Dec 27 Friday focus

If you haven’t seen the movie The Usual Suspects but plan to at some point, you might not want to read the rest of this section (SPOILER ALERT). 

One of my favourite films of all times is The Usual Suspects, which is a twisting, turning psychological crime thriller that surprised nearly everyone with the final reveal. But if we had really been paying closer attention—that and brushed up on our Turkish before watching it—we might have seen it all coming. Kevin Spacey plays Verbal Kint, a meek, mobility-limited associate of some suspects the police have rounded up for possible involvement in a recent crime. When they get to Verbal, they get a story that seems airtight as an alibi, and just based on the richness of details and his explanation for every single question and accusation they hurl at him, they finally let him go. 

Little do they know at the time that he masterminded the whole thing. 

Verbal spins a tale about a crime boss named Keyser Söze behind the whole scheme, peppering in details he pulls from words and images around the very office in which they interrogate him. What the cops don’t know is that the name he gives them is a sort of puzzle. It turns out that the name “Söze” comes from the Turkish slang söze boğmak, it refers to casting a blizzard of words so copious and confounding that they leave the audience scratching their heads. 

And Keyser, as you can probably guess, is remarkably similar to qaysar, the title for an Ottoman ruler, pronounced much like Kaiser in German, which means king. So in giving up his supposed associate, Verbal is basically confessing that he is the king of obfuscation. It is right there in front of the cops, and yet it is invisible. It isn’t until it’s too late that they realize Verbal (another connection to the root meaning of “Söze”) is, in fact, Keyser Söze. By then he is gone, never to be seen again. 

If you’re like me, sometimes you have these moments when something is so obvious and so palpably close, and yet you miss it. It’s enough to make us smack our foreheads flat on a nearby table. Fortunately God knows this about us. It’s not like it hasn’t played out before throughout history.

 It’s enough to make me wonder how many of those moments, just today, I’ve missed. Maybe someday I’ll start paying closer attention.