Verlaine, "Allégorie"

A work ("Allegory") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Despotic, heavy Summer's heat,          
A lazy king hears pleas for grace;  
Complicit white skies burn his face,
Which yawns near shirking men asleep.

With sloth to thank, the morning lark  
Sang not: no cloud, no breath, no crease 
Of softest ripples on blue leas,
Where silence falls in stillness dark. 

Cicadas come in torpor tart,   
And on their bed of unmatched stones
The streams half-dry no longer splash,

And endless spins of moiré art
More luminous than tidal moans,
As wasps fly by in gold and black.

Tres versiones de Judas

A short story ("Three versions of Judas") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

In Asia Minor or Alexandria, in the second century of Our Faith, when Basilides was publishing that the cosmos was the reckless or wicked improvisation of deficient angels, Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Perhaps Dante would have confined him to a sepulcher of fire; perhaps his name would have augmented the catalogues of minor heresiarchs, somewhere between Satornil and Carpocrates; perhaps some fragment of his sermons, exonerated of all slander, would have remained in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses, or have perished when the fire of a monastic library devoured the last copy of the Syntagma. Instead, God dispatched him to the twentieth century and the university town of Lund. Here, in 1904, the first edition of Kristus och Judas (Christ and Judas) was published; here, in 1909, his seminal work Den hemlige Frälsaren (The Secret Savior) (the latter has a German version, composed in 1912 by Emili Schering and called Der heimliche Heiland).  

Before attempting an examination of the aforecited works, I should reiterate that Nils Runeberg, member of the National Evangelical Union, was profoundly religious. In a cenacle in Paris or even in Buenos Aires, a literary man could very well rediscover the theses of Runeberg; were these theses to be promulgated during this same cenacle, however, they would be nothing more than flimsy exercises in negligence and blasphemy. Yet for Runeberg they composed the key to deciphering theology's central mystery: material for meditation and analysis, for historical and philological controversy, for arrogance, for jubilation, for terror. They justified and ruined his life. Whoever peruses this article should also consider that neither Runeberg's conclusions, nor his dialectics, nor his proofs may register. Indeed, an observer may believe that his conclusion undoubtedly preceded his "proofs." Who now would resign himself to seeking out proofs for something he does not believe, or whose message leaves him indifferent?    

The first edition of Kristus och Judas bore this categorical epigraph, whose sense, years later, Nils Runeberg himself would monstrously expand: Not one thing, but everything which tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false (De Quincey, 1857). Preceded by a certain German, De Quincey speculated that Judas betrayed Jesus Christ to force him to declare his divinity and ignite a vast rebellion against the Roman yoke; Runeberg, however, suggests a vindication of a metaphysical kind. Skilfully he begins to highlight the superfluity of Judas's act. He observes (as had Robertson) that in order to identify a master who preached daily in the synagogue and who performed miracles before thousands of people, no treason on the part of an apostle is required. It, nevertheless, occurred. Supposing there to be an error in the Scriptures is intolerable; no less tolerable is admitting an accidental fact into the most beautiful event in world history. Therefore, Judas's betrayal was not accidental: it was a prefigured act which has its mysterious place in the economy of Salvation.

Runeberg goes on: the Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from unbounded happiness to change and flesh; for such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, who would represent all men, make a sacrifice of condign worth. Judas Iscariot was this man. Judas alone among the Apostles intuited the secret divinity and terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had been reduced to something mortal; Judas, disciple of the Word, could reduce himself to an informer (the worst crime in infamy) and become host to the unquenchable fire. The lower order is a mirror of the upper order; the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of heaven; our skin's blemishes are a map of the incorruptible constellations; and in some way Judas reflects Jesus. Hence come the thirty coins and the kiss; hence comes voluntary death all the more to merit Damnation. In this way Nils Runeberg elucidated the enigma of Judas.  

