In the consultation room, a psychoanalyst sees the world entirely through the patient’s words. This gives an unusual perspective on reality that is serendipitously reproduced in the modern film noir, The Usual Suspects. By focusing on our patients and what they tell us, psychoanalysts have a close-up view of psychic reality, the reality of the mind in which perception, memory, and fantasy are intertwined. However, this perspective creates problems in judging and verifying external reality. The detective in this film and the audience itself share this perspective and the problems it creates.
At the center of The Usual Suspects is an interrogation. There has been an explosion and fire on a pier. One of the two survivors is a crippled confidence man named Verbal Kint who tells of a failed plan to intercept a 90 million dollar cocaine deal by a daring group of hijackers. He is being questioned by an investigator, who believes that Kint has been holding back information. Just when the investigator is satisfied that he has gotten the true story, he discovers that he has been totally deceived. At this point the viewer realizes that it is not clear what was “real” and what was created as deception. Fantasy and reality are intertwined to such an extent that one viewer (me) rewound the tape and started it over to sort it out. I thought this was a personal obsession until I read in Janet Maslin’s review (N.Y.Times 8/16/95) that “it has been made to be seen twice, with a plot guaranteed to create minor bewilderment the first time around.”
Kint is being questioned by a customs agent, David Kujan. Kujan is interested in the case because of the involvement of Dean Keaton, a former corrupt police officer and career criminal who is his personal Jean Valjean. Kint has told investigators that Keaton died on the pier. Kujan believes that Kint has not told everything he knows. He also suspects that Kint does not know the significance of everything he knows. If he can get Kint to tell everything, Kujan believes he can piece together what actually happened. In this, Kujan is like a psychoanalyst who believes that if he can get his patient to tell everything that comes to mind, he can piece together the unconscious meaning of the patient’s communications. It is clear that the filmmakers had no conscious or unconscious intent to portray the role of the psychoanalyst. Nevertheless, The Usual Suspects bears a close resemblance to a psychoanalytic attempt to uncover the truth about a traumatic incident.
The Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz, describes film noir as “A term coined by French critics to describe a type of film that is characterized by its dark, somber tone and cynical, pessimistic mood.” The Usual Suspects clearly fits this description, bringing the viewer into a violent and cynical underworld in which powerful, malevolent characters and forces control the action. While watching the film at home, I got a call from someone I didn’t know, and found myself so caught up in the mood of the film (and unwilling to relinquish it) that I was momentarily on guard for something sinister. One of the key determinants to the creation of mood and suspension of disbelief in this film and others of this genre is the creation of confusion in the viewer. We are presented with a surface that is murky and unreliable, often through the eyes and words of dishonest characters.
The opening credits are shown with a background of a quiet body of water illuminated with a streak of moonlight. It is appropriate to the style and tone of the film that we do not know very much about what we are seeing or why we are seeing it. I was reminded of the still, quiet surface of some “primal scene” memories (memories that reflect an early childhood experience of watching parental intercourse, or, more generally, of passively viewing any highly charged, traumatic scene) that screen intense action “behind “ that screen. The quiet ends with the credits, but the sense of mystery and confusion continues. We are then given a grounding in space and time by a caption, “San Pedro, California—last night.” Even this has a slightly surreal quality. We are not given a day or date. To what “today” does “last night” refer? Are we to feel that the events occurred the night before we are viewing it, putting us right into the time of action, or does “last night” refer to the night before the narrative is being told? On the surface, the answer is the latter, but the former is still implanted in our preconscious.
