So, we here at IDSG have lots of plans for the future. Good stuff is coming. But we need a bit longer to provide it. Just a little bit. So, to tide you over - because it's been a couple of weeks since you've heard from us - here's one of our bonus episodes, previously for Patreon backers only. (They got it months ago, along with seven other bonus episodes... consider bunging one or other of us a dollar a month for access to this exclusive bonus content.) This episode sees Daniel and myself, both Orson Welles fans, chatting about The Third Man. Enjoy, and see you soon with new material. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true
I'm Jack Graham, he, him, and in this podcast, I talk to my friend Daniel him, and in this podcast, I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he, him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each other when they don't think we're
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Well, there's basically no section of the top layer of American capital that was going to benefit from Trump.
You know, he made the market unstable, he failed to deal with coronavirus, etc.
You know, Coca-Cola didn't want him.
You know, the arms manufacturers don't care who's in power because they're catered to.
He did have a Diet Coke button on his desk, so maybe Coca-Cola wanted him.
He might have drank enough Diet Coke that they were like, you know, actually our profits are up.
Purely based on Donald Trump.
Simultaneously, single-handedly, yeah.
No, like, you know, big capital doesn't need him.
It's, you know, it's got... I'll take the tax cut, thanks.
Now fuck off, because, you know... Yeah, well, they got the tax cut in 2018, so that's it.
Biden is gonna do anything god like the degree to which that man i mean i was instantly i wasn't expecting much but i was expecting more than like i thought it would be longer than this before he just completely caved on everything.
Like, but he's not caving, because it's not like he believes in the thing.
He was saying the thing.
I thought maybe there was some chance that... but it literally is like, oh no no no, we're not gonna abolish ICE, we're gonna keep the kids in cages, they're just gonna be in softer cages.
And a $15 minimum wage, I think I even talked about this on the show.
Like, yeah, they're going to cut that immediately as soon as- and what did they do?
Yeah, no, we're not going to do that.
He's in a meeting with governors and mayors.
It's like, yeah, we put that in the thing, but we're definitely not going to actually do that.
Yeah.
No, that's not going to be a thing.
Yeah.
$2,000?
How about $1,400?
$1,400 sounds good, right?
We've only had six.
We always win.
We always said $1,400.
That was what we always said.
And every fucking liberal is like, well, if you read the bill, that was always the thing that was in the bill.
And it's like, just fuck off.
Just fuck off.
like it's not like it's just what i'm just do you not want to win in 2022 like i'm sorry it's just the whole process it's so it's so awful it's It's so awful.
Yeah, it is.
It's so fucking awful.
Like, just give up immediately, you know?
And like, I don't, like, Bernie is just, Bernie has gone along with it, you know?
And I, like, I don't know, I get it, in that like, if you're gonna be inside, and you're gonna play the game, and you're gonna say, like, Like, you know, like, it's not your decision to make.
You support the guy in hopes that you can get something better in the future, but it still looks super, super disappointing.
You know, like...
I don't know.
I'm willing to grant him like that slight bit of thing of going like, I think he doesn't agree with it, but he has to go along with it sort of thing, you know, like.
I genuinely think he'd be doing more good staying out of the government and criticizing it from the left on the outside, because doing what he's doing, he's just going to be shoveling, you know, young left wingers into disillusion.
And it's not like Bernie Sanders doesn't know this, you know?
Right, right.
There's a complicated calculus there, right?
And like, I'm... I don't know, like, I'm not disagreeing with you.
I agree with the logic.
I think you understand my logic.
It's all super frustrating.
I hate everything.
He's got a unique position, this is the thing.
Right.
Yeah.
And, like, what is and is not, like, the best thing is ultimately super contingent on what he... And we don't know the whole story because we don't know what's going on behind the scenes and all that sort of thing.
So, you know, like... Who knows?
Anyway, we should talk about the third man.
In a way, are we not already talking about the third man?
We are already.
Maybe this will be our cold open.
Nah, not really.
Not really, particularly.
Yeah, the third man.
This is bonus episode two of I Don't Speak German for Patreon backers only.
At least for the foreseeable.
For a few months, until we decide to release it.
Being recorded on the 20th stroke 21st of February 2021.
In case you're listening to this five years later and wonder what created the collapse in American society and we're looking at a discussion of the third man on a low rated podcast.
If you're listening to this under the reign of President Carlson.
In early 2025.
President Bollard.
President Taylor Greene.
President praying medic.
President Spencer.
President Enoch or Anglin or whatever.
Anyway, continue.
Yeah.
This is how that happened.
Yeah.
This episode, that's all you need.
