Film: Usual Suspects

[jack]

One of the classic films I saw at some point on TV, but wasn't paying enough attention to really follow at the time.

Mostly recounted by Verbal Kint, a small-time confidence trickster in an interview with the police after a bloodbath at a freighter ship, recounting how he and four other guys met at a police line-up, did a robbery, fell into a job set up by legendary illusive crime-lord Keyser Soze, and how he ended up involved in the massacre.

And questioning, what else is going on that makes these events only make sense in retrospect.

It's not exactly a heist movie, but it has some of the same feel, it's a classic if you don't object to fairly violent crime movies, and enjoy an air of intellectual questioning.

Lots of spoilers

I definitely enjoyed it, but I was left asking, what actually happened? I thought the internet would answer immediately which bits were real and which weren't, but it didn't seem to help a lot!

Almost everyone agrees VK is KS if anyone is, and spun most of the tale on the spot. I think it's fairly clear that's what the film intended to show at the end: the focus on the names inspiring his story, and on him suddenly losing his physical impairments.

Did he make up the entire thing, apart from the boat? The first heist in NY, everything? Reasons to think not, the names of the rest of his team were not apparently inspired by the bulletin board, and Dean Keaton at least was known by the police to be involved. And he told that bit to the DA, if there had been no such robbery in NY, it might have raised flags. Presumably everything with Redfoot and maybe Kobayashi was invented, but some of those events must have had real-world analogues, to get them to the boat at all.

Why was Verbal talking to the customs officer at all? Was it part of his plan, to connect Dean as a potential identity for Soze? Then why didn't he tell any of that to the DA in the first place? Why didn't he have more of the story pre-prepared? Was it improvised? Some scenes seem to suggest he made stuff up in response to what the officer was asking. But then why talk at all? Why not just stay clammed up?

Did he know he was being recorded?

Did he plan to be arrested at all? If not, how come we're not shown where he's caught? If so, wasn't he worried about having mug shots taken?

How much of the back-story about being a gratuitously ruthless killer from Hungary was true? Some of it must be, at least in reputation, as the Hungarian in the hospital believed something like that, and the Fed had heard of it. If it wasn't, why the Hungarians there? But if so, did he establish an identity as a small-time confidence trickster in the US later? Or did he decide to "pretend" to be KS, backed by that sort of pre-existing legend?

Was Kobayashi supposed to be Japanese or part-Japanese? Or just randomly have a Japanese name?

Are we seeing what Verbal's imagining, or what the officer is imagining? Presumably, it must be Verbal, because how else would Kobayashi look like Verbal's friend/driver/colleague at the end? Unless he described him, but wouldn't he prefer to make someone up? But he made up the name, so is the Kobayashi in the story fictional based partly on the real person?

In this film, I'm not annoyed so much of it was undercut. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the middle was interesting, but the emotional focus was on Kint's voice-over, not on his success, failure, or survival in the flashback, so we don't feel we emotionally invested in something which was undermined.

It works without those questions, I'm ok if they're not really answered. But I'm curious if any have clearly acceptable answers.

In case it helps, there's a fairly detailed list of what's shown on the bulletin board here: http://www.zenoshrdlu.com/zenosusp.htm

Comments

[gerald_duck]

A few years ago I wrote about the problem of stories with plot twists so shocking, so fundamental, that even to say there are spoilers is a spoiler.

The Usual Suspects is one of the examples I had in mind. I wouldn't have thanked you for posting this review before I'd seen it: even watching it with the thought in mind that there were spoilers to be had would have alerted me that it was something much more than the straightforward police procedural heist movie that it seems for 95% of one's first watching. If I'd been alerted to the existence of spoilers, I'd have started questioning things from the outset. As it stood, I took the narrator at face value and the ending was truly shocking.

That shock puts The Usual Suspects as one of my favourite films of all time. But I don't dare mention this fact to people because they'll ask me why, and I can't even say that I'd rather not say.

So I feel your posting is… brave. :-p

[jack]

I acknowledge the problem, but I don't know how best to write this sort of post. I think you're at the far end of wanting to avoid spoilers of any form, I think there's probably more people who might like to see it, having been told there's something specific interesting about it, than people who haven't seen it, but are likely to watch a random crime flick anyway and be successfully surprised there's twist.

