Strange Days

Viewing this for the first time from a distance of thirty years (writing in 2026), what stands out is how clearly it is a product of its time, which no doubt has more than a little to do with Ebert’s ability to believe that it deserved his maximum rating, which he justified at the time on the grounds that it is “the first movie about virtual reality to deal in a challenging way with the implications of the technology”. Really? VIDEODROME, on the other hand, made twelve years earlier, and which he gives one-and-a-half stars, elicits from Ebert the carefully considered view that the “characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and […] when the screen fades to black it’s a relief”, informing his millions of readers that it “is the kind of movie that makes you want to see a different movie”, and concluding that it “has got to be one of the least entertaining movies ever made”. So sayeth America's most celebrated film critic.

STRANGE DAYS is very obviously influenced throughout by the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, it is also notable that the first screening occurred four days after O.J. Simpson’s acquittal, but nearly a year before the murder of Tupac Shakur.As my brother (user lumpnboy) has pointed out – quoting David Walsh (2012) quoting Bigelow (2007) – the director acknowledges the strong influence of Jean Baudrillard and his notion of hyper-reality, but to me the film seems to owe more to Fredric Jameson’s idea of postmodernism as the “cultural logic” of “late capitalism”. John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure appears in both text and film as a location that “aspires to being a total space, a complete world”, but where this involves “a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd” (Jameson, 1991, p. 40), the building’s “glass skin” achieving “a peculiar and placeless dissociation […] from its neighborhood”, and where even the lifts amount to a “transportation machine” that functions as an “allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own”, all of this being part of an “intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its content” (42).

Still, just as one may wonder whether the cultural critic is not allowing himself a bit too much latitude to read into the significance of the glass elevators of this fancy and somewhat striking hotel, so too it bears remembering that the plot of this movie amounts to some very standard and banal film noir machinations involving slimeballs and whores, and where the plot turns on (very predictably answered) questions about who is sleeping with whom, and why, and about friendships betrayed: neither the “challenging way” it deals with VR nor the allusions “late capitalism” save the film from its mundane plot, clichéd dialogue and cartoonish performances. Product of its time or not, it’s still somehow surprising to see that these flaws were not manifestly obvious to 1995 reviewers.

Finally: why did it take me three decades to get around to watching this? I’m glad you asked. Well, the main reason is probably that I never forgot the scene in Nanni Moretti’s excellent APRIL (1998) where the protagonist (played by Moretti and named Nanni Moretti) lies in bed, reciting the dialogue about “virgin brains”, then sits down for his morning coffee reciting the lines about the possibility of spending “the right twenty minutes” with the Filipina, before collapsing in tears, lamenting his unthinking decision to take his son to see this “cazzata memorabile” at the cinema, bemoaning the influence on children of this kind of memorable crap. In truth, this scene seemed convincing enough to draw conclusions at the time, and I should probably have trusted that and waited another three decades.