The Usual Suspects: Narrative and Discerning the Differences in the Illusion

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2014

“I’ll get right to the point.  I’m smarter than you.  I’ll find out what I want to know and I’ll get it from you whether you like it or not.”

- Detective Kujan to Verbal

“Who is Keyser Soze?”

The Usual Suspects is one of the last great masterful thrillers in American cinema, resulting from one of the greatest scripts ever written for the screen.  Bryan Singer, of X-Men fame, directed his second film from the blueprint of screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie.

The film eerily opens with out-of-frame pier lights, scintillating beams across the bay water with ominous music playing.  A mystery man casually walks up to Dean Keaton, who has been shot moments prior, and lights his cigarette as Keaton looks up at him, knowing what’s going to happen next, Keaton looks up at the shaded figure as he his shot.

The next day while police investigate, it becomes clear that something big was going down.  There are multiple dead bodies, some burned, and a ship on fire.  The only two survivors is a Hungarian criminal named Arkosh Kovash, who has been hospitalized with severe burns all over his body and a small-time con man named Verbal Kint, a man with cerebral palsy, which causes the left side of his body to be mostly non-responsive.

The five men that the film focuses on are brought into the police station for some trumped-up charge, stealing a truck full of guns.  One by one they are picked up and brought down to the station and interrogated after a quite amusing police line-up scene.

“Hand me the keys you fucking cocksucker!”

McManus, a professional thief and top-notch entry man, his partner in crime Fenster, who speaks in mangled English, and Hockney, explosives expert, all are asked about the stolen truck.  Then Dean Keaton is up and he knows just as the other guys knew, them being brought in there was a joke, some excuse for something else.

McManus decided to use their little unfortunate get together at the police station as an opportunity to recruit for a new job.  Keaton didn’t want anything to do with it.  He just wanted the simple life, above book, legal and away from his previous life of crime.  But he did realize, even though the cops had nothing on him, they weren’t going to leave him alone, so he decided to go along with McManus’ job proposal.

The job was to hit on the NYPD taxi service, an illegal police operation where they would pick up a criminal from the airport, in their police cruiser, and then drive them where ever they need to go in the city, for big bucks of course.  Verbal tells this story, in a series of flashbacks, to Agent Kujan in a messy office at the police station.  Verbal is being ‘interviewed’ by Kujan as he waits for his bail, giving him near-total immunity, to process so he can go.

“Back when I was picking beans in Guatemala, we used to make fresh coffee, right off the trees I mean.  That was good.  This is shit but, hey, I’m in a police station.” 

- Verbal Kint

Kujan wants to know what was going on that led up to so many people dying.  He wants to know if it was a drug deal gone wrong, where is the 91 million dollars in cocaine?  He thinks Verbal knows something and he thinks that Keaton is still alive.  He tells Verbal that Keaton was a bad cop and has faked his death before.

Verbal, now scared a little of Kujan, tells him about a lawyer, Kobayashi, who set up a deal with a man named Redfoot in Los Angeles, the city the group went to sell the jewels they stole from the NYPD taxi service.  They get there and do a job gone wrong and insist on meeting with Kobayashi.

“Keaton fought it as best he could, but a man can’t change what he is, he can convince anyone that he’s someone else, but never himself.” 

- Verbal Kint

Kujan is pulled out of the office and told that the severely burnt Hungarian at the hospital is saying a Turkish criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze is behind the events that happened at the harbor. 

Kobayashi tells Keaton along with the other men by a pool table that he works for Keyser Soze.  He tells them that they have all unintentionally stolen from Soze in their past and as a result, he is ordering them to repay their debt to him.  He wants to break up a cocaine deal at the San Pedro Harbor between the Argentinians and Hungarians, rival groups that Soze wants done away with.  Keaton and the group need to get the drugs and money at the exchange, they get to keep the money, and Soze’s people get the cocaine.

During the present, in the messy office, Verbal tells Kujan about the ‘myth’ of Keyser Soze and how the stories are legendary.  He tells him of how Soze killed his own wife and children in front of the Hungarian mob sent to kill him.  He tells him how Soze then killed all their families and burned down their homes, killed people they knew, or owed them money, and then he disappeared.

The ‘will’ that Soze showed them Hungarians, to kill his family, the only group of people on this planet that most would protect above all.  Like Vlad the Impaler, an ancestor rival of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Soze demonstrated a form of evil that even bad men couldn’t understand.  He recognized that his family would forever be held over his head.  This makes him completely insane, simply because he chose his cocaine business over his family, some would argue that it was pride in the end that did it.  How dare the Hungarian mob threaten his family so he would give them his growing drug territory?

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Fenster decided to bail on their deal with Soze and is killed.  Kobayashi notifies Keaton of the whereabouts of his body, clearly laying the law: If you leave, you die.  The group goes to the beach and buries Fenster in the sand.  As a form of retaliation, or just letting Soze know that they can’t be controlled, the group infiltrates an office building to kill Kobayashi.  Their attempt fails when Kobayashi informs them that Soze’s people are prepared to kill a family member of each of them if they try to back out.  Keaton badly wants to kill him but the group complies and stakes out the harbor and prepares for the job.

Verbal stays behind while Hockney sets a distraction bomb, McManus perches himself on a roof with a sniper rifle and Keaton takes point, entering the harbor.  Soon Hockney’s bomb goes off and gunfire begins, and he is killed in front of wooden boxes of money.  McManus and Keaton check the ship for money or cocaine as they kill Hungarians along the way.  They soon discover that there is no money and that they were tricked.  McManus is killed with a knife in the back of the neck and then Keaton.

“Keaton always said, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.”  Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.” 

- Verbal Kint

Kujan is still confused about the situation when Verbal leaves the police station.  Then in one of the greatest moments in the history of cinema, Kujan notices that the names that Verbal gave him were actually suspects on the wall behind him and then he drops his coffee cup.  The cup smashes on the floor revealing the name Kobayashi printed on the bottom.  Kujan scrambles to get Verbal back as the cripple stumbles out of the police station and suddenly corrects his left limp and hand as he lights himself a cigarette, climbing into Kobayashi’s (clearly not his real name),  Jaguar and drives off into the distance.

The Usual Suspects is a film about chess, it’s a film about strategy, and it’s a film about manipulation and deceit.  It’s a film that explains why choices matter in our lives and that consequences to those choices can be devastating if ill-managed.  The film is a psychological journey into the maze of the mind.  A place we think we know well be we don’t.  The mind tricks us into believing in the world outside our windows as a real place.  The mind tricks us into thinking that what we see is a representation of reality when in actuality, it's diluted and edited to fit into our own comfort bias.
 

The Usual Suspects reminds us that there is a world happening outside of our purview of it.  It lets us know that if we don’t understand that fact, well…the strong have always eaten the weak.  For that, the film is very existential in nature; it’s up Nietzsche’s ally with its harsh reality, even though in the end, it’s still hard to know what really happened.  Our sensory data limits our perception of reality which is why this film leaves us with so many blanks, we change and alter our reality as it happens.  We do this unconsciously, as we invent scenarios in our minds to make life easier to comprehend, we then believe in them scenarios, this becomes the narrative, the story we tell ourselves.  We are agent Kujan, we think we know when we actually don’t know, we think we read people better than they read us; in the end, hilariously, we think we’re right.

"...and like that, poof, he was gone."