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Strange Days (1995)

Nathan Shumate on August 11, 2001 in Sci-fi — No Comments

  • Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
  • Written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks
  • Starring
    • Ralph Fiennes
    • Angela Bassett
    • Juliette Lewis
    • Tom Sizemore
    • Michael Wincott
  • Produced by James Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe

Like clockwork, the B-Masters Cabal has found yet another sub-sub-genre of film to ridicule. This time, it’s those movies that were set in a future year which has since come and gone. Are we living in the glorious future they painted for us? Well, when was the last time you took a spin in your flying car? I thought so.

For your edification, here are the other entries in this roundtable:

And now, our feature presentation:

It always amazes me when moviemakers date-stamp their movies for the near future, especially when they posit major changes to society. I mean, if you made a movie in 1954 and set it in 1999, you’re safe, because hey, your flick isn’t going to still be making the rounds of the drive-ins in forty-five years, right? But having a movie made in 1995 (that’s not that far back, people knew that the video market was going to be a large part of continuing revenue) that’s set in 1999 doesn’t give you a long viable shelf-life. It’s like making an announcement: “THIS MOVIE WILL BE OBSOLETE AFTER FOUR YEARS.”

That goes double when you posit a major technological change, such as, oh, I dunno… the wherewithal to record from and playback to the cerebral cortex?


The yarmulke of the new millennium.

Such is the case in the Los Angeles of December 1999, which is in most ways a reasonable extrapolation of the LA of 1995. Race riots are almost commonplace, as are just about every other kind of sleazy crime. The police have stepped up their “beat first, ask questions later” mentality, and as the year 2000 approaches, things are building to a head with apocalyptic fervor. (It’s that whole “big round number” thing. Ask Dogbert.) And the fact that rapper Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), who’d been holding “power to the people” rallies to combat police excesses, just got murdered execution-style has got the whole town on pins and needles.

In the middle of all this is Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), former vice cop turned peddler of recorded experiences. See, there’s this device called a “squid” (I can’t remember what it stands for, but it looks like a collapsible fry basket) you put on your head, which can record or playback sensory data and record it to a mini-CD. It’s a black-market technology, having been developed first for the military, but that just means that Lenny can charge more for each experience. Sex scenarios are popular, of course, as are other vicarious thrills, such as robbing a liquor store. Lenny does it all, except for snuff clips (or, in the vernacular, “blackjacks”). Nice to see that he draws the line somewhere, hmm?

Lenny’s not just a pusher, though; he’s also a user. See, his girlfriend used to be Faith (Juliette Lewis, who has a penchant for playing strung-out child-women), who left him for her singing career. But he’s still got a collection of clips of the good times together — mostly of them having sex — which he replays regularly. It’s not much of a life, but… well, it’s not much of a life.


“A chicken in every pot, and a widescreen HDTV in every home!”

So. Aside from Lenny’s hanger-on existence, what else is going on? Funny you should ask. We also meet Iris (Brigitte Bako), a hooker who’s a common acquaintance of Lenny and Faith. Unfortunately, we meet her as she’s running for her life from a couple of cops, one of whom (Vincent D’Onofrio) bears a disturbing resemblance to an evil Donny Osmond. She escapes into the subway, leaving in their hands her wig — with a squid attached to the underside. She, apparently, has seen something she wasn’t supposed to see, and now there’s a permanent record of it.

You may be able to see the plot coming now: Iris does manage to let Lenny know that she has something she needs to give to him, but dies before he gets it. But someone’s after the clip, and is willing to kill for it. And if Lenny can tear himself away from moping over Faith (and getting the shit beat out of him by the goons of her manager/boyfriend Philo (Michael Wincott)), he, along with his friends former homicide cop Max (Tom Sizemore) and security limousine driver Mace (Angela Bassett, kicking serious ass) might be able to crack a mystery that might cause the biggest riot ever in a city just waiting for an excuse to tear itself apart.

