Transcription
You are too goddamn paranoid, you know that Philo? Paranoia is just reality on a finest [Music] scale.
Strange Days is a 1995 science fiction film directed by Katherine Bigalow. On the eve of the New Millennium, Los Angeles is in chaos. Protesters believe they are living in a police state, and famous rap artist and activist Jericho 1 has been murdered.
Lenny, an ex-cop, deals in clips: the memories of individuals who record their experiences with a device called a squid. Lenny and his close friend Mace learn through one of these clips that the LAPD murdered Jericho 1. Lenny and Mace hope to prove this.
What's fascinating about Strange Days is that it depicts a future of oppression, a common dystopic science fiction premise. But it purposefully eschews the trope that usually links them all together in a Sci-Fi dystopia: something common is scarce, either through a lack of resources or because it is illegal. Not something like the black market science fiction technology of Strange Days. Something everyday.
In Tank Girl, water is scarce and it is controlled by a powerful authority. In Equilibrium, emotions are illegal. In Fahrenheit 451, books are illegal. In Demolition Man, every kind of vice is illegal. And in each case, these laws are enforced by another powerful authority. Our daily routines from present day are broadly illegal in the future, and because of this, the oppression is universal. Virtually everybody is oppressed in the same way because in the future, everyone has the same core problem: nobody has enough water, or emotions, or knowledge.
In Strange Days, this is not so. It is also a movie about oppression, and it is also science fiction, but it takes a different tack. In Strange Days, the oppression is largely maintained by the militarized police, but different people in different groups suffer in variations and degrees, just like in the real world.
Iris, a sex worker, is brutally raped and murdered. Due to the Jericho 1 incident, she recorded everything. When Lenny discovers that she has died, he remarks that even if they file a report, the police will not take the homicide seriously. Sex workers do not often receive the best treatment from police due to their line of work. This goes unquestioned by Mace, who although certainly not a sex worker, is still a woman and understands patriarchal attitudes of society.
The Chinese characters at the start of the film are called racial epithets. Racism as a form of oppression is depicted in the film, especially racism as it relates to the police. Jericho one is pulled over by two police officers for seemingly no reason. He supports community action groups to fight oppression. He writes songs about the wrongs that America has done to his people, and upon realizing this, and also because Jericho had the audacity to question the police officers, the police murder him. The police officers also also murder his friend and a woman simply for being witnesses.
When Mace attempts to expose this, she is brutalized by the police officers, who continually beat her after she is down and offering no more resistance. Based on the time this film was released, this appears to be a reference to the Rodney King beating.
Strange Days also tackles the idea of a recording of a crime committed by police officers. But before tackling that, look at the police in this film and how they are depicted. Militarized. Is this really much different from the the way American police departments are now? In 2017, since 1996, under the pretense of the War on Drugs, Defense Department program 1033 spent $4.3 billion in military equipment that was given to local law enforcement. These are the police of the future.
Following 9/11, this budget was increased dramatically under the explanation that it was for the prevention of terrorism. However, military equipment like armored vehicles and weapons that are only necessary in a war zone and not on the sidewalk are not used exclusively for drug enforcement or terrorism. Not that anyone requires a tank to take down street peddlers or invade a house. Terrorism happens, but the likelihood of the average American dying due to a terrorist attack is negligible. No military equipment is almost never used on terrorists. It is oddly enough often used on protesters.
This is actually shown in the film. The people of the city are understandably upset about the murder of Jericho 1, as well as other grievances they have with the city. The police's response to this is to exacerbate the problem by using weapons and tanks. In the real world, this does not deescalate the situation. If the grievance that the citizenry has is with the police, because it is more evidence that the police are too well armed, too powerful, and flex their muscles when they should not. If a protest is about police brutality and the police response is tear gas, then it is only more evidence of the premise of the original protest.
Police may be trained to use the military equipment in the sense that they know how to pull the trigger, but they are apparently not trained to use it responsibly. For example, they have been known to point their weapons, whether they intend to shoot or not, a practice discouraged in Afghanistan and Iraq due to the propensity to needlessly escalate a situation. In Strange Days, police seem to go out of their way to use excessive force. The police are meant to protect the people, and the military is meant to fight the people's enemies. When the police become the military, the people become the enemy.
So back to the recorded killing of Jericho 1. Strange Days portrays a future in which the only way for police brutality to be believed by the public, enforced by better cops, and receive proper punishment is for it to be recorded. Mace shows the clip to the police commissioner, and he himself orders the arrest of the two murderers.
Strange Days sympathizes with those who are victims of police brutality and other crimes inflicted by police officers, even going so far as to say the only way the police will be caught is if a science fiction technology literally records the memories of someone who is there. Although what is troubling about this in 2017 is that over the past several years, there have been a number of high-profile killings by police officers, often by victims who were unarmed or not resisting or even unable to resist, all recorded and available for all to see, but still not doing any good towards convicting the officers, none of which I am comfortable showing here today.
Obviously, today everyone has a camera because everyone has a phone, and everyone has access to the videos because everyone can watch YouTube. And yet, the conclusion is never as tidy as the one we see in Strange Days. At the end of the film, one officer commits suicide once he realizes he has been caught, and the other is shot by other police officers for threatening Mace with a gun.
In 2016, police officers killed 963 Americans. It rose in 2017 to 976. Now, some killings are the result of a civilian being armed and posing an imminent threat to the responding officer, but some, like Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many others, were not. In a lot of cases, even with video capturing the killings, officers were not convicted. Some are at best suspended.
In Strange Days, the audience gets the satisfaction of watching the two murderers gunned down themselves by police, a kind of perverse poetic justice. But if they survived, and we applied the real world practices of the police, police department, and justice system to these two, their chances of avoiding murder convictions would be surprisingly good. That's not speculation, that's just what keeps happening. All they would have to do is say they felt threatened. The two officers are placed under arrest by the police commissioner, but the upper echelons of the real world American police are historically very defensive about accusations of police brutality and will far more often than not defend accused officers.
Strange Days occasionally shows us fascistic imagery, like these Nazi costumes at the club, and it might not be a coincidence that the two officers, Steckler and Angleman, have German surnames.
Throughout the course of the film, characters mention paranoia. Lenny accuses Philo of being paranoid. Mace believes Lenny is not being paranoid enough, and so forth. Paranoia is generally thought of as a personality trait or even a mental illness: thoughts of "everyone is out to get me" and mad conspiracy theories. But another way to look at paranoia is that it is simply the opposite of trust. And in Strange Days, the authority of society, the police, have lost the public trust. Lenny even believes Mace when he lies about police death squads, because even though Mace is only saying this to divert attention from his own crimes, it does not sound too implausible right after learning that two police officers brutally murdered multiple people for no good reason.
This and other things can make the world feel so oppressive. Max has reached a kind of nihilism about life, suggesting that now that human beings have done more or less everything there is to do, the world may as well end. Nothing matters. Lenny on the other hand, wants something to believe in. Throughout the film, he tries to win back his ex-girlfriend named Faith. He has lost his faith. The radio speaks of the apocalypse. Max tells Lenny to get religion. Jericho's name is a Biblical reference as well. It's hard to have hope in a world of oppression, but there's always next [Music] year.
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