what the film does
los angeles, the last two days of 1999. a squid is an illegal rig that records memories and physical sensation straight from the wearer’s cortex onto a minidisc. lenny nero, a former lapd officer turned squid dealer, buys a robbery clip from his supplier tick, and sells other people’s lives to whoever can pay. his ex, faith, now sings for philo gant, a music mogul whose biggest act, the rapper jeriko one, was just murdered. lenny’s friend iris drops a disc through the sunroof of his car. then iris is murdered, and the disc shows who did it: two lapd officers, steckler and engelman. the same two killed jeriko one for his lyrics.
the truth is worse than cops. max peltier, lenny’s private investigator friend, killed iris on philo’s orders, fried philo and tick’s brains with amplified squid playback, and framed lenny. faith pulls the rig off max’s head mid confession. max hangs from a hotel balcony and lenny cuts the tie. mace, lenny’s bodyguard friend who has loved him forever, fights steckler and engelman in the street while a crowd gathers. the deputy commissioner arrives with iris’s disc in hand, frees mace, and the two murderous cops go down, one by his own gun. at midnight, lenny pulls mace out of the commissioner’s car and kisses her while the crowd celebrates the millennium.
why this one
cameron wrote the story around 1986 and bigelow made it into the last great pre-y2k noir. the squid is the film’s engine: a drug, a camera, a witness, and a weapon, usually all four in the same scene. the opening robbery, shot as one long pov take, is the best argument the movie makes for its own technology.
the riots are in the frame on purpose. principal photography wrapped in october 1994, and the film carries the king verdict and the burning city like background radiation. it flopped hard, seventeen million against forty two, and the flop itself became part of the story: the studio never knew how to sell a noir about recorded experience in the year of the internet’s adolescence.
the cast is a time capsule. fiennes before the english patient, bassett at full force, juliette lewis as the singer, tom sizemore, vincent d’onofrio. the saturn awards gave bassett best actress and bigelow best director, the first woman to take it.
what stays with me
the kiss. after everything, lenny drags mace back out of the commissioner’s car and kisses her at midnight while the city erupts around them. it is the least noir ending in noir history and the film means it.
and the first scene. the robbery from inside the robber’s head, the camera riding someone else’s nerves for four minutes before the title card admits what the rest of the movie will do to you.
on hand
the dvd.
image: letterboxd og:image (1200x675 crop); genuine production still of mace shielding lenny against the la graffiti backdrop. source luma 76.78, pre-darkened 1.0, baked at factor 0.45, lanczos to 1200x675, on-disk luma 26.74