Claude Miller’s Garde à vue (1981), Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) belong to different moments of the modern crime film, yet they share a radical suspicion: perhaps the plot is not something that happens to characters but is a progressive construction inside of them; something that makes characters into what they are. The decisive struggle is over who controls the narrative. Crime is merely the material through which this struggle becomes visible.
In Garde à vue, Jérôme Martinaud enters the police station as a
witness and gradually becomes a suspect. The film’s entire dramatic mechanism
is an interrogation in which facts are never simply discovered; they are rearranged.
Inspector Gallien possesses evidence, but evidence alone does not produce
meaning. It requires a story. Martinaud’s gestures, evasions, inventions,
eruptions, troubles, memories and contradictions are progressively incorporated
into an explanatory structure.
This is close to what Michel Foucault would call the production of truth
through institutional discourse. The interrogation does not merely ask, “What
happened?” It establishes the conditions under which something can count as an
answer. Power and knowledge become inseparable. Yet Miller complicates the
Foucauldian model because the investigator himself is vulnerable to the
narrative he constructs. Gallien is not simply discovering Martinaud; he is writing and feeling
throughout Martinaud.
The philosophical problem resembles the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur: an
event becomes intelligible only when it is configured into a narrative. But
configuration always excludes possibilities. Once Martinaud begins to resemble
the guilty man required by the plot, every new fact appears to confirm the hypothesis.
The character becomes the product of an interpretive circle. His identity is no
longer something behind the evidence; it is something assembled from it.
This is why the eventual revelation of his innocence is more disturbing
than a conventional detective solution. The plot has temporarily succeeded in
making an innocent man psychologically guilty. The false narrative has acquired
the force of reality.
The Usual Suspects takes precisely this mechanism one step further. Here the narrator does
not merely become the object of interpretation: he becomes the author of interpretation
itself. Verbal Kint tells Agent Kujan a story about criminals,
conspiracies and Keyser Söze, and Kujan believes that he is extracting the
truth from his prisoner. In fact, he is being given a story carefully adapted
to his own assumptions. The famous revelation that Verbal has constructed much
of the narrative from objects and names in the interrogation room turns
storytelling into an act of criminal manipulation.
The crucial philosophical inversion is this: the detective thinks he is
interpreting the story, while the storyteller is interpreting the detective.
This makes Verbal a particularly postmodern character. He does not
defeat institutional power by possessing better facts. He defeats it by
controlling the signs from which facts are constructed. The film therefore
approaches Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulation: the sign no longer simply
represents an underlying reality; it becomes capable of organizing what counts
as reality in the first place. Verbal’s story is not merely false information.
It is a machine that produces consequences.
But the film also exposes a weakness in the classical idea of the
“unreliable narrator.” Calling Verbal unreliable still presupposes that somewhere
there is a stable, recoverable story. The Usual Suspects deliberately
leaves us uncertain about how much of his account actually happened. The
important fact is not simply that he lies. It is that truth has become dependent
upon the narrative architecture through which it is delivered.
Memento
radicalizes this principle by removing the possibility of a stable narrator
altogether. Leonard cannot form lasting new memories, so he constructs an
external system of photographs, notes and tattoos to preserve continuity. Yet
these supposedly objective records are themselves manipulable. The character
therefore lives through signs that are intended to preserve reality but can
instead manufacture it.
There are no facts without interpretations but Memento gives this
proposition a phenomenological form. Leonard does not merely interpret the
world incorrectly by his own intentions;
interpretation
is the only mechanism by which he can possess a world at all.
The film’s reverse chronology makes the spectator experience this
condition directly. We repeatedly encounter consequences before causes,
characters before we understand their histories, and actions before we
understand their motives. Ricoeur’s distinction between chronological time and
narrative time becomes crucial: plot does not simply organize events after they
have happened. Plot creates intelligibility by deciding the order in which
events become meaningful. Scholarship on Nolan has consequently connected Memento
with Ricoeur’s reflections on memory, temporality and narrative identity.
The three films thus describe three increasingly unstable relationships
between plot
and character. In Garde à vue, the institution
constructs the suspect. In The Usual Suspects, the character
constructs a simulated version of events for the institution. In Memento,
the character constructs himself from fragments of evidence whose reliability
he cannot establish.
There is also a profound difference in the way manipulation operates.
Gallien manipulates through questions; Verbal through stories; Leonard through evidences.
The first controls what another person is permitted to say. The second controls
what another person believes. The third controls what he himself is able to
believe.
This progression moves from Foucault’s disciplinary power toward
Baudrillard’s simulation and finally toward Ricoeur’s problem of narrative
identity. Yet none of the films allows philosophy an easy escape. There is no
privileged position outside interpretation from which the truth can simply be
recovered.
Their deepest similarity therefore lies in their treatment of the
detective plot. Classical detective fiction assumes that the mystery precedes
the investigation: something happened, and the detective reconstructs it. These
films reverse the relation. The investigation itself becomes an event that changes the meaning of
what happened.
Consequently, plot is no longer an innocent container for character.
Plot is a form of power. It selects causes, distributes motives, establishes
identities and determines which facts become significant. Character, meanwhile,
is increasingly revealed as something narratively produced.
In
Garde à vue, a man is almost made guilty by an assemblage of a
personal story. In The Usual Suspects, a man escapes because he
controls the assembling of the story about himself. In Memento, a man
cannot escape his story because he is condemned to reconstruct it continually.
The crime film has
therefore undergone a philosophical transformation. The question is no longer
simply “Who
committed the crime?” It becomes: “Who controls holds the identity
card?” or “Who controls the plot?” But how can we know him when
every testimony, record, memory, and narrative can be manipulated?
