Surveillance and Social Memory: Strange Days Indeed

The power of the false exists only from the perspective of a series of powers, always referring to each other and passing into one another.

—Gilles Deleuze

Introduction

Surveillance has long been a recurrent theme in cinematic narrative, and the recent spate of films organized around the technologies, violences, and productive possibilities of surveillance and documentation has considerably furthered this significant trope. From such highly discussed films as Michael Haneke's Caché to lesser known films such as the British Red Road, and on through the American films Vantage Point, Untraceable, Vacancy, Source Code, and so on, narratives either completely based in or regularly deploying visual surveillance methodologies are more ubiquitous today than ever before. The temptation to view this as a "post-9/11" trend is strong. But there would also seem to be a demand to look at the trajectory of what I call "surveillance cinema" that precedes the current manifestations, since before today's rather overdetermined examples, many films were compellingly exploring not just the political and psychological but crucially historicized and phenomenological affects and effects of surveillance technologies.

Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 Strange Days presents the possible reproduction of exact sensory experience through a technology called a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID). Under the auspices of this conceit, the film engages in a remarkably symptomatic, and at times remarkably incisive, analysis of the relations among subjective experience, representational mediation, surveillance practices, and political actions. As such, it draws attention to a crux in the theorization of surveillance as well as cinematic representations of surveillance: that surveillance both defines and is defined by the technologies and subjects it incorporates. Strange Days serves as a critical meditation on this seemingly circular action of surveillance. I will argue that the film's treatment of SQUID as a technology of immediacy navigates interrelated problematics of surveillance, representation, memory, and politics by establishing the circularity of the surveillance medium and deploying that circularity as a form of temporal intervention—intervention that is pivotal in any framework through which the "now" is being deployed as the rationale for political exceptionalism. Introducing the possibility of recording an individual's perceptual experience "straight from the cerebral cortex," with the SQUID technology, these sensations can then be replayed with the same technology, allowing the recordings to emerge as "raw" first-person experience for the wearer. By establishing narrative connectivity between absolute subjective experience and the use of representational media in surveillance and racial formations, the film asks us to trace the possible intersections of individually embodied experience and systematic intervention in technologies of mediation and political structuring. Strange Days thus serves even now, if at times problematically, as a re-membering of a political community through its deployments of representational surveillance technologies.

Strange Days revolves its story, at least initially, around Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), an ex-cop who now peddles SQUID "clips" on a black market that is presented as comparable to a drug trade. As an ex-police officer, Lenny is himself representative of the trajectory of the SQUID technology, since we are told that it was initially developed for the FBI for surveillance purposes. Both Lenny and the SQUID have now transgressed their law enforcement functions and are thus presented as conduits for "underground" technological perversion. Lenny is also characterized as a "user" (problematically so) of his own clips: his unhealthy attachment to his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis) is highlighted by his ecstatically melancholic review of his own recorded experiences with her. Lenny's narrative of overattachment to his lost object is woven together with two different (but eventually seen to be related) murder mysteries—notably murders that are respectively racialized and sexualized—also "played out" on, through, and against the SQUID technology. These plotlines unfold against the pivotal background of the impending end-of-millennium New Year's Eve celebration, which is presented as a looming disaster. The film proposes SQUID and its embodied users as the mechanisms of surveillance, even as it thematizes the production and erasure of both personal and historical memory as the object of such surveillance technologies (both human and...