confidence crime ⢠film ⢠gender ⢠representation ⢠youth. Introduction. Sociological and criminological reflections on 'confidence crime' are not- able for their ...
Theoretical Criminology © 2005 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. www.sagepublications.com Vol. 9(1): 97–117; 1362–4806 DOI: 10.1177/1362480605048945
’Con me if you can’: Exploring crime in the American cinematic imagination RODANTHI TZANELLI, MAJID YAR AND MARTIN O’BRIEN
University of Kent at Medway, Lancaster University and Lancaster University, UK Abstract This article deals with current re-dramatizations of crime and popular criminologies. It analyses key elements of the popular criminological imaginaries underpinning a recent and highly successful film—Catch Me If You Can—in order to tease out the discursive, mythical and fabulist techniques by which it communicates particular imaginations of crime. Additionally, the article offers some conceptual and analytical anchors for interpreting filmwork so that other popular representations might be more easily situated within criminological analysis. We argue that popular media portrayals of crime are highly effective in sustaining particular conceptions of the interaction between crime and wider social conditions, and we explore four layers of discursive work through which this film communicates the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour.
Key Words confidence crime • film • gender • representation • youth
Introduction Sociological and criminological reflections on ‘confidence crime’ are notable for their relative paucity, especially in recent academic literature. 97
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) David Maurer’s The Big Con (1940/2000) remains the classic study in the area, an elegant ethnography of the confidence criminal’s social and cultural world. Theoretical reflections on the ‘conman’s’ modus operandi were offered by Goffman (1952, 1969), as part of his sociology of social interaction and self-presentation. Other contributions have emerged more indirectly, for example in Shapiro’s (1990) attempts to theorize the importance and exploitation of trust in fraud and ‘white-collar crime’. To these we can add an eclectic range of works spanning popular history (Nash, 1976), biography (Rayner, 2002), social history (Moore, 2000) and literary studies (Bergmann, 1969; Blair, 1979). Insofar as any general criminological insight might be gleaned from this eclectic range, it is that the essence of ‘confidence crime’ lies in the management and manipulation of social roles, expectations and stereotypes in order to win the (ultimately misplaced) trust of the ‘mark’ or victim. At the heart of the ‘con’ is the ‘art’ of deception—the cultivation of impressions and identity so as to lead the victim to part voluntarily with their money or other goods. ‘Con artists’ succeed neither by force, nor by stealth, but by misrepresentation. The moral and social drama of trust won and trust betrayed characterizes, above all else, the ‘con game’ as a distinctive form of criminal endeavour. While this play of deception, manipulation and betrayal has remained on the margins of criminological concerns, it has had an enduring appeal for film makers and their audiences. The earliest Hollywood treatment of the ‘con’ appeared in 1905, a silent ‘short’ entitled The Green Goods Man; or, Josiah and Samanthy’s Experience with the Original ‘American Confidence Game’. In this film, a gullible country couple are lured to the big city by a conman and fleeced of their savings, although they are ultimately rescued by a vigilant police force. Subsequent treatments of the confidence criminal range from the obscure (The Confidence Man (1924), The Confidence Trick (1926), Confidence Girl (1952), The Flim-Flam Man (1967), Sweet Talker (1991)) to the famous (The Lady Eve (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), The Rain Maker (1956), The Great Impostor (1961), The Music Man (1962), Paper Moon (1973), The Sting (1973)). In recent decades, the ‘con movie’ has become a ‘sub-genre’ in its own right, with the appearance of successful films such as House of Games (1987), The Grifters (1990), The Last Seduction (1994), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Heartbreakers (2001), Heist (2001), Nine Queens (2001), Confidence (2003) and Matchstick Men (2003). Such films exploit confidence crime variously for comedic, romantic, dramatic or frightening effect. Indeed, as Rafter (2000) suggests, crime films as a whole can be seen to make use of, exemplify and give voice to wider assumptions, concerns and anxieties about social life, social disorder and social change. One recurrent theme of the ‘con crime’ genre has been that of the individual’s perceived vulnerability in a mass, urbanized and increasingly anonymous society, a world in which competition is rife, trust is fragile and honesty is in short supply. Similarly, the frequent appearance of women as con artists, for example, might be taken to articulate the
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ periodic eruption of a different sort of anxiety, namely patriarchal fears about female emancipation and empowerment (exemplified in the figure of the femme fatale who by turns seduces, manipulates and betrays her male victims). However, if ‘con’ films capture certain fears and concerns about the criminal threat to society, they also valorize and celebrate that self-same ‘criminal element’. A significant proportion of the genre’s representative works depict the con artist as ‘hero’, giving us an aspirational figure and prototype for the ideology of self-realization, independence and ‘rugged individualism’. As film critic Philip French puts it: The Confidence-Man . . . has had a peculiar grip on the American imagination. In the US context, he’s as much a chameleon as a charlatan, as much a benefactor as a criminal, and is an extreme case of the fluidity of the national character and the freedom to recreate the self. (2003a)
