Lenny, who had intended to trade the Jeriko tape to get back together with Faith, is convinced of his plan’s stupidity in the film’s most-quoted scene, famously sampled by Fatboy Slim. “This is your life! Right here, right now!” Mace yells at him. Echoing the words of the radio caller and Jeriko One, Mace’s “right here, right now” rips Lenny from his backward-looking solipsism and into a collective, political ‘now.’ Invigoratingly, Strange Days repeatedly juxtaposes white nihilism with Black revolutionary futurity. (Bigelow says, while this was “certainly intentional,” it was “by no means intended as an indictment of American white males.” They’ll live!)
Mace, in turn, is reluctantly convinced to hand the Jeriko tape to a police commissioner. Amid falling confetti and a throng of ravers, she disarms the cops who killed Jeriko before a police squad arrives and violently beats her with their batons: a direct citation of the Rodney King footage. The crowd looks on, stunned. Then, the wave breaks. A breathtaking bird’s-eye view shot (a cinematographic choice as formally opposed to the POV clips as it gets) sees a mass of bodies overpowering the police, refusing to be spectators, fighting the fuck back.
Then, the police commissioner arrests the two cops for Jeriko’s murder. Can I interest you in Sebastian’s list of Movies Where White People Solve Racism? “It’s very funny to me that this dark and archly cynical social satire ends on the conviction that if one simply gives the right knowledge to the right authorities, you can achieve something like justice,” Jamelle wryly observes. Bigelow said she “wasn’t interested in tearing an institution apart,” emphasizing that the film is about “loose-cannon cops [acting] outside any authority.”
And yet, Strange Days keeps us coming back. Robert suggests it’s because the film “perfectly captures the misplaced hope of its time.” But maybe it’s more the disappointment of its ending that feels familiar, despite Bigelow’s intention: that we have seen, time and time again, how a riot is always followed by its suppression, how the fires of a social movement are extinguished by the restoration of a violent status quo. We know, better than the film does, that the tape doesn’t save us—but if we listen for the revolutionary pulse of that New Year’s Eve crowd, we know what might. “Strange days, but for now, not estranged,” Tim writes. If all we have is right here, right now, what are we waiting for?
