“Only his lips moved”: suppressed sexuality in The Maltese Falcon from novel to film

The Maltese Falcon’s purview to represent transgressive characters, particularly Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo’s sexualities, was fundamentally transformed by the Motion Picture Production Code in the shift from novel (1929)[1] to film (1941). Uncharacteristic of the definiteness of the written text, the film employs visual modes of obfuscation. Brigid’s feminine sexuality is masked to create an incomplete femme fatale character, while Joel Cairo’s homosexuality and, interestingly, his race are similarly transformed via this veiling effect. What results is a film which creates a sense that these figures’ stifled sexualities nonetheless lurk and loom, and which invents twin death drives which are absent from the novel.

Brigid’s 1929 feminine sexuality is transgressive for its brazen attitude towards weakness and sex. She is, for example, unabashed about depending on men for protection: while imploring Sam Spade to help her, she easily goes ‘down on her knees’ (35) before she even resorts to verbal pleas. Her sexual manipulation, too, does not meet the trope of deceitful “feminine wiles”: she initiates sex transactionally with Spade by unambiguously stating ‘Can I buy you with my body?’ (57) Brigid’s sexual thrall over men in the film, meanwhile, is constrained to representation via only the filmic resources available under the Code, none of which included actual sexual consummation. Instead, costuming, for example, is used to recharacterise her: unlike in the novel, she is introduced wearing, hyperbolically, a silver fox wrap, a lambskin, a shawl of sables and a mink coat. This transformation functions on two levels: not only does Brigid never once strip or undress, unlike in the novel (195), because her costumes are ‘designed to conceal’ — featuring heavy padding, large ruffles and throat clasps — she begins to appear as someone ‘who can never be open or transparent.’[2] The “toughening” associated with her opulence and guardedness is also accomplished in the purging of desperation: even by the end, Brigid never physically begs Spade, and at most ‘dons… [an] inconsistent array of hysterical masks.’[3] She also evokes a demureness the novel’s Brigid, who concedes to having initiated sex with three separate men besides Spade (87, 155, 209), does not possess. Brigid resultantly shifts closer to femme fatale status: filmic Brigid ‘nourish[es Spade’s] sexual fantasies’[4] by enticing but withholding, and the comparative ease with which she accepts her doom suggests an assumption of ‘the fact of the death drive.’[5] That Žižek considers filmic Brigid to be inconsistent, forever masked, and to lack a ‘coherent ethical atittude,’[6] I argue, is a consequence of the film’s partial re-characterisation: prohibited from rendering Brigid’s transgressiveness anything but inscrutable, she appears as an — incomplete — femme fatale.

Joel Cairo’s sexuality undergoes a similar process of suppression via the “ambiguation” of his character. Cairo and Gutman are both (probably) gay villains who furthermore share the commonality of being somehow “abject” in their bodies, particularly in comparison to the heterosexual, attractive, white Sam Spade. While Gutman retains the 1929 obesity that renders an audience likely to read him asexually or as somehow deviant, Cairo’s obvious racial Otherness is enhanced while his homosexuality is diminished in adaptation. This, I argue, is a parallel process designed to enfold his sexuality into his race so that the effect of ambiguity is compounded and the latter transgression is read as a “proxy measure” of the former.[7] In the novel, Joel Cairo is indisputably Greek — he carries a Greek passport (47), and racial epithets, when used, refer to his Greekness (108). This unambiguity is echoed in his sexuality: of all the novel’s queer characters, Cairo is most immediately and repeatedly defined as ‘queer’ (42); a ‘fairy’ (92). In the film, however, four different passports spill out of Cairo’s pockets and his accent vacillates impossibly, a re-characterisation which creates the effect of compounded unease and duplicity. There is no reason why the film fabricates this ambiguity other than that the colour of his skin contains a visual linchpin of deviance, like Gutman’s fatness.

The overall effect of censorship is that these characters’ sexualities are forced into hiding in the murky peripheries of the film, which is also conducive to visual representation. This looming effect, I argue, is literalised in the kiss that Brigid and Spade almost share, until he glances out the window and notices Wilmer Cook lurking in the darkness, carefully preventing an act of heterosexuality and casting a sort of homosexual shadow over the film. Indeed, it is an ironic fact that Sam Spade is surrounded by a dearth of heterosexual evidence: the Archer marriage is a sham, Brigid’s family was an invention, and the Gutman-Wilmer-Cairo trio are queer.[8] It is therefore interesting to consider Edelman’s theory that queer individuals have a relationship with the death drive that comes about because of their ‘unregenerating sexuality’[9] (indeed, Gutman’s daughter is written out of the film and he appears newly childless) in conjunction with Žižek’s comments above. The ultimate effect, then, of the film’s handling of transgressive sexualities is to impute them with death drives.