I try to keep it ambiguous, by saying, there's stuff which puts stuff in a different light... I think that's best for most people, if I don't know there's *something* to watch for, I'm likely to not pay as much attention, and then the twist probably won't make a lot of sense to me.

But for a few people like you, that would still ruin the film. I'm not sure if there's any way of doing both. I guess, using two spoiler tags, one for "anything at all" and one for "lots of spoilers"?

[gerald_duck]

Yeah — I know I'm an outlier. As you can probably tell (and would certainly know if you played Resistance/Werewolf/Skull/similar with me) I think around that kind of corner instinctively.

I've been learning a lot about different people's attitudes to spoilers, and how careful or careless people can be, from being around the Pandemic Legacy forums.

For the Usual Suspects to hold up until the end without me suspecting a thing was… remarkable. Almost unprecedented. In the other famous film with that depth of plot twist (link is a spoiler for which film has a twist, obv.) a lot of stuff just wasn't adding up from fairly early on.

My own strategy has been, firstly, to keep pretty quiet about The Usual Suspects, secondly to talk about the Casablanca reference if I talk about it at all, and thirdly to drop it nonchalantly into lists of good films.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Yay, now I can finally reveal that The Usual Suspects was the film I mentioned asking qqzm about in that thread.

[jack]

Ah! Good to know. Did you end up watching it?

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Yes (I wouldn't have clicked the spoiler cut in this post if I hadn't).

[gerald_duck]

Woo. (-8

Meanwhile, I recently perpetrated a faux pas when discussing spoilers with someone. They'd recently seen another film I shall not name, and had said perhaps a little too much about it to a third party. I came very close to comparing and contrasting with Usual Suspects spoilers… but suddenly realised they'd not seen it yet. I think I managed to extricate myself OK, especially since the person doesn't know me very well.

Maybe in another 3½ years I'll be able to write about that experience!

[gerald_duck]

Having said that… it's been many years since I last saw the film, but it all made sense to me at the time.

So: the original line-up is genuine. The actual bloodbath on the ship is genuine. The Hungarian survivor is genuine, and genuinely names Keyser Soze, and genuinely identifies Spacey's character as he. From now on, I'll use "Spacey" as a neutral identifier for that character.

What I think happened was: there's a criminal underworld full of various miscreants. "Keyser Soze" is one name for a crime lord so successful he's managed to escape the police's notice. He's known to various criminals, but they keep quiet about his existence and never know his true name or true identity. Spacey genuinely has a middleman and factotum — the guy we see driving him away in the Jag at the end of the film — but there's no reason to suppose "Kobayashi" is his real name, nor even an alias he'd ever really used.

My assumption is lots of people cross Soze in small ways, and it just happened four of them got pulled together with "Verbal Kint", a character Spacey is playing at the time for some purpose. (We know the physical impairment is faked; there's no reason to suppose he's not also in disguise.) They surely don't know Kint is Soze. Taking advantage of this, he has "Kobayashi" pull them in and manipulate them into taking part in a job. During it, Spacey treats them as expendable, possibly even wanting them dead as dead men tell no tales.

So at the end of the job, Spacey thinks everybody else is dead, but doesn't know the Hungarian is merely wounded. He walks off, satisfied… only to get caught by the police. Since he's still in Kint guise, the police recognise him and pull him in.

Having parlayed immunity from prosecution, why does Kint talk? Partly, he's pressured into it, partly he sees no reason not to, partly he feels he can throw the police off track.

But the Hungarian has survived. He's realised Kint is Soze, because he witnessed the true events on the ship. When he comes round, he starts to talk, beginning with just the name. Initially, the tale he tells is pretty bland.

When the name Keyser Soze is put to Spacey, everything changes. Firstly, he knows there was a survivor, who is going to be able to identify him in short order; secondly the police now have the name Soze for the first time.

