[QUOTE=Balance]
Precisely my point. I didn’t mean that Kint made him up on the spot–I was suggesting (albeit somewhat facetiously) that Soze was a legend/persona Kint had long established to cover or support his own activities.
[/QUOTE]
There’s also a school of thought which says that Keyser Soze was a pre-existing myth/legend appropriated by Kint for much the same reason, but not a myth/legend that he’d actually established.
[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
There’s also a school of thought which says that Keyser Soze was a pre-existing myth/legend appropriated by Kint for much the same reason, but not a myth/legend that he’d actually established.
[/QUOTE]
Well, his rivalry with Hungarian mobsters was accepted as part of the Soze mystique (FBI agent Baer talks about it as if it was a long-standing feud even though he wasn’t in the room when Verbal told the story about Soze’s family), so if Verbal had simply co-opted the Soze myth, either he added that element (and it’s such a major facet that at that point it makes no difference if Verbal is the original Soze or not) or decided to fulfill it by seeking out Hungarians to massacre.
Regardless of what the fictional truth is, that Verbal guy tells a good story.
(Can a mod fix the thread title?)