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In a future that's now our past, Strange Days tells a beguiling and disturbing tale of addiction and police brutality. Kathryn Bigelow's most most ambitious project to date, at least at the level of form and theme, opened in movie theaters twenty-five years ago today. Mixing social commentary with action excitement, insane feats of camera choreography, and feverish performances, the movie's a testament to its director's skill even if it wasn't the title that won her the Oscar. It's also a heady thrill ride that's out to dazzle the spectator, to shock them and galvanize too. Pleasure and violence are forever intertwined in this dream of celluloid.
The setting is Los Angeles on New Year's Eve, 1999, and the air is suffused with the threat of revolt. Strange Days, which opened in movie theaters on this very day in '95, posits a near future where technological advancements have made it possible to record and share memories...
It's now common to know what it's like to be in another's head and first-hand experience is no longer an individual treasure, but a commodity to exploit, as addictive as the hardest drugs out there. Lenny Nero was once a cop working for the LAPD, but, when we meet him, he's become a black marketeer who specializes in the trade of recorded memory. It's through his eyes that we find our way across this future of yore when the city feels like it's on the brink of war and the police are racist, have blood on their hands and secrets to hide (aka business as usual).
Lenny's reeling from the end of a relationship with Faith, a singer who's now dating a music industry mogul who managed the career of a recently killed rapper. Through a series of chaotic events, he also finds himself in the possession of a disc full of incriminating memories. Everyone associated with that piece of evidence is dying away and, in one horrifying scene, Lenny gets to see through the eyes of a madman as he rapes and murders the woman whose memories are in the disc. Through it all, he's helped by Mace, his best friend, a limo driver, and bodyguard who strongly disapproves of his criminal dealings with the memory discs.
Playing the main characters, we have the, at the time, recently Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, and Angela Bassett. As Lenny Nero, Fiennes is a greasy wreck of a man, someone on the brink of self-destruction who still believes a bit too much in his moribund charm. The actor never shies away from showing just how pathetic his character is, no matter how the script devised by James Cameron and Jay Cocks structures itself around his tale of redemption. In his interior struggles, Lenny embodies the many tensions inherent to this piece of entertainment about the perils of entertainment.
At a certain point in the story, Lenny's dilemma becomes the choice between facing reality or living in the nostalgic remembrance of days gone by. Strange Days, as it concerns its protagonist, is about choosing to fight for the future or indulge in the intoxicating ambrosia of simpler, happier, times. Fiennes' willingness to verge on unlikability is crucial for the picture to work. Just like Lenny, we feel the adrenaline rushing through our bloodstream while watching Strange Days, easily empathizing with his more insidious and self-defeating impulses. By making himself repugnant, the actor calls attention to his characters' desperate need to change. Maybe even to the audience's need to change.
If Fiennes is a man who must choose his path, Lewis' Faith and Bassett's Mace represent two very different alternatives. Drugged out of her mind and glamorously decadent, Faith is performed by Lewis as a cracked porcelain doll whose grungy decay makes her all the more fascinating. Her characterization is fuzzy, but purposefully so, and, like many a femme fatale in film noir, she's got trouble written all over her. Mace, on the other hand, doesn't recall many characters from the cinematic past, being a female action hero for the new millennium. I honestly find it difficult to find words to describe the perfection of Bassett's performance.
For many years, I've considered it a platonic ideal of action movie acting, intensely physical, always anchored in strong emotion, both muscular and heartfelt. It's easy to lose oneself waxing rhapsodic about Mace's badass qualities, but we shouldn't lose sight of Bassett's mastery of tone and sentiment. Watching her react to the truth hidden inside another's memory strips the sci-fi scenario of any alienation, making its stakes more real than real. All the formal dazzlement of Strange Days needs a center of gravity or it would all drift off into space. By the end of it, Bassett's Mace is the center, the sun around which everything else orbits, Fiennes, Lewis, even Bigelow's mise-en-scène.
Speaking of the director, like her camera flies through the space with insane fervor, so does Kathryn Bigelow soar through her narrative. She shoots the script by gathering a mess of plot points and story threads, world-building, and character detail, forcing the audience to work to understand what's going on in this crazy world. Instead of making the spectator into a passive passenger, Bigelow demands their active viewership and Strange Days is all the more exhilarating because of it. One must always be on their toes while experiencing this inspired lunacy, wrestling with how the world of Strange Days reflects our own.
One can't write about Strange Days in 2020 without mentioning that its themes reverberate in our day and age like a Californian earthquake. By now, it's clichéd to say that this is a prescient narrative, but that doesn't make it any less true. Inspired by the '92 L.A. riots, the filmmakers created a hard tale about racial unrest, the increasing militarization and brutality of the police, socioeconomic inequality, and media addiction. These things are still relevant, they've always been and they'll probably always be. Only the too tidy happy ending of Strange Days rings untrue. Still, in 2020 maybe the naivety of that conclusion is needed as a balm to the soul. Then again, maybe not.
While it wasn't a big success back in '95, neither with critics or audiences, Strange Days lives on. Are you a fan of its strange pleasures?