Strange Days (1995)

This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.

A word of warning: this post grapples with the depiction of sexual assault and rape.

I watched the movie Strange Days with my husband last night. I went in knowing almost nothing about it except that it was a cyberpunk movie, that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and that it was out of print and hard to find. I had to wait for almost two weeks for the library to send me a copy. The decision to watch this movie was premeditated and purposeful, although I might have thought twice about it—or at the very least prepared myself—had I known what was in store.

On a world building level, the film is brilliant. It's the type of science fiction that takes place twenty minutes into the future, and (thanks to the natural progression of time after the film’s release) also now takes place twenty years in the past. The film shows a world that is falling apart at the seams, grimy and chaotic. It skips past the cars burning on the street and the scuffles that break out on every street corner, trading the citywide conflict taking place in LA for a much more personal conflict in the city’s underbelly. The casualness with which the characters treat the world around them even as it's falling apart rings true to me. 

The story’s novum—technology that allows the wearer to record their lived experience, and that allows others to play back that experience in a way that makes them feel it, in every sense of the word—is a fascinating piece of fantasy. I appreciated that it felt completely unique, while also nodding to other cyberpunk stories (the recording devices are called “wires,” playback machines are called “decks,” and watching a recording is referred to as “jacking in,” the  terms drawn directly from cyberpunk pioneers like William Gibson). This is the kind of science fiction that I love. This is the kind of storytelling that keeps me coming back to the movies. The action is gorgeously shot; I want to live in the shadows and highlights in just about every frame.

I also never want to watch this movie again.

I wasn’t prepared for there to be a rape scene. I especially was not prepared for the scene to be from the perspective of the rapist. The film very clearly condemns the crime. So do all the other characters within the film. It's treated as an unthinkable action, something that no person should ever do. But the scene remains: a man rapes and murders a woman, and he uses the deck technology to make her feel what he’s feeling as he does it, in a feedback loop of fear and abuse. We learn about the crime as the protagonist does: by watching the recording taken by the rapist. He—and by extension, the audience—experience the scene through the rapist’s eyes. It's one of the most horrific things I've ever seen. I wish hadn't seen it.

I also don’t know how we get this movie without that scene; it’s the very thing that convinces the protagonist to take action. It's the synthesis of everything the movie is interested in. In some ways, it's the synthesis of cyberpunk in general.

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Cybernetics as a field of study revolves around the idea of feedback. Something happens and we take action as a result of that something happening, and our actions cause further actions, become inputs for additional actions, spiraling on and on. Action in, action out, with the feedback from the resulting action becoming an inciting action itself. This is a gross oversimplification of a very complex field that is concerned with complex relationships and ecosystems of relationships and actions, but it's helpful for understanding the ethos of cyberpunk as a genre.

This scene is horrific precisely because it understands the ideas of cybernetics and feedback. The scene is an ongoing feedback loop both within the recording (between rapist and woman) and  after the recording (between the rapist and the protagonist, to whom the rapist is sending a message via the recording). The focus of the scene and its aftermath is on the horrific nature of the crime, and yet, at the same time, the scene completely elides the woman's experience, even as we see her reactions on her face. Her subjectivity is removed completely from the equation. She is forced to feel what her rapist is feeling. Her free will is taken from her, and she becomes an object. We as an audience alongside the protagonist are made into unwilling voyeurs. We are implicated in the crime.

The implication is the point. I came out of the movie feeling extreme cognitive dissonance because of the scene, because of the way that the scene is presented (voyeuristically), and because of the way the movie understands the scene (as a horrific crime). I don't like art that cossets me or makes me feel safe. But this felt simultaneously too real and also too dreamlike. It felt like the movie had crossed a line somehow. But I couldn't find the exact line. I just oscillated back and forth between my horrified reaction and my fascination with that reaction, which left me feeling profoundly dissociated from the film.

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I am writing this post with the help of text to speech software. It's slow going—I am not used to the software; I've never had to use it before. I'm in a feedback loop with the software I'm using, adjusting my speech patterns to allow the software to understand me well enough to get my words down on virtual paper. The software is learning as I go as well; it’s getting better at understanding me, although I still have to correct for typos and for punctuation.

My own arm is caught in a kind of feedback loop of its own. I've been dealing with a case of tendinitis in the form of golfer’s elbow. My arm feels as though it is straining against a weight even when it's lying still. My wrist does not want to grab things. I have a brace, and I've been icing my arm, but I do not want to strain anything any more than I already have. Pain in, pain out: I can't write. I move my body much more gingerly than I usually do, because I don't want to risk straining my arm. The inaction weakens my arm further in return.

Cyberpunk stories would refer to my arm as “wetware,” something to be endured until I can jack back in to technology. The physical in stories like this is usually abandoned in favor of the mind. Strange Days understands what it is like to live as a physical being in the world, surrounded by technology that allows a person to transcend their physical form. Strange Days also acknowledges the fact that although our subjective experience can be transformed into whatever we want—or into our worst nightmare—we can't escape the physical world. Not fully.

I'm planning to take a short hiatus from writing for the time being. I need to heal, and I can't do that while I'm typing constantly. I will be getting better acquainted with my arm as a part of me, rather than as a tool used to type things, and I will be hopefully getting better at taking care of my physical body. I'll be back before long, either typing with my actual hands, or with a better relationship with text to speech software.