That's all you need.
Join the dots up yourself.
I don't know.
You might be able to tell listeners we're in a bit of a funny mood.
I'm not sure I'm prepared for this episode at all.
I did re-watch the film.
Did you re-watch the film?
I watched it last week and I watched a little bit of it in like the last hour or so.
But, you know, just kind of like some of the pivotal scenes just to sort of like keep them back in my head.
So, but I don't think, I mean, you know, we'll go.
It'll be fine.
This is bonus material.
We'll go for it, yeah.
These are the people that already like us.
It's fine.
That's right, yeah, so we can basically abuse their goodwill.
We can just take advantage of them.
With impunity.
Give me a dollar.
You've already given me a dollar a month.
Here's a bunch of bullshit.
That's the answer that we give.
Yeah.
Much like Harry Lyme.
Much like Harry Lyme.
Exactly.
What we are doing for our audience, what Harry Lyme did to the people, we need the penicillin.
That's what's... They talk about the people and the proletariat.
We talk about the suckers and the mugs.
It's fine.
The suckers in the mugs that give us money on Patreon.
Who we love.
Who we love.
Yes, thank you very much.
Yeah.
Yeah, bonus episode two, as I say, if I don't speak German, in which we talk about The Third Man, released in 1949, I think.
Yeah.
Directed by Carol Reid, written by Graham Greene, starring Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, and Orson Welles, who plays Harry Lyme, the legendary Harry Lyme.
Who I didn't realize until I was doing, like, there was a TV series that came out starring Harry Lyme.
Yeah, there was a radio series.
There was a radio series and then, like, a TV series that ran for a few years.
And I'm just kind of like, did you not watch the film?
You really shouldn't.
Like, I know it's a prequel or whatever, but, like, you know, it didn't even star Orson Welles.
Like, that would have been...
Like, I can kinda see, like, oh, Orson Welles being a black market here on TV in 1951.
Like, I can sorta see, like, oh yeah, I could see watching that show.
But if it's not even, like, Orson Welles, it's like, oh, well, okay, whatever.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's like certain film characters, you know, they're so bound up with the person that plays them, there's really...
There's no point in making anything with that character if it's not the same actor.
For instance, you'd never make a Star Wars prequel about Han Solo as a young man, would you?
You wouldn't do that.
Because the whole point of Han Solo is that it's Harrison Ford.
So you couldn't do that.
Nobody would want to see that.
It's ridiculous.
Right, yeah.
You certainly wouldn't spend $250 million on a movie like that.
No, no.
It's silly.
And then, like, alternately, if you decided to make a TV show about the same, in the same universe, and decided in the last episode of the second season that you wanted to bring back a beloved character, you probably could recast that and not do an you probably could recast that and not do an abominable CGI recreation.
That would be another option for you if you were to choose to do that.
Well, I think the CGI, is a better actor than the real one, to be honest. - Yeah.
Yeah, but Harry Lyne was big.
People loved this.
And another thing that was big at the time was the music.
Oh yeah, the Zither music, which I hope you throw in a little bit of that Zither music here for the episode.
I might, I might.
Even though it's very annoying.
My granddad had like a, you know, a vinyl record of the music from the film.
He liked it so much.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's my anecdote.
It's great.
Did you grow up on it?
Like, I mean, did your granddad, sorry not to talk about your personal life, but did your granddad like play it often?
Like, was it like a thing that you kind of grew up with it or not so much?
No.
No.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, my granddad, you know, he only watched things about the Second World War.
Of course, this is about the Second World War, isn't it really?
It very much is about the Second World War.
I hope we get to talk about that a bit here in a second, yeah.
But yeah, like the only things he liked were things that were, you know, like the Battle of Britain and stuff like that.
He used to watch stuff like that.
Sure.
I don't know, like, I feel like we're not gonna talk- I understand, for a good long while afterwards, people had to process it culturally.
I get that.
That's how it goes, and I feel like we're in this kind of place now where I feel like people are, like, there's a sense that we're coming out of the pandemic, that the vaccines are here, it's gonna take some time to distribute them, we're gonna talk about that I'm sure.
But, like, people are very much, like, you're starting to get conversations about, like, should there be, like, movies and TV shows about the pandemic?
And I feel like there's this sense of, like, no, nobody wants to see that right now, right?
Yeah.
But I feel like in five or ten years, you could very easily see, you know, like, Pandemic romantic comedies or kind of whatever like I feel like that's gonna be a thing in a few years You know in the same way that like 9-11 like nothing like well actually you did see a ton of 9-11 shit But like it's I don't know it's a different thing.