It is interesting that this powerful ‘grip’, whose popular expression is confined in the world of cinematic and literary creation, has not attracted criminological attention. The silence is surprising on a number of levels: not only do the contents of popular media play an important role in criminological research (for a, mild, critique of which see Braithwaite, 2003) but popular media portrayals of crime and deviance both exploit and inflect key theoretical propositions and analytical schemata through which criminological perspectives describe and explain law-breaking behaviour and policies against crime. David Garland (2001: 10) puts this succinctly when he argues that crime has been ‘re-dramatized’ and sets this re-dramatization in the familiar contexts of new technological developments—including cable television and mobile ’phones (2001: 1). Our understanding of ‘re-dramatization’ in cinematic contexts exceeds the classical thesis that film reproduces dominant perceptions of crime. If ‘drama’ is, literally, action, a process of making something, film ‘redramatization’ can be viewed as a process of re-constituting and negotiating ideas and popular ideologies. Film does not simply copy and rehearse the meaning systems of culture, it also revises them (Turner, 1999: 152). Film is ‘social drama’ in its finest form, because it enacts, criticizes and reconsiders socio-political realities, conflicts and dilemmas (for a similar analysis see Nellis, 1988; O’Sullivan, 2001). To follow Ryan and Kellner’s (1990) analysis of Hollywood production, even the most ideological films carry within their narratives: ‘Potentially progressive undercurrents in American society by delineating, frequently inadvertently, the salient fears, desires, and needs that make up the everyday fabric of American culture’ (1990: 2). Not only is film weaving together trends, debates and ideas in new and exciting ways, but it can also reinforce and legitimize popular crime discourses. Ian Taylor (1999: 3) opened his critical criminology of market societies by arguing that cinematic and televisual representations of crime, and accompanying forensic and socio-biological literatures, are helping to
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) construct and legitimize a form of ‘commonsense and populist criminology’, with an influential social presence. He went on to suggest that this populist criminology comprised a ‘discourse’ and a ‘new penological project’ that was transforming not only penal and criminal justice policy but also the very mind-set of criminology itself. Although Taylor did not elaborate the material manifestations of this populist criminological discourse, we take it as read that he felt it to be worthy of sustained attention—if only to ensure that all of its discursive elements and forms could be plotted in the service of a continuing critical tradition. We, too, believe that popular media are crucial players in the articulation of crime discourses—and that the latter’s overwhelming presence in cinematic, literary and televisual media is a necessary component of any account of the current surge in interest in criminology. In this article, we aim to contribute an understanding of such redramatizations and popular criminologies in two ways. First, we present an analysis of key elements of the crime discourses underpinning a recent and highly successful Dreamworks production—Catch Me If You Can (henceforth CMIYC) (Spielberg, 2003)—in order to tease out the discursive, mythical and fabulist techniques by which it seeks to communicate particular visions of crime. Second, we aim to present some conceptual and analytical anchors for interpreting filmwork so that films and other popular representations of this kind can be more easily situated within criminological analysis and more easily incorporated into debates about how specific media (in this case, cinema) intervene in the aforementioned redramatization of crime at the present time. It should be noted that we do not claim to offer a new theory, nor even to supply a new analytic synthesis. More modestly, we exploit techniques of filmic analysis in order to supply a detailed and criminologically-oriented understanding of how crime’s re-dramatization might be seen to connect with popular perceptions of crime. Our choice to focus on this particular film was not random, but based on two observations. We will relate the first one to the thematic conventions of the film, and the second to the relationship of these themes to social concerns. Significantly, when asked ‘why do you think audiences love con artists?’, CMIYC’s director Spielberg replied: ‘We all sometimes fantasize about, gee, could I do that? We don’t really want to become those people but we kind of admire their nerve’ (Spielberg, 2002). What makes the ‘con’ movie a socially significant representation of crime is, we claim, precisely this kind of ambiguity—the ‘con artist’ appears to occupy a space between ‘romantic anti-hero’ and ‘unconscionable rogue’, simultaneously inviting alarm and admiration from the audience. However, in our analysis we will move beyond the question of ‘con genre’, to suggest that CMIYC exemplifies a cluster of contemporary fears and fantasies about crime (see Sparks, 1992) and its relation to the wider dynamics of American social life. What makes CMIYC noteworthy among the recent contributions to the ‘con crime’ genre is the range of themes and debates it weaves
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ together—all of which revolve around contemporary anxieties concerning the breakdown of social order and crime. Significantly then, CMIYC provides us with a combination of crime and social anxiety genres that have traditionally re-dramatized the conflict between conservative and liberal American voices. We will observe later that CMIYC does indeed open up possibilities for an analysis of this political battle through its thematic arrangements. The second reason that justifies our selection is related to the popularity both of the film, and the genre as a whole. Although CMIYC’s returns were moderate compared to those of other films released in the same year, it has received many more reviews in fan sites than other, more lucrative movies. Currently, in the two major online film databases (the Internet Movie Database and Amazon.com) there are over 450 reviews—a stunning number, compared to those of other mainstream films. Formal press reviews bolstered this popularity: the Film Journal International, Film Thread, Hollywood Reporter, L.A. Weekly, New York Daily News, New York Post and Reel News published very positive analyses, suggesting the film to their readers (see movies.go.com). A well-known columnist, Roger Friedman, went as far as to suggest that the film was very likely not only to be nominated but also to receive Oscars (Fox News, 12 July 2002). In addition we could quote the intense involvement of the most influential Hollywood ‘player’ in CMIYC. In interviews director Spielberg claimed that it became his personal enterprise to place CMIYC within the cinematic tradition of the romantic outlaw ‘as we know it from classical movies, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde and The Sting’ (Spielberg, 2002). Indeed, the film is representative of a recent upsurge in the ‘con crime’ genre as a whole—critic Philip French recently observed ‘two movie trends of the past year’: ‘One is a fascination with confidence tricksters—the subject of a cluster of films including Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, James Foley’s Confidence and Ji Yang’s Chinese noir thriller Blind Shaft’ (2003b). Thus, far from being a piece of movie marginalia, CMIYC partakes of a significant trend in popular depictions of crime, and in popular film making in general. Moreover, as we shall later note, CMIYC exemplifies a number of tropes and motifs about crime and its causes that structure the genre’s discourse as a whole. CMIYC is of particular interest because it comprises a fiction constructed upon a fiction.1 It is based on an account of the short career of a confidence trickster, Frank Abagnale Jr, who operated internationally in the mid1960s. His (sanitized) autobiography was re-released in 2001 and we make reference to some important differences between the filmic account and the literary account in order to demonstrate more clearly how this particular instance of the popular criminological discourse works as a film. A ‘biopic’ of Frank Abagnale Jr, the film charts the escapades of this teenage conman who led authorities worldwide a merry chase as he amassed a fortune through ‘paperhanging’ (cheque fraud and forgery), and passed himself off
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) as variously a Pan-Am Airlines pilot, a paediatrician, a lawyer and a college sociology professor. An examination of the film offers, we suggest, some insights into the contemporary Hollywood ‘criminological imaginary’ (exploring, as it does, themes including fatherhood, ‘broken’ families, juvenile delinquency, gender relations, entrepreneurship, the pleasures and seductions of crime, the relationship between ‘rugged individualism’ and the State and retro-1960s nostalgia for a time when crime itself was seemingly more wholesome and less threatening than today’s landscape of gang wars, school shootings, teenage crack dealers and terrorism). Indeed, the film offers a meditation on the pleasures and pitfalls of Hollywood itself, the reinvention of the world in a ‘fiction factory’ that, like the film’s protagonist, blurs the boundaries between appearance and reality. Suspended between ‘roguery’ and ‘romance’, Spielberg’s Abagnale both recapitulates and renews the USA’s ambivalent relationship with one of its most enduring (and endearing) wayward sons, the Confidence Man.2
Synopsis of Catch Me If You Can The plot of the film revolves around the relationship between its three principal (male) characters—Frank Abagnale Jr3 (Leonardo DiCaprio), Frank Sr (Christopher Walken) and FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). The film begins in 1964, with Frank (aged 15) living an apparently happy and well-adjusted life with his parents in New Jersey. His father is a seemingly prosperous small businessman and a pillar of the local community. The opening scene shows Frank looking on adoringly as his father takes the podium to accept an award from luminaries of the local commercial and political establishment, a testament to his business acumen and success. However, the family idyll soon begins to disintegrate. Frank Sr comes under investigation from the IRS for tax irregularities and subsequently loses his business and is thrown into near-penury. His French wife Paula (Nathalie Baye) divorces him in favour of a family friend, with whom she has been conducting a clandestine affair. Frank runs away from home, making his way to New York. Here he initially survives by bouncing cheques for cash. This, however, proves a precarious and none too sustainable livelihood. Spotting a Pan-Am Airlines pilot (surrounded by a bevy of glamorous stewardesses) Frank is captivated. Frank reinvents himself as a Pan-Am co-pilot, complete with (fake) airline ID, FAA pilot’s licence and uniform. He ‘deadheads’ around the USA (getting complimentary free rides on the planes of other airlines), gaining his sexual initiation en route with an airline stewardess. He uses his pilot’s identity to expand his fraudulent cheque scams, now using forged salary cheques (complete with pasted on Pan-Am logos, obtained from model aircraft kits). However, his exploits both as a fake pilot (earning him the soubriquet ‘The Skywayman’) and his cheque frauds bring him to the attention of FBI agent Carl Hanratty (the fictional version of FBI agent O’Reilly who
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ arrested Abagnale). Hanratty doggedly pursues Frank, even cornering him in a motel room, where Frank proceeds to con his way out of the tight spot by convincing Hanratty that he is in fact a government agent also on the trail of Abagnale. A subsequent relationship develops between the two, with Frank periodically telephoning Hanratty, as much out of loneliness as from a desire to taunt his pursuer. Feeling the heat, Frank reinvents himself, this time posing as a Harvard-trained paediatrician. He takes a position at a hospital in Georgia, where he meets a gauche but endearing young nurse, Brenda Strong (Amy Adams), to whom he becomes engaged. Upon meeting Brenda’s father Roger (Martin Sheen), a State Prosecutor in New Orleans, Frank adroitly reinvents himself yet again, claiming to have a law degree from Berkeley. His prospective father-in-law procures him a position as an Assistant Prosecutor, and Frank somehow manages to pass the State bar exam. However, Hanratty is closing in, and Frank is forced to go on the run again, this time fleeing his own engagement party. Frank heads abroad, taking up residence in a small French village (the birthplace of his mother). It is here that Hanratty finally runs him to ground with help of the French gendarmerie. Securing his extradition to the USA, Frank is brought home to face justice—but not before a daring escape from the airplane (through the toilet) upon landing. Frank makes his way to his mother’s home, but finds her happily ensconced in a new life, complete with husband and child. Frank looks mournfully through the window upon the scene of domestic bliss from which he is excluded. When the police arrive, a disconsolate Frank surrenders himself without a struggle. He is tried and sentenced to prison, where he receives a visit from Hanratty. The agent wants Frank’s help with tracking down a cheque forger, something the young conman is able to do by utilizing his expertise. He is subsequently offered an early release from prison, provided he goes to work with Hanratty as part of the FBI fraud squad. Frank accepts and, despite a momentary temptation to revert to his old ways, he ultimately chooses to stay on the straight and narrow. The closing credits of the film inform us that Frank is now a settled family man, and a very successful consultant to the banking industry on matters of financial security. Frank and Hanratty remain close friends.