Theologians of all confessions refuted Runeberg's explanation. Lars Peter Engström accused him of not knowing, or of omitting, the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, of renewing the heresy of Docetism, which negated the humanity of Jesus; the mordant Bishop of Lund, of contradicting the third verse of Chapter 22 in the Gospel of Luke.

These assorted anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the condemned book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned to his adversaries all theological terrain and put forth oblique reasonings of moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who had at his disposal the considerable resources that Omnipotence might offer," did not need a man to redeem all men. Later, he countered those who claimed we knew nothing about the inexplicable traitor; we do know, he said, that he was one of the Apostles, one of those selected to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to heal the sick, to cleanse the lepers, to raise the dead, and to cast out devils (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1).

A man so distinguished from others by the Redeemer deserves from us the best interpretation of his acts. To impute his crime to avarice (as have so many others, with reference to John 12:6) is to resign ourselves to the most torpid of motives. Nils Runeberg proposes the opposite motive: hyperbolic and unlimited asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, vilifies and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same thing to the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, just like others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.* He premeditated his sins with terrible lucidity. In adultery, abnegation and tenderness should take part; in homicide, courage; in profanities and blasphemy, a certain Luciferian refulgence. Judas chose certain sins not visited with any virtue: the abuse of trust (John 12:6), and betrayal. He labored in gigantic humility, believing himself unworthy of being good. Paul wrote: That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord (1 Corinthians, 1:31); Judas sought Hell, because the happiness of the Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like good, was a divine attribute, and ought not to be usurped by man.**               

Many have discovered, post factum, that in Runeberg's justifiable beginnings lies his extravagant end. They have also discovered that The Secret Savior is a mere perversion or exasperation of Christ and Judas. Towards the end of 1907, Runeberg ended and revised the handwritten text; almost two years passed before he would give it in for printing. In October of 1909 the book appeared with a prologue – one tepid to the point of enigmatic – by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord, and with this perfidious epigraph: He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complete, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, reduced himself to being a man for the salvation of the human race; one may feasibly suppose that the sacrifice he undertook was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit his sufferings to the agony endured for one afternoon on a cross is blasphemous.*** To claim that he was man and was incapable of sin contains a contradiction: the attributes of impeccabilitas and humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, embarrassment, hunger, and thirst; he also admits he could sin and lose himself. The famous text

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness .... He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:2-3)

is for many a previsioning of the Crucified in the hour of His death; for some (for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), a refutation of the beauty public consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, this detail prophesied not one moment but all of the atrocious future, in time and in eternity, of the Word which was made flesh. God became man utterly, to infamy, to reprobation, to the very abyss. To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies woven through the perplexed web of history: He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus. But He chose a negligible destiny: He chose Judas. 

In vain the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund put forth this revelation. Skeptics considered it, a priori, to be an insipid and laborious theological game; theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited in this ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God ordered this indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret to be divulged on earth. Runeberg understood that the hour had not come; he sensed that ancient divine curses were converging upon him; he recalled Elijah and Moses, who upon the mountain had covered their faces so as not to see God; he recalled Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes saw Him whose glory fills the earth; he recalled Saul, whose eyes remained blind on the road to Damascus; he recalled the rabbi Simoen ben Azzai, who saw Paradise and died; he recalled the famous sorcerer John of Viterbo, who, once he could see the Trinity, went completely mad; he recalled the Midrashim, who loathed the impious who pronounced the Shem Hamephorash, the Secret Name of God. Wasn't he possibly guilty of this same dark crime? Might this have been the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, that which may not be forgiven (Matthew 12:31)? Valerius Soranus died for having divulged the secret name of Rome. What infinite punishment awaited him for having discovered and divulged the secret name of God?

Drunk on insomnia and vertiginous dialectics, Nils Runeberg roamed the streets of Malmö, shouting and pleading that his merciful destiny be the sharing of Hell with the Redeemer.         

He died from an aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists perhaps will remember him; to our notion of the Son, which seemed exhausted, he added the complications of evil and misfortune.

