DeConick A.D

161
JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
city’s avant-garde buildings slice through brick-and-mortar streets. The
cityscape is altered when the Strangers tune the city and, with a medieval
syringe, Dr. Schreber injects different memories into his human subjects.
Why this gruesome experiment? The aliens want to know what makes
the human being human, to divine what makes humans exceptional creatures.
Will a person imprinted with the memories of a murderer become
a murderer? Or are we more than the sum of our memories? Is there
something else about us that makes us who we are?
In a gripping scene, when Emma, Murdoch’s wife, finds him in prison,
Murdoch tries to explain to her that they are nothing to each other. They
never were husband and wife because their memories of each other are
false memories that the aliens have injected into them. But Emma is not
convinced. She tells him, “I love you, John. You can’t fake something like
that.” Emma is sure that our ability to love transcends everything else
about us, including our memories.
In one of the last scenes, Murdoch encounters the alien Mr. Hand
staggering in the street. Earlier in the film, Mr. Hand had imprinted Murdoch’s
memories onto his own. Now he says to Murdoch, “I’m dying,
John. Your imprint is not agreeable with my kind. But I wanted to know
what it was like. How you feel.”
Murdoch stares at him, realizing at that moment that Emma had been
right. The aliens, by focusing their experiments on human memories,
had been searching in the wrong place for the human soul. He says to
Mr. Hand, “That person isn’t me. Never was. You wanted to know what
it is that makes us human. Well, you’re not going to find it in here.” With
this, Murdoch points dismissively to his head.