What you see is what you get: a discourse on identity performance We have already noted in the introduction that the conman manipulates the problematic boundary between legitimate and illegitimate techniques of self-presentation. The film places this boundary manipulation as a central process in the genesis of Frank as conman. It is noteworthy, for instance, that Frank first learns to manipulate appearance for personal advantage from his ‘upstanding’ father. Early in the film, the financially challenged Frank Sr must go to Chase Manhattan bank to plead for more time and
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) money. He induces his son to pose as chauffeur for the visit (complete with uniform), so as to create the ‘right impression’—namely of a prosperous man of substance and status. This is Frank’s first lesson that, in the USA, who you are is ineluctably linked to who others think you are, and they determine this on the basis of what you appear to be. Frank soon starts to put this insight into practice on his own initiative. Arriving on his first day at a new school, Frank is immediately set upon by bullies. Entering the classroom, it appears as if the harassment will continue. While the class waits for a substitute teacher to arrive, Frank decides there and then to claim the role of the teacher. By presenting himself as ‘Mr Abagnale’ the French teacher, Frank has, in the eyes of the students, been transformed from ‘nerd’ and potential victim into a figure of authority. Relishing his new role and the power it brings, Frank spends the next week tutoring his unsuspecting charges in the rudiments of the French language. His deception is finally discovered, and his parents summoned; but his father, far from being angry, is both amused and apparently proud of his son’s precociousness in the acquisition of this valuable ‘art’. A little later, after leaving home, Frank begins to acquire a more refined understanding of, and competence in, deceptive self-presentation. His first attempt is crude—he scratches off the birth date from his driving licence, and replaces it with a new one that instantly adds 10 years to his age. Frank has learned, first, that official documents give an ‘objective’ verification of his adult status, and people will accept such evidence as true, the testimony of their own eyes notwithstanding. Second, he has learned that status is essential in differentiating the responses he is liable to get from others— while no one takes seriously a 16-year-old boy, a 26-year-old man is a different matter. The significance of status and role-perceptions in social life is also the subject of Frank’s next lesson, and having learned it successfully he is ready to embark upon his career as a fully fledged conman and professional impostor. We see Frank attempting to cash a fraudulent cheque at a large bank, but he is thwarted by the suspicious bank manager who smells deception. Later, equipped with a pilot’s outfit and ID, he saunters into the self-same bank, and is greeted by the self-same officious manager. This time, however, the manager’s demeanour is entirely different—not suspicious but self-effacing to the point of obsequiousness. What the manager sees before him is not the same teenager he unceremoniously refused days before, but a man of standing, a Pan-American Airlines pilot. It is the role (complete with its trappings) that makes the man, that defines him in the eyes of others—all Frank has to do from here on in is play his role(s) with sufficient skill and conviction to persuade others that he is what he appears to be. All the rest (cashed cheques, free airplane rides in the cockpit, sexual liaisons with willing stewardesses) automatically follow. Hence the vicarious appeal of Frank—he brims with brash self-confidence, and inspires confidence in others; he is never at a loss and always has the ‘upper hand’.
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ The film proposes that Frank is what we would wish ourselves to be: men successful in our self-presentation. But it also proposes what we ought to be in order to embody the American dream: isolated units that embody right-wing versions of individualism (Ryan and Kellner, 1990: 274). Yet, at the same time, Frank poses a threat to established social hierarchies and mocks at the right-wing belief in the individualist dogma—if a teenaged, high-school dropout can successfully take on the role of pilot, doctor, lawyer or teacher, are not the ‘legitimate’ occupants of those roles also shown to be ‘all front’, using ‘smoke and mirrors’ to attain respect, recognition and reward from others? And if we cannot trust our own best judgements about others, and we can be so easily fooled (as so many were), then is not social life exposed as a precarious business, bedevilled with the possibility that nothing (and no one) is what, on the surface, it appears to be?
Family fictions: motivation and the discourse of dysfunctionality But the filmic representation is determined to reveal that all is not what it seems to be: that, behind the brash self-confidence of the trickster, lies trouble in abundance. It is a comment not only on Frank the conman but also simultaneously on the over-exuberance and over-confidence of the American dream itself. A central goal of CMIYC is to unravel the sorrows of a fragile marriage and a confused child who watches the ‘perfect’, safe, world of his family life collapsing. Frank’s reaction to his parents’ divorce informs the plot and provides the narrative economy with a way to explain his motivation to crime. In the film, Frank decides to escape the grim situation at home and to commit forgery in order to provide his father with a new key to his wife’s heart: money. Thus, the motivations for Frank’s criminal activities are embedded in the disintegration of his family and his desire to put it together again (although, comparing the film with Frank Abagnale’s autobiography, one realizes that the makers of CMIYC interpret, rather than narrate, the young conman’s life). The connection of family dysfunction with a turn to con crime is not peculiar to CMIYC—the same theme takes centre-stage in other recent con crime films such as Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men (2003). In his memoirs, Frank Abagnale presents a number of reasons why he left home. Among them he mentions his love for adventure and the gloomy ‘situation in his dual home’, with his father ‘still wanting to win Mom back and Mom not wanting to be won’ (Abagnale and Redding, 2001: 23). Yet, Abagnale states clearly that his main motivation to confidence crime was his hatred of poverty: he could not forget how his father, now a postal clerk, once ‘used to wear Luis Roth and drive big expensive cars’ (2003: 23). Abagnale’s written account is much more complex than that of the film, and much closer to the conventional money-driven mentality of