-------------------------------------------- 

* Borelius asks mockingly: Why didn't he renounce renouncing? Why is renouncing not to be renounced?

** Euclydes da Cunha, in a book unknown to Runeberg, notes that, for the heresiarch of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue "was almost an impiety." Argentine readers will recall analogous passages in the works of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolic leaflet Sju insegel (Seven seals), a serialized descriptive poem, The Secret Water. The first stanzas narrate the facts of a tumultuous day; the last, the finding of a glacial pond. The poet suggests that the endurance of this silent water corrects our useless violence and in some way permits and absolves it. The poem concludes thus: The water of the forest is happy; we may be evil and sad.

*** Maurice Abramowicz observes: "According to this Scandinavian, Jesus always has the easy role: his streak of bad luck, thanks to the science of typographers, enjoys polyglot renown; his thirty-three-year residence among human beings was, on the whole, nothing more than a vacation." In the third appendix to Christelige Dogmatik (Christian Dogmatics), Erfjord refutes this passage. He notes that the crucifixion of God has not ceased because what happened once in time is repeated without respite in eternity. Judas, now, continues to charge silver coins in the temple; he continues to make a slipknot in the rope upon the field of blood.  (To justify this claim, Erfjord invokes the final chapter of the first volume of Jaromir Hladík's Vindication of Eternity.) 

The Omen

One may wonder what would possess a director to remake a film scene-for-scene if that film did not have some kind of artistic appeal. The reasoning behind such a premise is woefully simple: only art can be re-enjoyed. The crash-bang-blow-up vehicles that continue to diminish our attention span draw the numbers they are supposed to attract then quietly subside, forever relegated to oblivion or lost amongst hundreds of clones. But art, true art, cannot be remade, although its sensation can indeed be reproduced. As opposed to the latest screen version of this controversial novel, Kubrick's opuscule was not so much an adaptation as a slender louver to a majestic gallery from which readers of the novel could discern little of the original (praise for the movie has in fact been scattershot, with some critics invariably convinced that older, plainer, and pruder is always the way to go). Yet despite its moral shortcomings, Lolita is still an artistic masterpiece with the fatal flaw of trying to sublimate pornography, a mistake that might be the caption for the entire twentieth century. Other good to great literary works have enjoyed intermittent revival because what lies at their heart – be it a moral lesson, an artistic vision, or something infinitely tragic and infinitely beautiful – is worth repeating and remembering. And while we gladly indulge ourselves in sweet memories when given the opportunity, sometimes it is important to recall other, darker materials within our world. And nothing is more powerful than mantic mysteries in engendering fear and trembling. So do we step and behold this remake released ten years ago today.

We are taken into the family of thirtysomething Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber), a tall, handsome, and successful American diplomat posted in Italy. He is there with his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles), ten years his junior and, as the film begins, pregnant with their first child. Even being unaware of the film's poorly kept secret, we understand that horror movies that commence with a birth will necessarily involve a terrible fate for all present, and the Thorns' predicament proves to be no exception. Mere moments after he is supposed to be basking in the bliss of fatherhood, Thorn is approached by the hospital's Catholic priest, Father Spiletto, who regrets to inform him that his son did not make it out the womb alive. Yet a solution exists: Spiletto mentions a child whose mother did not survive his birth, and with a few smooth words about placating Katherine's desire to have a baby, the changeling is retrieved and bestowed. What is very curious about this revolting moral decision is Thorn's indifference to the origin of the baby's mother – admittedly, out of desperation not snobbery. One would think that given science's insistence on genetic disorders, tendencies, and determination, an educated modern man would be loath to accept a fatherless child in a foreign maternity ward. But this twist has nothing to do with Thorn's noble intentions. The conceit is clearly designed as a choice: Thorn elects to bring the child he will call Damien into his home and in so doing, seals the destiny of all parties involved. Katherine is happy, he no longer has a spouse to comfort, and he can turn his attention back to what interests him most, namely his career.