We see a man sitting on a dock at night. It is very quiet, but we see flames in the background behind him. He lights a cigarette, then uses the match to set fire to a powder fuse that starts a trail of fire. The flames go a few feet, then are doused by falling water. The camera pans up to a balcony where a man in a forties style hat and topcoat is zipping his fly. He walks slowly down the stairs, lights a cigarette, deftly sparking the match in the palm of one hand, and asks, “How ya doin, Keaton?” The man sitting replies, “I can’t feel my legs, Keyser.” There is a pause and a hint of irony on his face that is easily missed on first viewing. The man standing points a gun at him and asks if he’s ready. Keaton asks for the time and is told that it is 12:30. Keyser twists the pistol with an odd mannerism and we hear two shots fired, but do not see Keaton shot. As Keyser walks off, he casually drops his match, restarting the movement of flame along the powder fuse. We see only a bunch of rope and hear a series of explosions with a brightening of the screen, light shining behind the rope. Then we see a flaming explosion.
The scene is a tease for the viewer. We understand just enough of what we have seen to heighten our curiosity. We know we have seen a murder and an explosion, but motives are left in the dark. We are also struck by the extraordinary spectacle of the fuse being put out with a stream of urine, and then being restarted with a casual throw of a match. “Keyser” conveys extraordinary confidence and control over circumstances. The more obsessional amongst us might openly wonder if he had deliberately saved his urine for such an occasion. How could he know that his stream would put out the flame?
In fantasy, we all have this power to put out flames. Freud (1900) wrote about it nearly one hundred years ago in The Interpretation of Dreams. He found that in dreams fire was usually associated with bed-wetting. To a small boy, the ability to direct a stream of urine connotes power and control. Some may recall the scene in Gulliver’s Travels, in which the giant Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian castle with his urine. The term “pissing contest” connotes the competitiveness associated with urination for young boys. Keyser has complete control of urethral power. He is totally secure, in psychoanalytic terms, in his sphincter control. He can stop and start his stream of water or fire at will. Keyser’s control is in contrast to the viewer’s confusion. We, the viewers, are passive and not supplied with enough information to make sense of what we see. In this sense, also, we are forced into the position of a child viewing a “primal scene” or some mysterious traumatic incident.
Although this phallic urethral fantasy originates in early childhood, for me the action of the film as it is described by Verbal Kint is closer to preadolescence, another age at which these issues are important. His story begins with a police line-up. “It all started six weeks ago in New York. A truck loaded with stripped gun parts got jacked outside of Queens. Somebody fucked up. The driver didn’t see anybody but he heard a voice. Sometimes that’s all you need.” We see the police rounding up four of the five suspects. (We do not see them pick up the narrator, Verbal Kint, but are told by him, “It didn’t make sense that I was there. I mean these guys were hard-core hijackers. But there I was.”) Each one appears cocky and unafraid, wisecracking with the police. McManus is lying in his bed with police pistols pointing at his head from all directions, and coolly says, “Don’t you guys ever sleep?” Hockney reaches under a car for a rag to wipe his face while the police surrounding him nervously cock their guns. They are put together in a line-up in which each man must say, “Give me the fuckin’ keys, you cocksucker!” Brought together for the line-up, they join for a series of crimes that leads them to the San Pedro pier.
Although they are presented as dangerous men, the “suspects” bear a resemblance to a gang of boys, all cocky, defiant, and cursing. Throughout the film, they trade wisecracks and engage in face-to-face confrontations that sometimes carry clear homosexual innuendo. The clearest follows a daring holdup. McManus proposes that he and his partner, Fenster, take the gems they have stolen to a fence in California, named Redfoot, making the others distrustful and leading to a face-to-face confrontation. Hockney stands nose to nose with McManus and says, “My fucking problem is that you and Fenster are off honeymooning in California while the rest of us are sitting here holding our dicks.” A few moments later, they are still standing face to face and Hockney says, “You wanna dance?” Someone says, “Ladies,” and they laugh, breaking the tension.
There is only one female protagonist, and she plays a small, though important role. She is Edie Finneran, suspect Dean Keaton’s attorney girlfriend. We are told in the description of the line-up that Keaton was the big prize for the police. He is everyone’s prize. Kujan has been pursuing him for years, having given up a few years earlier only after Keaton had successfully faked his own death. Keaton is also sought by the other suspects, who need his expertise and police contacts to pull off their robbery. To do so, they must bring him back into their world of crime and criminal fellowship.
