The Purloined Letter and the Massey Prenup: Of Ethics, The Lacanian Real, And Nuptial Bliss in Intolerable Cruelty‪.‬

In "The Purloined Letter," the 1845 Edgar Allan Poe short story, the queen of France receives a letter whose content, were anyone else to learn of it, would jeopardize her honor and safety. When the king enters the room and surprises her, she furtively tries to hide the letter but, failing to find a proper place for it, avoids the king's notice by dropping it in plain sight. Shortly thereafter, Minister D--enters the room and, after quickly inferring the compromising nature of the missive, steals it and replaces it with a facsimile. In an attempt to recover it, the queen hires the Paris prefect of police, who searches the minister's apartment for it but finds nothing. The baffled prefect therefore consults Poe's intrepid detective C. Auguste Dupin, who visits the minister in his apartment and quickly spies an unassuming piece of crumpled paper hidden, again, out in the open. Knowing that he has found what he came for, Dupin exits, purposely leaving his snuffbox behind. When he returns the following day to retrieve it, he brings with him a facsimile of the crumpled letter and, during an incident he has staged outside in the street to distract the minister, grabs the letter and leaves the facsimile in its place. In Intolerable Cruelty, the 2003 Coen brothers film, Miles Massey has everything going for him: good looks, a substantial fortune, and a sterling and celebrated record as a divorce attorney. But his success has come at a price: Miles is bored, no longer finding his profession an appropriate challenge for his talents. Events begin to take a turn, though, when he defends adulterous millionaire Rex Rexroth. Rexroth's glamorous wife Marylin, a serial divorcee, is suing him for everything he has, and when Miles's expertise again proves unbeatable in court, Marylin swears revenge against him. What follows is a series of deceitful skirmishes that pivot around the possession of another written document, this time an impregnable prenuptial agreement that bears the name of its author, Miles himself. "The Purloined Letter" and Intolerable Cruelty thus both revolve around scenes of deceit that center on the subjective positions characters assume in relation to an elusive signifier, whether purloined letter or Massey Prenup.