Strange Days

“You see?” This postmodern neo-noir flick elevates the traditional questioning of elementary certainties to a new dimension. In an age of memory set fully in media, when people themselves become a recording medium and memories are a very marketable commodity, the boundaries between present and past, between public and private, between work and artist are irreversibly obliterated. This is a post-ideological age in which all schools of thought are disparaged and the only persistent logic is the logic of the market, making it impossible to express real feelings, to express an idea and to mean it seriously. Romantic relationships have been replaced by one-night stands, in the extreme case only virtual. In Strange Days, the dissolution of the long-term cohabitation of two people is symbolically linked to the loss of Faith, as Lenny’s girlfriend is called. To escape into an idyll, into a world that hasn’t been made exceedingly technical and to days literally and figuratively permeated with light, a device, a means of representing not only drugs but, in a broader sense, all of life, is used. The dissemination of information without context, with emphasis on immediate emotional (and, if possible, physical) response, deprives people of accountability and the necessity of thinking. It suffices to see and experience this here and now. The need to define one’s ungraspable experience of the world has reached absurd proportions. Because the real possibilities of getting to know the world better have been exhausted, the realm of the imaginary has come into play, though it has little in common with the atrophied human imagination – the content of the mind can now be converted into a common code that, thanks to technology, is easily understandable and rewritable by anyone. The last form of private property has become widely available. The relativity of the subjective perception of the world has been multiplied many times over. What do we see when we see what someone else has seen? The flashback, that classic means of film narrative, has penetrated reality. But, “Are you sure it’s real?” Cameron’s visionary screenplay offers enough philosophically substantial material for several films, which is both Strange Days’ greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There is something for everyone – media theorists, prophets of the apocalypse, sci-fi fans and feminists (the women here are at least morally stronger than the men). Kathryn Bigelow is also deserving of admiration, as she succeeded in taming this monster of an idea. The dark settings jam-packed with images (and images of images) and sounds and filmed in long Steadicam shots with minimal depth of field almost induce vertigo. Attention is permanently stress-tested due to the distractions created with light and sound. We are not told what we should notice; to some extent, it relies on how well the human eye is trained in a person whose visual mode is characterised by the word “inattentiveness”. The impermanence of the perception of reality that needs only to be retrieved and replayed displaces the need to gaze at the object of interest for a moment. It is not a pleasant experience to watch it twice and everything tends to peculiarly fall apart, shattering the image (in the climax, which is reminiscent The Lady from Shanghai), but this is how we experience reality and thus how we live. Life in the unconscious and in the unseen. 85% (31/07/2022) (less) (more)