Introduction
By all accounts, three men dominated the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein. Each, in their own way, overturned previous ideas and led to a new way of seeing the world. Their influence on Hollywood films varies dramatically.
Freud was taken up very enthusiastically by mainstream filmmakers. This is most obvious in the works of somebody like Hitchcock, whose use of Freud’s theories informed his work as early as the 1940s, most obviously in the film Spellbound, with its Dali-created dream sequences. However, Freud’s ideas have infiltrated the very fabric of Hollywood: what is the inner conflict so beloved by writing teachers as the correlative of the outer conflict if not a simplified restatement of Freud’s battle between the id and the ego?
Marx, by way of contrast, has been all but ignored by Hollywood. This is understandable. Complaints about the liberality of filmmakers notwithstanding, Hollywood is an industry like any other in a capitalist economy. The major purpose of the studios is to make money for their shareholders. You’re not going to find much sympathy for a proletariat revolution here outside of the mind of Warren Beatty.
That leaves Einstein. In many ways, the revolution which arose out of his General Theory of Relativity was the most profound. Before Einstein, the universe was seen as a huge mechanism; it was believed that, by figuring out the rules by which the mechanism worked, it would be possible to know precisely all there was to know about the universe. In fact, if you knew where every atom in the universe was, and every rule which guided its movement, you could predict the whole history of the universe, past and present. In theory, anyway.
Einstein argued that two people, living in different conditions (say, one much closer to the speed of light than the other) will have a completely different experience of the universe. This idea was soon augmented by Heisenberg, who showed that any experimental attempt to understand a physical phenomenon would introduce a bias because of the equipment; in this way, scientists could never be sure that they were seeing the actual thing they studied. More recently, chaos theory introduced the idea that in complicated systems (ones with a large number of variables), small inputs could quickly change the system in unpredictable ways, making long-term prediction of the system’s behaviour impossible. The nineteenth century ideal of science making the universe understandable gave way, in the twentieth century, to a model fraught with complication and uncertainty.
Some filmmakers in other countries have used these ideas. Kurasowa’s Rashomon, for instance, is an obvious interpretation of Einstein’s theory of relativity transferred from the scientific to the social realm. Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad is full of narrative uncertainty, open to a variety of interpretations. One can come up with any number of additional examples.
Hollywood, by way of contrast, resisted uncertain or ambiguous narratives; the reigning paradigm at the studios was that mass audiences required clear stories. As journalist Peter Howell explained: “Test marketing, the scourge of cinema, made the situation worse. As studios targeted their wares to the largest-possible audiences, last-minute revisions prompted by advance screenings in suburban multiplexes ensured that the boy always got the girl, the Mountie always got his man and that happy people always rode off into the sunset. The opinions of anonymous moviegoers began to matter more than those of directors, actors and screenwriters.” [1]
The breakthrough didn’t come until 1995, when The Usual Suspects was released. The film is a complex crime story which starts with the incarceration of a petty thief, Verbal Kint, who is somehow involved in the death of dozens of people on a barge. The ongoing story in the present involves Kint’s interrogation by a dogged policeman; the story of the events leading up to what happened on the barge is told in flashbacks. Kint’s tale revolves around a man named Keyser Soze, a shadowy, utterly ruthless underworld figure.
It is only in the last few seconds of The Usual Suspects that we find out that Kint is, in fact, Soze, and that virtually everything he has said (and, therefore, almost the entire film) has been a lie. The viewer must then go back and reinterpret everything he or she has seen in the film based on this new information.
In 1999, Hollywood released two more films with similar surprise endings. The Sixth Sense is about a child psychologist who tries to help a troubled young boy. Halfway through the film, we find out that the boy is not psychologically disturbed, but has the power to see ghosts, a power which causes him much anguish. The psychologist comes to believe the boy, and helps him find a way to make peace with the ghosts. Again, it is only in the final scene that we find out that the psychologist himself has been a ghost for almost the entire film, and we have to reassess what we have seen with this knowledge.
Fight Club is about an emotionally dead Yuppie who meets an anarchist, Tyler Durden, on a plane. Together, they create a fight club, a place where men beat the crap out of each other, yet find the experience exhilerating. It makes them feel alive. They also become involved in escalating pranks against consumer society. Unbeknownst to the narrator, Durden has a political agenda which involves destroying the commercial credit system. Towards the end of the film, we find that Durden doesn’t physically exist, that he is a figment of the unnamed Yuppie’s imagination, a projection which has allowed the narrator to do things his uptight persona wouldn’t ordinarily do. Again, the audience is challenged to reconsider what it has seen up to that point in the film.
