Unreliable Narrators

Rebecca Hachamovitch
William C. Armstrong
English 9G
25 May 2012
Unreliable Narratives
When ancient Greek singers warbled out fantastic tales of mythical heroes, the listening kings and courts never once challenged the poet’s authority. However questionable the story may be, the first-person account itself has rarely been called into question: it has not needed to be. Within the last twenty years, a new noir-film trend has emerged, one which does not permit the viewer to take for granted anything he/she has taken for granted before. The use of unreliable narratives and narrators began to appear within select and semi-obscure films. When Christopher Nolan read his little brother Jonathan’s budding short story “Memento Mori” told from the perspective of a man with no memory, Nolan was instantly fascinated and wrote a script version. Bryan Singer’s inspiration also came from writing; he read a two-hundred-word story in a magazine about a man tricking the police. Singer completed the first draft of his script four months later. In 2000, Nolan released his second movie, Memento, which won forty-five awards and was nominated for thirty-three other awards. Rita Kemply of The Washington Post describes it as “the perfect date movie for members of Mensa.” (1). Five years before that, Singer had released his film. The Usual Suspects won two Oscars, along with twenty-four other awards. Aside from their positive receptions by critics and fans, these movies also share apocryphal narrators. It is typical for protagonists telling the story to lie to other characters within the plot, but the revolutionary idea in Memento and Usual Suspects is to have the narrator deceive the audience as well. Because so few directors have explored this new genre, Singer and Nolan have had opportunities to explore multiple ideas and themes at a time and to put something old in a new and interesting light. In Memento and Usual Suspects, Nolan and Singer explore the themes of deception, identity, and the reality of events through the lens of unreliable narratives.
Directors Nolan and Singer use their unreliable narrators to manipulate the identities of characters in both movies. Keyser Sӧze and John G. are the main villains, but their existences and identities depend on the narrator’s use for them at any particular point in the story. In Usual Suspects, Verbal Kint, the narrator, introduces Keyser Sӧze as merely a “spook-story” which “no one ever believed” (Usual Suspects). He does this at the time because he needs Agent Kujan to believe Keyser Sӧze is not a material threat. Through Verbal’s narrative, director Singer has the power to bring Keyser Sӧze in and out of existence at will. Keyser Sӧze, “who may be real or may be a total myth,” could really be anyone in the movie or out; his name is separate from his identity (Leeper 1). The same is true for Memento, in which Johnny G. could be anyone or indeed everyone. Nolan allows Leonard to know certain facts for sure, such as the villain’s first name and last initial, but his clues could fit millions of people. A key question, raised by character Natalie, is “if you have all this information, why haven’t the police caught him yet?” (Memento). The answer is not immediately clear, but it mirrors a similar recurring question in Usual Suspects: “who is Keyser Sӧze?” Both directors choose to reveal more and more of their evil characters as the movies progress. This choice is designed to deceive the viewer, which is necessary because the villains’ identities change from scene to scene. Keaton, the cop-turned-conman in Usual Suspects is quick to claim that “there is no Keyser Sӧze!” the first time the name is introduced to his character (Usual Suspects). Kujan, the main detective, later deduces that “Keaton was Keyser Sӧze,” a conclusion which relates directly to the theme of misconceived identity (Usual Suspects). Only the audience knows he was not. Similarly, Memento’s Teddy (another ex-cop) is in the same situation as Keaton when he is killed as John G. “Nothing is what it seems” writes Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader. “Characters [whom Leonard] has trusted turn out to be duplicitous.” (1). Nolan clearly shows this deception when Teddy says to Lenny “Jesus, Lenny, I’m a John G.,” (Memento). Because Teddy’s information matches up perfectly to what Lenny already knows about John G., Lenny has reason to kill him. Teddy and John Edward Gammel are two names to fit one person—a concept which mirrors the idea behind the identities of Keyser Sӧze and Verbal Kint. Bryan Singer revealed in a behind-the-scenes director’s cut interview that “Keyser Sӧze” translates directly from Hungarian to “King Blabbermouth” or “Verbal King” (IMdB). The name is important for more than just its definition. As Arkash Kobash, the deep-fried Hungarian man from the docks, is babbling in his native tongue, the only words to get through are “Keyser Sӧze” and “The Devil” (Usual Suspects). The name, as well as the fear of the identity behind the name, drive Kobash to babble continuously about how “[Keyser Sӧze] is the Devil, you’ve never seen anyone like [him] in all your miserable life, you idiot. Keyser Sӧze. Do you at least understand that?” (Usual Suspects, translation IMdB). The police however, refuse to believe Sӧze exists. The same police incredulity appears Memento. Leonard’s response to Natalie’s question about why the police hadn’t found John G. yet is simply “They don’t think he exists.” (Memento). Then again, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” (Usual Suspects).
