Strange Days is a late 90's Film Noir/Sci-fi genre film by Katherine Bigelow, set in the near future. The first draft of the film was written by her former husband, James Cameron. The film deals deeply with issues of race and sex. It is owned by Universal Studios.
This is part of a series of papers I wrote for a Humanities class last semester.
The a central plot device to the film Strange Days is the use of the SQUID, an electronic device that records an individuals senses to a disk that can later be replayed for another persons pleasure. The use of the SQUID can help people experience things that they would likely not experience otherwise; sexual encounters, theft, etc. The SQUID becomes the ultimate spectacle replacing not just visual images but all of a persons senses. “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.” What is the world view that has materialized in Strange Days? That men dominate women, and white men dominate all. The film presents a bleak future in which LA has become a police state, and powerful men buy and murder for control.
Here we see Tom Sizemore as Max experiencing the SQUID.
It is the men who dominate in the film; record producer Philo Gant who keeps tight control over his women, Max dominates over the singer Faith and the other women he rapes. Women have no control over the film. Faith is a shell of a woman, who has been battered emotionally and physically by the men in her life now has become a compliant shell. She obeys whoever is the biggest male that can guarantee her a form of safety. She leaves Lenny for Philo Gant who can give her wealth and promises her a career, then she leaves Philo for Max who guarantees her safety from Philo’s abuse. Each male is a step in a spiral downward. She is destructing and taking place in it. Many of the men are obsessed with replay through the SQUID’s. Max uses it so that when he rapes and kills women they are forced to watch it from his perspective. Philo Gant has SQUIDS planted on persons under his employ so he can keep tabs on his assets. The SQUID, a spectacle, becomes a source of control. Controlling not only by surveillance, but now what other people experience.
Spectacle becomes a greater factor for Lenny, Philo Gant, and Max. They have become seperate and distant from other people in their lives. Max lies about who is; claiming to be Lenny’s friend while setting him up. Philo Gant can’t communicate or connect with people so he keeps tabs on them with SQUIDS’s on spies; using brute force to keep those who oppose him from falling out of line. Lenny can’t get over the past he had with Faith, his ex-girlfriend; he replays disks of them interacting over and over. This creates further distant between him and Faith, because he objectifies her as well.
Faith becomes a spectacle to Lenny obsessing over her. He creates a distance with her by stopping interacting with her, replaying SQUID imagery of her. Faith tries to talk to Lenny, but Lenny never listens to her. He objectifies her in his mind, she no longer is a person but a spectacle. DeBord writes that the spectacle “is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.” SQUID replays and sneaking into Faith’s performances are ways of playing out the experience he wants, neither situation is real. Lenny creating a spectacle of Faith rather than interacting removes himself from her life. McKenzie Wark writes of those who play video games, a form of spectacle, but then remove themselves from making history because of it. Lenny too removes himself from a positive history of Faith by clinging onto the past in a literal form of recorded SQUID disks containing those memories.
Watching the film I realized that I was like Lenny, holding onto memories of a former girlfriend and turning them into something they were not. She was a different person, and so was I. Like Lenny I became slightly pathetic and unable to act. Those memories of my former love had become a spectacle of their own, keeping me moving in a direction that I had chosen; not one that I necessarily wanted. DeBord states, “the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.” I, not just a state or overseeing organization, created a spectacle in my own life to keep myself and the status quo moving; similar to Lenny.
The film depicts men objectifying women over and over; in both personal ways-like Lenny, pornographic ways-the buyers, and sadistic ways-like Max. There is a separation between the sexes, they never see woman as more than objects for the majority of the film. Strange Days isn’t largely pessimistic about men, however. The end shows Max connecting with Mace. Mace who is as just as powerful and intelligent- if not more so- than any of the men in power, is thrown down in the film like the other women. When Lenny is able to stop making a spectacle of the past he is able to move on and connect with Mace.
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