Brain Damage: Neo Noir in the Nineties

by Eric Szyszka

"I was the only guy who disagreed with the facts and I had brain damage." - Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), Memento.

The 1990's presented audiences throughout the world with a new dark vision of noir hidden within old formulas yet presented as fresh, sleek, and cool narratives in glorious color. One thing that separates 90's neo-noir from other reinventions of film noir is the more frequent focus on mental problems and predicaments. This new neo-noir reflected a white male bourgeois perspective, expressing a fear of being the sole target in a new bold politically correct society, but it also offered a meditation on the growth of mental illnesses present in 90's America. The films function as a way to fight back against these various minorities while dealing with intricate internal conflicts going on within not only the characters' minds but the filmmakers' as well. While this is a theory as to why noir came back, it is clearly evident that this new splash of anxiety was not just "noir" in quotation marks composed solely of style over substance. The substance was produced by going into the realm of the mind instead of the ordinary physical plane of existence we have seen time and time again in most narrative cinema. These films that use the mental field while attacking "unfit" elements in society brew an interesting combination. I will explore these connections and their uses within The Usual Suspects (1995) and the last neo-noir of the 90's era, Memento (2000). These films are landmarks in the modern noir and show us how some kind of depth can be found in a style of film that has continuously been viewed as simplistic and shallow.

Classic film noir exploded during a legitimate time of gloom and dread. The Second World War was a true catalyst for the darkness and cynicism that was projected onto screens in the 1940's and into the post-war 1950's. However, noir never died for as long as there are men and women involved in crime and seduction, noir will endure. It just became a figure in the shadows seldom emerging until the next big bang – the 1970's. This was another time of honest fear, an untrustworthy government, and a national crisis. Through Vietnam and Watergate the population had a reason for their resurgence of noir. The feelings of powerlessness became realized in film images of the 70's with themes of paranoia and isolation stronger than 40's film noir could have managed. The next largest moment of this dark cinema besides several key 80's pictures was the 1990's and it too took noir to a new level. There is a chance it was needed once more due to a war of ideology and mind rather than something on a physical battlefield; the Gulf War was hardly a big enough skirmish to launch an entire population into disillusionment. In this new decade, the 90's, when everyone was in therapy, the movies needed a shrink as well.

Thematically, this postmodern period is deeply saturated in paranoia. In part this reflects a public crisis in epistemology regarding truth claims, the status of knowledge, and the determination of truth. It is now commonplace that the contemporary postindustrial, post-cold war, post-Marxist, postmodern society has produced a continuing anxiety over what is "real" and how "reality" is determined and authorized. This postmodern fear and confusion of truth and reality is the center of the increased mental focus in 90's American cinema, particularly that of the neo-noir. With the increasing flow of information, including from such new forms as the internet, people had no idea what to trust or not. The 90's produced the fastest way to spread misinformation and further spiral a nation into disillusionment. This explosion of computer technology and exponential growth of the internet are major contributing factors to the appeal of conspiracy theories and broadening cultural paranoia. This also bred a deepening wave of anti-social behavior and a new type of techno-age alienation unseen before by the world. This is a way a culture can be seemingly tossed into the blender of despair and produce a new age of dark cinema unseen on this large of a scale since the 1970's. Thus, David Thomson's sense that, "the urban crime picture has come into its own a paradigm of alienation and breakdown, as a political and social condition, and as a particular human predicament,"was proven true not just for the 1970's, but for all the 90's as well. However, whereas in the 70's viewer priority distrusted government and corporate infrastructure, citizens of the 90's reached the height of paranoia by reaching the pinnacle – of distrusting of their own minds. It was a time to go to therapy and load up on the prescription drugs.

The Usual Suspects (1995) presents us with a classic tale of a heist gone wrong but gives it a postmodern spin. The entire story is told through flashbacks all from within the mind of Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey). The flashbacks turn out to be completely false. The gimmick of the film is the fact we follow along with it, buy into it, believe in it as we're trained to do with flashbacks, only to find out it was all a big lie. It also presents us with the wider alluring and scary idea of conspiracy as Verbal turns out to be legendary criminal mastermind Keyser Soze, which we know a lot of through Verbal's own flashbacks, somewhat destroying Soze's credibility. What is most interesting is the fact Verbal reads off the police station walls to help formulate his story. The walls are overrun with information and Verbal uses this flood of information to deceive U.S. Customs Agent David Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), and in effect turns the postmodern itself into a weapon.