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) confidence artists. As he stated in a recent interview, in his life he ‘was truly an opportunist’ and not a hurt child that struggled to unite his parents (about.com). However, in CMIYC we watch an apparently distraught teenage Frank running away from the lawyer who deals with his parents’ divorce and from various custody-related forms that are forced on him. Later in the film, Paula Abagnale’s new life will seal Frank’s fate: when Frank, after his arrest by Hanratty, attempts his last escape from the plane, his mother is the first person to whom he turns. Yet, he arrives at her new home to discover that he and his father have been replaced by a stranger and a little daughter. This theme of dysfunctional families runs deep in Steven Spielberg’s filmography. Himself a child of a broken family, Spielberg reproduced his personal experience in various films that figure lonely, abandoned or traumatized children.4 Unlike the real Abagnale, he dwelled upon the idea of ‘extending the reality’ (Spielberg, 2003) of the conman’s life by imagining a young Frank who ‘every night [would] be in a hotel room in the middle of the country . . . lie in bed with tears in his eyes, thinking about his dad who he loved dearly’ and ‘fantasising’ that his parents would ‘someday come back together again’ (2003). We will return to some of these Spielbergian interlocutions again, later. Thus, in the film, in contrast to the written autobiography, Frank is represented as the victim of his parents’ disputes and his vulnerability highlighted throughout, especially in scenes that encapsulate his loneliness and confusion. The viewer never forgets that under the mask of this conman, there is just an insecure teenager who needs his mother and his father. Frank proves to be malleable, if we take into account that, eventually, Hanratty manages to change his habits through a portrayal of a ‘tough love’ father figure who succeeds in rescuing Frank from a life of crime (see later). The relationship between malleability, adolescence and crime is part and parcel of a discourse that emerged in the late 19th century (see Zelizer, 1994), a discourse that rendered teenage ‘psychological disturbance’ (Graham and Clarke, 2001: 168) interchangeable with social disturbance, stressing the importance of retaining control over youngsters. This discourse is also symbolized in Frank’s social environment after his family’s downfall: he leaves private school for a state school that hosts bullies and troublemakers—yet another signifier of youth ‘delinquency’. Situating Frank’s behaviour within this discourse of adolescent identity makes his mastery of confidence crime look less dangerous and invites the viewer to regard Frank’s interest in confidence crime as a ‘whim’—not something to worry about—just like the mood swings and short-lived enthusiasms of adolescence. The film’s emphasis on problematic aspects of family life and the transition from adolescence dramatizes popular discussions of criminal behaviour where these questions are associated with crime in an implicit, symbolic way. We will explore this process of symbolization, one that describes certain anti-crime agents by using the vocabulary of intimacy.
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’
From imaginary to symbolic status: a discourse of crime and redemption CMIYC uses the language of parenting in its images and narrative to describe the relationship between the criminal and state institutions. In the cinematic narrative, a structural homology is constructed between Frank’s passage from crime to lawfulness on the one hand, and his acquisition of a new father figure in the shape of FBI agent Hanratty on the other hand. This homology constitutes the primary basis for further symbolization of the relationship between outlawry and the State. We elaborate this relationship through the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore Frank’s relationship with his two ‘fathers’ (Frank Sr and agent Hanratty) before moving on to explain how this relationship works as a metaphor for macro-sociological processes such as the role of criminal justice in the State’s self-definition and in contemporary society. Frank’s illegal life is characterized by secrecy. In fact, there is a clear-cut divide between his public life and persona and more intimate aspects of his life. In the public sphere he appears to be a man of status who socializes with many important people and enjoys the company of women. In private he is lonely and inaccessible. Only his father, Frank Sr and his Nemesis, Hanratty, operate as interlocutors. It is interesting that Frank Sr himself had the notoriety of being a petty fraudster before his economic downfall. The film suggests that Frank modelled his con performance on his father’s—a fictional suggestion, as the real Frank suggests in his interview (about.com). An understanding exists between them from the outset in which Frank’s mother, Paula, never partakes (a situation to which we will return). The camera is keen on capturing and exacerbating the pleasure that father and son experience when they share evidence of their naughty behaviour: winking, secret smiles and hugs allude to a solidarity that Frank does not have with his mother. Frank always returns to his father for advice, support and approval, even when the FBI is pursuing him. Frank’s self-recognition is thus constructed dialogically with the most accessible other, his father. But Frank Sr is not a real ‘other’, as he simply mirrors, and is mirrored in, his son’s behaviour. His father realizes this first: as the end of his life approaches, he begins to advise his son to change, to renounce his life of crime. Frank never listens to him: on the contrary, he tries to lure him into sharing the ‘spoils’. We could argue that the two Franks’ absolute identification removes from their relationship a competitive element. This allows space for the introduction of agent Hanratty in the narrative as a substitute father figure, a disciplinary element in Frank’s life. We should also bear in mind that the Abagnale family is represented as ‘dysfunctional’. Paula Abagnale is almost always absent from the ‘normal’ tripartite relationship (child–father–mother), leaving a gap that Frank Sr has to ‘fill’. In other words, Frank Sr ends up being the mother and the father for his son. As a father, he exercises some influence on him; as a ‘mother’ he becomes the object of primal identification.
