"The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Didn't Exist" - An Analysis of How Film-makers of The Usual Suspects Achieved the Shocking Effect (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Didactics - English - Miscellaneous, grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), course: Studying Media, language: English, abstract: When the filmThe Usual Suspectswas released in 1995 nobody knew it would eventually be rated as one of the best films of all time.1The appeal of the film lies within its cleverly structured narrative and its unique way of making the viewer want to watch the film again in a different light.The Usual Suspectsis one of those films you have to watch at least twice to get close to the truth of what is being told. During the second watching you will ask yourself if you are really seeing the same film and the same character, because you were sure that Verbal Kint seemed incredibly harmless the first time around while he comes across very differently the second time. That is the question that shall be examined in the course of this paper in which I want to analyse how Bryan Singer, the film's director, achieved his aim of creating a completely innocent character in the course of the film, only to let the audience find out that Kint might be the criminal mastermind behind the whole scheme. How do the film-makers achieve the portrayal of the harmless Kint, and how does he come across in the second watching? By choosingThe Usual Suspects,this paper also serves as an example of how audiences can be manipulated. Therefore, I will also have a look at the role and the behaviour of an audience.
First of all, we will concern ourselves with a film theory developed by Kracauer examining the role of an audience and the effects films might have on it. We will analyse how audiences feel and behave during the experience of a film screening and how their minds function at the time. Secondly, I will shortly introduce the filmThe Usual Suspectswith its most important characters and its plot, before I, thirdly, want to go into the analysis of the creation of Verbal Kint's character, and scrutinise how Singer worked with narrative and technical means to leave behind a puzzled audience. To achieve that, I will pick a few scenes from the film and analyse them in respect to their filmic realisation.
I hope that this paper will thoroughly answer the question of how an audience let themselves be manipulated by a feature film and what effects certain filmic means can achieve if properly deployed. Towards the end, all the gathered information will shortly be summarised and a conclusion will be expressed.