Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
2005 · Shane Black · Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on Sightlines
Twenty minutes in, Harry Lockhart stops the movie. He has been narrating the case badly, gets ahead of himself, realizes he skipped something, and the film backs up to insert the scene he forgot. Later he apologizes for another one and that scene simply doesn't happen. This is a murder mystery. The man telling it cannot keep it in order.
That is the invention, and it belongs to Shane Black specifically. Voice-over usually sits on top of a film like a coat of varnish. Here it reaches down and moves the furniture. Harry's narration doesn't comment on the cuts, it causes them. Jim Page's editing takes dictation from a man not competent to give it, and the freeze-frames and rewinds arrive exactly when the mystery threatens to become merely good at its job.
Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on cinema in the early 1980s, gives us a precise way to say what's broken here. His movement-image names the ordinary contract of most films: a character perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. Perception runs into action the way your hand runs to a doorknob. Nobody wrote that circuit tighter than Black did in the late eighties. Lethal Weapon is a machine for converting what a man sees into what he does.
Harry cannot close the circuit. He perceives plenty. He acts almost never, and when he does it costs him a finger. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He found it in postwar Italy, in people wandering through rubble with nothing to do about it. Black finds it in a New York thief who has read this story and still can't survive it. The lens earns its keep because it explains why the jokes hurt. Harry's fluency is a symptom rather than a competence. He talks because talking is the only action left to him.
Deleuze listed another symptom of that crisis: the consciousness of clichés, films and characters who know they are moving through worn images. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is soaked in it. The five chapter headings are borrowed from Chandler. The plot skeleton is openly Chinatown's: the corrupt patriarch, the buried paternity, the detective who gets competent too late. Harry keeps telling us not to worry about the plot. And yet the machine still runs. The clues pay. The mystery resolves. Black and Page operate the genre and annotate it in the same pass, which is much harder than parody, because parody has to break the thing first.
Which brings the film's best trick into view. Cinema arrived with a contract: the camera was there, so what you see happened. Noir found the graceful way to honor it. In Murder, My Sweet, Marlowe tells the whole case in retrospective confession from a chair he can't leave, and the images obey his voice because his voice is telling the truth. Black keeps the chair and voids the contract. Harry narrates his own apparent death and then takes it back.
Deleuze has a name for what replaces truthful narration once it goes: the powers of the false. Not lying. A liar still respects the truth, he just points away from it. This is forging. Deleuze's figure for it is le faussaire, the forger, a man of serial, shifting identity who manufactures a truth instead of reporting one. Harry is a petty thief who becomes an actor by fleeing a robbery into an audition, then a detective's research assistant, then, by narrating, the author of a case he barely lived through. Every identity is stolen goods. And the telling itself is what Deleuze calls falsifying narration: versions that cannot both be true handed to us as though they both are, with the film cheerfully continuing.
Watch what Michael Barrett's camera is doing while all this goes on. It stays sober. No venetian-blind shadows, no smoke and key light, none of the visual quotation the material begs for. Los Angeles at Christmas in warm lamplit rooms and cold sodium streets, party houses glowing over the basin, the anamorphic frame used mainly to hold two men in one image with one of them composed and the other coming apart. The genre memory lives in the writing; the pictures decline to play along. Sound and image are telling slightly different stories, a comic version of what Deleuze called the disjunction of the audiovisual, the point at which an image stops being something you follow and becomes something you have to read.
The debts are specific and Black doesn't hide them. The Big Sleep licensed the unsolvable plot as texture: Hawks let the chauffeur's murder go unexplained and covered the hole with overlapping wisecrack tempo, which is exactly Harry's don't-worry-about-it. Sunset Boulevard supplied the compromised Hollywood narrator addressing us from past his own ending. The Long Goodbye supplied the sound, talk stepping on talk, and the premise that Chandler's code no longer fits the city it's spoken in. Kiss Me Deadly supplied violence that lands on the detective's body as damage rather than punctuation, which is why the finger is funny and also permanently gone. Chinatown supplied the skeleton and the habit of reading canyon and reservoir geography as evidence, the framing logic Barrett reproduces in the cold exteriors.
Forward, it becomes The Nice Guys with the two men recast, and the Christmas tinsel travels on into Iron Man 3. The tinsel was never decoration. It insists on family and homecoming inside a story about transplanted people lying about their names.
And Downey. Three years later he carried this register, panic at speed, self-editing mid-sentence, into Iron Man, where it acquired armor and became the house voice of a decade of studio filmmaking. Most of what followed kept the annotation and threw away the machine: films that wink at the genre without being willing to run it. This one runs it. That is the significance, and it explains the strange career: a mid-budget, adult, dialogue-driven genre picture that the 2005 studios had no way to sell, culted into permanence in living rooms across 2006 and 2007 through a rediscovery window that no longer exists.
So the open question is whose account you trust. The voice keeps corrupting itself. The camera never lies and never says anything. Watch it again treating Harry as one more unreliable witness, and notice how much the pictures were telling you straight the whole time.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Harry perceives everything and can act on almost none of it: the surveillance job goes wrong, a body turns up, he loses a finger to gunfire. Downey plays 'a man narrating his life a half-second before he understands it,' whose fluency the dossier calls 'a symptom rather than a competence' — the sensory-motor circuit Black himself perfected in Lethal Weapon, now jammed.
- consciousness of clichés — Five chapter headings lifted from Chandler; the plot skeleton openly recycled from Chinatown (corrupt patriarch, buried paternity, late-arriving competence); Harry's 'don't worry about the plot' asides. Per the dossier, Black and Page 'run the genre and annotate it in the same pass' without ever disabling it — the clues still pay.
- the powers of the false — Harry narrates his own apparent death and then takes it back (the Sunset Boulevard debt pushed further). The voice-over is 'not an overlay on a stable story but an active, unreliable interference with it' — falsity made into the film's productive principle rather than a defect to be corrected.
- le faussaire / the forger — Serial stolen identities: petty thief fleeing a botched Christmas robbery, actor by accident at a Los Angeles audition, a private detective's research assistant, and finally the narrator who authors the case. Harry never reports a truth; he manufactures one badly, in public.
- falsifying narration — He admits he has forgotten to show us something and the film reverses to insert it; he apologizes for a scene and the scene is elided. Incompatible versions of the telling are held as co-true, with freeze-frames, rewinds and direct address deployed as punctuation.
- audiovisual disjunction — The mix has to keep three registers legible at once — scene dialogue, Harry's retrospective narration, and the narration's arguments with itself — while Barrett 'largely refuses the visual quotations the material invites': no venetian blinds, no smoke and key light. The soundtrack is doing noir; the images stay contemporary and sober.
- the readable image — Once the voice-over can reverse, elide and annotate the cut, the image loses its self-evidence: the freeze-frames and direct address make the detective story visible as 'a machine for withholding and revealing,' something to be deciphered rather than simply followed.
- weak links / slackened causality — The Big Sleep debt named in the lineage — Hawks leaving the chauffeur's murder unexplained and covering the gap with overlapping wisecrack tempo — is the exact tactic behind Black's dueling-Chandler mystery, its elliptical cuts, and Harry's instruction not to worry about the plot.