The Black Bird

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

This volume, based on the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, is interesting because, while criticizing the cinema through the viewpoint of one of its heroes, it finds special significance in this criticism. The volume contains ten sets of brief poems called newsreels; four sets of poems which progressively describe scenes from the film, the characters, the actors, and Humphrey Bogart; five excerpts from Bogart’s supposed diary; and a four-part interview with his spirit after death. The newsreels are both historical and surreal. They provide a context for understanding the film by reporting the social and political realities of the times, yet, since they are less pictorial than absurdly witty, they establish a black humour corresponding to the film’s eerieness. As heightened images of news clips which audiences would have seen when viewing The Maltese Falcon, these newsreels suggest that the film reflects its times and mirrors the spiritual crisis of the twentieth century. The poems describing the film contain jarring perspectives suggestive of the chaotic way in which scenes are shot. Following the first set of newsreels and the first excerpt from Bogart’s diary, these poems show that the scenes are images that are neither aesthetically coherent nor simply contained by the film, that it is impossible to consider the film organically or as an enclosed world. The poems describing the characters also back a steady viewpoint, yet they uniformly reveal the characters as caricatures. The characters, rationalizing their behaviour in frustrated and spiritless ways, are disparaged in an unsympathetic manner similar to Bogart’s attitude to people. The poems about the actors reveal them in a similarly unsympathetic light. Their biographies are occasions for the poet’s cruel wit. The actors are viewed as robots possessing no sense of the relation of life to the illusions they seem to create. The poems about Bogart show that he has the same stunted being as the other actors. But his diary proves that he struggles to be amusing and intellectually alive. Since he knows that he is automatic yet disoriented, impulsive yet passive, he makes himself the image of an era. Unable to tolerate his cinematic image, believing it has removed his sense of self, he is immensely self-critical in letting “acid joy” eat through his cynicism. In his diary he proves that he can get behind his cinematic image occasionally, that he can convert his psychological into a metaphysical uncertainty sometimes. In his punning desperateness and reductive thoughtfulness, he assumes the burden of creating an image for himself and his generation. Unhappy about being the “messiah of illusion” and a fragmented person, he becomes a true image of the times by making a sense of himself. The poet intelligently turns Bogart’s death into an instructive image of America’s malaise and its unpreparedness to face the twentieth century whose illusions it has created in film.