Identity Slippage and The Departed

The Departed is brilliant. You don't need me to tell you that.

What you won't be reading in the reviews, however, is how clever the script truly is -- in the sinister ways it embeds its deconstructive textual cues in the most flippant of dialogue.

Allow me to elaborate. Here is a scene:

At a golf driving range, Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) grills Sullivan (Matt Damon), probing him for personal information and testing his fiber against his immaculate record as a police officer. There is a certain amount of narrative tension. Baldwin plays the head of Sullivan's agency at the Massachusetts State Police force and Damon - don't worry, I am not spoiling anything that isn't clear within the first five minutes of the film - plays an undercover mole rooting out informants for Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). When Sullivan admits that he is engaged, Ellerby approves:

"Marriage is an important part of getting ahead. It lets people know you're not a homo. A married guy seems more stable. People see the ring, they think 'at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch.' Ladies see the ring, they know immediately that you must have some cash, and your cock must work."

The movie thus expands beyond merely a cat and mouse game between undercover cops and robbers, to the ways we use cultural referents to masquerade a stable self and hide our schizophrenic identities from others -- of symbolic interactionism and cultural hermeneutics in replacement of the intellectual bankruptcy of Freudianism and psychology (and you thought that first date dinner conversation about Freud and the Irish was just being cute). A wedding band is not representative of a union of love, or even symbolic of some psychosexual semiotics, but instead a marker of social positioning and identity.

Somebody could write a convincing dissertation that the characters' obsession with discovering "rats" amidst their ranks is about the rampant fear of homophobia and being outed in male dominated occupations (think about the conversation about 'how you know if someone is a rat') -- a thesis which would be well substantiated with Sullivan's erectile dysfunction (and his constant sexual slurs) and the thematic linkage to pederasty in the Catholic clergy (and you wondered why the movie ended with the image conflation of the 'rat' with the 'church').

The Departed is the best kind of movie: a sharply entertaining film that stands on its own, with an absolutely beguiling subtext that unravels the narrative days after you leave the theater.