Strange Days Have Found Us: Commodification Via Technology
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“Bodies confused
Memories misused”
-from The Doors song “Strange Days”
The film Strange Days depicts Los Angeles in the year 1999, when a technology known as SQUID (super-conducting quantum interference device), has made it possible to literally inhabit someone else’s experiences. The device, which looks like a squid and toupee combined into one, was initially created by the Feds for criminal inquiries, but eventually fell into the hands of peddlers on the black market. Also on the black market are thousands of clips, or ‘wire hits’, that affect the user in much the same way that drugs do, providing a real yet distorted experience that leaves the user strung out and ravenous for more.
The film’s protagonist, Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), is a dealer of SQUID products, whose clientele ranges from wealthy businessmen to down and out info-junkies, addicted to other people’s experiences, or perhaps simply the feeling of being outside one’s self. Lenny is also a user of his own product. Early in the film, he picks from a number of tapes of him and his ex-girlfriend, Faith, roller-skating and making love. Undressing, Faith asks: “Are you going to watch or are you going to do?” Lenny does, of course, but the fact that the experience is from the past suggests that he has, to a certain extent, lost control over his present experiences. He no longer cares to make the distinction between real experience and mediated ‘playback’.
The film grows progressively more violent and perverse in its depiction of the wire-tripping technology. In one scene, we watch from the point of view of an unknown assailant as he rapes a prostitute in the following fashion: he captures the assault on playback and ‘jacks’ the girl in to SQUID so that she can feel, see and hear what he feels, sees and hears, augmenting her fear and thus enhancing his excitement. The girl is literally experiencing rape from the point of view of both the victim and the aggressor. The scene, albeit profoundly disturbing, is a prime example of the convergence of subjectivity and technology displayed in the film: sexuality, entertainment and technology welded into the same experience.
Made over a decade ago, Strange Days‘s prophetic powers about an age of sexually deviant, memory-based virtual reality will, I believe, prove to be uncanny. Very few dystopian films–another being the modern masterpiece Children of Men (2006)–manage to paint a picture of the future so compelling it makes the viewer physical uncomfortable. Strange Days presents a distorted but all-too-familiar paradigm of the postmodern crisis: sensory overdose. The mass production of experience threatens to erode the quality of the the individual’s own subjectivity by disconnecting one from one’s experiences. One of the fundamental building blocks of film theory is the idea that a moviegoer frequents the cinema to absorb someone else’s experiences, to live vicariously through the protagonist. Strange Days re-inscribes this idea into a science fiction premise in which the moviegoer can actually be the protagonist, and, moreover, be a protagonist of the real world. This is not exactly interactive in the sense that a video game is, but it spins the idea of voyeurism in such a way that the commodification of experience appears open to innovation. During these strange days, our experiences are no longer solely ours; we can buy new ones and sell our old ones.
-Jake Anderson
Clarkesworld Magazine
Cleverbot
Craphound
Disinformation
Gizmodo
Global Consciousness Project
io9
Unreality Magazine
Over the Moon
