LA, 1999. 5 years into the future. 2 days before the new millennium. Tensions are high, and race riots and martial law seem inevitable. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is an ex-LAPD cop turned black marketeer who trades in immersive memory technology. A SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) is an addictive VR tech that allows users to use ‘clips’ to feel someone else’s experience as if they were their own. Lenny cruises around LA using his friends: Lornette ‘Mace’ Mason’s (Angela Bassett) limo service and PI Max Peltier’s (Tom Sizemore) contacts are co-opted to pick up new clients. Lenny is given an anonymous clip of Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), a Black artist and activist, being murdered by a pair of police officers. Through this investigation, he uncovers the crimes of a serial rapist and murderer who is using the VR tech to force women to experience the pleasure he feels committing their sexual assaults. Lenny gets embroiled in a mystery of murder and police corruption. But can Lenny overcome his self-destructive addiction to ex-lover Faith Justin (Juliette Lewis) and the VR he sinks into when reality is just too much, and save the city and people he loves from an eruption of violence on the streets?
Strange Days is an overlooked film in the history of cyberpunk sitting amongst films like Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), The Terminator (Cameron, 1984), and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999). Take a look at Dr Anna McFarlane’s 2017 work on Bigelow and science fiction realism in Strange Days and Zero Dark Thirty for an excellent and developed discussion of the film as cyberpunk. Strange Days also aligns with the subgenre Tech Noir (a merging of imagined futures, 1940s aesthetics, and noir narrative devices) that was fully defined by Blade Runner but not given its moniker until the Tech Noir club appeared in The Terminator. In Blade Runner, as special photographic effects supervisor Dave Dryer explains, “one of the principles in the design of the film [was] that while it is 40 years in the future, it is also 40 years in the past”. Strange Days offers a vision of a near-future LA – like Blade Runner – as a dystopia of seductive high-tech placed against a dingy tired cityscape filled with desperate hopeless people. Past, present, and future collide with disastrous consequences.
The dissonance I feel with the technology presented in Strange Days may be a reflection of my age and when I first saw the film, especially in comparison to the way I responded to the similar retro futurism in Blade Runner. I first watched Strange Days as preparation for a module I was teaching on science fiction and desperate for a woman-directed SF to disrupt the boys’ club. In 2010 this was the best example I could find (and with some digging I got hold of a [legal!] copy). It offered some interesting opportunities to talk about memory and the feminist potential of the technology imagined. For a man to literally feel a woman’s experience is a pretty radical concept. No ‘someone’s mother/daughter/sister/wife’ framing needed; in Strange Days men could literally feel what it’s like.
The soul of Strange Days: Mace (Angela Bassett)
The women in Strange Days are all selling their skills and bodies to survive: Mace is a single mother who is a driver/bodyguard for hire, Faith is a rock singer/model, and Iris (Brigitte Bako) is a sex worker who witnesses the murder of Jeriko One, and is then raped, further tortured (using a SQUID) and murdered. Faith has power and agency (power over Lenny, Max, and music mogul Philo [Michael Wincott]), but Mace is the soul of Strange Days. A maternal force who, echoing the black-clad bad-ass style of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, Terminator 2 [1991]), cares for her son and Lenny, the latter of whom rarely deserves her love or protection. She is the only character we know of that doesn’t use a SQUID – denouncing it as “porno” and “sleaze” – so she can be “right here, right now [in] real time” (she quotes the political statements of Jeriko One). The SQUID technology might be able to give literal insight into the experience of others (potentially women), but Lenny, like the other men in the film, predominantly use it as a drug: for sexual pleasure/perversion, money, and power.
When I first saw Strange Days, I was struck by how outdated the technology felt. The Minidisks and players refashioned as a way of recording and playing experiences felt at odds with the developments in technology in reality. This felt clunky and almost laughable as if the filmmakers were sure that this then-emergent-in-1995 technology would still be in use fifteen years later. However, with Blade Runner, released before I was born, I was less concerned with the technologies on show. The heritage computer technology was just part of the piling detritus of the future and added to the production design; it was as alien to me as any imagined future might be.