Because figuring out if a character exists or not in these movies is crucial, identity is as well. Identity is always important to movies, but it is especially so in Memento and Usual Suspects for the ever-changing faces of the villains. Due to their intentional vagueness in developing characters, Nolan and Singer are able to fool the viewer into believing whatever they as the director want. This includes everything Verbal Kint babbled in the office and everything Leonard Shelby thinks he remembers. Nolan and Singer are only able to do this having first made the narrators apocryphal sources. The unreliability of Verbal and Leonard plays a key role in ensuring that the audience remains unsuspecting until the last defining moment. In order for the audience to struggle with the characters’ identities, the characters telling the stories should struggle with identities as well.
The brawl with identity continues beyond the villains John G. and Keyser Sӧze, and on to affect the main character(s). Leonard of Memento wrestles with remembering his own identity as much as he does with John G.’s. In the words of a reviewer from TV Guide, “He’s as much a mystery to himself as he is to the viewer.” (McDonagh 1). Teddy even accuses Leonard of not knowing “who you are anymore” (Memento). Director Nolan has chosen for Lenny to remember only what happened before the accident; as he says in an interview “in an amnesia movie, there are no rules; anything can be true. I mean, absolutely anything can be true. The protagonist can be anything, he can be the killer […] with no rhyme or reason. It’s too easy.” (Memento, Special Features). By choosing not to make the movie a complete amnesia movie, in which Lenny would remember absolutely nothing, Nolan opts for a more consistent character. Lenny is a killer, with motivation; even if he can’t remember what it is. “John G.?” He asks Teddy. “John G., the guy who raped and killed your wife. Christ, Lenny.” (Memento). In Usual Suspects, the main conflict with identity is within Verbal’s attempts to understand why Keyser Sӧze chose him. Admittedly, this is different from Memento in that Verbal knows what he’s doing when he’s fooling the police, but assuming Verbal’s character and the Keyser’s character are different, the conflict is roughly the same. Unlike Sӧze, Verbal is a weak-willed disabled survivor of a hardcore hit who will gladly rat on his colleagues. His main question is understandably “why me?” (Usual Suspects). Of all his surrounding conmen, he wants to know “Why me, I’m stupid, I’m worthless, I’m a cripple, why me?” (Usual Suspects). As Verbal is stuck on “why me,” Leonard is still struggling with the “who am I really?” As such, the identity of the characters plays an enormous role in both movies.
Questioning identity is nothing new in film, and nor is trickery. However, a combination of them with the overtone of unreliable narratives is a revolutionary development. What Singer and Nolan both execute gracefully in their movies is the complete deception of the audience and the characters. A certain level of deception is possible in movies when characters other than the narrators are lying, but Nolan and Singer bump the standard up by taking an old idea in movies—fraud—and putting it in a new and interesting light: unreliable narratives.
The directors utilize the unreliable narrators in both movies to deceive the viewer and main characters. Nolan’s and Singer’s choices in the scripts allow the viewer to understand what is happening in the plot while showing that that information is confusing the characters. In Usual Suspects, director Singer spoon-feeds Verbal Kint’s complicated narrative to the viewer while making it obvious that Kujan is struggling with it. “The primary battle of wits is between Kint and U.S. Customs Agent Kujan” writes Hal Hinson of The Washington Post (1). What Singer reveals to the viewers, before revealing it to the characters themselves, is the fact that there is an unreliable narrator telling the story. Memento director Nolan does the same; Leonard does not realize that Natalie is using him as a hit-man to kill people making her life harder. All she has to do is convince Leonard that each target is John G. The audience comes to understand this before Leonard himself exclaims “You’re using me” (Memento). Similarly, in Usual Suspects, an intimidated and interrogated self-described “crippled” con is using a customs agent. Singer manipulates Agent Kujan through Verbal’s narrative. Kint must fend off Kujan until he is able to escape with his immunity. Meanwhile, Verbal is simply toying with the agent. “Back when I was in that barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois…” Kint babbles to Kujan in order to distract him (Usual Suspects). Verbal was never in a barbershop quartet, and the only thing in the room from Skokie, Illinois is the bulletin board. The unreliable narrator here is deceiving the audience and the characters. In Memento, Natalie deceives Leonard for her own benefit, much as Verbal tricks Kujan. Natalie’s pleasure, however, comes from being able to trick Leonard again and again, no matter how many times he realizes and forgets it. “I’m gonna use you. I’m telling you now, because I’m gonna enjoy it so much more if I know that you could stop me if you weren’t such a f-ing freak.” Natalie tells Leonard, grinning wickedly (Memento). Director Nolan makes sure the audience knows what Natalie is doing, while keeping that information from Lenny himself. Similarly in Usual Suspects, the viewer is supposed to pick up on Verbal’s lies before the detective himself does.
