| Matthew Lambert |
Strange Days plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, December 31 through Tuesday, January 2. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
Strange Days Holds the Niche Noir Title Belt
Can you remember the first noir you ever saw? Let me guess, did it star Humphrey Bogart? For the most part, people understand what makes noir films one of the most popular genres in cinematic history: a private investigator or disgraced police officer, typically with a drinking problem, has to solve a crime and save the day. Ultimately, noirs are captivating by the story starting with a simple task then turning deadly.
Strange Days is uniquely positioned in the noir category for its subject matter. It has all of the beats of a classic, Sam Spade noir: A hustler sells something illegal and lives in the underbelly of a rotten city but must return to his investigator ways after witnessing a violent crime. You can find hundreds of movies on The Criterion Channel that follow that exact premise.
So why isn’t the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow-directed film, Strange Days, not more widely discussed as more of the most unique and niche noirs in the history of cinema?
The film follows Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a former cop-turned-dealer of illegal recordings that give the buyers a virtual reality type of experience, generating the sensation of the event without its consequences. In the film’s opening sequence, you can experience a failed robbery attempt that results in the death of the recorder. While Lenny slithers his way throughout a warzone of cops and soldiers fighting minorities in the streets on a regular basis, a conspiracy sets Lenny into action. One of Lenny’s virtual reality performers is brutally raped and murdered during a break-in. The murderer leaves his calling card for Lenny, who then must save his ex-lover, Faith (Juliette Lewis), with the help of his driver, Lornette (Angela Bassett) on New Year’s Eve.
What makes Strange Days more unique is the subsection of noir it belongs to: cyberpunk. You can picture a handful of movies right now that came out between 1980-2000 that had cyberpunk qualities to it. There’s a brief deluge of diegetic grunge music blaring while most people on screen are wearing black leather outfits. And more often than not, a white woman with white dreads can kick your ass.
Instant American classics like Blade Runner, RoboCop, Total Recall, The Matrix, and The Terminator franchises utilize this aesthetic in close comparison to Strange Days. But what Strange Days is interested in presenting is much different than all of those other films: the science fiction causes the crime, but doesn’t define the film.
Cyberpunk films typically respond to potential technological changes in the future. Many cyberpunk films focus on living in a parallel reality through the internet, time travelers saving the world, and flying cars polluting our skies. Strange Days leans more heavily into the classic noir tropes than most cyberpunk films do. The only science-fiction-related aspect of Strange Days is the virtual reality experience Lenny illegally sells. There isn’t any other sci-fi thriller action that occurs, which makes this film the standard of cyberpunk noirs, alongside Bigelow’s exquisite direction.
Bigelow captures a truly legitimate portrait of fear and anxiety related to the Los Angeles police department, with the film’s release coming just three years after the Rodney King Riots rocked the city. Strange Days’ setting posits a reality where the rioting and police violence never stopped—a concern that may still weigh heavily on our own minds in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder three years ago. It’s easy to see how Bigelow transitioned from making movies like Strange Days, Point Break, and Blue Steel to Oscar-winning films like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She clearly has an interest in capturing current events and showing the internal rot of the systems that define them. This movie was written by Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron. Based on Cameron’s filmography, this film would’ve likely been closer to Johnny Mnemonic or Repo Man as it pushes the virtual reality aspect of the plot further than focusing on the grunge underworld and police violence that Bigelow prefers.
A classic New Year’s Eve movie that depicts part of our current reality with a sprinkle of Juliette Lewis doing her best Courtney Love impression makes Strange Days a film that should be more widely discussed as part of the noir cannon.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon