and explain that before he stepped out in front of the train, but he's like, I've got it.
Watch this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have it.
Yeah, it's solved.
So, yeah, the way that conspiracies can lead, can feel like a dead end is present here.
The way that it feels like there isn't a way out, the way it can kind of trap a person in a life, a reality that is much, much smaller than actual reality.
Even though a person who has these beliefs and whatever will feel that they're more real, they still have far fewer choices.
They still have because they often aren't participating as much in society.
This is a thing that a person that I know who's been on this podcast before said, not on the podcast, but in a different conversation, that he, When he believed in conspiracies deeply, he made a lot of decisions that led to that were poor decisions for his life.
For example, he didn't in any way try to buy a home.
He didn't ever save money to buy a home.
He didn't do anything because he felt that that was worthless.
To participate in society that way, because of the nature that he thought was real about society right, and this um, you know, set him on a different path than it would have if he had made choices that led to buying a home right, obviously.
So I mean, that alone is, I mean, and he the, the things that led to that decision were part of feeling of disconnection with the world as we see it as objective reality would lay it out for us um, and so yeah this this uh, that that's a, that's a factor in this, that the world is smaller when you're um,
confined in that way it, in some ways, right now, when people are uh, deep in on Q Anon beliefs, right now that world probably doesn't feel very small.
Because right now and I follow twitter accounts right now that that know all the, all the cue drops and by heart, and which number they are like, and can cite that stuff chapter and verse, just like a devout man would a bible, but these are people.
Cue Drops and Q Anon Beliefs00:08:07
I don't even know what cue drops are.
Well okay, that's for different podcasts, but Q And On as a set of beliefs came about very brief version, one minute version.
Q And On as a set of beliefs came about shortly after Trump first got into power in 2017, um, as a, as an extension of what was um.
You you did hear about a guy who showed up at a pizza parlor shortly after Trump took office who tried to save all the children right, the cue drops were an extension of that and it ex it.
It took like a single set of of ideas that were cribbed uh as a set of unreal ideas that were meant to lose the election for Hillary Clinton, and they contributed to expand those into a uh, an expanded cinematic universe of what is now Q And On, and it started with uh, what appears to be a random person who just started uh larping live action, role-playing himself.
We presume it's a him himself as a member of a super secret uh spy that's close to Trump in the administration and going to communicate to the patriots what the real thing was of what was going on with Trump.
And people bought this and they followed along and they developed a whole extra story around it with a whole series of extra things, but that added um uh uh, essentially like an element of war or something essentially additional material to a story, plot elements to a story that would have flopped on its own earlier, but it had extra story elements to keep going.
So instead of being one single Dark City movie, it instead became the uh Extended Universe Dark City that had extra extra, extra movies, part four five, six and seven and eight, right um, that seemingly won't end now um, and so that's essentially what Q Anon beliefs are.
And right now, like what happened with Q Anon beliefs, was that real politicians and real uh, would-be right-wing influencers picked up on them and some of them used the slogans and the, the language from the Qdrops, as part of their political speech and this gave it much more life.
So Mike Flynn famously took a picture of himself with his family in his backyard with the slogan, where we go one, we go all, which was a Q Anon slogan.
It's a very strangely worded thing.
It's very unique and it's usually uh, just the initials wwg one wg, a is usually how it's put as a you know small thing and and Trump now has many times thrown out um, Q Anon language whenever you hear anyone talking about the storm.
That's the Q speech was a lot about the storm um, and now we have, as of the last few months, we have individual departments in the?
U.s framework of the.
The greater bureaucracy that governs it we're talking like Department Homeland Security and that sort of thing that are on their individual twitter accounts are using direct quotes from the q drops in those quotes, so like it's mainstream in the Trump administration now.
So, to the people who follow those beliefs, they probably don't feel like their world is very small because they believe that they're winning, that their, their guy is in charge and they are, you know, as more and more of the individual uh, um agencies and this sort of thing throw out these slogans, they come to a stronger and stronger belief that they're their side their their, the side that they imagine is is there, whatever that exactly looks like to them.
Their side is winning in this secret war and for them it's a secret war against Hillary Clinton and the pedophiles.
Um, strangely also um, not big on releasing the Epscene files, but that's a whole other story.
Um yeah yeah, but because the central q and on essentially is a.
It's uh, a systematic reinterpretation of reality as new events happen.
So it's, it's a, it's a live.
It's not us, it's not a movie, it's not a play, It's not something that was pre-written.
Right now, it is essentially trying to actively reinterpret every new thing that happens to be a part of their narrative.
And it's being done by 40 or 50 different influencers, roughly speaking, 40 or 50 different influencers who are all trying to add in their little bit of the narrative.
And in this way, it becomes crowdsourced storytelling as a way to, you know, create their story, their reality.
