Friday, July 08, 2005

The Devil's Trick

I pulled out "The Usual Suspects" on DVD last night. How apt the tagline seemed on 7/7.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Charles Baudelaire, said it first "la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas", but in the film Verbal Kint uses it to tell the story of Keyser Soze:

He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. One story the guys told me � the story I believe � was from his days in Turkey. There was a petty gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. After a while they come to power, and then they come after Soze. He was small time then, just running dope, they say...

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