Damien ages and nothing seems awry; we see the blissful trio doing blissful family things, giggling warmly all the while. By the time his son is five, Robert has been appointed Deputy Chief of Mission to the American Embassy in London, a rather fantastic feat for so young a diplomat. But then again, perhaps he's had some help along the way – and more help is coming. At precisely 6:06:06 am, the Ambassador perishes in a freak road accident with an oil tanker, leaving Thorn, still in his thirties, as the "youngest Ambassador in American history." A large estate outside of London awaits the Thorns who decide on a gala celebration of Damien's fifth birthday. Now about this Damien character. As I child I was always lectured about how horrible it was to expose underage actors to the trauma and nightmarish scenes so commonly incident to films involving evil, human or superhuman. Evidence for this edict is tremendous: so many young actors, having run and screamed from phantom killers their whole childhood, turn to drugs and other insidious outlets and end up ruining their lives in toto. Who knows what will befall Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick; one hopes his fate will be kinder than that of so many of his predecessors. In any case, the lad is convincing in his irreverence towards the rules of the adult world. When his nanny commits suicide in his name at said gala event, he is neither as proud as a devil nor as scared as a child. No, this little beast couldn't care less about what happens to this nanny, as he is duly aware of the coming of another, the malefic Mrs. Baylock (Mia Farrow).

There are other odds and ends: a photographer (David Thewlis) whose work contains hints of how his subjects might meet their maker; a barbiturate-addled priest (Pete Postlethwaite) who chants weird verse of impending doom and claims to have seen Damien's birth mother; and the scholar Bugenhagen (Michael Gambon) who knows something about killing a demon. A few amendments to the original script are made – mostly, as it were, visual inserts – such as a series of nightmares that plague Thorn (one involves the slow closing of a bathroom cabinet mirror; I will leave it at that) and an allusion to the cowled figure in this film previously reviewed here. What ultimately takes place is far less surprising than the sidelights into what may have spawned this diabolical situation: the topical allusions at the film's beginning to recent natural and manmade disasters; calling upon Father Spiletto, who has survived a mysterious fire in the hospital that cost him his speech and half his face, in a lazaretto; the graveyard that Spiletto indicates the photographer and Thorn might want to visit (there is also a subsequent dream sequence with a hideously animate Spiletto cackling in a way that will hurt your sleep); and the identity of Damien's biological mother. The photographer and priest provide a sturdy contrast of what cannot be denied owing to photographic evidence and what cannot be empirically ascertained, because faith inherently means there is no ocular proof. It is this coin that the Thorns decide to flip, with unfortunately no winning scenario on either side. If the Thorns are a shade too young (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick were each substantially older than their counterparts in the original) it is both to appeal to a more adolescent crowd and underscore that meteoric rises might be owed to other shooting stars. Or other light bearers.

Nerval, "Nuit perdue"

A prose poem ("Lost night") by this French man of letters. You can read the original here.

I was exiting a theater where, every evening, I would put in an appearance in the loges among the large entourage of admirers.  Sometimes it was completely full; sometimes completely empty. I did not care much to detain my glance on the orchestra seats filled only with thirty-odd forced enthusiasts, on the loges garnished in bonnets or on the antiquated dress – or, for that matter, to be part of an animated and trembling hall crowned on every floor with flowery outfits, sparkling jewels, and radiant countenances. Indifferent as I was to the performance in the hall, the performance in the theater hardly detained me – until the second or third scene of a sullen masterpiece popular at the time, when a well-known apparition illuminated the empty space, bestowing life in a breath and a word upon these vain figures in my immediate vicinity.

I felt alive in her, and she alone lived for me. Her smile filled me with infinite bliss; the vibration of her voice, so soft and yet so strongly resonant, made me twitch in joy and love. For me she had every perfection, responded to every interest and every whim. She was beautiful like the day amidst the footlights that shone upon her from below, pale as the night when, the footlights dimmed, the chandelier rays let her shine from on high. This last position showed her to be even more natural and brilliant in the shadow of her beauty thus isolated, like the divine Hours cast, with a star upon the forehead, on the brown depths of the frescoes of Herculaneum! 