So: he wants to get out of there as quickly as possible, and mustn't attract suspicion to himself. It is inevitable now that the police will make enquiries about Soze, and there's no point in covering up things they'll easily discover, including the ways in which the dead people had crossed Soze. But beyond that he wants to spread as much misinformation as possible.

So I suspect Soze's personal history is a fiction, but one he'd invented already and that's circulating in the criminal underground. I assume the various meetings between the crooks and Kobayashi really happened, and they were unaware "Soze" was in the room with them. The account of the bloodbath on the boat may have been relatively accurate except that Spacey was actually killing people rather than cowering in the corner. I assume the Hungarian identified Spacey as Soze by his conduct. Spacey may have bigged Soze up a little, and changed some details to confuse the police. All the other details he needed to flesh the tale out, he invented taking inspiration from the wall behind Kujan.

When Spacey leaves, Kujan immediately turns around and spots what's happened. So does the audience. But Spacey's gone. The identikit comes through too late and merely confirms his — and our — worst fears.

[jack]

Ah! That does make a lot of sense. Thank you.

So maybe he'd originally intended to get away without mentioning "Keyser Soze" at all, but when the police questioned the Hungarian and asked him about it, he knew he needed to fill a story he'd left out before. That does seem to fit quite well, that's why he was improvising. And why he's suddenly in a hurry, and why he had to fall back on political influence to escape the police (which isn't very subtle).

It seems odd the film doesn't show him being picked up, but I guess it doesn't need to.

And it's not clear why the Hungarians wanted the witness if the backstory wasn't exactly true. Maybe someone ELSE went on that killing spree and vanished or died, and Spacey attached that legend to the KS character he was constructing. I wondered if maybe he wanted everyone on the boat dead for some third reason, neither drugs nor a witness to his face, and just made the first two up for the police. But the Hungarian has some corroboration for the "witness" theory.

[gerald_duck]

I assumed he'd started off wanting the drugs, but ended up wanting witnesses dead.

And yes, I'm pretty sure he hadn't intended to mention Keyser Soze until his hand was forced. People in the underworld being scared of Soze was likely true, as well as being a convenient excuse for Kint having been reluctant to mention the name.

[gerald_duck]

Answering specific questions…

Almost everyone agrees VK is KS if anyone is

The Hungarian was the first to mention Soze. He really exists — at least as a pseudonym under which someone interacted with the Hungarian.

Did he make up the entire thing, apart from the boat? The first heist in NY, everything?

No. The line-up was genuine, so the people in it existed and the heist really happened. But it's probably true that the "usual suspects" were uninvolved. At least… I believe the other four were uninvolved. Spacey could well have had a hand in it, somehow, in some guise.

Presumably everything with Redfoot and maybe Kobayashi

Kobayashi drives him away at the end of the film. He's genuine. Though possibly a man of many names and many faces, like Spacey himself.

Why was Verbal talking to the customs officer at all? Was it part of his plan, to connect Dean as a potential identity for Soze? Then why didn't he tell any of that to the DA in the first place? Why didn't he have more of the story pre-prepared?

As mentioned before, when the conversation began he didn't know there was a survivor who was going to contradict his initial simple narrative, name Soze and identify him as Soze. Initially, he hadn't planned for that. He had to up his game significantly when the police put the name Keyser Soze on the table. When he hears the name, he seems genuinely fearful and alarmed. He explains this as being frightened of Soze, but perhaps for a moment he's having to wonder how he'll talk his way out of this?

Did he plan to be arrested at all? If not, how come we're not shown where he's caught? If so, wasn't he worried about having mug shots taken?

I bet he didn't plan to be arrested, but the police arrived too soon and obviously wanted to talk to the only man seen walking alive from that carnage. I suspect he wasn't worried about having mug shots taken because the police already had mugshots for "Kint". Do the police routinely check people aren't disguised in any way? It's not clear everyone who'd ever dealt with Spacey would necessarily recognise him from a Kint mugshot. Besides, he clearly had to pretend not to be worried, even if he was.

We know that Spacey's narrative of what happened on the boat has to have deviated somewhat from what he told the police. The two tales have to converge at the point where he's arrested. Maybe the writers decided it was simpler not to show his arrest than to try to avoid any inconsistencies or spoilers there.

