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.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the film rations out the murder clip's footage. (structure)
The clip is withheld, then given in pieces, and finally forced on Lenny and the audience in full, implicating the act of watching itself.
Payoff: The film makes you complicit in wanting to see the very thing it is accusing you of wanting.
Watch what Mace does instead of watching a clip. (structure)
While Lenny stays sealed inside his replayed memory of Faith, Mace acts in real time, in the one body that is actually hers.
Payoff: She is the proof that there is a world the loop cannot reach. In the reading: crystal-cracked. The reading calls her the crack in the crystal: the line out of a sealed loop of replayed feeling toward an actual present.
Watch the countdown to midnight cross-cut with the conspiracy's exposure. (cutting)
The crowd at the Bonaventure, the unraveling plot, and the literal clock toward 2000 all escalate together toward the same single moment.
Payoff: Personal violence and mass celebration are made to collide at exactly the same second.
Carry this in: Watch whether you are seeing someone or being made to be them. The film never confuses the two.