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) It is precisely when Frank Sr’s self-presentation changes to that of a lawabiding citizen that he begins to fade as a persona from the plot and is eventually replaced by agent Hanratty. Now Frank, deep into the conworld, feeling lonely and without a family, begins a series of ’phone calls, engaging in competitive conversations with Hanratty who reprimands him and warns him that he will be caught. It is intriguing that Hanratty’s personality, here, has two sides: harsh and benevolent. He cruelly sneers at Frank’s loneliness and shouts at him when he is upset. But he also displays a restrained affection for Frank when he is caught and has to enter a programme of rehabilitation under his supervision. Ironically then, agent Hanratty fulfils the duties of Frank’s father better than his real father, since he becomes a form of abstract Law, from which Frank initially tries to escape, but eventually embraces. CMIYC proffers a filmic imposition of what Jacques Lacan termed ‘Law-of-the-Father’ or ‘Name-of-the-Father’, a concept that encapsulates the process through which, allegedly, we become reflective social beings. It is, of course, no surprise that mainstream American cinema should portray this psychoanalytic journey as the route from childhood dependence to autonomous cultural beings. Lacan argued that we manage the shift from a closed-circuit system, a self-referential being, to one who recognizes, and is recognized as a ‘Self’, by autonomous human beings, when the ‘physical’ father is transformed into an abstract ‘Law’. The role of this abstract ‘Law/Father’ is regulatory: it becomes a constant negotiator of our behaviour and our actions (Lacan, 1994: 34–5). Lacan named our pre-‘Law’ status ‘imaginary’ and our post‘Law’ status ‘symbolic’ (Lacan, 1984: 270–1). In CMIYC, Frank’s encounter with Hanratty marks his passage from the imaginary to the symbolic domain, in which one becomes a fully functional, social being. The title of the movie beautifully summarizes this argument: ‘catch me if you can’ bears the tone of childish mockery that the fictional Frank Abagnale is acting out with his capricious behaviour. The paternal role of this FBI agent in the film does not correspond to any true events as narrated in the autobiography. The real Frank Abagnale feels grateful to O’Reilly, the FBI agent who arrested him, but there are no indications in the autobiography that the strong emotional ties the two men develop in the film have any factual basis. It is worth noting, nevertheless, that in a postscript of his biography Abagnale discusses his encounter with Tom Hanks very much along the lines of the cinematic narrative. Hanks was described by Abagnale as ‘an outstanding individual’, ‘kind to him and his family’, ‘sincere’ and ‘always in a good mood’ (2003: 214). Here, a reference to Richard Dyer’s work Stars (1982) is necessary: ‘stars’, for Dyer, are like ‘signs’. As such, actors’ casting is always determined by what they signify. We should bear in mind that Hanks has repeatedly embodied the ‘Everyman’, the ‘easy-going’, ‘friendly guy’ who supposedly encompasses all-American virtues (see, for example, The Green Mile, Frank Darabont, 1999; Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis, 2000). In fact, one of these films that addressed itself to ‘American patriotism’, Saving Private Ryan (1998), was
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ directed by Stephen Spielberg. However, ‘stars’ can also transcend the ‘type’ that they embody, retaining a balance between ‘representativeness’ and their ‘uniqueness’. Although in CMIYC Hanratty is far from easygoing, we know he is a kind-hearted and caring individual. Hanks’ persona in the film resembles his performance in The Road to Perdition (2002), in which he plays a quiet but masculine gangster with ‘principles’, who sacrifices his life for his son. It is interesting that as the director of CMIYC, Spielberg chose the Everyman icon to play Hanratty. Hanratty appears to be the dialogical product of Hanks’ conventional Everyman ‘type’, and that of his unique Road to Perdition performance. The implicit suggestion here may be that in agent Hanratty we see the reflection of a benevolent (analogous to ‘easy-going’) American Law (analogous to firm principles and honesty). Hanratty is not meant to be just any father, but the American Father.
Fable of the two mice (plus one): a criminological semiotic The passage from the imaginary to the symbolic order signifies only the first-order redemptive discourse of CMIYC. A second-order redemptive discourse, which operates as a denotative and connotative semiotic chain (Metz, 1982), is revealed in Frank’s salvation through his scenographic identification with Hanratty. This second-order discourse operates as a fable about the yearning for success in American culture. The core message of the fable, as told in the film, is paraphrased below: Two mice fall into a milk-pale. One of them quickly gives up the struggle and drowns. The other one keeps on swimming round and round until he churns the milk and is able to climb out of the pale and escape.
This fable is told by Frank Abagnale Sr, as his son, Frank, looks on doeeyed while his father receives an award from the local business community. Its telling is the opening scene and the opening theme of the film. It is repeated by Frank, later, as he is asked to say Grace at the dinner table of his fianc´ee’s family. It appears, initially, as a simple technique of characterization: Frank Sr and Frank are not quitters. Like father, like son, both keep swimming round and round the pale of life until they can get themselves out of any trouble that comes their way and rise above and beyond the drowning American mass. On another level, however, the fable poses a question to the film’s audience and forecloses on its own happy conclusion: which character is the mouse that swims, and which the one that drowns? At the beginning of the film, the fable’s first narrator, Frank Sr, appears to be swimming and succeeding. As the film progresses, his strokes become increasingly laboured and futile as he is harassed by the IRS, his wife leaves him for another man, he loses his business and his son turns to crime. As Frank Sr begins to drown, Frank takes up the frantic swimming, allegedly, as we have seen, to succeed not only for himself but also for his broken
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) family. Repeatedly, Frank claims that his criminal activities are intended to put his father back on the pedestal upon which he stood at the opening of the film. If this is his goal, he fails miserably; his rise to wealth and status is paralleled scene-by-scene by his father’s descent into debt and social ostracism. But there is another mouse in the pale. One who has neither failed (as Frank Sr) nor deviated from the lawful track towards the American dream (as Frank). A mouse who is not included in the original fable but who, none the less, provides an alternative way out for both the drowner and the churner. This mouse, of course, is Hanratty, the FBI agent. With his spectacles, his cheap suits and his incompetence as a field agent, he represents, as we have noted, Mr Average America. He possesses some special skills (in understanding and tracking financial crimes), but is distinguished chiefly by his commitment to an ethical version of the American way of life: do your job, love those who matter to you, avoid hurting others unnecessarily, strive to do well within your chosen field. His ordinariness, ironically, is what marks him as special in the film’s plot; it is what makes him uniquely placed to match the extraordinary skill and cunning of Frank. It is Hanratty who swims and swims, who refuses to give up on Frank, who neither churns nor drowns in the milky American mass until he is able, eventually, not only to bring the latter to American justice but also to redeem his character: to pull Frank out of the milk-pale of his own making. This fable, and its working through in the film’s narrative structure, is the lynch-pin of its mythic organization: the resolution of a two-dimensional, paradoxical circumstance by the introduction of a third element or, rather, by allowing Hanratty to be inserted as a third term between binary dilemmas (Barthes, 2000). Like the 19th-century novel, contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema operates on a simple, yet effective premise: the end must reply to the beginning, the opening disjuncture of the story must be resolved through a narrative adventure in which the heroic and villainous condition of its characters can be clearly disentangled. This mythic organization acknowledges as a universal truth that both good and evil reside in the human heart but proposes that, in the end, only one of these can be followed. How the narrative structure—the scene-by-scene resolution of contradictions and conflicts—achieves this closure comprises the second-order redemptive discourse through which the film’s imaginary of crime is communicated. The significance of Frank’s new status as an FBI employee—his rescue by Hanratty—should not be underestimated. It reveals the crucial mythical role played by Hanratty in organizing a filmic response to the dilemma of the two mice. Hanratty, in fact, guides Abagnale Jr to accept that the individual and the State can work harmoniously towards the realization of the USA’s cultural values. We would suggest that this passage from outlawry to law figures everywhere nowadays and is constitutive of the State’s ideological function as an ‘enemy of crime’. The second-order
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ Deviance
Conformity
Failure
Success
Criminal
Citizen
Child CRIME (Imaginary)
Adult LAW (Symbolic)
Figure 1 Binary oppositions
discourse of CMIYC encompasses a trope on the relationships between crime, law and the State in the individual’s pursuit of culturally valued goals. The mythic organization of the film can be summed up quite simply by indicating the binary oppositions through which the opening (fabled) disjuncture is resolved (see Figure 1). Indeed, this denotative and connotative cinematic chain is the filmic structure—the narrative system—that displays the symbolic passage from the outside to the inside of the legitimate American dream. It comprises the second-order discursive movement towards the value, and ultimate reward, of legitimate enterprise. At the same time, it elaborates a myth that is fully gendered.
