Why Everyone Should Watch "The Usual Suspects" (#Spoilers)

It's a film with an all white cast that heroizes criminals and comes straight from the depths of Hollywood. So why is the film so important? By looking at the use of Kayser Soze as an ethereal villain used to scare the Western World the audience can more easily understand concepts like Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and basic xenophobic tendencies that have been nurtured by western media.

The basic idea of the movie is that several career criminals are tricked into pulling a big heist for a shady crime lord called Kayser Soze. The crime lord is never seen and talked about in whispers. The story of him being that he was a middle eastern small time mafia member that killed his family in order to keep them from being killed by enemy gangsters. Then he killed the enemy mafia's wives, children, associates, and finally members. At the end of the movie we realize that the Kayser Soze that was presented to us does not exist. It was only a cultivated story that a man had come up with in order to control a large part of the criminal underworld through fear. The story and the reasons for it are very important regarding Orientalism, race relations, and xenophobia.

The Orientalist perspective comes in the form of Kayser Soze as an unfathomable demon that cannot be understood or reasoned with. By making him a man from the "far east", the man behind the mask created a persona that the western world felt was so different from themselves that he could not be seen as a human. We see this concept presented in much less intelligent ways in many other movies; Jafar became an evil genie, kamikaze pilots in "Pearl Harbor" supposedly had the devil inside them, and who can forget that in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" a priest wearing horns(doing a dual purpose of terribly misrepresenting Zoroastrianism and being a symbol of the devil) rips the beating heart out of a man. However in "The Usual Suspects", that stereotype is used by a main character to clearly manipulate and control the people around him. This use is important because instead of reasserting the stereotype, the movie shows how Orientalist stereotypes are misrepresentations and unreasonable .

Secondly the view of cultural misappropriation through the shadow of Kayser Soze is very different than the ones we see in other films. This appropriation is clearly subversive, malicious, and again plays upon those stereotypes created by other cultural appropriations. It symbolizes all cultural appropriation(whether or not the writer had that in mind when constructing the film) through the selection of certain aspects of a non-native culture and the materialistic use of the constructed image to demonize people of a different country. I think that at it's worst, that is exactly what cultural appropriation does.

Lastly, the xenophobic tendencies created by the combination of negative Orientalist perspectives and malicious cultural appropriation are very important when talking about anything from insider satire to fourth cinema. Kayser Soze represents the outsider who is different and more violent than any man in the criminal underworld. When addressing foreigners, 4th cinema tends to take a aggressive stance mainly because of what those foreigners have done to them. But we see that most members of any society that believe themselves true insiders are distrustful of outsiders(Trump).  Later we see this feeling taken and dissected by minority comedians. Trevor Noah had a wonderful response to "Are you scared of kids where you come from because of all those child soldiers?". He said "Are you scared of white people because of the KKK?". Kayser Soze represents that baseless fear and in so doing represents our own misunderstandings.