The Usual Suspects (1995)
Directed by Bryan Singer
As with many films, Singer’s magnificent work has faced a growing wave of detractors in recent years. These critics argue that the surprise of the final twist overshadows the film’s artistic quality, leaving little behind once the twist is digested. However, the film is far from being just the final twist. In fact, it is almost everything but that.
In 1950, Akira Kurosawa, with one of his many masterpieces, the seminal Rashomon, delivered a fascinating and profound reflection on how the objective reality of events is essentially unattainable by the human soul, too vulnerable to external agents that distort and influence perception. Reality itself is fragile and constantly fluctuating in the ether, making it elusive. Many authors argue that only the camera, as an impartial and unsuggestible mechanical tool, can capture a reality shared by a large group of people. Just a few years later, another great master of cinema, New York’s Stanley Kubrick, in his most famous noir, The Killing, presented a fairly straightforward story and dissected it from different perspectives, showing a sort of subjectivity within objective reality. Years later, one of the best “citationist” directors in cinema history, Quentin Tarantino, paid homage to Kubrick’s synchronized heist in Jackie Brown.
The theme of narrative/truth has always represented one of the most significant and complex aesthetic reflections in cinema.
Let’s take a leap forward, at least 15 years, to a lesser-known but no less significant film from 1971. In A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin by Lucio Fulci, Florinda Bolkan, in the film’s unsettling opening, mixes dreams, memories of dreams, and daydreams without interruption, updating the archetype of the “dishonest” image of the false flashback from Hitchcock‘s Stage Fright. Every psychological-narrative category that the captivating actress illustrates to her psychologist, and simultaneously to the viewer, will reveal itself, throughout the tortuous and tormented vicissitudes of the anti-heroine, as a misleading starting point that the audience must constantly reference to decipher the film’s mystery. The fact is that the initial sequence is a mosaic of different dreamlike or “recollection” fragments, where the truth-lie dichotomy is skillfully blended and made credible by Fulci’s masterful direction.
The film, in its aesthetic brazenness, obviously exceeds in narrative deception. The genre and period cater to an audience with a taste for strong flavors that shuns sobriety. Therefore, we can overlook certain kitsch narrative flourishes and focus instead on Fulci’s opening maneuver, which influences the rest of the film. The Roman director reflects on the many possibilities and combinations that the non-factual nature of cinematic storytelling can operate in a given context. The game is bold, perhaps too bold, but the raw idea underlying the pure vision is a rich dramaturgical magma, on which many later authors would build more ordered and methodical narrative paradigms.
One of the most fascinating reflections on the power and complexity of cinematic storytelling, which dogmatically unfolds on three different levels, can be found in the second film by New York director Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects. This film is only superficially a noir with a mystery plot. The true essence of the work is the profound reflection that the director, in great artistic synergy with screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, conducts on the complexity of cinematic narrative. The factual truth of the film and the reality of the vision mark the clear boundaries within which infinite, alchemically mixable versions demonstrate their ability to credibly float in a virtual dramatic space, drawing from various sources of inspiration that the jester-narrator Verbal shamelessly exploits. We are talking about the truth of events that happened, the manipulation of those events, and pure fantasy. These elements constantly balance each other (like cyan, yellow, and magenta can form any possible color) in a narrative flow that appears credible and compelling to the viewer, despite the full awareness that we may be constantly subjected to cinematic manipulation, either through Verbal’s words or Singer’s direction.
Placing the mere mystery structure in a secondary or contingent perspective does not automatically mean branding it as weak or too openly paradigmatic. The point is that Singer’s fairly obvious aesthetic idea is to create a moderately compelling story with vibrant content, but with a style entirely focused on de-dramatizing the narrative, avoiding the easy adrenaline rushes that a noir script would have easily permitted. This subtractive operation is expressed through an openly colloquial, ironic, and anti-spectacular tone that the film consistently maintains.
First and foremost, the choice of flashback narrative inherently halves the empathetic and emotional component that can be transmitted to the viewer. To clarify, let’s compare the key moments of Singer’s film with the contemporary Seven by David Fincher. When a mysterious courier arrives in the heart of the desert with a mysterious package for the tense agent Mills, we are Brad Pitt; we are Morgan Freeman (depending on our age, we might identify with one or the other). We experience the event live, with the perception that everything is happening at that moment. Fincher’s style aims to extract pure adrenaline, which is then skillfully pumped into the viewer’s veins. In The Usual Suspects, the aesthetic approach is almost the opposite of Fincher’s. The narrative form, modulated through Verbal’s “anesthetizing” voice, transports us into a bradycardic receptive dimension, where even the most ferocious and frantic act is converted into a sober anecdote by the phlegmatic narrator. We are no longer alongside the protagonist in the present, at the mercy of a “Blade Runner”-esque downpour; instead, we are next to agent Kujan, in the warmth of a cozy police office, listening to events that have already occurred, whose tragic consequences we mostly already know.
