"Memories were meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
I first encountered Strange Day during a “Women Making Films” class at the University of Iowa. Within 
that context, the film devastates; a meditation on the roll that women have played in popular film and their victimization in American society, there seems to be little redemption in its narrative. The film’s most infamous scene is a rape scene shown from a first-person perspective, not exploitative but functioning as an indictment of the audience. Both director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter James Cameron seem to be asking the audience, “How can you live with this? How can you look away? What if you couldn’t?”
Thus I was shocked when our professor argued that the film’s primary theme is one of hope. This movie? The film where almost every single woman is either a victim or a leech? The film where the MacGuffin of the plot is a snuff film of a prophetic African-American rapper, recalling both the Rodney King beating and the killing of Tupac Shakur? Strange Days is a futuristic film noir written by one of science fiction’s most skeptical and cynical voices. So how can it possible be a story about hope?
There are two central characters of Strange Days. The first is Lenny Nero (played with contagious nervous energy by Ralph Fiennes), a former police officer turned drug dealer. Nero is like his namesake in the sense that while Los Angeles is quite literally burning down around him due to ongoing racial riots, he is still peddling his product to the underbelly. To raise the stakes even higher, Nero’s drug of choice is SQUID recordings, the memories and experiences recorded and sold to Nero for duplication. As Nero explains to a potential client, “this is not ‘Like TV, only better’…this is a piece of somebody’s life,” completely realized as if the user was in the skin. In a very scientific sense, Nero buys and sells souls in a city where no one has one.
Of course, Nero is every bit of Faust as well; he’s been recording his own life for years and often replays his favorite memories in his moments alone. When he is with his clients or his friends, Nero is cool, confident and charismatic; alone, he’s lost himself. He lives in a perpetual state of nostalgia and sentimentality. We see him reliving a romantic evening with his girlfriend Faith; through this (admittedly heavy-handed) moment, we realize what Nero misses. He is a man searching for his Faith, both the woman who left him and his belief in the inherent goodness of people. But living at the bottom can make it hard to see the sun.
The second main character is Los Angeles itself. Every character that Nero encounters represents different aspects of the city’s tortured soul. The crooked police, the prostitutes, Nero’s clients, Nero himself: everyone is searching for their own personal salvation. The city is cast in fire and smoke. The only person we see who has risen is Mace, a single mother who protects Nero, despite her better judgment.
In the end, it is Mace who sees that both Nero and Los Angeles aren’t beyond saving. She knows the good man that Nero once was (he was there when the father of her child was arrested); and she knows that Los Angeles doesn’t have to be the same forever, that just as the millennium is coming to a close, so is the old way of things. It is by Mace’s actions that the truth about Jeriko One are revealed and on a personal level, she convinces Nero that he needs to stop living in the past and try to live for the future, for what she calls “Real Time.”
In the final moments of the film, Nero and Los Angeles find themselves facing both their past (the truth about Faith or the brutal killing of Jeriko One/Rodney King) and facing their future, not with fear but with a certain boldness. And by entering the new world, what the film calls 2K, both Nero and Los Angeles are saved from themselves.
Cameron, when asked why he wrote the film, puts it best: “I…wanted to do a…redemption motif. I always had in mind the fate of this one guy, Lenny Nero, and his ability to find what’s right and what’s wrong. If one person can elevate themselves or redeem themselves, then…we all can.” This is the core of the hidden hope of Strange Days: that none of us, even the least of these is beyond hope, beyond a new start and a new self.
