Perry van Shrike, aka "Gay Perry" (Val Kilmer). (Hence the party.) To research his role, he's assigned "detective lessons" with big-time P.I. In no time, Harry is in Hollywood as the presumptive star of a cop flick.
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But fleeing police after a burglary gone awry, he stumbled into an open movie audition, where his authentic distress was mistaken for method acting. Just a few days earlier, Harry was an inept petty thief in New York City. ("Oh shit, I skipped something," he chides himself at one point.
Point is, I don't see another goddamn narrator here, so pipe down." From there he loops backward and forward, stutter-stepping his way through the story, stopping to revise as necessary. Maybe you wonder how Silly Putty picks shit up from comic books. Standing by a massive swimming pool in which a Santa hat is sinking lazily, he informs the audience, "You may wonder how I wound up here. We first meet him in that most disjunctive of settings, the L.A. That narrator is Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.), the movie's hero, and he is incompetent at many things. But Black gives each element a satiric twist: the tough shamus is gay the corpse is discovered in a bathroom and accidentally peed on the first-person narrator is not so much unreliable as simply incompetent. setting the protagonist's expository voiceover the jaded but ultimately decent private eye the dead body that mysteriously turns up exactly where it's not wanted.
The familiar ingredients of the hard-boiled school (and the noir cinema it spawned) are all here: the half-glittering, half-seedy L.A. But it's also largely beside the point, an excuse for quite a few good scenes, most of them equal parts homage and subversion. As with Chandler's tales, the plot of the film is almost willfully convoluted. It's one of many insights that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, writer/director Shane Black's sly, ironic contribution to the genre, gets exactly right.
In the hard-boiled genre, by contrast, the opposite was true: "he scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one that made good scenes." In the former, the conclusion-when the sleuth explains whodunit and how-was everything what led up to it was mere "passagework," a careful alignment of plot elements to enable that final, big revelation. In the 1950 introduction to his collection of stories Trouble Is My Business, Raymond Chandler explained the difference between the classic murder mystery and the hard-boiled detective genre he helped invent.
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