The Maltese Falcon discussion

Great stories are told for a reason…
…and one of the best reasons is that of the cautionary tale

Like Chaucer’s The Pardoner, The Maltese Falcon has a warning for us:
False idols will get you killed.

If you read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or you watch John Huston’s version of the Maltese Falcon, there’s a reason you can’t put the book down or walk out of the theater, even though what you’re watching or reading may make you very uncomfortable. These cautionary stories have you hooked and are telling you something you can’t deny: truth in fiction.

As with the tale of the pardoner’s avarice, the Maltese Falcon (book or movie) warns you once again that greed and idolatry are cardinal sins—of the “seven deadly sins” type.

When Glanton’s gang of amoral murderers burns across America’s western deserts in Blood Meridian, in the back of the mind something is saying, “Don’t end up this way!” Samuel (Dashiell Hammett) Spade is saying, “Don’t end up like the Fat Man, Wilmer, ‘Ms. Wunderly,’ Miles Archer, Floyd Thursby, Joel Cairo, or maybe even Sam Spade.” Can you count their sins? Beyond idolatry, lust, greed and killing?

If you take a look at the Ten Commandments the first three items are covered with a command to remain true and not have idols before God.

“Ms. Wunderly” does not exactly honor her father and mother.

Murder, adultery and theft are essential to the story.

False witness and coveting round out the tale.

In Chaucer’s story, the ending presents us with an enigma: an unnatural, hairless, ambiguously asexual amoral character “a gelding or a mare”. And, as with the curious ending of Blood Meridian where the story ends when the kid who is now a man goes to “the Jakes” and disappears, so, the Maltese Falcon is, in the end, the “stuff that dreams are made of,” or is it the stuff that screams are made of?

Whatever did happen to Joel Cairo?

W.B. Yeats’
The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Joel Cairo ended up in Casablanca....tee hee tee hee.