For a year now I had not dreamed of learning what else she could be; I was afraid to disturb that magic mirror that sent me her image, and, what is more, I had lent an ear to certain notions regarding not the actress, but the woman; what little I learned could have just as well applied to the Princesse d'Élide or the Princess of Trébizonde. One of my uncles, who had lived in the last years of the 18th century, as one needed to have lived in that era to know it well, had warned me early on that actresses were not women, and that nature had forgotten to make them a heart. Doubtless, he was talking about the actresses of that time; but he had told me so many stories of his illusions, his disappointments, and showed me so many portraits on ivory, charming medallions that he would use later to adorn snuff boxes, so many yellowed tickets, so many withered ribbons, all in establishing the definitive tale, that I had habituated myself to think badly of all these actresses without comprehending the nature of the times.

At that time we lived in a strange era, like those periods which ordinarily succeed revolutions or the overthrows of great reigns. No longer did one find the heroic gallantry of the Fronde, the elegant and adorned vice of the Régence, the scepticism and mad orgies of the Directory; instead, there obtained a medley of activity, hesitation and sloth, of brilliant utopias, philosophical or religious aspirations, vague enthusiasms, all imbued with certain instincts of rebirth; of worries from past disagreements, of uncertain hopes – something akin to the epoch of Peregrinus and Apuleius. Worldly man aspired to the bouquet of roses which were supposed to regenerate him through the hands of beautiful Isis; the eternally young and pure goddess would appear to us at night and shame us for the hours lost during the day. Ambition nevertheless was not something of our age, and the avid carving up of the positions and honors distanced us from the possible spheres of activity. The only refuge we had was the poets' ivory tower, where we would climb ever higher to isolate ourselves from the throngs. At these elevated peaks to which our masters guided us, we would finally breath the pure air of solitude, we would drink in oblivion from the golden cup of legends, we would be drunk on poetry and love. Love, alas, of vague forms, of pink and blue hues, of metaphysical ghosts! Seen from close, the real woman appalled our ingenuity; she had to appear as a queen or a goddess, and most of all, she could not be approached. Several among us understood, however, little of these Platonic paradoxes, and through our renewed dreams of Alexandria at times agitated the torch of subterranean gods, which lights the shadow for an instant with its sparkling trails. 

It is in this way, therefore, that I, exiting the theater with the bitter sadness of a vanished dream, gladly made my way to the company of a large circle of acquaintances who dined together. And all melancholy yielded in the face of the inexhaustible eloquence of a handful of dazzling, stormy, lively, and sometimes sublime minds, those one always finds in periods of renewal or decadence, and whose discussions escalated to such a degree that the more fearful among us would go to the windows to see whether the Huns, the Ottomans, or the Cossacks had not come at last to cut short these arguments of rhetoricians and sophists.

"Let us drink, let us love, this is wisdom!" Such was the sole opinion of the circle's very youngest members. One of them told me: "For some time now I have seen you again and again in the same theater, each time I go, in fact. Which actress do you come to see?"

Which actress? ... It did not seem as if one could go there for any other. Nevertheless, I gave a name.

"Well, then!" said my friend with indulgence. "Do you see that happy man over there who just accompanied her out, and who, faithful to the rules of our circle, will not meet her again until perhaps after the night is done?"

Without too much emotion, I turned my eyes towards the person in question. They rested upon a young man properly dressed, a pale and nervous figure with acceptable manners and eyes stamped with melancholy and gentleness. He threw down gold pieces on a table of whist and lost them with indifference. 

"What difference does it make to me," I said, "if it is he or someone else? There had to be someone, and he seems worthy of having been chosen."

"What about you?"

"Me? She's an image I pursue, nothing more."

