It is undeniable now that we are living in an age - whether you want to call it ‘postmodernism’ or not is up to you - in which acknowledging, recycling and deconstructing previous artistic styles is one of the main, if not now the dominant, form of artistic expression. Some find this self-awareness exciting and profound, others see it as emblematic of the decline of popular culture, proof that there is nowhere new for it to go but back into itself.

Whatever it means, it has been around for quite some time. Even if we look only at the cinema we see that there have been famous examples of films which constantly remind us that they are films being made for over half a century. From ‘high art’ like Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) and most of Godard’s early work, to Hollywood comedies such as Hellzapopppin (1941), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Paris When it Sizzles (1964), the self-conscious movie is shown to not be a particularly recent invention.

Yet it is often a danger of the form that when a film breaks the fourth wall - when we are told definitively, “you are watching film” - that it will act as if this is the first time this has ever been done, asking us to praise it for its ingenuity and daring. This is certainly the case with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, its faults lying not in the fact that it never allows us to forget we are watching a movie, but in the way it does so.

From the moment Robert Downey Jr’s voiceover first tells us “Hi, I’m Harry, I’ll be your narrator for the duration of the movie,” (and when, a few minutes later, he actually stops the film stock) there is a smugness about the whole enterprise - an unfounded belief in its own cleverness - that grates severely. (What is even more annoying about this first moment is that the combination of voiceover and shot [looking up at Downey Jr. from out of a swimming pool] is itself also a token reference to the opening of Sunset Boulevard [1951], thus simultaneously justifying and negating its existence.)

The problem is, even if we were to take the history of self-conscious cinema as beginning in the early nineties with Tarantino, what is going on here is nothing in the slightest bit new - in fact, it even feels like a number of steps backwards. Having a narrator simply say occasionally damning things about the film we are watching (eg: “I’ve just realised that was a terrible scene” or “Can you all see where this is going?”), combined with the odd reference to other movies, is a highly simplified, lazy and ultimately pointless way to make a self-aware film. It becomes clear that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is in fact little more than an exercise that allows Shane Black to write the kind of film he always has done (except for the layer of noir added for the sake of respectability) whilst also giving a running commentary on all the failings and stupidity he sees in the genre that would normally pass without question.

There are those who will accuse any openly self-conscious film of doing this, claiming it to be simply “having its cake and eating it”. In a sense this might be true, but there are many different ways of going about such a film and it’s entirely unfair to tar them all with the same brush.

Scream

What it ultimately comes down to is the relationship between art and life. Those who believe that the self-aware cannibalism postmodernism brings with it heralds the death of popular culture are quick to say that nowadays art has become only about art, rather than about life itself. Sometimes this is true: as genuinely clever and fun as they are, both Scream and Pulp Fiction are finally only about what the world is like inside of a movie. What has always interested me more about self-conscious art is instead the possibilities it holds for exploring the relationship between the real world and the world of art.

Amongst my favourite realisations of these possibilities are 8 ½ and its depiction of filmmaking-as-mind-process; Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) - itself a tribute to 8 ½ - with its conception of film as a noble but ultimately fruitless striving for meaning; Far From Heaven (2002) and its complex experiment of playing true emotion against high artificiality; and Adaptation (2003), which uses the film process of its title as an analogy for similar processes found in life. All these films are not asking simply with what life means inside art but are what art means to us in life - I would argue a considerably more worthwhile question.

Stardust Memories

This film, made twelve years prior to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, played subtler self-aware, genre-mocking games whilst also working its central plot around the idea of the gulf between real life and movies. It’s philosophy, yelled by the Arnie-loving kid protagonist at his idol - “You think you can just stumble across the bad guys here in the real world? You can’t, because the real world stinks” - may not exactly be poetry, but it is at least something. In fact, compared with the intellectual and emotional void left by Kiss Kiss Bang Bang after its final scene, it feels like a lot…

Downey Jr, speaking directly into camera, is interrupted by Kilmer whilst trying to cap on an unconvincing moral to the film we have just seen (“This movie is about friendship…”). He quickly gives up, bickers with his mismatched buddy one last time, then finally tells us he hopes we have enjoyed the film; cut to credits. Yes, in some ways I did: I laughed many times, I liked a number of the observations, I wasn’t bored. Yet this perfunctory ending was also the final straw for me in a film that felt not only proud to be shallow (there are many shallow films that I love), but almost exuded a casual and distasteful contempt for depth: precisely the criticism so often unjustly levelled at postmodern art as a whole.