[Robert Urbanek]

I have experienced scores of meaningful coincidences (synchronicity) involving falcons, an icon of the Egyptian sun god Ra. Interest in falcons led me to The Maltese Falcon and a different memory of the story, in which the bird was broken, not just scratched.

Suspecting I had seen a variation of the movie with a different ending, I recently purchased a DVD of a likely candidate: the 1975 film The Black Bird, a parody of The Maltese Falcon.

(Spoiler Alert) The movie starred George Segal as Sam Spade, Jr. and featured both old and new characters pursuing the bird, including Elisha Cook, reprising his role as Wilmer Cook; a mysterious Russian woman; and a Nazi dwarf with Hawaiian henchmen. In the movie, the black bird is neither scratched nor broken. Instead, the Hawaiians dumped the bird off a boat. As Spade tries to retrieve it from the ocean floor in a deep-sea diving suit, a great white shark swoops in, grabs the black bird in his jaws, and swims away.

This ending seemed to draw from Egyptian mythology. Ra travels in a boat, the Barque of Ra, from which he battles the sea demon Apep. In The Black Bird, Ra, personified as the falcon, falls from his boat, and is captured by Apep, portrayed by the shark. If I was an incarnation of Ra, did my intersection with this film mean I had lost my personal struggle with Evil? Or perhaps my spiritual journey, like the film, is just a farce.