Year of the Month
"Harmony was right, her sister was murdered. You pulled the trigger. It just took this long for the bullet to hit."
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is often described as a comedy; you’ll see it tagged with both “Comedy” and “Dark Comedy” on IMDb, and most of the top Letterboxd reviews talk about how funny it is (Amazon, forever being Amazon, categorizes it as “Action and Adventure”). For whatever reason, of the “big” websites, only Wikipedia has the courage to name it as the neo-noir it is.
I found this pretty surprising: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang proudly wears its influences on its sleeve, from the cynical narrative voice to its morally-dubious-at-best protagonists. Like many other neo-noirs, most notably its predecessor The Long Goodbye1, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang tries to address a world where women’s lives are treated cheaply without treating the women themselves cheaply, but struggles a bit when execution that particular theme. It has a mean streak that makes the experience of watching it slightly unsettling, especially when it comes to that theme of violence against women.
But also, it’s extremely funny.
Shane Black’s just-shy-of-crackerjack script gleans its humor from absurdity, from straight-up jokes, and from those horror-comedy moments where a laugh threatens to turn into a scream (or maybe it’s the other way around). Take the scene where Harry, never the brightest man in the room and often the butt of the joke, discovers a body in his bathroom and calls his newly found mentor Gay Perry in a panic. Even the dialogue works on multiple levels:
Perry: [talking over the phone] We gotta move her somewhere. You got gloves? Harry: [over the phone] Excuse me? Perry: Gloves. Do you have gloves? You have to move her. If it's a frame-up, some asshole's probably calling the cops on you right now. Do this: wrap up the body in a blanket, a sheet, anything. Harry: Okay, any particular kind of gloves? Perry: [sarcastically] Yes, fawn. Will you fucking hurry! Harry: Perry? Perry: Yeah? Harry: I peed on it. Perry: What? You peed on what? Harry: I peed on the corpse. Can they do, like, I.D. from that? Perry: I'm sorry, you peed on...? Harry: On the corpse. My question is... Perry: No, my question, I get to go first: Why in pluperfect hell would you pee on a corpse? Harry: I didn't intend to! It's not like I did it for kicks!
(Quote taken from IMDb to save me typing.)
This scene, to quote Stefon, has everything. The absurd slapstick of Harry struggling to deal with a body in his bathroom; Perry’s lightning-fast wit and biting sarcasm; and the actually-horrific-when-you-start-thinking-about-it dead woman in Harry’s bathroom. That Harry peed on. It’s awful. It’s hilarious. But you might as well laugh as cry, right?
Like the humor, the plot works on multiple levels but is all over the place in the bad way: it’s not as convoluted as The Big Sleep, but even Raymond Chandler didn’t know the identity of one of the killers in that novel, so I’m not sure that really counts. Almost everyone is screwing someone, literally and figuratively, and every action leads to a catastrophic sequence of results. Harry gets a weak sort of revenge at the movie’s end (another moment that echoes Marlowe in The Long Goodbye), but it feels hollow; there are still two dead girls at the end of this movie,2 and the parade of resurrected cast members at the end doesn’t really dull the sting. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s biggest challenge, and biggest failing, is not quite being able to balance the fine line between tragedy and farce.
Its greatest strength is Gay Perry.
I’ve always had a weakness for men who are perpetually on their last nerve, and Val Kilmer’s Perry is as good as it gets. He’s done with Harry almost as soon as they met, and his patience gets shorter as the movie continues.
Perry: Look up “idiot” in the dictionary. You know what you’ll find?
Harry: A picture of me?
Perry: No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!
But Perry’s anger isn’t just at that dumbfuck Harry. It’s at his whole dumbfuck world, where people get dragged cross-country because Colin Farrell wants more money, where the lives of women are cheap, where Perry himself has to play nice with idiots, homophobes, and homophobic idiots all the fucking time.
Perry gets the best lines, and Val Kilmer is more than up to the task of delivering them. He and Robert Downey, Jr. play off each other beautifully, Harry’s sad-sack sincerity hitting the sharp-edged wall of Perry’s cynicism. (Michelle Monaghan is a lot of fun too, especially when her character’s not actively being slut-shamed.3)
“Who taught you math?” and “look up ‘idiot’ in the dictionary” are the kind of useful go-to insults that make a movie endlessly quotable, but Perry’s body language and expressions are selling the comedy as elegantly as his line deliveries. We really lost a great one when we lost Val Kilmer.
It’s messy and flawed and incredibly awkward to watch with your teenager4, but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is still a good time at the movies. I’m glad that Black got to go back to the crime comedy well with The Nice Guys a decade later.