A crime story. A supernatural story. A social satire. Although the genres are diverse, these films are connected by the way they defy clarity and embrace uncertainty, by the way they ask the viewer: “Can you believe what you have just seen?” This article will look at the ways in which they accomplish this.
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Last night while walking down the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
I met that man again today
I wish that man would go away.
Mainstream culture was quick to take up the ambiguities being explored in the sciences. In literature, for instance, “modernism turned against the naturalism and realism that dominated the fiction of the nineteenth century. It taught us to look with suspicion on the idea that a straightforward narrative can tell the truth about human life; it began to favour complexity, parody, ambiguity, and ironic self-awareness. In this new atmosphere, the unreliable narrator emerged, the storyteller for the age of relativism, the age of doubt and incredulity.” [2] The unreliable narrator appeared in such high culture books as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where a poem is commented upon by a writer who is out of touch with reality and may, in fact, be completely insane. The device also appeared in works of popular culture, such as Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a mystery in which we find, in the final pages, that the narrator was the murderer.
Both Fight Club and The Usual Suspects use the device of the unreliable narrator. The unnamed narrator is the storyteller in the former while Verbal Kint is the storyteller in the latter; both stories unfold as flashbacks told by the main character. According to Fulford, “Sometimes an unreliable narrator withholds crucial information from the reader; just as often, the narrator doesn’t know the facts, or doesn’t grasp their meaning.” [3] Here, we have examples of both situations. In the Usual Suspects, Kint knowingly withholds information from the policeman who is interrogating him, thus keeping that information from the audience. In Fight Club, the narrator does not know that he is leading a second life until the evidence becomes so overwhelming he can no longer deny the fact.
The Sixth Sense is an interesting case in that it is an ongoing narrative, not told in flashbacks, which seems to employ an omniscient narrator. However, every scene features the main character, psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe, and the audience is invited to see events from his point of view. Although not the outward narrator, his point of view is unreliable because he does not acknowledge (and, therefore, the audience does not know) that he is dead until the final scene of the film. (Another way of looking at this is that the omniscient narrator itself is unreliable, which is a challenge to our common way of experiencing film, a possibility that is considered later.)
All three films use the unreliability of their narrative to create characters in the mind of the audience who do not, in fact, exist for the characters in the films themselves. Tyler Durden, for instance, has no existence outside of the narrator’s mind; when other characters interact with him, they are really interacting with the narrator who has taken on the Durden persona. Malcolm Crowe is only visible to the child who can see ghosts; his interactions with other characters in the film are, as we shall see, authorial misdirections intended to convince the audience of his existence. Finally, the Keyser Soze who emerges from Verbal Kint’s story is not the Keyser Soze who actually exists.
To convince us of the reality of these unreal characters, each film works on at least two levels. The first is the surface level on which most of the narrative appears to take place. This is the primary reading of the film. Below this is another level, a secondary reading, through which the first level must be reinterpreted by new information supplied late in the narrative. Individual scenes must contain enough ambiguity to allow for both levels of interpretation.
Readings and Ambiguity
Two of the three films begin with a scene that takes place in “objective” reality. The Sixth Sense opens with Crowe and his wife having dinner, after which he is shot by a former patient who believes Crowe failed him in his therapy. We next see Crowe two years later, and assume that he survived the shooting (although, as it turns out, this was not the case). In The Usual Suspects, the opening scene takes place on the barge with all the dead bodies. Dean Keaton, one of the thugs who ends up in a gang with Kint, is lying on the deck, his body broken. He greets Soze, who kills him. Soon after, Kint, one of only two survivors of the barge massacre, is hauled into the police station and the interrogation begins.
Fight Club opens with Tyler Durden placing a gun in the narrator’s mouth on an upper floor of a building which is soon to be blown up. The film unfolds as the narrator’s flashback describing how the two of them got to this point. After this scene, there are several scenes of the narrator’s life; Durden doesn’t actually reappear until page 24. [4] Although the film doesn’t open with an objective scene, the subsequent scenes of the narrator’s life seem objective, and we are given no reason to distrust them.
