Hats, Phones, and Guns: Heteronormativity and its Signifie

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Play, download and edit the free video Hats, Phones, and Guns: Heteronormativity and its Signifiers in The Maltese Falcon.

The character of Joel Cairo of The Maltese Falcon is one commonly discussed when it comes to queer visibility in the production code era. If we look beyond him, though, we’ll see queerness everywhere, in the most mundane of places. In this video, I attempted to show how even the most mundane of objects can become vessels for gender-conforming ideology – and how that ideology is reinforced in subtle ways, with The Maltese Falcon ultimately taking a normative stance portraying queerness as an attack on an imagined standard.

An act as simple as doffing one’s hat can be imbued with symbolic importance through this lens – when does one put it on? When does one take it off? The use of a phone – who calls? Who picks up? In other words, who’s active and in control?

I tried to pay especially close attention to the scenes in Gutman’s hotel room. Over the course of watching and rewatching, I came to consider it as a queer space of sorts (and came to understand the negative connotations affiliated with that). Contrast its opulence, marking it as non-standard, with Sam’s modest office or his home – with almost any other locale in the movie. It’s here where the points examined come together strongest, and I hope it comes across how. Throughout the rest of the film Sam always has a tight grip on events, but the hotel room is a different space. It may be worth examining the framing of the shots, even. While I didn’t touch on it here, it seems that within the hotel room set there is rarely a visible exit in-shot. The queerness has our tough, virile protagonist surrounded, and it is intent on keeping him there.

The queerness presented in The Maltese Falcon is one deeply intertwined with other forms of “otherness,” with conceptions of race and of class. I hope this video essay gives you a look into how that’s executed.

Edited together by Harry Thoemmes

Licenses used:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode

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