“It's a fairytale town, isn't it?”
One doesn’t watching a film titled In Bruges without a certain level of expectation that no matter what else the film may be about, at some level the main element of importance is going to be the city itself. It is not a question of the impossibility of setting the movie anywhere else; it is simply that Bruges must have something to it that would make it worthy of the tale. The observation by Harry encapsulates this idea which is, of course, visually expressed in the oppositional perspectives toward Bruges taken by Ken and Ray. As a black comedy about gangsters, the story itself also has a certain sort of fairy tale sensibility as well.
“Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't.”
Ray’s rather politically incorrect transmission of his meaning is another element of how actually being in Bruges is far more significant than being in a city might be in most other movies. The attitude of the two hitmen toward the city are distinctly at polar opposites, but it is not necessarily a valid or authentic accounting. Ken is able to find discover the offbeat charm of Bruges and appreciate it not so much because he is naturally more sensitive than Ray. In fact, the reality may well be quite the opposite; it is precisely because of Ray’s sensitivity to his recent accidental shooting of a young boy in carrying out a hit that is the prime cause of being in Bruges, but not being “in Bruges.”
“A great day this has turned out to be. I'm suicidal, me mate tries to kill me, me gun gets nicked and we're still in f**kin' Bruges.”
While the film is definitely about being in Bruges, it is more complex and specific than that. It is about the perspective of being there. Ray and Ken are there not by original design, but in response to circumstances. Circumstances produce perspective as indicated by the two different approaches to being in Bruges expressed by the contract killers. And it is perspective that is ultimately at the heart of the film. The perspective of a film about gangsters and hit men is thrown out of sync by unexpected circumstances and so scenes that would normally be played for dramatic effect tend to get twisted into comedy. The conventional perspective offered toward hit men in movies that they simply don’t allow their weapon to be stolen, much less become suicidal; those are fundamental violations of the terms of employment.
“An Uzi?..I didn't come here to shoot twenty black ten-year-olds in a drive-by. I want a normal gun for a normal person.”
Unquestionably one of the most oft-quoted lines from the film, it encapsulates the film’s obsession with skewed perspective. What could be more skewed than buying a weapon designed for efficient mass slaughter sure to draw unwanted attention when all you plan to do is quietly take out a particular target? With this line, the film concretely establishes the thematic argument that Bruges is not merely a fairytale town, but that the world of fairy tales are off-kilter and subject to a distortion of perspective. So skewed is this world that Harry’s non-Bruges sense of logical reasoning (albeit tempered by a less logical racist perspective) would serve perfectly in a real-world public relations campaign calling for common sense gun control that would still allow for normal people to own normal weaponry.