It's like 9-11 was a singular event.
It was a day In our life, right?
Yeah.
That led to, like, ultimately, we're still, I mean, we're even now dealing with the consequences of 9-11.
We're still in wars that were started based on 9-11.
Oh yeah, yeah.
But I feel like pop culture sort of responded, like, because it was one day and, like, kind of the trauma kind of came and went fairly quickly, pop culture can respond fairly quickly.
And then you got, like, Movies about the Iraq War, movies about the World Trade Center, you know, and TV shows and everything.
But I feel like there was an immediate kind of cultural response within like kind of the TV and film industry.
Whereas with the pandemic, we really, I mean, we've seen a couple of like, You know, made for TV, kind of like Netflix movies or whatever that were like kind of pandemic related or whatever, but like not a ton and people come talking about it.
But I feel like we're going to see a big kind of cultural thing afterwards.
And if you look at like World War Two, like after World War Two and you look at like movies about World War Two on Wikipedia or whatever, like there's this big gap in which, you know, there's really not much immediately after the war.
And then in the late 40s, you see You know, like, war movies that are basically like adventure movies, where it's like, oh yeah, and then we went off and we killed a bunch of Japanese people, or we killed the Germans, or whatever, and that's sort of the history of it.
But it's not for, you know, many years until you really start to see people, like, really kind of...
Get to the core of what World War two was I mean like judgment at Nuremberg is like 1961 Yeah, which is like 15 years later and now Holocaust deniers look at that and go well Nobody's talking about the Holocaust until until like years years and years and years later.
It's like well a not true be pop culture takes a while to respond after trauma you need like a And I believe that's what the pandemic is going to be.
And so I find, I don't know, I know I would like to talk about the movie at some point, but I find what's interesting about The Third Man is the fact that it was made so soon after the war, and the fact that it's at least big chunks of it were filmed in Vienna, and in that In that kind of physical and emotional, like, context, right?
Because nobody, obviously in 1949, nobody knew what Vienna would look like in 1972 or whatever.
You know, nobody knew what was going to happen kind of, like, after this.
And one of the things that, like, I as an American respond to in The Third Man is the, um, A, just the beauty of, like, the European city of Vienna.
Um, the one European city that I've spent any amount of time in is Prague.
Which I got to spend, I spent about a month in Prague in 2010 with my wife on a study abroad kind of thing.
And Prague is gorgeous and it looks very similar to Vienna in a lot of ways.
In fact, I rewatched this movie with my wife and she was kind of like, is that Prague?
And I'm like, no, it's Vienna.
And she's like, okay, okay, we're good.
And so, you know, the kind of beautiful cobblestone streets and then kind of the architecture and all that sort of thing.
But also, like, the bombed-out buildings that were there and that, like, are never remarked upon in the narrative.
Like, nobody ever says, oh yeah, we had a bombing campaign come across this four years ago, or whatever, but it's very much part of the landscape, and that's something that was very Common in this kind of era in Central Europe but like is a very different thing than what we had in America like the post-war years in the United States are Everything's great.
Nobody bombed us the Bombers, yeah, we sent the bombers over there and now we just get to build we just get to have factories that export everything and we get the money back and like the post-war years in America are very much like You know a time of plenty and bounty and like kind of create this very particular kind of economic circumstance which You know creates kind of the baby boom era and you know all that sort of thing.
And so the post-war years are very There were good years for America, but not so much for Europe And you know, it's funny I think American audiences don't necessarily like kind of see a movie of this kind and kind of think about the kind of the post-war years in Europe and I think it is this kind of bit of historical context that gets lost for American audiences, and I don't know if you have... I'm sure you have something to say about that, but I don't know if you have anything you'd like to say about that.
Well, let me see if I can respond to the entire podcast's worth of things you've just remarked on.
Yeah, yeah, no, no.
I just rambled for four minutes, and you can now spend two hours responding to my four minutes of rambling, but you know what I'm trying to get at, yeah.
Yeah, the first thing you talked about was pandemic TV.
I think that's interesting.
In this country, we've had a few comedy shows, have done quarantine or lockdown versions, specials and things.
I don't know if you're familiar with this very important cultural touchstone that we have in Britain called the Vicar of Dibley.
Dwayne Dibley?
Dwayne Dibley, that's all I know.
That's a different sitcom.
The Vicar of Dibley is a very long-running, very beloved, very, very, very bad sitcom on the BBC, starring Dawn French as a female vicar in a little village.
And it's been running for 78 billion years and, you know, it's one of those things that the British just inexplicably adore, even though it's the most absolute wretched shite.
