Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Strange Days
1995 · Kathryn Bigelow · Strange Days on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the opening scene from inside someone else's eyes. (camera)
The camera moves as a body would, sprinting and climbing and falling, with no cut to show you whose eyes you are borrowing.
Payoff: You are given a body before you are given a name to attach to it. In the reading: perception-image. The reading calls this a perception-image: cinema that foregrounds the act of seeing itself, the world arriving as someone's specific looking.
Notice when the image shifts to unbroken first-person view. (camera)
The film keeps two distinct visual languages, Lenny's ordinary third-person world and the seamless embodied POV of a playback clip, and never confuses the two.
Payoff: You always know whether you are watching someone or being made to be them.
Notice the wet streets and sodium-orange streetlight throughout. (light)
Leonetti lights the real-world Los Angeles in a grimy, neon-soaked nocturnal register, a city that already looks like it is under threat.
Payoff: The ordinary streets look as unstable as the technology at the center of the plot.
Notice Mace is the one character who never plays a clip. (performance)
Bassett plays her as grounded and physically present, the only major character who refuses the technology everyone else is addicted to.
Payoff: She is the film's one visible argument for simply living in the present.
Watch Lenny replay the same old clip of Faith. (performance)
He returns to this one recorded memory of a former lover again and again, treating a dated recording as though it were still happening now.
Payoff: His addiction is not to violence, it is to a past he cannot stop re-entering. In the reading: mnemosign / image-souvenir. The reading calls this a recollection-image: a dated memory replayed as if it were the present rather than something already gone.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch whether you are seeing someone or being made to be them. The film never confuses the two.