_Strange Days_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Point of view from a car's backseat: you're getting talked at by a couple of guys putting stockings on their heads, you're on your way to rob a restaurant. At the scene, you spill out of the car with your gun, rush through the kitchen, grab at a woman trying to get away. Your voice, male: "Where you goin, bitch?!'' Lights outside, cops. "Fuck!'' You're running, upstairs. Jumping from building roof to roof, in a panic to escape. You're falling. You're going to die. You're ... done. This character named Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), he yanks off his headset: "You know I hate the zap when they die,'' he tells his buddy Tick (Richard Edson), the weaselly dealer who supplied the disk. "Ruins my whole day.'' So, okay. Plug pulled. You're not watching some _Cops_-backwards reality-tv episode, you're watching this movie, Kathryn Bigelow's _Strange Days_. Jacked-in, jangly, and ambitious, the film has a lot on its mind. It's terrific as spectacle (beautifully filmed and edited), not so good as narrative, but it's most compelling as something to think through after you see it. It's an imperfectly hyper-realized nightmare, the collision of at least three central storylines: the impending millenium, psychokilling, and the LA Uprising revisited. Living in LA 1999, Lenny's an ex-cop street hustler, dealing in SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) disks, which allow users to download sensory experiences recorded by someone else (someone committing, for instance, robbery or rape). While he won't deal snuff, Lenny's product is strictly black market, which means his clients are rich and/or desperate, they're suits and junkies. "It's about what you can't have '' he tells one anxious wiretrip-virgin, "I'm the Santa Claus of the subconscious.'' Lenny's own tripping extends beyond his gnarly sense of self-importance, to his obsessive lust-love for his ex, Faith (Juliette Lewis as Mallory after Mickey), a post-punk singer now hooked up with miscreant producer Philo (typecast Michael Wincott). Bereft and ambiguously tragic, Lenny routinely goes home after a hard day's street-work to download his own memories of fucking the significantly named Faith, while the neon and noise outside his scuzzy apartment remind us that the end of the century is near. The camera plays Lenny's part: "I love your eyes, Lenny,'' Faith tells us. "I love the way they see.'' This idea, "the way they see,'' becomes the film's relentless, if mostly muddled, focus, more precisely, the way that vision and responsibility (social, political, ethical) are connected. This point isn't so original - it goes directly to current concerns about tabloid culture and mass-voyeurism - and the film splits it into initially parallel plots, one about a rapist-murderer and the other, the assassination of a rap-artist, Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer). Lenny's the immediate conduit for the connection of these stories: the murderer sends him disks of the experience (extending the viewer-implicating premise of Michael Powell's _Peeping Tom_, these disks replay the victims' simultaneously downloading of their own deaths, filtered through the killer's rush), and someone else gives him a disk that "witnesses'' Jeriko One's death. But if Lenny's the conduit, he's only standing in as a kind of ur-viewer, standing in for "us,'' the white guy anti-hero who can't quite get it right, who's increasingly dependent on his guardian angel, Mace (Angela Bassett). Lenny's responsibility, his guilt, has to do with his passivity, his willingness to let things happen around him, to watch and "take'' Faith in his head forever. The film sets up a continuum of indicted spectating, an experiential progression: viewing as visceral sensation as culpability. Linking the rape-murder and the assassination in this way is an astutely political gesture (and I won't belabor this, but institutionalyl and culturally conditioned sexism, racism, and violence are surely issues "of the moment''). And if this link is somewhat convoluted, sometimes vexingly obvious, it is crucial, I think, for understanding what this movie does do well, which is question what it's doing as it does it. What it doesn't do so well is hold together. Like Bigelow's _Blue Steel_ and _Point Break_ (both films which dismantled macho-generic conventions, by questioning standard heteroerotics and fixed gender-power arrangements), _Strange Days_ is fairly upfront about its incoherence. It's like the movie is supposing that you already know what its formula will do, that Lenny will learn about love and loyalty, the psychokiller (whose identity is clear from the start because you've seen this story before) will suffer a terrible end, the end of the century will happen, in a climactically over-the-top street-throng scene (apparently the filmmakers were able to charge LA citizens $10 a head to party for this mighty simu-celebration), and a corny-please-don't-go-there resolution. But in the midst of all this movie's overt supposing that you know what you're watching, yeah yeah, the movie offers something else, something that doesn't typically show up in a cyberpunkish, super-teched, white-folks-at- the-end-of-the-world scenario. This something else is the rap-star's murder, filtered through Mace (Angela Bassett), a limo-driver-bodyguard who's also Lenny's friend. She shows up relatively late, about a third of the way into the film, but Mace's astute pragmatism (not to mention her ability to kick serious ass) reframes what you're seeing, so that the various plot strands (read: "black'' and "white'') come together in potent, troubling ways. Mace's mix of pragmatism and romanticism (she's a working mother who struggles with her affection for basic-deadbeat Lenny, explained perfunctorily through a flashback where he's good with her son) drives the film to a complicated examination of the differences between public and private seeing. These complications evolve with regard to the disk recording of Jeriko One's murder: Lenny wants to take it to the "media,'' but she understands the situation very differently, from within a specific community - at one point we see her with her black neighbors, with tag-along Lenny looking especially pale and out of place. She sees that his impulse is hopelessly hopeful, that the media are necessarily complicit in social orders and surveillances, that exposing the murderers - that is, "the truth'' - won't change anything. Though the film sells her out at the end, it's hard to dispel the lingering sense that Mace is right to worry about this, that ways of seeing, by communities and individuals, are incalculably divided and divisive, that they're simultaneously personal and public, but also that falling back on essentialism and relativism ("That's my opinion, deal with it'') can't address many problems of living in a world with other people. (And in this context, the trite ending makes some vague, if disappointing, sense.) This is what the film does well, ask questions that it can't possibly resolve. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.