The Maltese Falcon = √-1: Lacan, Bentham and the Necessary Fiction of Noir (original) (raw)

“Mr Spade, I have a terrible, terrible confession to make: that story I told you yesterday was just a story.” The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) is concerned throughout with truth and lies; moreover, there is a willingness to treat certain lies as if they were true. Indeed, the falcon statue itself is the film’s proton-pseudos: it is a fake, an object that “does not exist” but nonetheless sets the narrative in motion. More than a lie, such a construction works as a fiction. This paper will suggest that Lacan’s much misunderstood references to the square root of minus one provide a useful way in which to approach the fictions that structure The Maltese Falcon. Referencing the necessity in mathematics of introducing an imaginary number (the fictional value i) for the square root of minus one, Lacan insists in “The Subversion of the Subject” upon the necessary fiction of signification for the functioning of the Symbolic order. Signification, imaginary number, falcon: none of which “exists” but all of which “function”. Each exercises an influence as a fiction, granting its respective field – language, mathematics, film – a certain consistency that would otherwise be lacking. Finally, through an examination of the film’s use of the figure of the “fall guy”, I will seek to draw Lacan’s discussion of the imaginary number into a relation with his (brief) references to Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. I will explore the way in which The Maltese Falcon suggests a reconsideration (and expansion) of Lacan’s engagement – particularly in Seminar VII – with Bentham, to highlight a necessary, imaginary dimension of structure that is common to the work of psychoanalyst, philosopher and film alike.