And they did a few sort of special episodes where this comedy vicar, played by Dawn French, is at home during the lockdown, you know, making videos and having Zoom meetings and stuff like that.
So we've done a few things like that on a sort of comedy level.
My sense, I don't actually watch that much TV, but my sense is that, I don't know what the soaps have been doing.
Soaps are probably the same everywhere, but in Britain we have several big soaps and you've got EastEnders, you've got Coronation Street, I believe Emmerdale is still going.
And there's some other ones that are kind of about younger, prettier people.
I don't watch them, so I don't know what they're doing.
But they tend to kind of, sort of refer to real events, but never anything that's too sticky to deal with.
Like, they will bring in issues, but EastEnders is set in, obviously it's not The real East End of London, because the real East End of London is now all coffee bars.
But in the television show... It just becomes Friends in like 1997, I guess.
Yeah, it's all been gentrified and the poors have been ethnically cleansed and stuff like that.
In the TV East Enders, it's still kind of this mythical version of the East End where everybody's kind of a chirpy cockney cocksparrow who runs their own little garage and their own pub and stuff like that.
And they have these They all have affairs with each other.
I think that's basically it.
And in that, you know, they didn't mention 7-7.
Like, the 7-7 bombings just didn't happen in that version of London.
Except that I think, bizarrely, years later they kind of referred to the 10-year anniversary memorial service or something?
That's what you get.
British TV is really fucking demented.
But I don't think, as I say, I don't know, but I don't think any of the soaps have... I think they've all just been kind of pretending that it's not happening.
It's just carrying on in an alternate dimension where there's no... I could be wrong about this.
People will angrily at me to tell me, actually, no.
Yeah, all the soap opera listeners and viewers in our audience.
I believe there are a few.
I'd actually be curious.
I have not looked at one.
I would.
Is doing about the pandemic.
And I mean, you know, historically, like in the, again, in the, in the depression, historically, like these, these kind of shows, like the soap operas were born in the wake of the depression of the, you know, like the whole point was, well, we need to sell soap.
Yeah.
the way to do that is to keep making our, at the time it was radio programs, and then later it became TV programs when television was birthed.
And so there is that, like they were literally born in that era.
And I feel like, you know, we're only seeing the beginning of like kind of what mass media is going to turn into, like in the wake of a year or two of being locked down.
But yeah, no, no.
Yeah, no, I don't know what the, like I haven't even thought about what the soap operas are doing, honestly.
Kind of a fascinating question.
Yeah, yeah.
TV drama generally, I think is just kind of ignoring it.
And it's easy for British TV drama, because half of it's set in the Edwardian era now, and it's just clones of Downton Abbey, because everybody wants to have the next Downton Abbey.
And the other half is like murder mysteries set in either cutesy little villages filled with eccentric middle class people or sort of stereotypical rundown urban areas from fables of Glasgow in the 80s and stuff like that.
Those are the three types of drama we have in Britain.
Edwardian era soap operas that pretend to be dramas because they want to be Downton Abbey And like, like serious crime shows that are all about how dreadful poor people living on estates are and taking drugs and things.
And crime shows that are about lovable middle class eccentrics killing each other in villages.
That's it.
So I don't think you really need to respond to reality in any of those sorts of things.
But my sense is that a few years down the line we will kind of get a series of big serious pandemic dramas like I think we'll get them on TV and we'll get them on in cinema as well and one of them will win the Oscar and you know and and then it will be
Well, I mean, just to... Well, there's already been a Michael Bay thriller, which was... I think it's been released, where it was set a couple of years down the line, like COVID-23, and we're all in lockdown, and there's a woman who's locked in, and there's a guy who's trying to break in, or whatever.
I saw a trailer for it.
So, yeah, to make the pandemic comprehensible to Hollywood audiences, they've turned it into a sort of dystopian sci-fi thriller directed by Michael Bay.
They've turned it into a really bad version of Rear Window, which isn't even about Rear Window.
But no, I suspect we'll get something like the 9-11 movie phenomenon, which that's a whole... I'm fascinated by how culture responded to 9-11.
That's a whole different tangent, which we'll leave... We will probably cover on this podcast at some point, because I am equally fascinated by it, yes.
Let's talk about Matt Damon in the green zone at some point.
Let's do that.
It'll be great.
Let's do that.
For now, let me just say, Lindsay Ellis has a good two-part video about cultural depictions of 9-11 and movies about 9-11.
That's a good starting place if you're interested in that.
Co-signed, for sure, yeah.
Yeah.
I think a few years down the line, we'll start getting these, oh, it's a terribly serious pandemic.
