Strange Days and the Subject of Mobility

This is not like TV, only better. This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. It's pure and uncut—straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you're there, you're doing it, you're seeing it, you're hearing it, you're feeling it.

—Lenny Nero, Strange Days

In Lenny Nero's (Ralph Fiennes) description of the SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) technology, given in Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 neo-noir film Strange Days (US), we can hear a stark refusal of Christian Metz's groundbreaking assertion that the cinema's imaginary mechanics can never restore the spectator to the object world the cinema depicts. In the cinema, the spectator is not, as Nero says, "there." ¹ Metz's The Imaginary Signifier has drawn critical attention to the radical ontological difference between the spectator and the filmic event, arguing that the uniqueness of the cinematic experience relative to other representational media lies in the irreducible spatial and temporal loss at its heart: the filmic image is of a set of objects no longer present, objects lost to another space and time. For Metz, the cinematic spectator and the "real" filmic object never coincide in space and time, unlike the theatrical spectator for whom the objects are present. The cinema calls us into an identification with its world and at the same time bars us from sustaining life there, since, after all, it is a world that, strictly speaking, no longer exists. We are left, sometimes disappointingly, in our seats.

Nero's account of the futuristic SQUID technology in Strange Days triumphantly exalts SQUID's ability to overcome precisely the limits Metz claims are constitutive of cinematic spectatorship. The SQUID technology enables the spectator to occupy in the fullest sense what was once, in the cinematic technology, the place of the camera but is now, in the SQUID apparatus, the embodied perspective of another human subject. He or she cannot only see, but be in the place of another, a spectatorial transportation that puts one into direct access with an alternate life world; unlike in television or the cinema, "You're there, you're doing it, you're seeing it, you're hearing it, you're feeling it." While Nero, the film's protagonist who deals in the illegal clips of other people's experiences, seems unflinchingly to endorse both the technological plausibility and the ethical desirability of this form of subjective transformation, the film more generally appears conflicted over how best to appraise the technology's capacity to overcome the limits of cinematic mediation as Metz lays them out. On one level, the film seems to side with the spectatorial fantasy to go where we could never go before, to experience the rush of bodily otherness. At this level, Strange Days dreams a dream widely central not only to the cinema and its spectatorial mechanisms, but to film theory itself. Film and many of its theoreticians have long wished for a cinema that might hurl the spectator into bodily and psychic otherness, into the "corporeal coordinates" of the other. ²

Film theory's dream of spectatorial abduction, recently revived in Kaja Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World, is echoed in a good deal of political thought on the democratic potentiality of the city. By some accounts, the city promises, like the cinema, to provide the subject with a productive opportunity to confront otherness. This confrontation with "strangers" in the city, like the confrontation with the other on the screen, is thought to have the potential to draw normative subjects out of their psychic fixity—out of what Silverman will call the "principle of the self-same body"—and induct them into new kinds of hitherto disavowed identifications (35). I turn to Strange Days insofar as it engages the cinematic fantasy of a productive identification with difference from within the material context of the contemporary city. In so doing, I ultimately explore less the...