About the writer
Bridgett Taylor
Bridgett Taylor has a day job, but would rather talk about comic books. She lives in small-town Vermont (she has met Bernie; she has not met Noah Kahan), where she ushers at local theatrical productions and talks too much at Town Meeting.
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Conversation
YES. I’d been looking forward to this piece, and this is delightful. I’m so glad you spotlighted Harry and Perry’s conversation about the dead body, because Kilmer’s irritated, flat delivery of, “Yes. Fawn,” has been blissfully stuck in my head forever as a somewhat-more-obscure quote in a movie that’s almost wall-to-wall great quotes. (“Who taught you math?” and the idiot/dictionary bit are ones I think of on an almost daily basis.)
And yeah, while I’m happy to forgive its faults–this is definitely a personal favorite of mine–I agree that it doesn’t quite get to where it wants to in terms of handling its female characters. It’s a shame that even though I’m giving that caveat here, I still feel like this is one of Monaghan’s best and most developed roles–she’s so often stuck playing the love interest in a much more limited way than she is here.
Per footnote 4, “movies I unwisely watched with my family” is always a great and painful conversation topic, I say as someone who saw Black Swan in theaters with her dad, really underestimating the amount of female masturbation that would be on screen.
Shane Black movies are notorious for leaving me wanting sequels (ah, The Nice Guys, you should have had more time!), just for craving more: I absolutely want the ongoing PI adventures of Gay Perry and his new assistant, Harry, ideally with Harmony also helping out whenever she feels like it. Why does everything get turned into a cinematic universe except the things I want most?
Even in Gone Baby Gone, where it makes sense in the story and focus, it’s annoying that Monaghan gets a bit downplayed. And that’s one of her better roles!
Yes, the line delivery on ‘fawn’ is SO good.
Complete agreement on the role and performance of Monaghan’s. It really speaks to how we just…do not give actresses those meaty roles they deserve.
I would have watched ten KKBB sequels. At least. It’s not fair!
I saw Black Swan with a friend who I thought of as a younger brother!
Superb stuff here, love the neo-noir angle. Noirs wouldn’t openly side with the femme fatale but I think it’s easy to see sympathy for them being trapped in a man’s world and a man’s cinema (thinking of Gloria Grahame in Human Desire and The Big Heat here) – by 2005 they should have more options, right? At its best, like the line you excerpt up top, Black interrogates that with real anger, but he also doesn’t quite figure out how to manage his own exploitation of cliche.
I think it’s always hard to fight a stereotype without accidentally reinforcing it, and choosing Hollywood – which is notoriously hostile to women – I think puts it a bit on hard mode.
Great call on the Lang/Grahame film noir combo. A number of feminist critics have interpreted the Femme Fatale in terms of the limits of women’s power in the 1940s and 50s, and in these films we enter the stories with Grahame at a point where he wiliness at using the weakness of the male sexual drive to her advantage has wained, and her behavior, and the tragedies of her predicaments, result in a more explosive form of retribution.
I never thought it as neo-noir either, mainly because noir is rarely so absurdist. Indeed, most movies are rarely so absurdist.
I love the narration. To this day, it disappoints me that Black started using the same trick in Iron Man 3 and abandoned it. It really takes the piss out of things.
Noir does trade in absurdity, though. The great joke of the Maltese Falcon being a fake comes to mind.
And RDJ is so good at it.
“Like many other neo-noirs, most notably its predecessor The Long Goodbye1, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang tries to address a world where women’s lives are treated cheaply without treating the women themselves cheaply, but struggles a bit when execution that particular theme.”
Altman’s stab at the private eye genre has left a huge impact on later periods of American cinema, ranging from this, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, INHERENT VICE and LICORICE PIZZA. Where THE LONG GOODBYE (and NIGHT MOVES two years later) differ from traditional noir, is a growing awareness that the agency exhibited to the femme fatale, namely that of manipulating male desire in their recognition that sex is their weakness, is a myth and not a path towards personal fulfillment rooted in female sexual pathology. Much of that comes from Leigh Brackett, whose adaptation eliminates Raymond Chandler’s virulent misogyny, lending considerably more sympathy towards Mrs. Wade than on display in the book.
That is not to say that the changing way in which women have more recently been portrayed in neo-noir pastiches isn’t problematic or incomplete in its realization. Much of that is because these films are focused on masculine perception of human behavior and the urban environment. This is an area where literature has made inroads where Hollywood hasn’t.
When I read The Long Goodbye I had such an appreciation for what Leigh Brackett did with the screenplay (and credit where due to Altman as well). Good point about literature managing to go further, and more consistently, I think.