How is The Usual Suspects typical of a Film Noir?
Okay – you are very right about the lighting, but there’s also the subject of the shots and the cinematic language – for example, following the smoke of a cigarette or the trail of liquid (its a while since I saw this, but is something like this not the opening shot of the movie?), the long shots of rippling water in the docks, the long tracking shots of the dockside are all classic language of noir. The use of scenes of graphic violence was also one of the main shock factors of the early noir films. There is also the use of the ‘unreliable narrator’/ antihero. The film is largely ‘narrated’ by Verbal – the Kevin Spacey character – and as a result we are led to believe that what he says is the truth (the temptation is always to believe the narrator in fiction/film). But it transpires at the end (in the ‘twist’ – also a common mechanism of noir) that everything we have been told is untrue. Similarly, the narrator and the main protagonists of the film are the criminals – this, or the fla
