ABSTRACT
As the police lieutenant picked it up, he said: ‘It’s heavy! What is it?’ Sam Spade, incarnated by the legendary Humphrey Bogart, answered: ‘It’s the stuff that dreams are made of’. The object in question was a coarse, black statuette which turned out to be nothing more than a worthless reproduction of that famous treasure known as the ‘Maltese Falcon’. However, this dialogue does not appear in Dashiell Hammett’s novel, it was added by John Huston to end his film version. The plot portrays a group of colourful characters (‘swindlers’) enduring insufferable calamities as they pursue the precious object. It is a treasure hunt! Or, as Sam saw it, the desire to possess the unattainable: a dream. The irony of such a statement illustrates a current paradox in conservation: as a piece of heritage accumulates multiple stages of transformation, its prestige grows exponentially, yet its appearance and essence gradually fade away, becoming just a deferred presence of its prior self. In Hammett’s story, not only the Falcon’s location remains a mystery but the actual moment in which the original became a ‘falsification’ is also unknown. Even after all the adversity these characters have endured (treason, torture, even death), the obsession to crystallize their dreams kept pushing them towards even more reckless adventures. Their illusion to possess the famous bird, originally described as a golden statuette covered with precious stones, was enough to risk it all. In many ways, Hammett’s vignette illustrates certain pitfalls in the current treatment of heritage: we tend to overlook the actual transformations of heritage, replacing its actual appearance with a dream-image (a juxtaposed connotation). So, as much as heritage is deeply rooted in everyday life, its actual engagement stems from a dream-like scenario: insubstantial, provocative, and disconnected from reality.