Now, it’s against the rules of Queensbury to take science fiction to task for what it got wrong. After all, the point of SF is extrapolation, not prognostication (as opposed to the point of “sci-fi,” which can be summed up in the word “whizbang”). But there’s a difference between getting it wrong because hey, no one can know the future, and getting it wrong because of poor extrapolation. And because I’ve got those overly pedantic side of my just clawing to get out today, I’m going to go over some of my major nitpicks.


“Male bonding. Good. Let’s drink. You can’t do male bonding without drinking.”

For one thing, there’s no Internet detectable in this future. Sure, there are widescreen TV’s that can serve other tasks, and there are phones with answering machine units that show the caller’s words on a screen as they’re spoken (though I don’t know exactly why that would be useful or desireable), but there’s no computer networking to speak of. No instant messaging. No “gotta check my e-mail.” No uploading or downloading or streaming of these cyber-clips. Now, I can think of two very plausible reasons why the Web got shunted here:

  1. Even though this movie came out in 1995, which is when America finally woke up and discovered the Web, we all know that movies take much longer than that to get made. The project was probably greenlighted for production in ‘94, which means the screenplay was probably finished early that year or in ‘93, which means the story was at best completely conceived that year, or maybe ‘92 (James Cameron, who came up with the original story, was a pretty busy fellow those years, remember). Back then, the completely networked future was still pretty exclusively a cyberpunk/neuromantic concept, and hadn’t filtered out into all other areas of SF; it may simply have been below the horizon when Cameron was doing his imagining. (I’m putting the absolute earliest date at 1992, since this plot was obviously suggested by the Rodney King riots.)
  2. Frank Herbert was once asked why he didn’t have computers play any real role in Dune. His reply was that the presence of computers would have had such a tremendous impact on his story that it literally wouldn’t have been the same story. Same thing here, I think. Even if Cameron had conceived of broadband internet connections, what kind of story would he have been able to tell? Lenny might have spent the entire movie sitting at home, selling and exchanging clips over his T3 connection, never leaving his apartment and interacting with other real characters. And as even the most addicted netizen will tell you, watching someone else use a computer ain’t exactly high drama. Better yet, positing a wired world with squid-jacked brains, you’d have yourself a very different story, one with permanently jacked-in netheads living in a very William Gibsonesque virtual world. Which is definitely not the story being told here.


“I’m a little bit country. He’s a little bit rock’n'roll.”

In fact, it’s interesting to compare how the use of the Internet in the real world compares with the use of the squid in the movie world. Cameron was canny enough to realize that any new communications medium is going to have an immediate reception in the underground: porn, ultra-violence, etc. Not unlike the Internet, whose first for-real profitable businesses were all porn-related, the early adopters of the squid technology are all on the sleazy side of the street.

But that brings up a bigger problem, probably the single greatest factor contributing to cinematic obsolescence is that whole concept of the squid-transferable experience, and for that Cameron and Bigelow have no one to blame but themselves. Again, the Internet provides a real-world touchstone, this time as a contrast: Although it may seem to Joe Q. Public that the World Wide Web sprang upon the world parthenogenetically in 1994 or 1995, in reality the basis of a national and global computer network were in place by the mid-’70s (and while Al Gore didn’t invent it — and never said he did — he was one of the pushers behind funding for ARPAnet, one of the main progenitors of the modern Internet). All that remained was for technology, both heavy-duty and consumer-grade, to catch up. By contrast, the squid is still wholly undeveloped technology in the real world. There is no technological basis for it in any form, no parallel to the clunky ARPAnet from which to extrapolate the squid’s eventual existence. (Unless you’re one of those people who sleeps in a tin-foil hat to block the beams of the UN satellites, in which case you may safely assign me to your list of Known Collaborators.) To thus posit the emergence of such a technology, consumer-usable if not consumer-legal, by 1999 was playing really bad odds.

