Christopher McQuarrie, screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, was once a security guard at a New Jersey multiplex, affording him the opportunity to gauge what Hollywood audiences wanted in some detail. I first saw The Usual Suspects as an usher at the British premiere at the Cambridge Film Festival in 1995. It was difficult to ignore a gigantic scam perpetrated at the expense of Hollywood narrative expectations for a roomful of grateful adventurers.
Appearing out of that renaissance of US independent cinema that had by the mid-90s sputtered to life, The Usual Suspects avoided the pitfall of talky self-absorption to which the indie sector has been prone. Instead, it seemed to overhaul truth and fiction themselves, whilst remaining literate in the ensuing storm. For Ernest Larsen, the film "effectively delivers the audience from the domination of the narrative". How ironic that "the usual suspects" was a phrase first used in Casablanca (1942), that arch exemplar of classical Hollywood, itself famously shot on the hoof, ironically.
Such notions as omniscient storytellers and cause-and-effect, let alone divine revelation, seemed increasingly elusive in the inexplicable darkness of Singer's film. As Kevin Spacey's crippled conman 'Verbal' Kint says: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." It's a nice metaphor for the play of fact and fabulism, design and disorder which is Verbal's story.
Larsen is a crime writer and he brings the crime writers' curiosity with him. The account of Agent Kujan's interrogation of 'Verbal' is as gripping in its searching density as the scene itself is powerful. Sensitive to Chazz Palminteri and Spacey's lunges and feints and evoking medieval allegory alongside contemporary geopolitics while crisp illustrations pop up like clues, Larsen sees nothing less than the erasure of ancient verities by the savagery of postmodern corporate advantage. A New York bus Larsen saw plastered, "Who is Keyser Soze?", that 'Kobayashi' coffee cup - nothing is tied down. The final disjunctive audio montage that leaves Kujan perplexed and alone in the street "actually spills over the entire scene, generalizing its effect so that it becomes clear that it's ascribed to the dawning consciousness of the audience". At the end of the Cambridge screening the audience roared with pleasure.
The Usual Suspects has since become something of a cult film. A key characteristic of a cult film is its historicity. A film gains midnight grindhouse repute by resonating (well or badly) with its moment. We like that it's dated. It's too soon to tell with The Usual Suspects perhaps, but Larsen locates the film amidst the buzzing US economy of the '80s and '90s, bringing sensitivity to relentlessly male and homosocial undercurrents amongst the suspects. I was reminded of such post-Reagan masculinist fare as Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Comparison is made with Reservoir Dogs (1991), Larsen underlining the culture of long hours which the contemporary black economy, like contemporary Reaganomics, had come to represent. On a film-historical level, such a culture gave rise to a spate of films revolving around work stress – Groundhog Day (1993), Multiplicity (1996), One Fine Day (1996) – while Singer and McQuarrie's marginalization of women evokes the domestic tensions of Heat (1995).
Larsen sees in Keyser Soze a metaphor for the rise of gangster economies in Eastern Europe following the decline of Communism. In the light of the world post-9/11, its economy going haywire in response to the post-Enron American bear market, The Usual Suspects will find new audiences, pleasuring, perplexing and changing shape before their eyes.
Reviewed by Richard Armstrong