It’s a man’s world: confidence, deception and gender discourse One recurring motif in CMIYC is an obdurate exclusion of women from the ‘intimate space’ the three main characters occupy (Frank, Frank Sr and agent Hanratty). Agent Hanratty pretends to be in touch with a distant daughter and his wife, and only towards the end of the film do we learn that he is divorced and barely sees his child. His ascetic manners and his affection for Frank begin to make more sense then. Solidarity develops between Frank and Hanratty as a result of their loneliness. We also noted earlier that Paula Abagnale is never allowed to partake in intimate familial moments. Her husband and her son ‘share’ their inner, naughty ‘self’, but she is left out. Throughout the film, Paula observes patterns of interaction between the two Franks without fully comprehending them. For example, when Frank’s performance as a school teacher is uncovered, distressed and upset with him, Paula misses the congratulatory look in Frank Sr’s eyes and the hugs behind her back. The same principle applies to Brenda, who learns that she is the fianc´ee of a conman only when Frank is about to flee arrest.
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) Brenda and Paula possess key places in CMIYC because they are, or become, an important part of Frank’s life. It is worth pointing out that not only are women excluded from Frank Abagnale’s illegal activities, they are also placed in the position of the victim. This applies mainly to those women whose agency in the narrative is marginal. For example, in order to escape from the FBI, Frank recruits four students to play airhostesses. These young women think that they are selected by Pan-Am for a publicity campaign. In reality, they simply provide Frank with an extra social ‘facade’ when he enters the airport. Two female ‘attributes’ that these girls display are stressed: vanity (their desire to acquire status as stewardesses) and na¨ıvety. The film emphasizes this through a sequence of ‘girly’ laughter, gossip and teenage behaviour. On another occasion, a beautiful woman consents to have sex with Frank (now assuming the persona of a wealthy young bachelor) but only if she gets paid. Frank, of course, cons her, paying her by ‘cheque’. This time we have an even stronger contrast between Frank’s rational calculation, and the lustrous prostitute’s use of charm. The film suggests that the astuteness of con art is far superior to the art of female cunning. Although in CMIYC Frank seems to enjoy female company in his adventures, he does not trust women. The untrustworthiness of women is central to Frank’s story. There is the focus on his mother’s clandestine affair with her husband’s friend, and her subsequent attempt to buy Frank’s secrecy by giving him money presents her as a dangerous deceiver. A further binary opposition is constructed here: Paula’s deception is dangerous because it targets the heart, as opposed to that of her two Franks, which aims at the wallet. Paula’s affair is not romanticized in the fashion that her son’s con games are. The cinematic narrative returns to this form of female deception when Frank, before fleeing Hanratty, opens up to his fianc´ee Brenda, reveals to her his second identity and arranges a meeting at the airport with her. Brenda, however, betrays him, and he manages to escape an FBI trap thanks to his acute eye. We can argue here that, as opposed to ‘strange’ women, Brenda and Paula are represented in the film as dangerous to such an extent that intimate women’s betrayal becomes synonymous with ‘deception’. This synonymization, we should note, again typifies the dynamic of gender relations in the con crime genre as a whole—from The Lady Eve (1941) through The Grifters (1990) and The Last Seduction (1994), to Heartbreakers (2001). We can note here a clear correspondence between cinematic ‘technology’ and everyday practices and discourses (de Lauretis, 1987: 2), in that both Brenda’s and Paula’s social roles (mother, wife-to-be) represent in the film the domestic site, the sphere of comfort. This is reinforced by young Frank’s persistence in helping his father regain his wife and unite the family again: without the mother/wife, there is no domestic hearth. It is further supported by Frank’s eventual decision to treat Brenda as someone worth trusting. The fact that Brenda and Paula fail to live up to these expectations (to provide Frank with love, comfort and security) makes them dangerous
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ and less likeable characters. However, CMIYC uses this disenchanting picture of female rationalization to accentuate the romantic image of Frank as a conman. Frank becomes a likeable and well-meaning guy, who offers love and trust and receives disloyalty. The association of femininity with dangerousness and deception has clear religious undertones that nicely reflect conservative American political discourse: women are temptresses, just like the Devil’s Eve; a narrative technique with clear references to the ‘femme fatale’ genre, in which certain theorists have recognized a distinctive narrative of female resistance to male domination (Krutnick, 1991: 56–72; see also Kaplan, 1980). The association of femininity with betrayal and dangerousness can be examined as transfer points for relations of power (Best and Kellner, 1991: ch. 2). In CMIYC, Frank’s desire for sex is transformed into a discourse on gender and sexuality (Foucault, 1979: 21), a device that serves to demarcate gender roles (Douglas, 1993: 3–4). CMIYC suggests that even a conman, the deceiver par excellence, can be deceived by untrustworthy women. Paula and Brenda, the two women who can easily penetrate the protective shield that covers Frank’s lawless self, are the ones who cause him most pain. In a reversal of roles, they are the ones who act with cold-blooded calculation (Frank’s mother leaves Frank Sr, for someone who has money and status; Brenda co-operates with the FBI and reveals her assignation with Frank). We would suggest that, although in CMIYC Frank and his two ‘femme fatales’ share the same properties (reason, calculation), they mobilize them in different ways. This differentiation serves as a discourse, in which rationality and its moral (or immoral) uses define gender properties. In filmic terms, then, there are narrative techniques that produce relatively clear-cut gender demarcations which themselves cut across wider social discourses of sex, gender, morality, reason, loyalty and truth. We have noted that CMIYC represents women in two contrasting, yet complementary, ways. Women-as-strangers appear to be na¨ıve, easily manipulated and occasionally possessing ‘low-cunning’. These attributes appear as inferior to Frank’s rationality and calculation of possibilities for profit making. By contrast, the two women who have access to Frank’s private life possess abilities similar to those that Frank musters in his ‘profession’— namely, deception. If the ‘na¨ıve’ behaviour of ‘women-as-strangers’ (or women-as-pleasure, since they become sexual objects) valorizes Frank’s image as a confidence artist, the ‘deceitful’ attitude of the ‘women-asintimates’ romanticizes Frank’s confidence persona. Both representations provide a picture of the world of confidence crime and, by narrative extension, the American dream itself, as essentially male. But they also serve as metonymies of two enduring political discourses on gender that defined Hollywood production since the 1970s and the feminist movement: the conservative, that views women as home-bound beings with no social identity, and the leftist, that demands their emancipation from these prejudices. On a meta-level then, ‘confidence crime’ becomes a substitute
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Theoretical Criminology 9(1) for the public sphere, in which manipulation of appearances (and, by extension, power) belongs to men. In this world of con wonders, letting women ‘loose’ (allowing them access to the secrets of power and manipulation) can, indeed, be a very dangerous business.
Conclusion Popular crime discourses and the ‘re-dramatization’ of crime are real in their effects and effective in their circulation of frameworks for making sense of crime and deviance. But, much more than this, they are effective in situating criminal activity at the intersection of wider discourses on family, gender, success and failure, role-legitimacy, morality and much more. Specific dramatizations, here mainstream Hollywood products, certainly draw upon popular ideologies and understandings about crime and criminals, but they also provide specific contextual inflections of those frameworks. It has been our intention to unpack some of the interactions between the contextually dramatic and the theoretically systematic dimensions of Hollywood cinematic narratives in order to contribute to the scholarly and pedagogically crucial task of grasping how popular criminological imaginaries gain the currency that they do. We have pursued this goal by investigating some interconnected layers of dramatic discourse that underpin CMIYC. More specifically, we explored how the film used confidence crime to debate the legitimization of social roles and the danger in which ‘appearances’ place order and the American dream. We also explained that the cinematic narrative parallels popular criminological discourses on the supposed ‘causal relationship’ of family dysfunctionality, poverty, class and adolescence with crime. Third, we pointed out that specific cinematic characters (sons and fathers) are mobilized as symbols of the disciplinary relationship of individuals-subjects with the State. Finally, we highlighted the emergence of gender discourses through representations of the confidence world as essentially male, and the presence of women as ‘dangerous’. All these themes point to the ever-lasting battle of conservative and progressive voices in American policy and social milieus. It is worth noting that there is a direct correspondence between conservative discourses of crime and the popular criminologies that we unpacked in the article. Contrariwise, progressive discourses emerged in the film wherever these popular criminologies were deconstructed and mocked. It may be time to reconsider the value of cinematic narratives of crime not just for entertainment purposes, but also as a source for a radical critique of the criminological project itself. Notes 1. The screenplay, authored by Jeff Nathanson, is adapted from Frank Abagnale’s autobiography (co-authored with Stan Redding)—Catch Me If You
Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ Can: The Amazing True Story of the Most Extraordinary Liar in the History of Fun and Profit (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001). 2. The significance of gender is discussed extensively in the last section of the article. 3. To distinguish between father and son, we refer to Frank Abagnale Jr as ‘Frank’ in the rest of the text. 4. See, for example, Artificial Intelligence (2001); Jurassic Park (2001); Twister (executive producer, 1996); ET The Extraterrestrial (1982); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
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Tzanelli et al.—‘Con me if you can’ Central Lancashire. Her research interests include identity, gender and ethnicity, film-induced tourism and crime and popular culture, areas in which she has published in international journals. MAJID YAR is Lecturer in Criminology at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include cybercrime, crime and popular culture and criminological and social theory. He has published in journals such as Theoretical Criminology, British Journal of Criminology, Theory Culture and Society and Economy and Society. MARTIN O’BRIEN is Lecturer in Community Justice at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include the sociology of environmental change, waste and recycling, social policy and welfare, citizenship and social justice and social theory. His publications include Theorising Welfare (Sage, 1998, co-authored with Sue Penna) and Theorising Modernity (1999, Longman, edited with Sue Penna and Colin Hay).
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