Forties Flick - Analysis

A screen of slats, a mind behind it

Central claim: the poem treats looking as a kind of editing—each lift or tilt of the Venetian blind turns lived experience into a framed, half-erased story, and the speaker can’t decide whether that transformation is a loss (melancholy, artificiality) or the only way to bear what’s too real. From the start, vision is already compromised: the shadow of the Venetian blind falls on a painted wall, making even the room feel like a set. The plant shadows and plaster animals aren’t just décor; they’re evidence that what surrounds the speaker is partly alive, partly imitation—an early hint of the poem’s core contradiction.

The first “movie”: bright stare into a hole

The opening images build a small tragedy out of ordinary light. Shadows focus the tragic melancholy of a bright stare into nowhere, and that nowhere becomes a hole compared to black holes in space. The leap from blind shadows to astrophysics feels exaggerated on purpose: it shows how quickly perception can turn domestic quiet into cosmic emptiness. Even before any plot arrives, the poem suggests that looking hard enough produces a void—clarity doesn’t guarantee meaning.

“Zip!”: the world appears, thin as paper

When the woman in bra and panties moves to the window, the poem snaps into a cinematic gesture: Zip! and the blind goes up. The street scene that offers itself is immediately diminished: pedestrians are wafer-thin, their certainty—know where they are going—reads less like reassurance than like a sign they are extras in someone else’s shot. Then the blind returns: it comes down slowly, the slats slowly tilted up. That double motion is crucial: the world is both closed off and made more controllable, as though the speaker wants not darkness but a calibrated amount of visibility—enough to feel something, not enough to be overwhelmed.

The turn: asking why it must end

Why must it always end this way? is the poem’s hinge, shifting from the sensual, private room to a broader meditation on narrative endings—how scenes conclude, how attention shuts down. The next image, a dais with woman reading, feels like a public counterpart to the underwear-at-the-window moment: another woman, another kind of exposure, but now organized by culture and ceremony. Yet the detail that most pulls is not the book but the ruckus of her hair, and then all that is unsaid that drags us back into the silence. The poem’s tone changes here: less flicker, more ache. Silence isn’t just absence; it’s a force that recruits the reader, making us complicit in the longing to complete what the poem refuses to say.

Silence as technology: library, telephone, plot

The poem then lists silences that are strangely manufactured: Silence of the library, and the telephone with its pad—objects designed to manage communication, to make pauses useful. That leads to the startling claim that we didn’t have to reinvent them: they’d already gone away into the plot of a story. In other words, even our most familiar quiet has been pre-shaped by narrative conventions; it’s already “literary.” The phrase The “art” part sharpens the poem’s self-suspicion: art is defined as knowing what important details to leave out, and even character becomes a technique, developed rather than discovered.

Too real, hence artificial—and the laugh that won’t stop

The poem’s most pointed tension arrives when it calls things too real / To be of much concern and therefore artificial. That paradox doesn’t dismiss reality; it shows a mind protecting itself. If the real is unbearable, the psyche may downgrade it into “not important,” turning it into style so it can be handled. Yet the poem refuses to keep reality out: suddenly it’s all over the page, and The indoors with the outside becomes part of you. The ending is bracingly unsentimental: you realize you’ve never left off laughing at death, with death rendered not as a climax but as The background, like a dark vine at the porch edge. The laugh isn’t joy; it’s a survival reflex, a way of living with the knowledge that the blind will always come down again.

A sharper question the poem leaves open

If art is the skill of leaving things out, what does it mean that the poem keeps letting the “outside” seep in—space’s black holes, the wafer-thin street, the dark vine of death? The blind doesn’t just hide; it measures how much truth can be admitted without collapsing the scene. The poem seems to ask whether we control the slats, or whether the need to control is itself the plot we can’t escape.