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NEAR FUTURE: By setting a story—in this case, in 1999—only a few years after the film was made, the filmmaker can critically comment on “today’s” lifestyle by exaggerating current problems to make an audience more fully aware of them. Angela Bassett helps Ralph Fiennes escape in Kathryn Bigelow’s dystopian vision. Courtesy: Lightstorm Ent./20th Century Fox.
CREDITS
Lightstorm Entertainment/Twentieth Century Fox; Kathryn Bigelow, dir.; James Cameron, Jay Cocks, scr.; Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe, pro.; Graeme Revell, mus.; Matthew F. Leonetti, cin.; Cameron, Howard E. Smith, ed.; Lilly Kilvert, prod. design; John Warnke, art dir.; Donald Frazee, Terry D. Frazee, Gregor Joackim, James S. Trois, F/X; Ellen Mirojnick, costumes; John Eaves, model maker; Sandina Bailo-Lape, Tom Barwick, Dennis Thorpe, foley; 145 min.; Color; 2.35:1.
Ralph Fiennes (Lenny Nero); Angela Bassett (Lornette “Mace” Mason); Juliette Lewis (Faith Justin); Tom Sizemore (Max Peltier); Michael Wincott (Philo Gant); Vincent D’Onofrio (Burton Steckler); Glenn Plummer (Jeriko One); Brigitte Bako (Iris); Richard Edson (Tick); William Fichtner (Dwayne Engelman); Josef Sommer (Palmer Strickland); Joe Urla (Keith); Nicky Katt (Joey Corto); Michael Jace (Wade Beemer); Louise LeCavalier (Cindy “Vita” Minh); David Carrera (Duncan); Jim Ishida (Mr. Fumitsu); Todd Graff (Tex Arcana); Malcolm Norrington (Replay); Anais Munoz (Diamanda); Ted Haler (Tow Truck Driver); Rio Hackford (Bobby); Kylie Ireland (Stoned Girl); Honey Labrador (Beach Beauty).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale.
PHILO TO FAITH
BACKGROUND
Following a two-year marriage, John Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow (1951–) divorced in 1991. Nonetheless, when Cameron began work on his script for Strange Days, he knew at once that the phantasmagoric quality associated with Bigelow films—the edgy biker movie The Loveless (1982), the vampire thriller Near Dark (1987), and the surfer action flick Point Break (1991)—was precisely what he needed. The project evolved into the most ambitious example of cyberpunk to appear in a mainstream movie, cinematically conveyed via an aesthetic that portrays a near-future dystopia as the only possible result of high-tech settings filled with low-life characters. In the cyberpunk world, an endless flow of information from more sources than can possibly be comprehended leads in part to a total breakdown in the social order. That scenario serves as this film’s starting point.
THE PLOT
Forty-eight hours before New Year’s Eve, 1999, street hustler Lenny Nero is marketing illegal wares in a Los Angeles that resembles a nightmare in which the future world of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) merges with the neon-lit New York decadence that defines Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Nero sells discs containing state-of-the-art virtual reality moments. He is devotedly loved by macho woman, limo driver Mace, but he is obsessed with Faith, who left him to live with a record producer who promised to make her a star. Reconnecting with his inamorata, melancholic Nero meets Jeriko, a rap star with heavy-duty connections to the city’s downtrodden. A disc that reveals a brutal rape and murder comes into Nero’s possession. Realizing that there may be political consequences to a seemingly random crime, Nero enlists the aid of best friend Max, a former cop, to help him identify the killer before Faith becomes his next victim.
As to claims that Bigelow celebrated the coming end of the world as we know it in Strange Days, the filmmaker replied: “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror.” Armageddon appears on the horizon every moment in her near-millennial world, a radical version of the fear of atomic oblivion that marked the post-WWII era. Not surprisingly, there are no heroes, only antiheroes in this grunge cosmos. Alienated lone wolves, hard-boiled on the surface if romantic deep down, wander mean streets that resemble exaggerations of those that appeared in the late 1940s in film noirs and cheap paperback bus-station books.
Film critics employed such terms as “ferocious,” “kinetic,” and “visionary” to describe Bigelow’s style. As Janet Maslin of the New York Times noted, “No one will ever say she directs like a girl.” If a male director had depicted rape in so intense and in-your-face terms—Bigelow insists that we see that the victim is being forced to experience the unspeakable thrills her captor enjoys—it goes without saying that he would have been criticized for creating a sexist cinema of the most exploitive nature. But such a controversial depiction is precisely what Bigelow flirts with in work after work; it is the essence of her unique edge and what makes her not a “woman director,” but a director who happens to be a woman. Shortly before Bigelow became the first female ever to receive a Best Director Oscar in 2010 for The Hurt Locker, Cameron insisted, “She’ll be of a mind that . . . I want to win for the work. [Not] because I’m a woman.”
THEME
Early in the film, as Nero listens to an eclectic mix of music, the phrase “every little thing gonna be alright” can be heard. These words from the song “Three Little Birds” first appeared on a 1977 Bob Marley and Wailers album, released as a single in 1980. Here, in a musical nutshell, is the film’s social theme. Jeriko is a fictionalized American version of that reggae great, and though his music of choice is rap, he perceives song as a means by which he might incite a revolution. Our own downtrodden, who live in a Third World within the upscale American landscape, could achieve some measure of social justice once their initially marginalized music reaches the mainstream. Like Jeriko in the film, Marley (1945–1981) was shot in 1976, in what many believe was an act of retaliation for his political attacks on fascistic power. Unlike Jeriko, Marley survived his assassination attempt.
The film’s title is a tribute to the second album recorded by the Doors, inspired in part by Jim Morrison’s views on the radically changing street scene in mid-sixties New York City. The title cut was to have been included in the film, but when legal rights to the Doors version proved too difficult to secure, the cover version by the heavy metal band Prong was used.