Keaton claims to have fallen in love with Edie and gone straight. The other suspects sneer at him, as if he has broken a moral code. “I never thought I’d see Dean Keaton take the high road.“ Neither the suspects nor Kujan want to believe that Keaton is really straight or in love with Edie. They are convinced that he is simply using her. Verbal Kint tells Keaton that his romance with Edie is a scam. Keaton punches him in the groin. The men in the film are like a group of boys nervously watching one of their members turn away from their homosexual bond to girls and romance. If we think of them this way, we see them as nervous, threatened by the defection and its meaning. The theme of the dangerous woman and the threat to male bonding that she presents is common in film noir. We see it in The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade is tempted by the woman, but has her arrested because she killed his partner.
After the interrogations and the lineup, Keaton, who has been beaten by the police and threatened with continued harassment, tells Edie, “They ruined me in there.” He feels that he can no longer pursue a life with her. He looks across the street at the other suspects who stare back. They will seduce him to return to the fold. They offer wealth and urethral/phallic power. Keaton can be the leader of the gang if he gives up his heterosexual interest. (In a sense, the film might be accused of subtle gay bashing, although I don’t think that is intended. The film has less to do with adult homosexuality than with the male bonding of pre-adolescent boys.)
The film’s mythology makes Keaton’s interest in Edie a weakness that will deprive him of his resolve and phallic strength. Kint’s narrative takes the gang to California, where they are blackmailed by a lawyer, Kobayashi, who wants them to undertake a daring robbery on the pier for his employer, a mysterious and legendary arch criminal, Keyser Soze. Under Keaton’s leadership, they plot to kill Kobayashi, but are thwarted when Kobayashi demonstrates that he has the power to have Edie killed if anything happens to him. Keaton backs off.
Keaton’s vulnerability is contrasted with the strength of the legendary Keyser Soze. Verbal Kint tells Kujan that he heard many stories about Keyser Soze, but there was one that he believes. In a somewhat surreal scene that we see as Verbal narrates, Keyser is confronted by a Hungarian gang in a territorial dispute over drugs, possibly in Turkey. They come to his house, find that he is not there, and proceed to rape and terrorize his wife and children. When Keyser returns, “he looked over the faces of his family. Then he showed these men of will what will really was.” He said that he’d rather his family didn’t live than to live after this. We see him shooting his wife and children, then sending the remaining gang member out to spread the message. Kint tells us that Soze hunted down the entire gang, killing their family members, customers, and debtors, then disappeared from sight to become a myth (and an enforcer of male loyalty): “Rat on your pop and Keyser Soze will get you.” Although Keaton’s conflict is presented in a very understated manner, the contrast is clear. By turning to a woman and love, a man gives up his phallic and urethral power.
The film has two foci of action. One is Kint’s narrative. The other is the investigation, centering around David Kujan’s interrogation of Kint. Kint, one of two survivors of the dock explosion, has cut a deal with the District Attorney through his powerful lawyer. Kujan, who is eager to interrogate him, is told by his friend with the local police, “I’m telling you this guy is protected up on high by the Prince of Darkness.” Nevertheless, Kujan is confident. He is told by his friend, “He doesn’t know what you want to know,” but replies, “I don’t think he does, not exactly, but there’s a lot more to his story, believe me.” Like the psychoanalyst who is confident in his authority and special knowledge, Kujan believes that if he can get Kint to tell him everything, he will be able to decode it. He is cocky about it, telling Kint, “Let me get right to the point. I’m smarter than you, and I’m gonna find out what I wanna know, and I’m gonna get it from you whether you like it or not.”
The interrogation reaches a climax as Kujan tells Kint what happened. He tells Kint that there was no cocaine on the boat, that the real target was an informant, Marquez, who could testify against Keyser Soze.
