Strange Days Have Found Us
HOST: So Dan, are you looking forward to the New Year?
DAN: Not really. I mean what’s the point? Nothing changes New Years day. The economy sucks, gas is over three bucks a gallon, fifth grade kids are shooting each other at recess… the whole thing sucks, right? So what the hell are we celebrating?
On Sunday I turned on one of my favorite New Year’s Eve movies, Strange Days. It’s been quite a while since I’ve watched it, and I was curious if it would hold up given the time that has passed. Sci-fi doesn’t often age well, so periodically I like to pop my favorite movies in and see if they’ve withstood the pace of technology and common sense.
What I found on watching Strange Days was that while the movie hasn’t aged that well in terms of direction, it’s still very worthwhile as a time capsule of the mindset of the early ‘90s, and the plot holds up very well. The film is set in an L.A. that is on the edge of complete collapse – fires rage through the city, dead cars line the streets, and the police and civilians are at each other’s throats. An ex-cop named Lenny makes his living peddling hairnets that record what the user is seeing and feeling, and then selling them to other people. One of his clients sees a popular rapper get murdered by police, records the whole thing, and thrusts Lenny into a predictable mess of trouble. It also reveals that all ex-cops grow their hair out long, refuse to wash it or shave, and apparently sleep in their clothes.
In the early 90’s, I remember being convinced that L.A. would soon burn itself completely down. I watched the Rodney King tapes on the news, and then the following riots in ‘92. Strange Days was born directly out of that time period of crazy fear and racial tension. I remember the music being very violently anti-establishment (“Cop Killer” anyone?), or feeling like it was coming from a drug induced trip. In fact, Strange Days absolutely drips with trip-hop and the kind of early 90’s gangsta rap that was designed to impress but not overly frighten white people. As a teenager in the 90’s, I’d spent my formative toy years worrying about the Russians in the Cold War. The war ended in the late 80’s, and I watched the Berlin Wall come down on television. The 90’s was a desperate search for definition as a society, and half the time it felt like everything was just going to collapse and burn itself out. Strange Days does an excellent job of capturing that lost and hopeless feeling about the future.
Despite pinning so much of it’s tone in that 90’s vibe, the movie remains quite fresh today. If you renamed Lenny to Julian Assange and replaced the hairnets with iPhones, you could remake the movie nearly shot for shot and have a blockbuster. The movie is really about the role of surveillance and who is watching the watchmen. These are issues that we really started grappling with as a culture only a few years ago, with police seizing cell phones, and videos of cops punching bicyclists or macing protesters showing up on Youtube. The movie did an excellent job of predicting what one of the major technological debates of the next decade would be – it simply did it through the lens of it’s time period – race and Los Angeles as a burning cesspit. It also predicted something else – Tupac Shakur was murdered under mysterious circumstances less than a year after it came out.
So, while Strange Days is still good, still fun to watch, and still relevant, all I could really feel when I watched it was depression, because of the quote I included at the top of this article. I’m sure that same exact sentiment was expressed on the radio 10,000 times on New Year’s Eve – about the exact same problems. Eighteen years have passed since the movie came out, and we haven’t done a damn thing to try and fix any of the problems people were talking about in 1995. It’s sad, and it’s our fault. (Though I’m ok with blaming Ralph Fiennes, too.)
