Lying in the film Los amantes pasajeros by Pedro Almodóvar

Abstract

In his film I'm So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros), Almodóvar assigned direct critical function to his movie. Using many words and expressions to legitimize expressed lies, Almodóvar's movie provides us with a corpus for analysis of the linguistic means that are used in Spanish in a communication based on lies. Considering that people primarily lie using language, from a linguistic point of view, a lie could be analyzed as an act of speech. Since lying was traditionally an ethical issue, this paper analyses a lie from a linguistic perspective and views their false assertions as acts of speech within a conversational context. Lying is viewed as a speech act of insincere assertion. Telling a lie in a performative construction would destroy it. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, a lie is 'a false statement made with the intent to deceive'. To lie is to make a believed-false statement with the intention that that statement be believed to be true by the other person. Grice (1975) concluded that when uttering a speech act, the speaker has certain intentions. To understand a speech act is to uncover speaker's intention. In order for a lie to be considered a successful speech act, speaker's intention must be concealed and since it is impossible for an addressee to recognize these intentions every time, the speech act of lying can be accomplished. In terms of conversational maxims, we are interested in the maxim of quality: be truthful. A speech act of lying directly contradicts this maxim. Examples for this paper were found in the film I'm So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros, 2013) by a famous Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar. The examples are cited and analyzed chronologically.