The non-emotional nature of The Usual Suspects is a card played early (essentially revealed from the start) that remains on the table throughout the film’s development. Singer tries to make us understand that the ambiguity of Verbal’s narrative, in its infinite expressive spectrum, humanly equalized, is the true artistic crux on which to focus our attention.
One fairly tangible proof of this, which is often underestimated, is the film’s title. The Usual Suspects is essentially a title-alias, a polyhedron so well-drawn in its details that we are led to engage with these suspect guys. But only by getting closer to the gang, breaking social distancing, do we realize the fallacious and two-dimensional essence of the characters. The title, from being an object of the narrative, assumes a meta-filmic value. The banal combined confrontation, so clumsily executed that it becomes ridiculously fake and poorly cobbled together, becomes the first in a long chain of mirrored reflections that will make us constantly bump our heads. It feels like the ending of The Lady from Shanghai, but we’re actually in an almost remake of Mr. Arkadin. But the eye always points to Welles, dissimulating its gaze.
Finally, we enter the heart of the matter. Only now can we focus on defining the true qualities of this work, which reflects with unprecedented complexity on cinema and its narrative and dramaturgical power, in its combination (suggesting even potential infinite variables) of multiple origins of narrating sources and the equally numerous listening or viewing receivers. Verbal is like a Mephistophelean color correction operator, where the corresponding cyan, yellow, and magenta are three well-defined narrative elements: actual events, events manipulated by Verbal’s mind, and completely invented elements.
Opposite him are two main interlocutors: the upright and self-assured agent Kujan and, no less, the mere spectator. Verbal/Bryan now has a dual responsibility: to be credible to the attentive ears of his real interlocutor and to weave an interesting story, cinematically speaking, for the listener beyond the screen. The two things are not necessarily equivalent. As far as Kujan is concerned, Verbal implicitly wonders…how far can I stretch the string of the tale without the good bloodhound catching the scent of bullshit? But at the same time, Bryan/Verbal is forced to ask…how much can I tell a banal and easily believable truth without the viewer starting to think they’re watching a boring James Fargo film or the like?
In some ways, these elements are antithetical. Verbal mixes the three elements with a modularity that will remain partially unknown for centuries. But when a narrated event appears 100% credible, can we already consider it a fact that actually happened, in the most plausible virtual story, stripped of objectively fallacious elements, or should we aspire to another reality that we will never fully grasp, but which it is still right to consider?
In other words, starting from the story told by Verbal, once we have purged the elements masterfully created ad hoc by the cripple, where can we stop in the game of subtracting the fallacious to feel in complete alignment with what really happened in the film’s virtual reality?
But above all, is it legitimate to ask or aspire that this reality exists and that Singer is aware of it and masters it as a reference point? This immense and fascinating meta-cinematic dilemma is what this little gem manages to evoke in the hearts of cinephiles.
Back in 1946, during the filming of The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart and his sweetheart Lauren Bacall, overwhelmed by the complexity of the plot, asked the great Howard Hawks for clarification on how to deliver certain lines that had become too ambiguous and lacking solid references within such a tentacular and layered script. It’s said that Hawks, also uncertain about some nuances of the story, called Raymond Chandler directly to ask for an objective view of the narrative. The writer said he was no longer sure about certain twists in the story. Truth or legend? Who knows… But The Big Sleep, like The Usual Suspects, projects us into an equally fascinating question: Should the filmmaker possess an objective truth, even if it remains forever unexpressed or secret?
In the case of The Usual Suspects, the narrative’s compositional complexity, which constantly raises questions balancing between cinematic dramaturgy and another factual truth, is pure artistic expression, complex and refined.
Even the final twist, which has become a cult for some superficial fans of the film, is a clear event that serves to give depth and meaning to the entire fabricated story of Verbal. In other words, when we hear a lie so well told that we baptize it as undeniable truth, we then want ample clarification to convince us that the beautiful reality was actually a colossal fabrication.
Agent Kujan says to Verbal in a stern tone: “Convince me!” What a beautiful verb that is also a complete sentence. Palminteri pronounces that word with great inspiration. It’s a deep phrase. Perhaps one of the most universal cinematic paradigms. At that moment, Palminteri is every viewer in the world, saying to every filmmaker in the world, each time a film begins: “Convince me!” Well, a small emotional excursus.
When reality gradually changes before our eyes, we are the ones who say to Mr. Singer, “Convince me that it was all a lie!” Because we don’t believe it. But the twist also serves that purpose—not simply to make us say “Wow!” but to add depth to Verbal’s tale.
Alberto Scalcon
