Cinema
Strange Days (18, selected cinemas)
Hooked up but not on
Mark Steyn
The past may be another country, but the future is always the same one: an apoc- alyptic nightmare in which jackbooted gov- ernment thugs and anarchist mobs rampage across a blighted, urban wasteland for control of the streets. In many of our great cities, such a world is not even futur- istic, and, for that reason alone, you'd have thought movie futurism might have come up with some variation by now. But no, here we are, in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, in the usual Blade Runner dystopia. It's New Year's Eve 1999 in Los Angeles: the century is running out and so, ideas- wise, is the film.
Back in Fritz Lang's day, pictures like Metropolis assumed that the masses would be enslaved by giant machines and doomed to spend 16-hour days turning huge, clank- ing valves and wheels and levers. We should be so lucky: now the only future that beckons is one in which the masses are sedated by 24-hour lesbian wrestling on the PornoGlobe Mega Channel. In Strange Days, the big idea is that the populace is hooked on and hooked up to SQUID — a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device. You put the SQUID on your head and it records your most intimate feelings and sensations, which are then sold like drugs. 'It isn't "like TV, only better",' explains Lenny, a SQUID dealer. 'It's a piece of somebody's life — pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.'
The SQUID actually looks like a squid, with lots of dangly tentacles. It is the first literal website: it's a web and, when you put it on, you look a sight. But Lenny is right. The SQUID isn't 'like TV, only better', it's like TV, only worse, or, anyway, like a Channel 4 yoof programme, only exactly the same. With the SQUID plugged in and your eyes closed, everything looks like it's been shot with a jerky hand-held cam- corder accompanied by a lot of huffing and puffing on the soundtrack. As high kicks and fevered ecstasy go, it seems to me to leave a lot to be desired: the SQUID is essentially a toupee that plays other peo- ple's home movies.
Miss Bigelow, intriguingly, has decided to shoot her movie as if it's a SQUID. She opens up with an ear-splitting rampage, the camera staggering and reeling from one deafening, visual assault to the next. I sup- pose her thinking is that, as the film is about the breakdown of society, the movie itself should also keep breaking down. Thus, trifling matters like, say, the story get busted up by sheer noise. In the middle of all this, mean and moody in basic black, is Lenny, an ex-cop turned SQUID-pusher. Our own Ralph Fiennes, either through cunning or complacency, plays Lenny exactly as he played the snooty, Waspy Ivy Leaguer in Quiz Show: it's a cool, quiet, still, minimalist performance, utterly at odds with the chaos raging around him. For the viewer, he is an oasis of calm, like stumbling across Val Doonican in the mid- dle of a rave.
Fiennes probably wouldn't take that as a compliment. Strange Days was supposed to catapult him to stardom. Instead, after the film flopped in America, Hollywood execs started going around saying they told you so, he's not a movie star, just another of those clever-clever tight-assed Brits who should never be let out of period costume. Presumably, their idea of a star turn is Juli- ette Lewis, who as Lenny's ex-girlfriend, a druggy rock singer, delivers her usual psY- choslut performance. But, in truth, the pic- ture's problems lie with neither of the prin- cipals but with the film itself: it looks into the future and sees nothing but the usual clichés.
Meanwhile, Lenny gets two SQUID discs that show, respectively, a brutal rape and a brutal rapper. The rap artiste, an idealistic black revolutionary, is murdered, and Lenny decides to solve the crime. The answer is obvious from the beginning: rogue racist cops from the Los Angeles Police Department who carry out instant executions and then cover them up. Yeah, right. If the OJ case taught us anything, it's that the LAPD is so incompetent it can't even frame a guilty man. Miss Bigelow, who used to be a quirky, iconoclastic direc- tor, seems to have lost heart. As the finale looms, we expect at least the consolation of total Armageddon-outta-here destruction, but here, denying the logic of the preceding two and a half apocalyptic hours, she chick- ens out completely. And so, for all the high-tech gloss of its virtual reality premise, the evening induces a familiar grumble: not much change from a SQUID.
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