These opening scenes/sequences are important because they set up the objectivity of the narrative to follow, conditioning the audience to interpret events according to the primary reading of the film.
Periodically, information will be introduced into the narrative that reinforces the primary reading of the story. In The Usual Suspects, for instance, after Kint has told the police about the gang’s first heist — the theft of gems from a jeweler which resulted in his death — as well as the criminal backgrounds of the other members of the gang, a conversation between two police officers confirms this information. [5] This objective corroboration of part of Kint’s story validates it for the audience. The fact that the police have no evidence for the existence of either Kobayashi, Soze’s lawyer in Kint’s story, or Redfoot, a go-between for Soze, is interpreted by the audience as something the police have to further investigate. The audience does not, at that point, have reason to believe that these two men do not exist.
In The Sixth Sense, the apparent interaction between Crowe and living characters reinforces the primary reading of the story, that is, the perception that he is alive. The most audacious example occurs in a scene with Anna, Crowe’s wife. He arrives in a restaurant just as she is finishing a meal. He offers a lengthy apology, saying, “I know I’ve been kind of out of it for a long while and you resent it. You do. I know you’re mad. I know it’s put some distance between us.” She doesn’t respond, taking the check before he has an opportunity to get it. Finally, she says, “…Happy anniversary.” And walks away. [6] The primary reading of the scene is that Crowe and his wife have grown distant in the two years since the shooting. The secondary reading is that she only vaguely senses his presence, literally hasn’t heard a word he has said, and says the final line as a sad, ironic comment to herself.
Another scene that has the same effect takes place in a hospital where Cole, Crowe’s patient, has been taken after an incident at a party. Cole’s mother, Lynn, is talking to a doctor as Crowe looks on:
I think he probably has a phobia of dark spaces.
Malcolm shakes his head.
He doesn’t.
Lynn stares at Dr. Patricia Hill.
I know he doesn’t. [SS 59]
In an ordinary narrative, it would appear that Crowe is interacting with the other characters; the dialogue is just ambiguous enough, however, that when we realize that Crowe is dead, we can reinterpret the scene in a way that shows he has not, in fact, interacted with anybody.
In Fight Club, the first fight (apparently) occurs between Durden and the narrator in a parking lot outside a bar. This fight is watched by five guys who “are now laughing, looking at each other in wondrous amusement.” [FC 37] Because the fight is being watched by people who do not know the participants, we are lead to believe that what we are seeing is what they are seeing: that is, a fight between two men. It isn’t until the end, that we are shown that they were watching the narrator throw himself around the parking lot, beating himself up.
Another example occurs later in the film. Durden has started recruiting members for what will turn out to be an anarchist army. He keeps them waiting on the stoop of his house for three days and abuses them; if they stick it out, they become members. At first, the narrator is appalled by this. He hits the first recruit with a broom and tells him to “Get the fuck out of here! There isn’t going to be any fucking army!” [FC 96] The primary reading of this scene is that the narrator, disgusted, is trying to discourage the recruit. The secondary reading is that, in fact, the narrator is simply continuing the work of his alter-ego. This is complicated by a scene that appears soon after in the film. Somebody the narrator knew from one of his support groups appears on the stoop hoping to join the Fight Club army. Durden berates him, and, hanging his head, he starts to leave. The narrator, seeing this, rushes out to tell him how things work, and encourage him to stick it out. From the primary reading of the film, this makes no sense: if the narrator is opposed to the development of this army, why would he encourage somebody he knows to join? In the secondary reading, it makes sense for the narrator/Durden character to do just that.
Sometimes, the information which reinforces the primary reading of the story comes from a character other than the narrator. In The Usual Suspects, for instance, Dave Kujan, Verbal Kint’s primary questioner, is convinced that “Dean Keaton was the mind behind this,” [US 15] and pushes Kint to “admit” this. As it happens, we saw Keaton die in the only objective scene in the film; however, the forward momentum of the flashbacks, which approach the present, and the interrogation may cause us to forget or even disbelieve this proof. (It helps that Kint is portrayed as having a lame foot and hand, leading us to believe that he couldn’t possibly have been responsible for the carnage on the barge.)
