Strange Days

Upon the eve of Detroit’s release, revisit Kathryn Bigelow’s overlooked cult classic that still feels relevant 22 years later.

The bravado buzz of cocaine and the temporal release of heroin no longer cut it. Lenny is a dealer of a new kind of drug: reality. Or should that be unreality? In Strange Days’ not-so-distant future of 1999, ‘real’ experiences can be purchased on the black market. Thanks to a device originally designed as a modern, more efficient equivalent to police body cams known as a S.Q.U.I.D., a brain wave transmitter that gives its user the impression — the feeling — that they are having someone else’s experiences, perception junkies are able to “jack in” to this ultimate high. The software tapes the lives of other people, transposing their feelings, senses, and emotions onto disc for users to play back again and again. “This is not TV but better,” says Ralph Fiennes’s wheeler dealer Lenny. “This is pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.”

The film opens with a shot of an eyeball — establishing the core theme of voyeurism — before sending the viewer spiralling through a violently frenetic armed robbery shot entirely in first-person, akin to Enter the Void or Hardcore Henry. It is a film that imagines the dark possibilities of a society that craves the high of virtual reality, and how this can blur the borders between reality and unreality. As the character Faith (Juliette Lewis) intones: “You know one of the ways movies are still better than playback? The music comes up, there’s credits, and you always know when it’s over.” It asks the question: what is more real, life or the experiential high of being inside another’s body that you crave? Because, after all, you cannot share someone else’s reality without abandoning your own.

We see a first-time user reliving the moment that an 18-year-old girl took a shower. We see him in a weak, free of inhibitions, on the verge of ecstasy as he not just imagines, but experiences, the feeling of being inside someone else’s skin. And in the film’s most shocking moments, we, the audience, are subjected to reliving the subjective experiences of a lunatic as he rapes and murders a woman, plugging her into the S.Q.U.I.D. technology so that she can witness and feel the thrill of her own murder. It is through these distressing and graphic moments that Bigelow forces the audience to deal with the harsh reality of the possibilities of technology, and virtual reality.

But this is not the only truth that Bigelow wants us to confront, and in turn, experience. In fact, as it progresses, Strange Days transforms from a film about the dangers of futuristic technology that can give people realer than realer — a concept very popular in the 90s, perhaps most famously displayed in The Matrix — but a film about racial tensions and police brutality. Los Angeles on the verge of the new millennium is a warzone. Criminals and rioters rule the streets, and the viscous racial violence that divides the city is animated in the background by the not-shocking-enough images of a black person being pounded into the ground by police.

As the narrative progresses the murder of “one of the most important black men in America”, Jeriko One, transcends what first appears to be one of the film’s subplots to become the driving seat to the story. It is this convoluted and intertwined narrative threads that place Strange Days within the noir tradition, but with a modern slant. The unveiling of those responsible for the murders is what drives the story and informs Bigelow’s interest in racial tensions in America.

This is something that Strange Days has in common with her latest film, Detroit. Bigelow has swapped low-key sci-fi for realism with her harrowing docudrama account of the 1967 Detroit riots. Though she is exploring a historical event, comparisons to recent history are obvious. Think of the names Tamir Rice and Philando Castile. Nothing has changed in the eyes of Bigelow. It is a film that features British stars-in-the-making, John Boyega and Will Poulter in important roles, and a film, that like Strange Days, is designed to make its viewers uncomfortable. In Detroit, Bigelow has swapped first-person atrocities of forced voyeurism with erratic documentarian camerawork, but the points are no less sharp.

The ever-present racial tensions in America are clearly something that has informed Bigelow across her entire filmography, and 22 years later Strange Days feels just as relevant as it did when it came out, if not more. It is a film that hopes to place us in the midst of the hate/fear dynamic that pervades much of the racial disparity in modern America, using an exploration of the possibilities of technology as a thinly veiled vehicle to carry more weightier and less fantastical issues. Despite setting itself in a wacky alternate vision of the late 90s, Strange Days feels much closer to home than is comfortable. And that is exactly Bigelow’s style. She has proven that she feels most comfortable making her audience uncomfortable. She forces the viewer to face reality. And it is because of this that over two decades after the release of Strange Days, Bigelow finds herself returning to the racial warzones of the street. Never have films like Detroit and Strange Days felt more relevant, and Bigelow uses the cinematic medium to remind us that we are all involved and along for the ride.