How much of the back-story about being a gratuitously ruthless killer from Hungary was true?

Given how much of the Kint story was lies, possibly not very much. I suspect Spacey invented Soze in order to manipulate the Hungarians, and I suspect what he told the police is pretty much what he'd previously told the Hungarians. After all, he knew the Hungarian survivor was talking to the police at the same time he was, and avoiding unnecessary contradiction was a smart move.

There's no reason for either Kint or Soze to be his real name or identity.

Are we seeing what Verbal's imagining, or what the officer is imagining? Presumably, it must be Verbal, because how else would Kobayashi look like Verbal's friend/driver/colleague at the end? Unless he described him, but wouldn't he prefer to make someone up? But he made up the name, so is the Kobayashi in the story fictional based partly on the real person?

I assume we're seeing Verbal's imagination, precisely because we get an accurate view of Kobayashi in it, and Spacey wouldn't have wanted the police to have that.

Real person, made up name. I suspect the "Kobayashi" scenes really happened much as described, but I bet the usual suspects got a different pseudonym for the guy.

[jack]

Spacey treats them as expendable, possibly even wanting them dead as dead men tell no tales.

Yeah, I assumed he wanted to eliminate all the witnesses on all sides. I guess he didn't absolutely have to, if he could get through without anyone on "his" side doubting the Kint identity, but I assumed he erred on the side of no witnesses.

the original line-up is genuine

It probably really happened, since that was part of his original story that might be checked. But it must have been engineered by someone (presumably him), because as they say, why would they put five suspects who look different into one lineup?

It's pretty suspicious they're all in a cell together, but I guess the police *might* have done that if they gave up questioning them about the gun robbery.

So I guess, KS set that up to get his favoured team together. Pulled the police-taxi job. And then proceeded through an unknown amount of shenanigans to get them all to commando-raid the boat together.

Maybe he or Kobayashi simply told them about that job, didn't tell them it was a suicide mission, and they all agreed, apart from the dead one. Or maybe they went through the threatened-by-Kobayashi scene as he described to the police.

Come to think of it, Kobayashi was maybe a real person with a fake name, maybe Redfoot was too.

I found the "threaten their loved ones" thing a bit implausible and over the top, so I thought it might have been invented, but I guess it's maybe equally important it's plausible, whether it happened, or whether he told the police it did.

[gerald_duck]

Oh! I didn't think the original line-up was intended to be an identity parade. I thought it was more of a group mugshot. And, given the film's poster, understood to be slight artistic licence — we know the police don't quite do them like that.

If you're on a boat at night and wanting some of the other people dead, which is easier: killing everybody, or correctly identifying the people you want dead in the dark then shooting them without revealing your identity to the survivors?

[jack]

Ah, I'm not sure. I'm totally happy with a bit of artistic license, but as I recall, one of them in the cell later calls it out, says it must be a set-up because they wouldn't put five cons on together, rather, one with four other guys. But now I'm not certain.

killing everybody, or correctly identifying the people you want dead in the dark then shooting them without revealing your identity to the survivors?

Uh, yes, that was rather my point. Although come to think of it, a big advantage of "kill everyone" is that you don't have any survivors asking where their pay is (especially if you fabricated the existence of a bunch of drugs, as he claims in his story).

[gerald_duck]

Then again, it's possible the drugs were genuine. Maybe he mentioned them because he knew the Hungarian would anyway, and said they were fictitious because that way there was some chance the police wouldn't find them?

Alas, my recollection of the line-up is hazier than of later stuff.

[jack]

I don't know if it's legal, but recently google often turns up film scripts which is really handy for me analysing stuff. There's often small differences to the filmed version.

From here: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/usualsuspects.html

KEATON
How many times have you been in a line-
up? It's always you and four dummies. The
P.D. pays homeless guys ten bucks a head
half the time. No way they'd line five
felons in the same row. No way. And what
the hell is a voice line-.up? A public
defender could get you off of that.

That's roughly as I remember it. I suspect part of that's covering for the "they wanted that line-up scene because it looked cool even though it didn't make sense" idea. But it does highlight that "it was contrived somehow".