Now obsolete tech, in 1992, Sony’s newly released Minidisk was an innovation. It combined the portability, recordability, and size of the cassette with the digital quality of a CD. They were more robust and unlike the cassette or CD once recorded a minidisk could be split or combined, and tracks could moved, named, individually deleted, and recovered. The CD-R (Recordable Compact Disc) first had professional use back in 1991, but it wasn’t available affordably until the late 90s (when I was making and receiving mix CDs – I still treasure the one my sister made for me when I left for uni).
1998 was declared ‘The Year of the MiniDisc’ by a desperate Sony as market research showed 75% of Americans didn’t recognise the device. The players become more ‘affordable’ (£150 rather than £450), but in my world, they were only owned by the wealthy kids, the gap year-ers. By the time I watched Strange Days for the first time, Minidisks might as well have been floppy disks or fax machines. Worse than obsolete, it was a failed technology – like Betamax before it, Minidisk didn’t reach its potential before the next new thing came to replace it. It was the iPod era, and I had just got my 4th Gen iPod Nano (in delicious Cadbury purple), and the touch-sensitive click wheel felt so advanced by comparison.
Strange Days visualises the sim/stim (simulation/stimulation) device technology imagined in William Gibson’s work including Neuromancer (1976) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). It’s an imagined brain computer interface (BCI) – known as SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) – which records the sensory experience of one person that, with a deck and headset, can be re-experienced in the mind of another person. In Strange Days it was originally intended for use by the FBI to replace the body mic; this now-illegal technology has become a black-market entertainment sensation selling true-to-live experiences of love, sex, awe, and death. It makes the virtual, mediated perception indistinguishable from the ‘real’ direct perception; the boundary between the direct and the virtual experience has been transversed.
“This is not like TV, only better. This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you’re there, you’re doing it, you’re hearing it, you’re feeling it” Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes)
From: The Movie Art of Syd Mead: Visual Futurist
The initial design for the SQUID headset (that attaches to the adapted Minidisk deck) was created by Syd Mead – the visual futurist best known for creating the concept art for Alien and Blade Runner. The sketches were done by Mead in collaboration with Cameron and based off an early treatment of the script (one of Cameron’s hybrid scriptments) in the mid-80s (c.1985/6). Mead imagined a tight fitting, vaguely medical headpiece that connected to an electronic recording device by a translucent umbilical-like cord. As noted in The Movie Art of Syd Mead: Visual Futurist the SQUID looks like a ‘giant centipede clutching the actor’s head’ but it is far more mechanical than the icky MetaFlesh (lab-grown, organic) Game-Pods from Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999).
Using the terminology emerging at the time of the film’s release, SQUID-users ‘jack in’ to recordings that allow them to feel someone else’s experience. But it is not reproduction; it is as Lenny explains ‘a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex’. Porn movies and snuff films become central to the trade of clips.
SQUID is addictive. In this near-future world, virtual reality is the drug of choice. Users can overdose and criminals can use it to kill and control witnesses. Lenny’s weak-willed immersion into his past introduces a version of his ex, Faith, that is hard to match up to the woman we see coked up in dingy nightclubs hanging off a sleazy music mogul. Lenny’s attempts to save Faith drive a lot of the film.
Lenny is addicted to replaying recordings of his own memories, instead of escaping into someone else’s. He repeatedly relives the heady experience of a new love/lust he had with Faith roller blading down Venice Beach and having spontaneous passionate sex. His memories of her never fade – he is locked in the fantasy of who he believed she might be and actively ignores the reality of the woman we see on screen. His mind is so riddled by this intoxicating limerent state that he almost fails to see the connections that allow for the uncovering of a serial rapist and murderer.
Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) can’t see Faith (Juliette Lewis) clearly – she’s disdorted by his additiction to the vivid memories of their early relationship recorded with a SQUID
Strange Days uses this near-future tech to speculate about 1990s anxieties about how (over)use of digital, immersive technologies might control behaviour and shape or corrupt perceptions of reality. Despite this engagement with emergent technology philosophically, Strange Days remains rather analog in its production – the digital effects are mostly limited to generating landscapes and NYE fireworks. Its use of the Minidisks and an adapted player for recording/playing ‘clips’ makes the future seem retro now, but in 1995 Bigelow was using the emergent portable music device to show how intrusive and expansive domestic immersive technology could become.
