Rewatch/Rewind: Strange Days
Let's dive back into Kathryn Bigelow's underrated stylish, grimy technothriller.
(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)
Sometimes, I get it wrong. More often than not, when I’ve gotten it wrong it’s by holding a movie in higher esteem than it probably deserves. For instance, up until I was a teenager I would have told you that Steven Spielberg’s 1941 was one of the funniest movies ever made, when really it was just one of the loudest, and not very funny at all1. Conversely, I used to disdainfully refer to The Blues Brothers as a “bro movie,” when actually (while also still being very loud) it’s quite funny2. We learn, we grow, we accept that the “how much for de wimmen?” scene is one of the great comedic bits of the 80s.
I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days at a time when there were few movies I didn’t see at the theater3. Released in 1995, it was part of a spate of futuristic technothrillers that capitalized on the rise of the internet. These movies presented a decidedly bleak depiction of the future: dirty, dangerous, and if not post-apocalyptic then maybe barely five minutes away from it. Despite it being right in the middle of the optimistic Clinton era, it was a curiously conservative take: if we don’t get things in the present under control right this minute, this is what lies ahead.
Though I appreciated its scummy charm (and, like a lot of 90s movies, it had an excellent soundtrack), I didn’t think much of Strange Days at the time. I found the idea that people would pay good money to experience other people’s memories implausible, and, considering that’s what the entire plot of the movie hinged on, it fell apart for me rather quickly.
I’ll give you a minute to compose yourself after laughing at my naïveté.
Okay, so obviously I was very wrong about thinking people wouldn’t really be interested in first-person POV perspectives of other people’s lives, especially the grimiest, most repugnant parts of them. Granted, it happened a bit later than 1999, when Strange Days takes place, but regardless, clearly screenwriters Big Jim Cameron and Jay Cocks were soothsayers, and able to see the still-very new concept of virtual reality for all its grotesque possibilities. I came around to the possibility that Strange Days was actually brilliant, while still being a little silly and kind of unpleasant.
I wasn’t able to fully reevaluate it for a long time, however, because it’s been long out of print on DVD in the U.S., and mysteriously unavailable for streaming. Then, in January, it simply showed up on HBO Max, nearly 30 years after it almost tanked Bigelow’s pre-Academy Award-winning career. I finally had an opportunity to watch it a second time, and, indeed, it’s better than I remembered, while still being, yes, a little silly and kind of unpleasant.
Strange Days exists in a very near future where it’s always nighttime, and everyone has stopped bathing (except for Angela Bassett, who all but shimmers in a co-starring role). Things evidently went to hell very quickly between 1995 and 1999, so quickly that downtown Los Angeles is now a war zone, where things just explode and gangs attack street corner Santa Clauses4. Yet, there’s also no issue with the city throwing a huge New Year’s Eve street party, which is not unlike if the Kremlin decided to set up an Easter carnival right on top of Chernobyl.
Ralph Fiennes, showing a greasy charisma he hadn’t demonstrated before up to this point, is Lenny Nero, a disgraced ex-cop now dealing in “playback,” black market recordings of memories and sensory experiences. How the technology, referred to as SQUID, works is a bit vague, as all it seems to require is a mini-disc player and something that looks like a space-age hairnet. Unsurprisingly, Lenny’s most popular recordings are pornographic — he’s basically Mr. Roark from Fantasy Island, if, instead of letting someone experience what it’s like to be a professional baseball player, it’s being a nubile teenager who’s apparently just discovered that she has breasts.
When he isn’t wheeling and dealing and just being a genial scumbag, Lenny mopes over the end of his relationship with singer Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis, still in her feral Natural Born Killers phase). He spends much of his alone time watching his own recorded memories of the good times with her (most of which seem to involve her being semi to entirely nude), before she dumped him for record label mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Acting as his shoulders to cry on are private investigator Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore, wearing a Cousin Itt wig that must be seen to be believed5), and Mace (Angela Bassett), Lenny's friend/bodyguard/driver who's barely hiding the torch she carries for him.
A sex worker and friend of Faith’s tries to pass on a mysterious recording to Lenny, pulling him into a mystery involving police brutality, violent cover-ups, artist surveillance, and multiple murder plots. As far as mysteries go, it’s more convoluted than it needs to be, and its abrupt resolution at the end feels like Cameron and Cocks simply ran out of ideas. It’s also startlingly brutal at times, particularly a scene in which a woman is raped and murdered while forced to wear a SQUID headset, essentially watching her own assault from the perspective of her attacker. Despite the technology that makes masturbation easier than ever before, Strange Days presents a future no one would have looked forward to.
What makes it an interesting and worthwhile watch is how prescient it was. While clearly inspired by the Rodney King attack, and the riots that followed, that it also foresaw the lure of social media, and how technology would sate our collective desire (if not addiction) to experience how other people live, is a kind of bizarre miracle. What is TikTok, if not a barrage of bite-sized images of other people, presented to entertain, titillate or appall? What is Instagram, if not offering a taste of a life different from our own?
Moving around in the world in 2023 means expecting you might be filmed at any time, and presented as “entertainment” for others. There’s not even any sneaking around or black market required, it’s all perfectly legal. “One man's mundane and desperate existence is another man's Technicolor,” one of Lenny’s grubby colleagues tells him, perfectly encapsulating the 21st century. Despite its rolling around in the gutter one too many times, Strange Days might be one of the most important movies of the 90s.
It says a lot (both about me and the movie itself) when the only thing about 1941 that still gets a laugh out of me as an adult is when Slim Pickens pretends to take a noisy, painful shit to distract the Japanese soldiers holding him captive.
Please note that this critical reassessment does not extend to The Blues Brothers 2000, perhaps the least necessary movie ever made.
Strange Days was one of several notable flops I saw in the theater during the 90s, along with Cool World, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and Virtuosity.
Interestingly, despite everything above ground looking like Beirut in the 80s, the subway station looks as spotlessly clean and safe as a hospital operating room.
The fact that it is actually a wig (that, unbelievably, nobody seems to notice) eventually comes into play in the plot.
Rewatch/Rewind: Strange Days
Wow. Just wow! I remember seeing this film back in the VHS days when I was a teenager. I actually found the made up memory-virtual-reality concept mind-blowing at the time. We’re really not that far from it now, are we? You brought up so many interesting points that will just have me thinking about this all day. Obsessed with your writing!
What is wrong with me that I loved this movie and saw it more than once in the theater? (TBF, the theater manager was a high school friend, and I worked at the mall food court, so I moseyed over at the end of my shifts and watched movies with hm from the booth, so I didn't pay to see it even once.) And yet, I literally hadn't thought of this movie in years until your headline hit my inbox.
And now I am going to hunt up the sound track to listen to tomorrow while I work.