As I left, I passed the reading room and mechanically took a look at a newspaper. This was, I believe, to see how the stock market was doing. In the debris of my opulence I had a sufficiently large amount invested in foreign equities. Rumor had said that these equities, long since neglected, would regain in value – which was exactly what had taken place following a change of ministers. The funds were already quoted as very high; and I became rich again. 

A single thought resulted from this change in situation, that of the woman I had loved for so long, for she was now mine for the taking if I so wished. I was close to touching my ideal. Was it not still an illusion, a mocking typographical error? But the other newspapers said much of the same. The newly gained sum rose before me like a gold statue of Moloch. "What would he say now," I thought to myself. "That young man who was just with her, if he abandoned her and I were to take his place at her side?" I trembled at this thought, and my pride was shaken.

No! Not this way! It is not at my age that one murders love with gold. I will not become a corrupter. Besides, this is an idea from another era. Now who told me that this woman was venal? My eyes wafted vaguely across the newspaper I was still holding and I read these two lines: "Provincial Festival of the Flowers: tomorrow the archers of Senlis are to hand over the bouquet to their counterparts from Loisy." These words, remarkably simple, awakened in me a new series of impressions: a long-forgotten memory from the countryside, a distant echo of the innocent festivals of my youth. The trumpet and drum resonated from the distance in the hamlets and in the woods; young girls wove garlands and, as they sang, matched ornate bouquets with ribbons. A heavy wagon pulled by oxen received presents on its path, and we, children of these lands, formed a procession with our bows and arrows, decorating ourselves with the title of knights, all the while not knowing that we were doing nothing but repeating, from one age to the next, a druidic celebration which had survived monarchies and new religions.

The Usual Suspects

A significant incentive to return to a fine book or film is what has been forgotten, what has been distorted by time's ruthless grip. Over the years the work will surface and resurface on memory's golden pond and we learn that what we once thought of it has more or less disappeared. Perhaps the work was enjoyed when we were still too young to distinguish first-rate art from its shadowy imitators; perhaps that part of our life has simply been closed and we have moved on to another concept of reality. Yet some works will always beckon. Some displays of genius will always linger and aid in our definition of art itself. We cannot pretend that a large number of the books and films in this world deserve such scrutiny; in fact, worthy are but a small percentage; rarer still are those that can be enjoyed again and again until our days darken. We also cannot claim that this film ranks among the most eternal because, after all, Hollywood has had its hand in it, and that means compromises. But even with a few minor flaws, and even knowing the path of its crooked turns, it is still undeniably entertaining.

We begin "last night" in San Pedro, California, aboard a doomed vessel aflame in an otherwise peaceful harbor. Aboard this boat – ostensibly a cargo ship, although from the look of things, its cargo could be corpses – lies a severely injured man (Gabriel Byrne) cradling a cigarette which will be his last. Above him, obscured by shadows and a regrettably coy camera angle, stands another man who calls him "Keaton," and whom he addresses, with some bitter irony, as "Kaiser." The separation is notable since another character will persist in the belief that the same mortal form inhabits both identities. The Kaiser shall light one more cigarette before finishing his dirty work on board (time for his chat with Keaton was bought by urinating on a lighted wick), left for the LAPD to mop up the next day. That morning five known felons are, in the words of one of the criminals, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), "brought in on a trumped-up charge to be leaned on by half-wits." Our title does not promise highly developed characters; and, indeed, apart from Kint, who will also serve as our narrator, we have some standard underworld cutouts: McManus (Stephen Baldwin), the high-strung psycho killer; Fenster (Benicio del Toro), McManus’s mellow, often incomprehensible sidekick; Hockney (Kevin Pollak), the sardonic chorus; Kint, a victim of cerebral palsy and the one we should pity – a perfect choice for a narrator; and Keaton, the Irish-accented 'dean' of criminals, and a disgraced former cop who may or may not have gone straight. The film's episodic first half details the events of the weeks following the police lineup, peppered all the while with some delightfully brash noir dialogue (the best being McManus's version of the lineup reading and Hockney's response to "I can put you in Queens on the night of the robbery"). The atmosphere, while murderous at times, is imbued with a certain light-heartedness; even when McManus skeptically recurs to Keaton's new 'clean' life with a big shot lawyer as his girlfriend (Suzy Amis), we all chuckle along, albeit not as unhingedly as McManus. But the oddity persists: rare is it, as Keaton points out, that five convicted felons occupy the same lineup (the second vignette is indeed entitled "Rounding up ..." since The Usual Suspects was named after this famous film). Odder still is that the cops seem to have nothing on these guys whatsoever. Which brings us back to that boat.