Kint acts as though he refuses to believe that Keaton is Soze, letting Kujan wear him down until he finally blurts out “It was all Keaton. We followed him from the beginning.” [US 45] This should immediately cause the audience to question what they have seen up to this point. In the story Kint has been telling, Keaton was hard, but he loved his girlfriend and treated Kint well, making Kint respond with loyalty. However, Kujan offers a different picture of the man: “Keaton was under indictment a total of seven times when he was on the [police] force. In every case, witnesses either reversed their testimony to the grand jury or died before they could testify. When they finally did nail him for fraud, he spent five years in Sing Sing. He killed three prisoners inside — one with a knife in the tailbone while he strangled him to death.” [US 24/25]. What are we supposed to make of this glaring contradiction? Kujan’s version likely is more objective, and, therefore, should be believed by the audience. Still, because Kint’s version is largely revealed in scenes and Kujan’s is given to us in dialogue, it is easy for the audience to shrug off the vision of Keaton as a thug and accept Kint’s more romantic version of him. In addition, the fact that Kint seems physically and emotionally powerless, first in the face of the criminals, then in the face of the police, makes us sympathetic to him. We want to believe his story.
Sometimes the information which reinforces the primary reading comes from the main character. Dr. Crowe, telling Cole a story, says that ever since the incident with his former patient “things have been different. He’s become messed up. Confused. Angry. Not the same person he used to be. (beat) His wife doesn’t like the person he’s become. They don’t speak anymore. They’re like strangers.” [SS 62] Of course, he’s not the same person he used to be: he is dead. Ditto the fact that he doesn’t speak to his wife any more. Again, though, the primary reading of this scene is that they are growing distant in life.
It also happens that information which is necessary to the secondary reading of the story is given to the audience, but they do not recognize it as such. Sometimes, it is disguised as information necessary for the primary reading. The importance of this information does not become apparent until after the surprise which opens the way for the secondary reading is revealed. Cole, asked if he sees the ghosts in dreams, states: “No, walking around, like regular people… They can’t see each other. Some of them don’t know they’re dead.” [SS 64] It isn’t until the ending that we find that he has described Dr. Crowe. This also explains why, in the secondary reading of the film, Crowe clings to the fiction he and his wife are having trouble: it’s the only way he can maintain the larger fiction that he is still alive.
Sometimes, the information is given to the audience as a character point. In Fight Club, we learn early on that the narrator suffers from sleep deprivation and spends a lot of time in a half-asleep/half awake state. [FC 6] This leads him to go to a variety of self-help groups, where he meets the love interest in the film, Marla Singer. It isn’t until the ending that we realize that these periods were the times that the narrator’s Tyler Durden alter-ego took control of his body, creating a persona (finding the abandoned house, making soap, etc.) that would seem full blown when they finally meet.
Fight Club is, by far, the most ambitious attempt to weave primary and secondary readings into a cohesive whole. In one scene, the Durden character comes to Marla’s apartment after she has swallowed a bottle of pills. “Who are you?” she asks, leading us to believe that she doesn’t know him (consistent with the fact that she has never met him before). For comic effect, she trips over the bed. Thus, when we find out that Durden is just a character in the narrator’s body, we assume that the reason she didn’t recognize him in that scene was because she was addled by the drug overdose.
Later in the film, Marla is having sex with Durden in the house he “shares” with the narrator. The narrator passes by the door of the room and Durden comes to ask him if he wants to join in. Marla asks, “Who are you talking to?” and, again, trips over the bed. This scene must be interpreted in exactly the opposite manner from the previous scene: in the primary reading, Marla seems addled by something and, therefore, unable to recognize Durden’s roommate; in the secondary reading, however, the question is perfectly reasonable because, as far as Marla knows, she and Durden are the only physical bodies in the building.
These scenes also have one other notable aspect. When we find out that Durden is, as he calls himself in the film, the narrator’s “imaginary friend,” we assume that the narrator projects himself from his physical body. The body must always be that of the narrator. In these scenes, however, the body belongs to Durden, and it is the narrator whose physical presence is imagined
The common element to all of these scenes is that they contain enough ambiguous information to allow for different interpretations. This is unusual for Hollywood films, which thrive on singular meanings. Moreover, these films can be read as a critique of film itself, a reminder that images do not have unambiguous meanings, but always require interpretation.
This is most clear in the film version of Fight Club, which contains three self-references that are not in the screenplay. In the opening scene in the building, Durden takes the gun out of the narrator’s mouth and asks if he has anything to say. He replies, “I have nothing to say.” When the scene is revisited at the end of the film, when Durden asks, the answer is now “I still have nothing to say.” “Ah,” Durden replies, “Flashback humour.”
