Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang

Nothing holds post-modern “classics” together and the audience is worn out doing it for the director

by Junius

For years I pretended to know what The Usual Suspects was all about; for years I pretended that Pulp Fiction was a new cinematic art form.

Even if “art form” is defined minimally as something having a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a thread of connection between the three, I’m afraid Pulp Fiction doesn’t cut it. Let’s pretend no longer. There is no coherence in these postmodern “classics”—it’s just kiss, kiss, bang, bang. As long as the actors are “sincere” and “mysterious,” there is the moment of the kiss, the moment of the second kiss, the moment of the bang, and the moment of the final bang, and the moments carry the movie forward. These are momentary splinters that are pieced together like a shattered window. But what else? What do we see through the window? A life, a theme, a purpose? No, just splinters.

It’s like one of the early bits in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, when Robert Downey Jr has fouled up a quasi-robbery and his mate has been shot (bang) by a vigilante housewife and Downey Jr opens a door to escape the police and enters a Hollywood screen test where he’s given a scene to read which involves the accusation that he has left a friend in the lurch. They are very impressed with his “sincerity” and present him with the part right there. Funny. But it gives the game away. This film (like its progenitors) The Usual Suspects, and Pulp Fiction, is as if made up of screen-test scenes which have generated enough “sincerity” to get into the final cut.

The ingredients are there in the title and the filmmaker puts them together so slickly that you think there must be some meaningful resolution. In his slickness he defies you to make sense of action that his film hasn’t bothered to make sense of itself. Now, we pride ourselves in taking the raw events of our lives and turning them into meaningful experience; this is what we joyously do in youth and desperately do in age. We do the same thing for the director; we give him his film even if he doesn’t deserve it. The plot can be ridiculously complicated and presented perfunctorily. He knows it doesn’t matter. The kisses and the bangs will take care of it. He knows that, for our own needs, we will make his film hang together. And we do.

Or, after a while, we don’t. We don’t care anymore, no matter how likeable Robert Downey Jr (or even Val Kilmer) turns out to be in these splintered screen tests.

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