Although a male-led film – men are the primary victims, villains and heroes, and the women are secondary characters whose pain is literally played for pleasure – Strange Days still offers a feminist perspective. It questions the role technology can play in telling the stories of the oppressed and provides insight into their lived experience, easily overlooked by the rich white, male establishment. Screenwriter James Cameron responded to 1990s US race relations and incorporated it into Strange Days. The idea for the film was originally his, but the atmosphere, politics and general setting of the film developed through a series of conversations with Bigelow. Structured around a video of LAPD officers killing an unarmed Black man, Strange Days is inspired by the beating of Rodney King in 1991 (videoed by George Halliday), the acquittal of the police officers in 1992, and the 1992 Rodney King Rebellion. It foregrounds white privilege and police brutality, and the power of filming racist attacks presaging the real-life police brutality exposed on smartphones and social media now.
“Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed”Will Smith
Mace puts her faith in the white police commissioner, Palmer Strickland (Josef Sommer), and gives evidence of Jeriko One’s murder to him – he gets to be the white saviour (brandishing a Minidisk, above) and riots are avoided. It’s a little too tidy, and viewing from 2025, it feels like an overly neat bow for a complex and at times overtly messy plot.
As we discuss in the podcast episode ‘Strange Days at 30’, Kathryn Bigelow had a hand in the development of Strange Days across its production history. Cameron was allegedly more focused on the romantic storylines (Lenny and Faith, and Mace and Lenny), while Bigelow was far more interested in the politics, grungey aesthetics and atmosphere. Kathryn Bigelow has taken issue with being defined by her gender. As she responded in an interview in 1987 following the premiere of her SF-horror Near Dark:
“For me, the notion of a woman’s aesthetic is limiting, to say that women have special vision kind of makes them impotent. The important thing is a common voice, a common eye—an eye that is not based on one’s sexuality [gender]. Somebody should be hired not because they’re a woman or a man but because their strength or their focus or their bent is in a certain direction. I think it’s important for women to do action pictures. Sam Peckinpah, Jim Cameron—those are my role models”Kathryn Bigelow
But there is a reason why women writers like Alice B. Sheldon used a pen name:
“A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation”Alice B. Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr./Racooner Sheldon
Gender is not a genre and I agree that defining women’s work through gender can feel disempowering. But this project is not about identifying something that makes a woman-directed science fiction different, better, worse… rather, it’s about thinking about how gender has undeniably been made a limiting factor, externally, meaning that women, femmes, thems have received different treatment because of their gender presentation and historically excluded from participating in making mainstream science fiction.
I understand why Bigelow disengages from discussions of her gender, but it is important to celebrate and highlight women’s participation in SF, especially when their contributions are overlooked, under-reviewed or reviewed as gendered fictions, or framed through the men who were also involved in production (on and off screen). In the future, I hope it’s not a discussion we need to have, but we’re not at that point yet, so we still need to be making these examinations of how, when and where women make SF.
Podcast:
Listen below to our podcast episode ‘Strange Days at 30′:
More from this director
One of the few women directors of SF to have an extensive filmography filled with genre fiction. Her 1980s and 1990s films were explicitly genre films with seductively violent horror, science fiction, and action; her 21st-century films have been more realist in their social, historical and political focus.
This is only a small selection of Bigelow’s feature films.
Her most recent film is politcal thriller A House of Dynamite (2025)
Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar with the war drama The Hurt Locker (2008)
She rose in popularity and notoriety directing the thrillers Blue Steel (1990) and Point Break (1991)
And her debut feature was, co-directed and co-written with Monty Montgomery, outlaw biker film The Loveless (1981) starring a then 26-year-old Willem Defoe
Further reading:
Bigelow once said, paraphrasing poet Getrude Stein, “A filmmaker is a filmmaker is a filmmaker,” and “Action is action.” But then she also said: “A woman can handle something perceived as masculine, but then you have to ask yourself, why is it perceived as masculine?” (qtd in Conterio, 2024)