At the opening of The Usual Suspects (1995) we're presented with an ex-cop and ex-criminal, the personification of duality and corruption – Dean Keaton (Gabriel Bryne), who is just trying to go straight but gets suckered into one last job (or three). Keaton in a way is a perfect example of internal conflict. This however is not our main focus of attention as the narrative takes place after Keaton's supposed death. Enter Verbal, a cripple, who talks too much, hence the nickname. Verbal is waiting to post bail as he talks to David Kujan and "knits" (the phony name being an anagram) an outlandish story of an arch-criminal being behind various capers that included these "usual suspects," originally lined up by the NYPD. Due to the fact we are just being told what has happened through flashbacks, The Usual Suspects (1995) moves beyond the existentialist dilemma posed by the heist formula, focusing rather upon the process of fiction-making itself. The film suggests that audiences of modern cinema and people in society are far too gullible and that in this new age of spin culture, it is nearly impossible to decipher the truth. Only several years after the release of The Usual Suspects (1995), we lived so far in a nation of spin that even the President of the United States had to question what is is. The Usual Suspects (1995) serves as a mental puzzle not entirely for Agent Kujan, but for those in the audience as well. This film is a complete battle of the mind. What we think is Agent Kujan wearing down this criminal actually turns out to be the opposite. In addition, all of the flashbacks involved are not actual reality but are figments of imagination strung together into a fantastical tale by Verbal Kint.

Bryan Singer (director) and Christopher McQuarrie (writer) weaved this web of misinformation while slipping in small pieces of definite narrative truth. Verbal's account and the story's credibility lie within the independent testimony of dying Hungarian mob witness Arkosh Kovash. Most audience members are unaware of anything being a false reality until the film's startling conclusion. However, Kovash is the only definite proof to verify the existence of Keyser Soze. Singer and McQuarrie accomplish the rest of the story (an utter fabrication) rather brilliantly through one of cinema history's most unreliable narrators, providing us with rampant voice-over which we simply buy into because the character of Verbal Kint is a weak cripple and very likable. Out of everyone in the film we would never suspect the he is in fact legendary criminal mastermind Keyser Soze, even though this has been staring us in the face this entire time.

Thus, Soze himself gives us our narration and flashbacks into a world of crime that probably was a whole lot simpler than he had let on. These flashbacks are the essence of the story and provide us with a definite standard noir convention, and the viewer buys into the flashback from being trained to not suspect and just partake in flashbacks, as they have proven reliable in most films. The audience living in a nation of distrust gets burned if they trust the cinema. The reason why we are so willingly led into this flashback trap is that in most movies flashbacks are given to us in a type of third person objectivity, even if the film began with a character narrating. There is also an aspect of trust in the movie theater and audiences who do not like to think and are simply going to see a film out of enjoyment. Yet here, People lie and aren't to be trusted. The Usual Suspects' characters, much like those in the classic film Citizen Kane (1941), will likely never learn the full truth other than what was told to them. In the cynical 1990's, the film asks the audience to applaud the character's infernal ingenuity as a storyteller, as well as retroactively to enjoy its own misperceptions. If the postmodern world is full of deceit, you may as well have fun with it, and also take glee in the fact this mastermind has beaten federal government agencies. Regarding this film's reliance on deceit through flashback, Ray Pratt in his book Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film suggests exactly how biased the usage of flashback can be due to their derive action from memory; his comments could easily apply to a film such as The Usual Suspects: "The flashback can be viewed as a kind of visual representation of the unconscious. If the mind absorbs all sorts of information, becoming a kind of archive from which the entire history of each individual can be recalled, as it were, out of the past to elucidate or advance plot development, the flashback is its visual equivalent, able to represent or express feelings of guilt, regret, hurt, rage, or envy – and even to describe, from the point of view of the central character, the psychopathology of noir's pantheon of femme fatales and some of its weird, twisted villains and anti-heroes. Most commonly the flashback is used to provide an explanation in the present by flashing back to events that occurred somewhere in the past. It is often a clarifying device, seemingly a way for the main character to explore with the audience something that he or she still does not quite understand and wants the viewer to review one more time."

Here, this onslaught of flashback presents the film entirely on the mental level and for once gives us a type of flashback that can be completely skewed based on emotion. Verbal has probably adjusted his story based on his opinions of others, institutions, and society. He uses his mouth as a tool of misinformation and single-handedly beats the system. Although we learn he is the film's personification of evil, we still root for him as some kind of anti-hero because in the 90's we had come to love the bad boy not only in cinema, but even the far reaches of political office. Verbal shows us the point of view of his character with clarity and the assurance that everything we had seen had actually happened. The character of Verbal was simply a character played by Keyser Soze. The modern audience had achieved a level of understanding regarding vast flows of information and the truth, but they have also come to accept and live in this society, making the truth in the end inconsequential.

Continues with part two: Memento