Kint : “I never heard of him.”
Kujan continues, “His own people were selling him to a gang of Hungarians, most likely the same Hungarians that Soze all but wiped out in Turkey. The Hungarians were going to buy the one guy that could incriminate Keyser Soze.”
Kint: “I said I never heard of him.”
Kujan: “But Keaton did. Edie Finneran was Marquez’ extradition advisor. She knew what he was and what he knew.”
As we hear this dialogue we flash from Kujan and Kint to images of a confident Dean Keaton and of Edie Finneran sitting at a table as Marquez’ extradition lawyer.
Keaton tells Kint, “It was a hit, a suicide mission to wipe out the one guy that could finger Keyser Soze.”
The dialogue moves on, accompanied by the montage of views of Keaton as a mastermind. Kujan tells Kint, “Keaton was Keyser Soze. The kind of man who could wrangle the wills of men like Hockney and McManus, the kind of man who could engineer a police lineup through all his years of contacts in the NYPD, the kind of man who could have killed Edie Finneran. (We see Keaton dressed in the hat and raincoat firing a pistol.) She was found yesterday in a hotel in Pennsylvania, shot twice in the head.” He continues to pound away, explaining to Kint that Keaton had programmed him to tell them what he wanted him to tell.
Kint begins to cry. He asks, “Why not Fenster or McManus, why me? I’m stupid, I’m a cripple, why me?”
Kujan replies, “Because you’re a cripple, because you’re stupid, because you’re weaker than them. If he’s dead, if what you say is true, then it won’t matter. It was his idea to hit the taxi service in New York, wasn’t it? Come on, tell me the truth.”
Kint breaks down. “It was all Keaton. We followed him from the beginning.”
Kujan closes his eyes with relief at the confession. He goes on to tell him that Keyser Soze is a shield (for Keaton), a “spook story.” He urges Kint to testify, but Kint refuses.
Kujan has not entered the interrogation with an attitude of true curiosity. He has a theory about what has happened. Kujan is convinced that Dean Keaton is the master criminal behind the events on the dock. This limits his ability to listen and make full use of what he hears. In effect, he has left pursuit of the truth aside and unwittingly gratified his own fantasy, creating a narrative that meets his personal needs. In his belief that Keaton could not have loved Edie, he joins the homosexual band. In his need to maintain his perfect image of Keaton—in effect idealizing him as he vilifies him, he has distorted his perception. In doing this, he accepts Verbal Kint’s surface presentation because it suits his theory. He tells Kint that Keaton has duped him because he is stupid and a cripple. Kint’s description of himself as a cripple and small time operator is not a “defense” in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, but it is clearly analogous to a defense. In psychoanalytic terms, Kint presents himself as a helpless cripple who cannot light his own cigarette in order to hide his phallic urethral narcissistic fantasies.
Kujan has either dismissed or disbelieved hints in Verbal’s narrative that he is not so helpless. Kint is a successful con-man, clearly not stupid. He is the author of the plan for the original robbery, something that Kujan does not believe. In a later scene, it is Kint who coolly shoots a jewel merchant who has been holding back a briefcase from Keaton, who is reluctant to shoot him. There is also the question of why Kint was in the line-up. The advertising promotions for the film show the five “suspects” in a lineup with the question superimposed, “Who is Keyser Soze?” We know in analytic work to look at the piece that does not appear to fit. Kint says, “It didn’t make sense that I was there. I mean these guys were hard-core hijackers. But there I was.” Finally, if Kint is a helpless cripple who is being used, then why is he “protected up on high by the Prince of Darkness”? There are two basic explanations: That the story Kint tells is a defense against awareness of his weakness and vulnerability; or, that the apparent weaknesses are a defense against discovery of his power and aggression. For reasons of his own, Kujan has shaped everything in terms of one of those possibilities and eliminated the other.
