Day for Night Magazine

Block on Black: The Many Shades of Shane Black
BY CORTLAND RANKIN

“This isn’t good cop, bad cop. This is fag and New Yorker.” It’s impossible to imagine Martin Riggs, played by Mel Gibson in 1987’s Lethal Weapon, saying anything remotely along these lines. Yet the man who wrote tough-guy banter for Mel also directed the movie where the above line appears – 2005’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The quotation, uttered by Kiss Kiss’ Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), sums up the movie’s departure from the action-adventure genre. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is not a traditional good cop, bad cop movie but rather a unique amalgamation of action, detective story, and parody. Unlike strongly action-oriented cop dramas such as Heat or Point Break, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang participates in and comments on the action film, striking a delicate balance between action,suspense, and comic distance. The man responsible is writer/director Shane Black, reluctant modern action auteur, who visited Block Cinema in October of 2005 to discuss his directorial debut. Black is one of the progenitors of the contemporary action-adventure blockbuster and continues to redefine and challenge the conventions that he helped establish.

To fully appreciate Kiss Kiss’ genre commentary, one must look to the rich traditions of the action film. Nowadays the term “action-adventure” mainly describes what was perceived in the 1980s and 1990s to be a new and dominant trend in Hollywood’s output, a trend exemplified by sequel-spawning franchises such as the Alien, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, and Terminator films, as well as by individual blockbusters like Total Recall or The Last of the Mohicans. Add to that list the Lethal Weapon series, and you’ve got a Saturday night of TNT programming.

At the age of 26, Black burst onto the Hollywood scene with Lethal Weapon, a movie now considered to be one of the pioneering works of modern action. Lethal Weapon embodies the quintessential ‘80s action flick. It’s a buddy movie about two homicide cops who chase a gang of drug dealers all over Southern California. The cops are Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), a homebody who has just celebrated his 50th birthday, and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), a crazed, wildeyed rebel who has developed a suicidal streak since his wife was killed in a car crash. In less than forty-eight hours, the two become partners, share a family dinner, kill several people, survive a shootout in the desert, battle with helicopters and machine guns, toss hand grenades, jump off buildings, rescue Glover’s kidnapped daughter, drive cars through walls, endure torture by electric shock, have a few beers and repair the engine on Glover’s boat – though not in that order. The contrasting racial and psychological characteristics of Gibson and Glover made Lethal Weapon great. The buddy-cop formula spawned three sequels and numerous imitations, among them the Rush Hour films (1998, 2001) and Showtime (2002).  After the success of the film, Black had the choice of either improving on or deviating from his successful action style. Understandably, Black decided to continue in action. His script for The Last Boy Scout positioned him as one of the highest paid screenwriters in the business. He followed up with work on Last Action Hero, a colossal critical and commercial failure. Nevertheless, Black still pocketed $4 million for the script to 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight. Black scripted 1999’s little-seen A.W.O.L. and then retreated from the business. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang marks his directorial debut and his most unique contribution to the action genre yet.

