If I were looking for paper topics for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (and I have to admit I'm glad I'm not), I'd have to focus on the finger. One reason for this might be because my children have been running around a lot lately holding up one finger in imitation of Spongebob's starfish friend Patrick saying "If you hold up your little finger, you're intelligent." For Robert Downey Jr.'s Harry the on-again, off-again finger is pretty much a clear indication of his lack of knowledge (ok, so it's not his little finger, but it's a digit all the same). Despite his sometimes desperate attempts to hold on to his severed finger, its repeated lack "points out" how vulnerable he is. Try as he might and smart-ass that he is, he just keeps adding things up wrong. Harry's missing digit as a form of castration also further illustrates the homme fatal aspect that Cim mentioned. Though Harmony serves as the castrating woman, her dismembering is totally accidental. The second time the finger is removed, it is by the tough-guy couple, Mr. Fire and Mr. Frying Pan, who seem a kind of double for the Harry/Gay Perry pairing. And if anybody in this movie is doing the manipulating (the associations with the hand and fingers comes up again), it has to be Perry. The vulnerability of the human body played for laughs (the dog ultimately eating it or shall we say "sampling it") is just one of many aspects of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang that shows the direction in which noir is developing in contemporary Hollywood. Might we call it a digitized noir?

By the way, Germany beat Ecuador yesterday and things have returned to normal, at least until Saturday.