One of the pranks Durden plays is splicing pornographic images into family films. While the narrator explains how he does this between changing reels, Durden points to a corner of the screen where the marker for reel changes appears.
Finally, there is a monologue that begins with a variation of a line in the screenplay: “I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world… I am the toxic waste by-product of God’s creation.” [FC 102] While this monologue is being delivered directly to the camera (first by Durden, then, later, by the narrator), the image begins to shake and sprocket holes appear on the screen. [7]
Self-reference is another aspect of the modernist impulse described by Fulford above. By momentarily destroying the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief, self-reference, like ambiguity, can call into question the nature of what we take for granted as narrative form.
Looking for Clues
These three films can be seen as elaborate games played with (or, if one is not so inclined, jokes played on) the audience. As such, they all contain clues to the secondary reading of the story. What follows is a by no means exhaustive list of all of the clues to be found as to the real nature of the narratives in the three films.
In The Sixth Sense, for example, whenever Dr. Crowe goes down into his basement workshop, he rattles the handle of the door, finding that “IT STICKS.” [SS 18] The seems odd, but isn’t explained until the final sequence, when “His eyes come to rest on the door to his basement office. He looks in disbelief at the set of DEAD BOLT LOCKS on the door.” [SS 123] In retrospect, it seems obvious that Anna Crowe locked up his workshop after his death, and his imagining the door to be locked was his way of transmuting the reality into something his ghostly self could accept.
Sometimes, the behaviour of characters is a clue to what is happening. The first scene after Crowe’s shooting has him sitting on a bench, waiting for Cole to come out of his house. When Cole appears, he immediately runs to a church, where he feels he can be safe. [SS 12] Since we won’t know for a long time that Cole is afraid of the ghosts he sees, it is unlikely that we will reach the correct (secondary) interpretation of the scene: that he is simply running away from another ghost. We are much more likely to accept Crowe’s (primary) suggestion that he is resisting a new therapist.
Often, the clues don’t appear to require an explanation. Anna Crowe gets attention from other men, but (we realize after the film) feels she cannot enter into a new relationship as long as Dr. Crowe’s spirit is nearby. In one scene, she is with one of her suitors in her store when “A SHATTERING DOOR SLAM ECHOES THROUGH THE STORE. Anna and Jeffery pull apart. They rush past the silver haired woman to the front of the store. They find the glass front door cracked in a spider web pattern.” [SS 85] In both readings of the film, this is an expression of Dr. Crowe’s jealousy. The cracking of glass has an additional meaning in the second reading because, of course, it is the kind of prank an incorporate spirit is supposed to commit. It’s a ghostly thing to do.
Sometimes, the clues can be really obscure. The name of the villain in The Usual Suspects, for example, was based on the name of one of the screenwriter’s co-workers, Keyser Sume: “We knew we wanted to keep some part of the name — either Keyser or Sume. We were more partial to Keyser, obviously because of its double meaning. We were coming up with alternate names for the Devil. There are thousands of them, but Bryan hated all of them. My roommate at the time was this sort of bizarre little collector of all sorts of strange things, and he happened to have an English-to-Turkish dictionary. We went into the book and I asked him to look up ‘Devil,’ ‘evil,’ ‘fire,’ ‘slippery’ — every single metaphor we could come up with — and finally I just said, ‘Look up “Verbal.”‘ And it was Soze.” [8] Those who know Turkish could figure out that the two characters had the same name.
Early in the film, before Kint’s interrogation even begins, he says, “That guy is tense. Tension is a killer. I used to be in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois — the baritone was this guy named Kip Diskin. Big fat guy. I mean like Orca fat. He used to get so stressed in the – ” [US 18] This casual bit of dialogue sets up the fact that Kint likes to talk, that has earned the nickname “Verbal.” It also is the first clue in the closing sequence that the film hasn’t been quite as it seemed: Kujan, looking over the bulletin board in the office, notices that it was manufactured by a company named Quartet from Skokie, Illinois. [US 48] Those who are aware of this fact have a very early clue that something is up in the film.