In Kiss Kiss, Black has not only rediscovered his old talents, but he has eclipsed them. This manic tribute to film noir, starring a zany Robert Downey Jr., is his breathstealing, riff-running, ever-escalating piece de resistance. Downey plays two-bit burglar Harry Lockhart, whose bizarre luck takes him from a botched East Village robbery into the fear-and-loathing underbelly of Hollywood, where he’s astounded to find himself a contender for an acting role. What ensues is a mess of circumstance and dumb-luck: Harry’s caught in a double-crossing, life-threatening web of complications involving aspiring starlet and former high school crush Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), a detective-cum-movie-adviser called Gay Perry (a zesty Kilmer) and all manner of business-dealing, moviemaking and gun-toting scum.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is the postmodern action film. Awkwardly self-aware at all times, the film falls not into parody but into self-reflection. The film is a meditation on Black’s personal influences. Though the film has gun violence and a chase scene, the action seems at times uncharacteristic and even surreal. It’s as if Johnny Gossamer, Black’s fictional stand-in for James Bond, holds sway over the action. Each character aspires to be Gossamer, but ultimately fails because he is, alas, only fiction. The tension between the Gossamer ideal and the mediocre results that the characters actually achieve is what makes the film interesting. Harry Lockhart is far too neurotic to play cool and his scatterbrained off-screen narration keeps him and the viewer at an ironic distance from the film’s origins in film noir and pulp crime fiction. Even the suave Gay Perry can’t match Gossamer’s Bond image because he is, not surprisingly, gay. While the Gossamer archetype of the sexy secret agent points to the origin of the action film in the noir/detective story crime novel, the failure of each character to measure up seems proof that action or suspense/thriller heroes need no longer adhere so strictly to that formula. There’s more to this film than simply commentary on old movies, however. Black establishes a unique formal and narrative tension in an attempt to break from his past and make a new mark in the genre. However, he was not always so optimistic or even clear of his path. The beginning of his troubles started after he sold The Long Kiss Goodnight for what he called “a sinful amount of money.” “People were angry that I took the money,” Black says. “People offer you $4 million for a script—what are you going to say? ‘No, I’d rather sell it for $100,000’? But it engendered so much anger; I lost friends over it. And no one talked about the creative content of anything I did any more. They all just assumed I was this guy with a formula, a hack formula.”

Black says he just wanted to become a better writer – so he went out of the spotlight. It took time for Black to find his voice again. He was tempted to remove himself from action films all together. However, Black’s close friend James L. Brooks (Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment) suggested that he might be trying a little too hard to take this giant step. Maybe he was reacting too strongly to people who hate action movies. Brooks told Black to write “something like Chinatown…something that’s character driven with suspense and lots of twists and turns. It can be a genre picture without being an action picture.” Black, along with the help of Joel Silver from Warner Bros., set out to write and direct a new take on the action genre. “Once I put the romantic comedy in the context of a murder mystery, then everything seemed to gel,” Black remembers. “Then the romance started to work and I was able to juxtapose things. I was able to do a comedy scene right up against a heavy scene and switch gears in a way that threw the audience for a loop. It became this wonderful combination.” Instead of rejecting the action genre, Black began to embrace and even defend it. Feeling sympathy for the lack of respect given to pulp novelists, Black understands what it’s like to write in a genre that’s largely dismissed. Using his predecessors as an inspiration, Black made light, and a movie, of the situation.

The unique tension that Black creates by using some generic conventions while warping others is not revolutionary, but it’s still innovative. As opposed to Gibson’s macho bravado in Lethal Weapon, Downey’s character has little stomach for violence though he performs when needed. And the cool detective, Gay Perry, is gay. The fact that the detective, a normally conservative white/male/hetero role, is gay points to the evolution of a social conscience within the genre. The film points to the haphazard pairing of con and detective also found in 1982’s 48 Hrs. starring Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. However, Kiss Kiss goes beyond the buddy comedy to offer an alternative view of what is cool about action films. Black comments on his departure from action conventions, saying, “I love the notion of… a kind of storytelling that depends on roughness and a hard-boiled point of view, but not helicopters exploding. There is some action…but the action that I chose to put in this is very awkward action or so over-the-top that it’s impossible seeming or ridiculous looking.”

With a comprehensive understanding of the history of action and suspense films and a heavy influence on their modern conception, Black may very well launch another age of action affluence in the coming years. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a step in a different direction that fuses the suspense and thriller aspects of the detective story with the stylized violence and comedy common to contemporary action films to create a unique piece within a heavily clichéd genre. As the film’s director, Black, reflecting the hesitancy of a reluctant auteur, quips, “It’s the first time in my career where what I wrote on the pages is on the screen. I’m more proud of it than anything else I’ve done. It is effectively what I wanted. If this movie’s bad, it’s my fault. It’s not somebody else who changed or censored or edited it. This is the stuff I wanted, and that’s what’s on the screen, and if you don't like it, it’s my bad.” In a genre that often sees in terms of good and evil, black and white, Black said he believes action films should be seen in shades of grey. By attaching the film to noir fiction and challenging contemporary conceptions of white/male/hetero coolness, Black paints a nuanced picture of a genre in need of masters.