After Kint leaves, Kujan looks smug, a smile on his face at the thought that he was right, and that he has been close on the tail of Dean Keaton. His friend tells him that he has nothing, but he is satisfied that Keaton will know he is close and confident that he will catch him. Kujan’s fantasy falls apart as he sits with his coffee cup, looking at the busy bulletin board that has been behind him during the interview. Stunned, he drops his cup to the floor and we see what he has been looking at. As he scans the board, we see and hear a rapid-fire montage of visual images and snatches of dialogue.
Kujan’s voice: “Tell me everything you know. Convince me.” Kint’s voice: “Back when I was in that barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois” (we see something on the bulletin board about a quartet in Skokie, Illinois) Kint’s voice: “Where’s your head, agent Kujan” Kujan’s voice: “We’ve just got to think. Think back.” Kobayashi’s voice: “I’m sure you’ve heard many tall tales” Kint’s voice: “Brick’s Marlin” (we see a photo on the board of a man holding a marlin)—a flurry of voices as the camera scans the bulletin board—Kint’s voice: “Well I’m telling it straight. It’s all there.” Kint’s voice: “Some guy in California, his name is Redfoot.”—We hear Kujan and then Kobayashi refer to Redfoot, and then see the name Redfoot in a list on the bulletin board. The montage goes on at dizzying speed, adding details from Kint’s narrative that were on the board, some of them just incidental references brought in by Kint as a distraction, like the barbershop quartet or picking coffee beans in Guatemala, adding significant snippets of dialogue such as “This guy is protected on high by the Prince of Darkness,” and finally settling on repetitions of the name “Kobayashi.” Kujan looks down at his broken coffee cup and sees at the bottom, “Kobayashi porcelain.” With his own words, “Convince me, convince me,” repeating in his ears, Kujan chases down the hall after Verbal Kint.
As David Kujan runs out of the office to try to catch Kint, we see a fax of a drawing done from the description of the only other survivor of the explosion, a badly burned and frightened Hungarian seaman who says that he has seen the Devil, Keyser Soze. It is the face of Verbal Kint. We see Kint hobbling out onto the street, then losing his limp, uncramping his hand, and entering a car driven by the lawyer, “Kobayashi.” Kint (Soze) lights a cigarette, holding it in the European style. As a dazed David Kujan peers in all directions, we hear the reprise of Kint saying that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
It was at this point that I wanted to rewind the tape and see it again. I was driven by the desire to see if I could separate the “true” and “false” parts of Verbal Kint’s story. This is like looking for evidence for a traumatic event. Of course, the entire film is a fiction, a narrative, but within the context of the film there is a “reality”. We know, for instance, that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze, and that the purpose of the plot was to kill an informer who was on the ship. We know with some certainty that Keaton has been shot, as we saw in the original scene, and that Kint was a participant, not an observer behind the bunch of rope. In psychoanalytic terms, this is a reversal of the primal scene experience in which the child is only an observer.
But there is still ambiguity. We know that Kint was lying, but we don’t really know which were the lies. Film is particularly well adapted to this kind of ambiguity. There is a common cinematic device by which a narrative trails off into a scene that we actually see. Verbal begins a description and we see the action. We don’t know his exact words, only what we see. Although we know the convention, we are still swayed by what we see. Seeing is believing. There is an implication in this film that the opening scene is not part of Kint’s narrative, that we are actually seeing what happened. But even this is somewhat ambiguous. More importantly, it is impossible to fully decipher Kint’s story. We realize that he has been subtly leading Kujan down a garden path. We cannot be certain about his presentation of the plot, of Keaton’s relationship with Edie, even of Keaton’s relationship with Kint.
