Identity is a switchbacking rollercoaster of a thriller, and one of the reasons I’d be seeing it again is to watch it retrospectively, as it were. That is, knowing what I know, now that I’ve seen it already, I would be asking myself how it holds up. Was its tremendous impact just the effect of deft manipulation of plot surprises? Will it make less sense, and be less enjoyable, seen with the fore-knowledge that is the after-knowledge of that first viewing? Like sex, seeing a movie is something you can only do for the first time once. With movies such as The Sixth Sense, Memento, Bound, or indeed Identity, which depend on revelatory twists, that first time is very important. The second viewing may be lower in shock value, but it will reveal whether the inner structure really works.
I would, however, also see Identity again just because it is so much fun — pure narrative pleasure. When Hollywood works, this is how well it works. This is pop trash brought to a pitch of engineered excellence. There is little in the way of deeper meaning here; Identity is not great art, if you expect great art to say something about the world in general. But, despite its being amoral and empty, or perhaps because it is amoral and empty, Identity is an instance of superb narrative art.
Then again, that’s the kind of thing people used to say about Alfred Hitchcock, and he has long since been reinvented as a great individualist auteur (by the French), a great moralist (by everyone else), and the ultimate Lacanian text (by the Slovenian theorist Slajov Zizek). I daresay something of the same could be done with Identity — that word is particularly suggestive for contemporary cultural theorists. It’s the piece of grit that gets the oyster working on a pearl. In fact, I can see already the start of such a post-Lacanian analysis, one that would be a very fruitful reading of Identity: Jacques Lacan, after all, sees the very business of identity or self-formation as a process of misrecognition.
But to pursue such a train of thought here would be to reveal too much about the plot machinations of Identity, and it is important to keep them secret so that the viewer gets all the pleasurable shocks possible. Let me, at least, sketch out the premise of the movie, which is not particularly original (as the characters in the movie are in fact aware), but it does put a new spin on an old idea.
A bunch of disparate people get caught in a ferocious storm and have to spend the night at a lonely motel somewhere in the Nevada desert. Among these people are a blowsy has-been film star (Rebecca DeMornay) and her ex-cop chauffeur (John Cusack), a runaway prostitute (Amanda Peet), a policeman (Ray Liotta) transporting a criminal, a family that has just suffered a terrible accident, and so on. Barely have they begun to settle in for the night (and it is, naturally, a dark and stormy one) than they start dying, one by one, in gruesome ways.
Things get increasingly panicky and complicated until it seems quite impossible to work out what’s really going on; and then Identity begins to explain itself. At which point it gets even more nerve-rackingly suspenseful and scary. Beyond which, as I say, let us not go — you’ll have to see it. In the meantime, though, let me reiterate what a fine actor Cusack is. We saw him recently in Max, playing a one-armed art dealer in Munich in 1919, a role some distance from his cynical ex-cop in Identity, but he does both with great skill and intelligence.
Alongside here, and playing artfully constructed stereotypes with real panache, Peet and DeMornay and Liotta and the rest do good work. They are little more than stereotypes because this isn’t a character-based movie, as those meandering indie features are usually tagged. Hollywood, and this is high Hollywood product, is always more interested in plot than character, as its perfunctory moral gestures show. And Hollywood is better when it dumps the morality, anyway. Character here is a convenience, a matter of chess pieces being manoeuvred toward their dooms — for Identity, and consummately so, the plot is the character.