I have already tipped my hand on my view of the role of the skin, i.e., the whole mobile field through which something bigger than the man himself finally settles back on its haunches, just out of intelligibility, equal parts dignity, vulnerability and unsentimental sex. The nature of the storyteller is to be greater than the sum of his parts, to be the vessel for intelligences distant both spatially and in time. We don't just get Spacey's eyes and his mouth. This formula is followed gospel fashion in The Usual Suspects , of course. Moreover, Verbal and his alter ego Keyser fold into the master story of western civilization, since Turkey, Keyser's ostensible wellspring, was formerly Troy.
Beauty starts out on the same tack, though it pumps things to eleven.
As in Suspects , Spacey is situated as storyteller through his mastery of the narrative, though his control in Beauty is more absolute, since the camera doesn't undermine his description of events there as it does occasionally in Suspects . It is also wired invisibly by the legacy of Verbal Kint and Keyser Soze. So Beauty begins in the vein of Suspects . But it is further infused with the epic by its dedication to themes of death. This is literalized as Lester tells the whole film from the perspective of his death, the two minutes it takes to die stretched to two plus hours.