From Slavoj Zizek, “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,” in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1992)

It is therefore totally misleading to locate the difference between the classical and the hard-boiled detective as one of "intellectual" versus "physical" activity, to say that the classical detective of logic and deduction is engaged in reasoning while the hard-boiled detective is mainly engaged in chase and fight. The real break consists in the fact that, existentially, the classical detective is not "engaged" at all: he maintains an eccentric position throughout; he is excluded from the exchanges that take place among the group of suspects constituted by the corpse. It is precisely on the basis of this exteriority of his position (which is of course not to be confused with the position of the "objective" scientist: the latter's distance toward the object of his research is of quite another nature) that the homology between the detective and the analyst is founded. One of the clues indicating the difference between the two types of detective is their respective attitudes toward financial reward. After solving the case, the classical detective accepts with accentuated pleasure payment for the services he has rendered, whereas the hard-boiled detective as a rule disdains money and solves his cases with the personal commitment of somebody fulfilling an ethical mission, although this commitment is often hidden under a mask of cynicism. What is at stake here is not the classical detective's simple greed or his callousness toward human suffering and injustice-the point is much finer: the payment enables him to avoid getting mixed up in the libidinal circuit of (symbolic) debt and its restitution. The symbolic value of payment is the same in psychoanalysis: the fees of the analyst allow him to stay out of the "sacred" domain of exchange and sacrifice, i.e., to avoid getting involved in the analysand's libidinal circuit . . . . The hard-boiled detective is, on the contrary, "involved" from the very beginning, caught up in the circuit: this involvement defines his very subjective position. What causes him to solve the mystery is first of all the fact that he has a certain debt to honor. We can locate this "settlement of (symbolic) accounts" on a wide scale ranging from Mike Hammer's primitive vendetta ethos in Mickey Spillane's novels to the refined sense of wounded subjectivity that characterizes Chandler's Philip Marlowe. (60-61)

Such an involvement entails the loss of the "excentric" position by means of which the classical detective plays a role homologous to the "subject supposed to know." That is to say, the detective is never, as a rule, the narrator of the classical detective novel, which has either an "omniscient" narrator or one who is a sympathetic member of the social milieu, preferably the detective's Watsonian companion--in short, the person/or whom the detective is a "subject supposed to know." The "subject supposed to know" is an effect of transference and is as such structurally impossible in the first person: he is by definition "supposed to know" by another subject. For that reason, it is strictly prohibited to divulge the detective's "inner thoughts." His reasoning must be concealed till the final triumphal denouement, except for occasional mysterious questions and remarks whose function is to emphasize even further the inaccessible character of what goes on in the detective's head. Agatha Christie is a great master of such remarks, although she seems sometimes to push them to a mannerist extreme: in the midst of an intricate investigation, Poirot usually asks a question such as "Do you know by any chance what was the color of the stockings worn by the lady's maid?"; after obtaining the answer, he mumbles into his moustache: ''Then the case is completely clear!"

The hard-boiled novels are in contrast generally narrated in the first person, with the detective himself as narrator (a notable exception, which would require exhaustive interpretation, is the majority of Dashiell Hammett's novels). This change sudden it becomes evident that he has been "played for a sucker." What looked at first like an easy job turns into an intricate game of criss-cross, and all his effort is directed toward clarifying the contours of the trap into which he has fallen. The "truth" at which he attempts to arrive is not just a challenge to his reason but concerns him ethically and often painfully. The deceitful game of which he has become a part poses a threat to his very identity as a subject. In short, the dialectic of deception in the hard-boiled novel is the dialectic of an active hero caught in a nightmarish game whose real stakes escape him. His acts acquire an unforeseen dimension, he can hurt somebody unknowingly--the guilt he thus contracts involuntarily propels him to "honor his debt."