The federal agent investigating the vessel's demise is Jack Baer (Giancarlo Esposito) – not to be confused with this fictional character – a friend and colleague of customs special agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri). Kujan and Baer will eventually convene and share notes. But for the time being, for that fateful morning, their stories will run on parallel tracks. Kujan will lock himself in a police station office to interrogate Kint; Baer will track down the only other known survivor of the incident, a hospitalized Hungarian sailor with burns over sixty percent of his body who boldly claims to have seen "the Devil." And who is this Devil? You may remember Keaton's odd appellation for a German emperor in our first reel: the person the sailor purports to have seen is Keyser Söze, and his origin may never really be resolved, which could easily have diminished the film's value. A hazy flashback shows Söze, an absolutely ruthless Turkish gangster, handling some Hungarian competitors in a manner that shocks even them (and explains, it is implied, the role of the Hungarian crew aboard the burning ship). Over time Söze has become the bogeyman to outlaws everywhere ("A spook story criminals tell their kids at night") with a network so volatile and multifaceted that the United States Government, among other entities, would give practically anything to find someone who could identify him. The sailor, a man not long for this world, complies with Baer's wishes and begins to describe the Devil to a police artist, who, of course, will take her sweet time in composing her subject. My strict non-disclosure policy prevents me from revealing what part of the drawing we get to see. Yet if we adhere to the characters and their appearances during the film, one detail is impossible – and we should leave matters right there.

Much noise has surrounded the dénouement of The Usual Suspects, perhaps justifiably so, although the final scene is more shocking in its celerity than its content. What is noticeable, however, is that throughout the film certain characters say and do things that they shouldn't, either because they cannot possibly know what they claim or because their reactions betray inappropriate emotions. Upon a reviewing, these moments seem so painfully obvious that we wonder why we didn't come to the same conclusions initially. Is the plot very complicated? Not really; it is certainly tortuous, but such plots lend credence to the suspicion that a criminal mind is built differently than that of a law-abiding citizen and, with the rare exception, every criminal existence will ultimately be captioned in that famous Hobbesian pentaptych ending in 'short.' We should also note, pace certain reviews, that Kint and Kujan spend the film not in Kujan's office, but the messy sty of one of Kujan's colleagues (an extremely important point, although not ours to say why). But the core of The Usual Suspects is the fact that Kujan wants to hear one story and Kint spins him another. Kint has a few scenes in which Keaton appears and defends his girlfriend’s honor, yet Kujan only wants to hear about Keaton, "the cold-blooded bastard" he's been "investigating for three years"; the Keaton who "was indicted seven times when he was on the force" (including on three counts of murder); the Keaton all of whose state witnesses "either reversed their testimony or died"; the Keaton who himself allegedly "died in a warehouse fire two years ago." Unfortunately, Byrne is for whatever reason one of the world's least convincing criminals, perhaps because he always seems above daily chit-chat (he works well as a Biblical Satan, or Lord Byron, or a wicked nobleman, but as a common criminal and NYC cop – no way in hell or heaven). So when his girlfriend is threatened, or when he is seen enjoying her company, he is convincing. But he is no hoodlum. Is that the intent? One cannot imagine it is, and if you've seen Byrne and his amazingly limited range you know 'brooding lover' is really the only tune in his jukebox. And we didn't even mention the man known as Kobayashi.