But as literary critics will tell you, science fiction isn’t so much about the future as the present, at least the work’s present. (In saying so, of course, I think such critics are overstating their case; like any work of literature, SF is a product of its era, and much of what the authors thought of their present can be understood by seeing their vision of the future.) Thus, Strange Days is a heady artifact of a time less than a decade ago, still practically “current events,” in which LA’s problems with police violence seemed to betoken a coming race war, and the battle of Armageddon seemed imminent. (Why do you think the story’s set in 1999? Because everyone, on both sides of the racial and economic divide, is both expecting and fearing a final straw of apocalyptic proportions, which is exactly what is contained on Iris’ disc.) Who knows? Perhaps that version of the present was very close to becoming a reality, if not for a certain white Bronco and ensuing trial, which somehow cooled the nation’s ardor over race wars and legal injustice, not by showing that such things didn’t exist, but by slowing them to a snail’s pace and rendering them too deathly boring for most people to get so worked up about. (O.J. Simpson as the unwitting deflector of unfocused apocalyptic rage? You heard it here first, folks!)


“If you’re the ex-cop, howcome I’m doing all the ass-kicking around here?”

As you might be able to tell, I’ve been perusing some of Ken Beggs’ politically informed reviews over at Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension, and some of his has worn off on me. I beg your forgiveness for my longwindedness, and point the accusatory finger at Ken.

At any rate. Risking the weight of crushing irony after that last comment, I should point out that Strange Days didn’t do very well at the box office in its own day, when the future was still the future. I’d probably blame that on its length — at two and a quarter hours, the movie is just too damned long. (Of course, this movie predates the Too-Damned-Long Movie Glut of 1998-99, at which point it became briefly fashionable for directors to torture the bladders and buttcheeks of their audiences — a trend which got considerable impetus from Cameron’s own Titanic (1997). Hmm… I think I’m detecting a trend here…) For reference, Lenny doesn’t even run into Iris until almost an hour into the movie, and that’s really the introduction of Lenny into the plot. Up to then, we’ve generally been getting to know Lenny and his deep but troubled pain.

When it comes right down to it, this movie has some wonderful technical filmmaking (the clips are usually shown in one continuous take, since they’re supposed to be an individual’s unedited experiences, which gives us the incredible breakneck playback of a small-time hood in a robbery gone wrong which opens the movie), some beautifully emotionally-charged scenes, a fair share of good acting, and — whoopie dang! — a romantic subplot that doesn’t seem horned in just to fit industry conventions. (And no, I’m not talking about Lenny and Faith.) On the other hand, this is a movie which just takes itself waaaay too seriously, right down to symbolism in the character’s names. Lenny Nero effectively spends his life fiddling while Rome burns (or threatens to). Iris is the witness to the crime which is the mainspring of the plot — “Iris,” you know, because she is the one who sees. (That symbolism is taken to further heights in the manner of her death — you’ll have to see it to get it.) Both Jeriko One and Mace (short for “Mason”) are references to walls and structures, both creation and destruction thereof. And Faith… well, any time you name a character with such an invested word, it’s like hanging a placard around that character’s neck that says, “READ INTO ME.”

Immortal cinema? No. Not too shabby cinema? Certainly. Worth the time it takes to watch it? Yes, even at its under-edited length. But it’s pretty hard to look at this movie and not think, “That’s not the way it happened.”

Some Notable Totables:

  • body count: 15
  • breasts: 8
  • explosions: 0 (well, a couple of Molotov cocktails, but those are technically incendiaries, not explosives, so…)
  • dream sequences: none as we currently define the term
  • ominous thunderstorms: 0
  • actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
    • Michael Jace (Wade Breemer) played the First Officer in the DS9 episode “The Jem’Hadar”
    • Art Chudabala (the Thai restaurant owner) played “Ilario” in the DS9 episode “Field of Fire”

Posted in Sci-fi
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