Catch Me If You Can · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch how a model-airplane decal becomes a multinational's seal of authority. Frank Abagnale, barely seventeen, soaks the Pan Am logo off a toy in a hotel sink, lifts it onto a counterfeit payroll check, and the bank pays. Nothing in the object is real. It works anyway. That little act — a child's toy made to vouch for a global institution — holds the whole of Spielberg's film in one gesture, and it happens to be the cleanest illustration you could ask for of something Gilles Deleuze called the powers of the false.

Classical cinema ran on a quiet contract: the image tells the truth, and a thing is what it shows itself to be. Deleuze noticed a strain of modern film that breaks that contract and finds the false has its own power — not lying as a defect, but forgery as a creative act, identity as something you make rather than something you have. His name for the figure at the center of it is le faussaire, the forger. Frank is the purest forger popular cinema has produced. He doesn't impersonate one man; he runs a series — Pan Am pilot, pediatrician, Louisiana prosecutor — each persona printed up and cashed like a fresh check, each discarded for the next. The forger is never a single liar. He's a chain of metamorphoses, and the film is built as exactly that: one escalating costume after another.

Why do the costumes work? Because Frank grasps early what the film keeps staging — that authority is largely a matter of costume and conviction. The pilot's uniform doesn't represent authority; it produces it. The concourse parts for the livery, not the boy inside it. Deleuze has a word for a posture that lays bare the social relation it performs: the gest. Frank's uniforms are pure gest. Strip the wings off the jacket and there's a frightened teenager, but nobody strips the jacket, because institutions run on habit. An object means, in Deleuze's borrowing from Peirce, by 'mark' — by customary chain. See a uniform, expect a pilot. See a Pan Am check, expect funds. Frank weaponizes the mark. And the film is unusually alert to where the mark fails: the days a check could travel before bouncing, the slowness of interbank verification. That gap in the habitual chain is the exact space forgery lives in. The con is an exploit of relation itself — of the trust that lets a piece of paper stand in for a man's word.

There's a further turn of the screw. The film is 'based on a true story,' adapted from a memoir Abagnale co-wrote and has himself muddied over the years. So the picture is a forger's account of his own forgeries, narrated in glossy retrospect. Deleuze would call this fabulation — a subject caught in the act of legending himself. The unreliable surface isn't a problem to be corrected. It's the form matching the content.

Here is what makes the film stranger and better than a caper. In Deleuze, the forger belongs to the time-image — to Welles's F for Fake, to Robbe-Grillet — where the false dissolves story into versions that can't be told apart. Spielberg does the opposite. He takes the one figure who should detonate classical storytelling and locks him inside the most classical structure there is: the chase. Situation, action, pursuit; Hanratty steadily closing the distance; the brisk, propulsive cutting of Michael Kahn keeping the sensory-motor circuit at full power. The film's real invention is the friction between these two things. Its content is the powers of the false. Its form is the airtight certainty of the movement-image. The forger gets domesticated, made charming, eventually returned to a family of sorts. That matters because it shows the false can be metabolized by popular cinema — the modern dissolver of truth re-tooled as entertainment, the time-image's most dangerous figure wearing a movement-image's uniform. Which is, of course, its own forgery. The film does to its genre exactly what Frank does to the bank.

The lineage is worn openly. From Charade and North by Northwest comes the pursued man improvising new personas to stay a step ahead, charm doing the work violence would do elsewhere; North by Northwest also bequeaths the kinetic graphic title, revived here as the animated opening. From The Sting comes the con-caper grammar: period pastiche, chapter structure, the cat-and-mouse between grifter and law. The animated-title-plus-lounge-jazz signature reaches back through The Pink Panther and Anatomy of a Murder, whose Saul Bass titles and Ellington score are the precise mid-century devices Williams's cool saxophone and the Kuntzel/Deygas credits consciously revive. But the deepest debt is to Paper Moon, where the con is a screen for paternal longing. That's Spielberg's engine. Frank forges because the real family dissolved — Walken's father undone by tax trouble, shrinking into bars and modest rooms. The false is how the boy keeps being his father's son.

So the saddest scenes aren't the heists. They're the Christmas phone calls, Frank alone in the world dialing the one man who is thinking about him — the hunter become surrogate father across the line of pursuit. Forgery turns out to be a way of reaching for someone. Watch it again and watch the uniform, not the man. Notice how often the world pays out on a costume, and how rarely anyone checks the wings.