In order for the plot to make sense and to come full circle, revelations of truth must follow the deceptions. Nolan and Singer keep even this prized information from the audience and the characters to provide a climactic and spectacular finale. Both movies are among the first to do this, and are recognized as such by Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News who describes Memento as “one of the most original and ultimately confounding mind games to reach the screen since ‘Usual Suspects’” (Mathews 1). The grand finale of the mind-game starts in Memento when Teddy reveals that Leonard’s “wife survived the attack” (Memento). Throughout the entire movie up until that point, the audience had relied upon the assumption that Lenny’s wife was dead—it was the entire reason he was seeking revenge. Keyser Sӧze of Usual Suspects also had a wife subject to rape and murder—unless that was part of the false narrative. When Verbal leaves the police station, the audience assumes that Keaton was Keyser Sӧze. When asked about the defining moment of the bulletin board in an interview, Singer took on a peevish smile (Usual Suspects). “…Barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois…” the voiceover says smugly over a pan-shot to the bottom of the bulletin board. Agent Dave Kujan is staring in a state of shock similar to that of Leonard Shelby’s reaction to learning that not only did his wife survive the rape, but that “the real John G. [is] already dead.” (Memento). “Our memories are not to be trusted,” writes Rita Kemply of The Washington Post. “They’re merely temporal souvenirs.” (1). This idea becomes extremely evident as Nolan spins out the truth through Teddy to an unsuspecting audience. “I’m the one that helped you find the other guy in your bathroom that night, the guy that cracked your skull and f-ed your wife. We found him. You killed him. But you didn’t remember. So I helped you start looking again, looking for the guy you already killed.” (Memento). This revelation may be the biggest in the movie, due to the audience’s realization that Leonard, the character on the good side, the character with the noble cause, is a cold-blooded murderer who has killed many unsuspecting people. The most extreme revelations in each movie come with the small subtleties the viewer has overlooked. In the case of Memento it takes the shape of the photo of Leonard posing over his first kill; in Usual Suspects it’s Verbal Kint’s walk. Singer had, through the movie, described Kint as “that cripple from New York” (Usual Suspects). The final scene of the movie shatters Verbal’s supposed identity and through this extreme revelation shows him as Keyser Sӧze, much as the final scene of Memento reveals Leonard as the unknowing killer of many innocent “John G.”s.
Both movies consist of the themes of distorted truths and believable lies. Singer has Verbal trick Kujan (and the audience) into believing that Keaton was Keyser Sӧze, while Nolan steers Leonard to convince himself that Teddy is really John G. Leonard sets up clues for himself, weaving his own puzzle to solve, while Verbal picks names off a bulletin board, creates a maze, and amuses himself watching Kujan struggle in it. The master puppeteers behind the movies’ curtains are Nolan and Singer. The two directors orchestrate the mêlée of trickery closely followed by the revelation of deception. By introducing the key plot points through an unreliable narrator, the directors make the reality of the depicted events debatable. Singer was the second to attempt this technique, preceded only by Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon from 1950. Rita Kempley actually compared Kurosawa’s film to Memento, noting that they both try out the “examination of shifting realities and self-serving motives.” (Kempley 1). The only other such film is David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner from 1997, which came before Memento and after Usual Suspects. With only four noteworthy movies in the budding genre, more directors are bound to try out similar ideas. However, Nolan and Singer have already begun exploration on two of the most interesting themes in this sub-genre: identity and deception.













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