Other clues require that the viewer put pieces of a puzzle together. When he tells agent Dave Kujan that Dean Keaton is Keyser Soze, Verbal Kint is simply telling him what he wants to hear. By the end of the film we realize that Kint/Soze actually has been playing Kujan all along. There is, in fact, a clue that this is the case. Early in the film, Kujan tells a superior that “if there’s anything I’ve learned as a cop, it’s always the obvious solution. Nothing is that complicated in the real world.” [US 16] Much later, Kint tells Kujan that “Keaton was a grounded guy. An ex-cop. To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It’s always simple. There’s no mystery on the street, no arch-criminal behind it all. If you got a dead guy and you think his brother did it, you’re going to find out you’re right.” [US 35] This echoing of sentiment is not coincidental: it shows that Kint understands Kujan’s psychology, and hints that he is using that knowledge to spin his yarn.
Some clues require close attention. In Fight Club Tyler Durden, driving a car, weaves in and out of traffic in an attempt to wake the narrator out of his emotional stupor. In a scene not in the screenplay, the car crashes, ending up overturned in a ditch. Despite the fact that Durden was driving, it is the narrator who is pulled out of the driver seat window.
Other clues seem obvious in retrospect. In order to blackmail his boss into paying him for not working, the narrator throws himself around the man’s office, beating himself bloody before building security arrives. Afterwards, the narrator, in a voice over, muses, “For some reason, I thought of my first fight – with Tyler.” [FC 73]
As the reader may have noticed, many of the clues and narrative ambiguities which appeared in the films were not in the screenplays. It would appear that in the process of rewriting and filming, the writers and/or directors of the films became increasingly daring in the way they combined the two levels of meaning. This is clearly true in the case of The Usual Suspects, as writer Christopher McQuarrie relates:
Bryan [Singer, director] really, really flirted with danger on a few things. He’s very mischievous that way. The [scene with Kint struggling] with the lighter was saying, on the one hand, that it couldn’t have been him lighting the cigarette on the deck of the boat, but on the other hand, it was making such a show out of the cigarette that I was afraid the audience was going to get the clue. There’s another scene in the film where Verbal is sort of turned away from Kujan, and he smiles. He literally cracks a smile and lets on that he knows something. When I saw it the first time, I was like, ‘What is this?!’ Every time I watch the film, I’m convinced the audience has just gotten it. I can feel them all around me, getting it. Bryan does a few of those in the movie. [9]
Conclusion
Are we looking at the death of classical narrative in Hollywood? Hardly. Tens of thousands of screenwriters, all schooled in traditional storytelling, are touting their screenplays to the studios. Moreover, most studio heads use Syd Field as their guide to how stories should be told; once the inevitable spate of imitators has played out, there is no reason to believe that mainstream producers will embrace ambiguity as a general narrative strategy.
What films like The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects and Fight Club do is remind us that film can be intellectually as well as emotionally engaging. In this way, they have opened a space for a different kind of storytelling than is frequently seen in mainstream films, one that embraces the uncertainties of the modern world.
Notes
1) Peter Howell, “Surprise endings make a comeback,” Toronto Star (December 3, 1999), D3.
2) Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling the Age of Mass Culture (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1999), 97.
3) ibid, 97/98.
4) Jim Uhle, Fight Club, undated, 24. Subsequent quotes from the Fight Club screenplay will refer to it as [FC #] in the text.
5) Christopher McQuarrie, The Usual Suspects, Scenario Magazine (V1 N3, Summer 1995), 34. Subsequent quotes from the screenplay of The Usual Suspects will refer to it as [US #] in the text.
6) M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense, undated draft, 28. In this draft, Crowe says the final line about having a happy anniversary. Subsequent quotes from the screenplay of The Sixth Sense will refer to it as [SS #] in the text.
7) I wasn’t crazy about the self-reference in Fight Club, which I felt generally distanced the audience from the narrative. However, I do believe that the film reference in the monologue worked; by taking the viewer out of the narrative, the device forced the viewer to consider how what the character was saying applied to her or his life.
8) Tod Lippy, “Writing The Usual Supects: A Talk with Christopher McQuarrie,” Scenario Magazine (V1 N3, Summer 1995), 52. It has also been pointed out that Keyser Soze has the same initials as the actor who played Verbal Kint, Kevin Spacey. However, given this story, that seems like a true coincidence. In any case, referring to an actor’s name is an unfair clue inasmuch as it refers to something outside the world of the film itself.
9) ibid, 195.
This article first appeared in Creative Screenwriting, Volume 8, Number 2, March/April 2001.