In this case, then, it is the detective himself-not the terrified members of the "group of suspects"-who undergoes a kind of "loss of reality," who finds himself in a dreamlike world where it is never quite clear who is playing what game. And the person who embodies this deceitful character of the universe, its fundamental corruption, the person who lures the detective and "plays him for a sucker," is as a rule the femme fatale, which is why the final "settlement of accounts" usually consists in the detective's confrontation with her. This confrontation results in a range of reactions, from desperate resignation or escape into cynicism in Hammett and Chandler to loose slaughter in Mickey Spillane (in the final page of I, the Jury, Mike Hammer answers "It was easy" when his dying, treacherous lover asks him how he could kill her in the middle of making love). Why is this ambiguity, this deceitfulness and corruption of the universe embodied in a woman whose promise of surplus enjoyment conceals mortal danger? What is the precise dimension of this danger? Our answer is that, contrary to appearance, the femme fatale embodies a radical ethical attitude, that of "not ceding one's desire," of persisting in it to the very end when its true nature as the death drive is revealed. It is the hero who, by rejecting the femme fatale, breaks with his ethical stance. (62-63)

And it is the same with the figure of the femme fatale in hard-boiled novels and in film noir: she who ruins the lives of men and is at the same time victim of her own lust for enjoyment, obsessed by a desire for power, who endlessly manipulates her partners and is at the same time slave to some third, ambiguous person, sometimes even an impotent or sexually ambivalent man. What bestows on her an aura of mystery is precisely the way she cannot be clearly located in the opposition between master and slave. Al the moment she seems permeated with intense pleasure, it suddenly becomes apparent that she suffers immensely; when she seems to be the victim of some horrible and unspeakable violence, it suddenly becomes clear that she enjoys it. We can never be quite sure if she enjoys or suffers, if she manipulates or is herself the victim of manipulation. It is this that produces the deeply ambiguous character of those moments in the film noir(or in the hard-boiled detective novel) when the femme fatale breaks down, loses her powers of manipulation, and becomes the victim of her own game. Let us just mention the first model of such a breakdown, the final confrontation between Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. As she begins to lose her grasp of the situation, Brigid suffers a hysterical breakdown; she passes immediately from one strategy to another. She first threatens, then she cries and maintains that she did not know what was really happening to her, then suddenly she assumes again an attitude of cold distance and disdain, and so on. In short, she unfolds a whole fan of inconsistent hysterical masks. This moment of the final breakdown of the femme fatale-who now appears as an entity without substance, a series of inconsistent masks without a coherent ethical attitude-this moment when her power of fascination evaporates and leaves us with feelings of nausea and disgust, this moment when we see "nought but shadows of what is not" where previously we saw clear and distinct form exerting tremendous powers of seduction, this moment of reversal is at the same time the moment of triumph for the hard-boiled detective. Now, when the fascinating figure of the femme fatale disintegrates into an inconsistent bric-a-brac of hysterical masks, he is finally capable of gaining a kind of distance toward her and of rejecting her.

The destiny of the femme fatale in film noir, her final hysterical breakdown, exemplifies perfectly the Lacanian proposition that "Woman does not exist": she is nothing but "the symptom of man," her power of fascination masks the void of her nonexistence, so that when she is finally rejected, her whole ontological consistency is dissolved. But precisely as nonexisting, i.e., at the moment at which, through hysterical breakdown, she assumes her nonexistence, she constitutes herself as "subject": what is waiting for her beyond hysterization is the death drive in its purest. In feminist writings on film noir we often encounter the thesis that the femme fatale presents a mortal threat to man (the hard-boiled detective), i.e., that her boundless enjoyment menaces his very identity as subject: by rejecting her at the end, he regains his sense of personal integrity and identity. This thesis is true, but in a sense that is the exact opposite of the way it is usually understood. What is so menacing about the femme fatale is not the boundless enjoyment that overwhelms the man and makes him woman's plaything or slave. It is not Woman as object of fascination that causes us to lose our sense of judgment and moral attitude but, on the contrary, that which remains hidden beneath this fascinating mask and which appears once the masks fall off: the dimension of the pure subject fully assuming the death drive. To use Kantian terminology, woman is not a threat to man insofar as she embodies pathological enjoyment, insofar as she enters the frame of a particular fantasy. The real dimension of the threat is revealed when we "traverse" the fantasy, when the coordinates of the fantasy space are lost via hysterical breakdown. In other words, what is really menacing about the femme fatale is not that she is fatal for men but that she presents a case of a "pure," nonpathological subject fully assuming her own fate. When the woman reaches this point, there are only two attitudes left to the man: either he "cedes his desire," rejects her and regains his imaginary, narcissistic identity (Sam Spade at the end of The Maltese Falcon), or he identifies with the woman as symptom and meets his fate in a suicidal gesture (the act of Robert Mitchum in what is perhaps the crucial film noir, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past). (65-66)