But so their reality is not well defined by what it actually is.
It's much more well defined by what its goal is.
And its goal has two central tenets.
Trump has never been wrong.
And whatever Trump does is the right thing to do.
And those are two, it's two immovable things.
So everything in reality has to shift itself to make room for these things, no matter what Trump does.
And in that way, they feel like they're got something.
But always, whenever there's a new part of objective reality that interferes with the previous things they've done, they have to ditch some of those beliefs.
They have to actively change what they're believing.
I mean, all that stuff is true.
So to them, it must feel like it's not quite as small as it probably would if they, you know, had some other set of beliefs that were more narrow.
There's probably enough people showing up to those meetings too that if you're part of a thing where you don't know everybody's name, it's always going to feel like it's big, right?
Yeah.
Well, Twitter makes a lot of people feel like they're big already.
Right.
Yeah.
It'll feel like you're big because you, you know, you might get a tweet every once in a while that gets a huge number of likes or retweets or whatever it is.
It just hits the right mood at the right time with the right people that gave it the right push at the right thing.
And all the things happen so that you get to ride that surfing wave for that little bit of time.
It always, it will make some people feel that way.
And it always feels like there's a sea of people that are potentially maybe going to turn your their head in your direction at any moment.
But it's not.
That's not as, you know, that's the illusion.
And mostly these people aren't having like real meetings.
They're only meeting online.
They're a lot of them are still not identifying themselves as who they really are as people.
Some of them have gone places and, you know, like January 6th, a bunch of them were at January 6th.
And so some through that event and some other events, some of their identities have come to be known, some of the influencers, but still there's a large number that are actively trying to obscure exactly who they are.
And one wonders what they're afraid of.
Their guy is in charge.
Like, you know, but their world probably doesn't feel as small as what it likely will feel eventually.
Once, once they, I mean, reality will likely always win in the end.
As my friend was just saying the other day, the arc.
The Solo Movie Mystery00:04:10
Yeah.
Yeah.
The arc tends to bend toward justice.
Right.
Sometimes it's not bending fast enough, but it does in the long run.
Yeah.
Sometimes it also like whips back and forth across and just briefly cross it at a sharp angle.
Yeah.
It is all yeah, yeah, bending towards justice.
Yeah.
But yeah.
Well, and we also usually try to assume that justice is reality.
It's also not totally always true, sorry to those people who've been incarcerated unfairly, but uh yeah um, I think we've probably beat this one to death.
I think I think we hit this one hard enough on several nails that it it holds up against the wall.
Yeah no, I think we had good coverage and it was a good movie, like you said.
So it was.
It was definitely worth a while.
Very good movie um, and no, do we know what's not a copy of the matrix?
No, what's what's our next movie?
I am going to uh call an audible I mean, not a true audible, because i'm not doing it uh, in the moment that we're about to start the podcast but um, it's.
It is one that I didn't mention before.
Okay, we're gonna do the bulk of the Star Wars cinematic universe.
Oh, insofar as you don't really need to watch anything.
But uh like, if anyone's gonna watch any one movie that will get picked on when we do this, it's gonna be the solo movie, the Han Solo.
It was just called Solo, A Star Wars Story, I think it was called.
Okay yeah yeah, I don't recall if I saw that one.
I think I saw Rogue One.
Yeah, was solo like the next kind of standalone yeah, peripheral movie that came after one, it was like a couple years after it was in between a couple of them.
Yeah, it was just kind of connecting tissue.
But because that that's, that's what I want to hit, I don't, I don't really want to spend a lot of time on the main plot points and and story parts and everything else of the the Star Wars Uh movies themselves, like the episodes one to nine and whatever.
I want to hit the connective tissue because to me that's where.
That's where the element is.
It'll all make sense once we do it.
Once we do it.
But if there's any one movie that i'm going to pick on the most, it's going to be solo.
So if we're watching one, watch solo and then we're going to talk about how we treat the Star Wars Cinematic Universe and uh it's, there's going to be some soapboxing.
I'll let you know in advance.
Cool, I have.
I have not taken in any of the Star Wars Uh Extended Universe stuff.
I've watched the nine movies and that's it.
So oh, and rogue one, I know for sure I watched and i've maybe watched.
So i'm not sure, but I will this time for sure.
Um, i'm probably going to uh, when we go to do it.
I'm probably going to uh go and find a bunch of things online where uh, that's actually not even movies.
I I might not even you be using clips.
We'll see how it goes.
Um yeah, but Star Wars.
Star Wars is next.
It's going to be fun.
Okay, sounds good.
All right so uh, with that, if anyone has any questions comments complaints, concerns about anything they heard on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com, and you can find me uh, laboring away on twitter trying to uh discover more about uh, the nature of how people come to unreal beliefs there at Spencer G Watson and um other than that, you know where to find me.