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Daniel Poe Schreber: Is Dark City deliberately paying tribute to the Schreber case made famous by Freud?


I thought it was interesting that Kiefer Sutherland's character is named Daniel Poe Schreber which is strikingly similar to Daniel Paul Schreber, the 19th century German judge who documented his paranoid delusions in his autobiographical "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" which Freud made famous by doing a case study on it. It remains a classic of literature grounded in mental illness. The visions Judge Schreber describes include such things as talking birds, magical porticoes that would suddenly appear and disappear in Schreber's asylum, and "Rays of God" which were gradually transforming Schreber's body into that of a woman so that God could impregnate him and repopulate the human race which Schreber believed had died and been replaced with what he called "fleeting improvised men." The phantasmagorical visions are highly similar to the shifting environments and alternate dimensions seen in Dark City. For those familiar with the film and novel, I would be curious if calling one of its major characters Daniel Poe Schreber is a deliberate homage to the case of Judge Schreber.

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In Alex Proyas's director's commentary on the DVD, he mentions Schreber's name and his metallic cage in the final showdown scene were inspired by Daniel Paul Schreber and "Memoirs of my Nervous Illness".

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Terrific! Thanks! I suppose I need to get the disc just so I can hear Proyas mention it. If you've never read "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness", it's quite an experience and the visions somewhat akin to those in "Dark City".

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