Keyser Soze, The Usual Suspects
It’s never made clear whether or not Keyser Soze, a brutal Turkish crime lord, is real or simply a myth, “a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night,” according to low-level criminal “Verbal” Kint, who proceeds to tell Soze’s. Soze’s influence is either everywhere or nowhere. But the idea of an all-powerful crime lord is so appealing that one can’t help but imagine it to be true. For those who don’t, Kint paraphrases Charles Baudelaire: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Soze is the king of criminals — appropriate given that his name is a version of the German word forEmperor (Kaiser), itself a version of the Russian czar and the Latin caesar.
