I Watch Films: Strange Days
In the last days of 1999 Los Angeles is on the verge of breakdown, thanks to the death of messianic rapper Jeriko One and also general apocalyptic fever. Lenny, a former LAPD detective, is now a dealer in memory recordings, which can be recorded or experienced by wearing a SQUID*. Lenny is discovered in the film buying a recording of a memory of a robbery.
Iris, a prostitute and friend of Faith, Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, tries to get a message and recording to him, but fails, leaving it in Lenny’s car, which is towed. Lenny gets his friend Mace, a bodyguard and Limo driver, to give him a lift to a club where his ex-Faith is playing; she’s with Philo, a music industry mogul who is her new boyfriend and also the manager of Jeriko One. Thrown out, Lenny teams up with Max, a moonlighting detective and they discover that Iris was murdered.
In classic noir fashion everywhere Lenny turns things get murkier and more complicated. Everyone has their own angle. Things are getting out of control. It’s a stylish and cool thriller, that uses the first-person memory recordings to reveal the secrets in a visceral fashion.
Watch This: Crime, corruption and memory recording in
retro-near-future LA
Don’t Watch This: Some gruesome first person sexual assault
and other violence, also shouldn’t California noir have a crooked land deal?
* A Superconducting QUantum Interference Device. These are real, and can detect very small changes in electro-magnetic fields, and I used a couple back when I was taking a Physics degree. The idea that they can be used to read thoughts/memories/sensory data is a cyberpunk conceit that seems to have been taken from William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic (in the collection Burning Chrome),in which Jones, a dolphin equipped with a SQUID by the Navy to detect and hack mines, uses it to uncover the password from Johnny’s implanted data storage device. My memory of how this is handled in the film version is, aptly, hazy; nevertheless I’m fairly sure the SQUID works on the data implant rather than Johnny’s actual memories.
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