Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
2005 · Shane Black · Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for Harry admitting he forgot to show you something. (sound)
His narration gets ahead of itself, and the film jumps back to insert scenes he skipped or apologizes and removes ones he already showed.
Payoff: The voice-over is not describing the story. It is actively building and unbuilding it as it goes.
Watch for a freeze frame or a rewind interrupting the plot. (cutting)
Jim Page's editing deploys these as punctuation, arriving exactly when the mystery threatens to become merely competent and ordinary.
Payoff: Each interruption reminds you that a person, not just a camera, is deciding what you get to see.
Watch how often Harry and Perry share one composed frame. (camera)
The widescreen frame keeps them together in doorways, cars, and rooftops, one man visibly composed and the other visibly coming apart in the same image.
Payoff: The joke is architectural: you can read the whole relationship off how each man fills his half of the frame.
Watch for Christmas lights and decorations in nearly every scene. (setting)
String lights, party houses, and seasonal color show up constantly around characters who are lying about who they are and drifting far from any real home.
Payoff: The tinsel keeps insisting on family and homecoming in a story about people who have neither.
Watch how much faster Harry talks than Perry does. (performance)
Downey plays continuous verbal panic, narrating his life a half-second before he understands it, while Kilmer plays Perry as unhurried, economical, and bored by the crisis.
Payoff: The contrast in pace tells you instantly which of the two actually knows what he is doing.
Once you have seen it
Track a moment where Harry narrates something that turns out untrue. (structure)
He narrates his own apparent death at one point and then simply takes it back, offering two versions that cannot both be true as though they were.
Payoff: The film keeps the camera's old promise, that what it shows really happened, while the narrator openly breaks his. In the reading: falsifying narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: incompatible versions of events handed to us as though both were true.
Count how many different roles Harry occupies by the film's end. (structure)
He goes from petty thief to actor to a detective's research assistant to, by narrating the case, the author of a story he barely lived through.
Payoff: Every identity he claims is borrowed goods, manufactured rather than earned. In the reading: le faussaire / the forger. The reading calls this figure the forger: someone who manufactures a shifting identity instead of settling on one truth.
Watch Barrett's camera for the noir shadows the dialogue keeps promising. (camera)
You won't find them. No venetian-blind shadows, no smoke and key light; the images stay contemporary and sober while the words do all the genre quoting.
Payoff: Sound and image are telling slightly different stories, and the gap is where the joke lives. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Deleuze's term for image and sound pulling apart like this is audiovisual disjunction, played here for comedy.
Carry this in: Watch how often Harry talks instead of acting; the talking is the only action left to him.