The only “reality” we can rely on is the interrogation itself, along with the few pieces of direct evidence collected by the police. This puts the viewer in the same position as the psychoanalyst, whose only direct knowledge of a patient comes from what is seen and heard in the office. The psychoanalyst has access to more than anyone else about the workings of the patient’s mind but has very limited access to the events in the patient’s life. Even assuming that patients in analysis are consciously being honest, we know that there are unconscious distortions of the truth. Add to this the distortions that come from the psychoanalyst’s unconscious fantasies and motivations. We can see the effect of the investigator’s bias in the mistakes of Agent Kujan in this film or of Hannibal Lecter in his early attempt to uncover Clarise Starling’s past in The Silence of the Lambs. This has led to a debate amongst psychoanalysts about how much we can reliably reconstruct about a patient’s past, and particularly with the reconstruction of very early traumatic events. Some argue that we cannot discover the truth about our patients’ pasts, but can at best construct with our patients a “narrative truth” that satisfies both patient and analyst as fitting the known facts and is most helpful to the patient.
With The Usual Suspects, we are left feeling that there is some “truth” hidden behind the disguises of Verbal’s story. At the heart of the film is trauma and the defensive attempts to cope with it. (This may be true of all film noir mysteries.) The phallic urethral power and control of Keyser Soze and the other characters in the film is a defense against the helplessness that accompanies trauma.
For me, the central trauma of the story, in essence the underlying primal scene, is Keyser Soze’s murder of his wife and children. Although it is presented in a surreal way as a possible fantasy, it is probably more disturbing to the average viewer than any other scene in the film. It involves the murder of innocent family members much closer to ourselves and loved ones than any of the film’s other victims. It is particularly disturbing because it depicts a father murdering his family, something that is likely to evoke some of our deepest, most terrifying fears. I found myself not wanting to “believe” it, yet drawn to the (impossible) question of whether it was a “real” event in the context of the film. It is the viewer’s primal scene, capturing the quality of a traumatic image that is uncertain, appearing to come from a prehistorical period of development with a seamless interplay of fact and fantasy. From a psychoanalytic perspective, we can see in it elements of both the child’s passive experience of coming upon adult intercourse and its terrible fantasies of revenge in response to that experience. The murder of the wife and children as well as the men who raped them captures the tone of the film in defending against and viciously attacking heterosexuality and family structure in favor of phallic urethral narcissistic fantasies and male bonding.
In the end, the true power of “Keyser Soze” is the power to interweave fact and fantasy so that we cannot distinguish them. In doing this, he—the film—presents us with traumatic events while making us doubt that they are real. There is something very appealing about the ambiguity. Perhaps it is close to the defensive way we deal with our own traumatic memories: sometimes we repress them, put them out of our minds; sometimes we remember them in a disguised form; and, sometimes we remember and reexperience the trauma, but tell ourselves it didn’t really happen. The film reassures us that the trauma we see is not real. “It’s just a movie.”
This film points up one of the difficulties with the approach that seeks a satisfactory “narrative truth” with no hope of knowing what actually happened. However difficult the truth may be to discern and however much doubt we may be left with, it is important that we try to uncover what actually happened. If an analyst believes that he is helping to create an adaptive narrative with a patient rather than attempting to discover the truth about a traumatic event, he is likely to convey that to the patient. This implicitly encourages the patient’s wish to deny the reality of the trauma by either dismissing it or substituting another version of the past. Shengold (1989) has emphasized how important this issue is to those who were abused as children, people he describes as victims of “soul murder”. Taught by their tyrannical parents to deny that the abuse ever happened, they are not helped by a therapist who does not believe in the existence of truth. Verbal Kint would tell these therapists, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: HogarthPress and The Institute of Psychoanalysis. vols. 4, 5.
Katz, E. (1994) The Film Encyclopedia (second edition). New York: Harper Collins 1496 pp.
Shengold, L. (1989) Soul Murder; The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New York: Fawcett Columbine
Published in the PANY Bulletin 34:2 Summer, 1996 and in
Stein, H. (2002) Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film. New York: E-Reads.