They're probably written by Aaron Sorkin, you know, and it'll win an Oscar and everybody will tap, flap.
What's the word?
Slap.
That's the word.
Slap each other on the back about how great they are.
And I think that'll be it.
The pandemic directed by David Fincher.
That's what we have to look forward to in five years.
Yeah.
What's the other thing?
Oh yeah, the Holocaust.
I mean, obviously the Holocaust is a huge topic, but the way the Holocaust has been depicted in culture from just after the war right the way through today, that is a huge, fascinating topic.
I'm very interested in that.
I think there is some truth to the thing where people talk about the fact that the Holocaust wasn't talked about so much in the years immediately after the war.
I think that's true.
There's lots of interesting reasons why.
It's not because it didn't happen and people were inventing it.
It's for lots of interesting… Norman Finkelstein has written about this and, you know, Norman Finkelstein has some problems.
There's lots of things he says I disagree with.
He's a big problematic figure who does a lot of really interesting work alongside like, oh, some takes I'm not going to sign on to.
Yeah, I profoundly disagree with a lot of things Norman Finkelstein does and says, but he is a very interesting historian.
And I think he's right when he talks about, I mean, other people have talked about this as well, but one of the reasons why the Holocaust didn't get talked about, and arguably it's talked about too much, or rather it's talked about in bad ways and unhealthy ways now, But it's sort of swung that way from the fact that, in culture I mean, not in history.
It's too culturally omnipresent.
It's become too much of a media signifier, that's what I mean.
I don't mean that we shouldn't talk about it in terms of history and politics.
But it's swung that way from being not talked about in culture.
And one of the reasons I think that he and other people point out is that in the years immediately after the Second World War you had the Cold War.
And it was actually seen as kind of a suspect thing to talk about the Holocaust.
If you were an American talking about the Holocaust, your loyalties were suspect.
Because the Soviets talked about the Holocaust and communists talked about it.
And of course, America was allied with West Germany, you know, which was staffed to an enormous extent.
The higher echelons of that society and government were staffed to an enormous extent by ex-Nazis, many of whom had been directly involved in it.
Operation Paperclip, right?
Well, yeah.
We're going to bring in a bunch of Nazis to create NASA, essentially.
And today, our modern Nazis look back on that and go, well, yeah, you just need that German engineering.
And if we just had more Nazis in society, and we were allowed to just have Open white supremacy and get rid of all these Jews that we could just have like a great space program again because You know material factors have no effect on anything.
No, no, of course not No, but to sort of veer vaguely back in the direction of what we're supposed to be talking about you talked about you know, Vienna and A lot of it's actually filmed in Vienna, and as you say, the bombed-out landscape is just not mentioned.
And that's fascinating to me.
Despite the fact that they're crawling over rubble in certain sequences, right?
Yeah!
It's not just in the background, it's deliberately there.
And again, as an American, I think that even re-watching it last week, I'm kind of on that.
I'd seen it a couple of times before.
And I was definitely on that like, wow, I just forget how overt some of that is, because at the time it didn't even need remarking on.
Everybody understood what this was, and I think the fact that this was not an American production It has a lot to say to that.
Exactly.
They're not hiding it.
They're very much not hiding it.
They're making it a central feature of the landscape.
They go out of their way to show you the ruined buildings and the shattered city.
And they go out of their way to show you the fact that it's divided between four sets of conquerors, essentially.
And as you say, it's not hidden, but it's not remarked upon either.
And I think there's some interesting stuff there in a movie that is so concerned with looking at and analysing and negotiating different approaches to ethics, different approaches to morality.
I mean, the central question of the movie is what's the right thing to do?
Is it to be loyal to the people you love?
Or is it to take into account what those people actually do?
It's actually a very stark dramatisation of the consequentialist versus universalist ethics of question.
And in a film that directly concerned with dramatising That's stark and an ethical question.
I think the fact that it shows you over and over again without really remarking upon the fact that it's taking place in a city that has been conquered and is being occupied and there are armed Agents of the conquering, occupying powers roaming the streets, basically running the place.
Everybody's frightened of the police.
Everybody's scraping for food and cigarettes and necessaries.
And they're scurrying in and out of the buildings that were shattered by the bombs dropped by these people.
I think it's really interesting they do that.
And to raise your point about America after the Second World War being very different to Europe after the Second World War, And then your other point about this being a British production.
The fact that it's a British production, written by an Englishman, funded by British companies, and the central character is an American.
That's one of those things that happens.
British films for many years always used to have American central characters played by American actors because they thought if they didn't have that, they wouldn't be able to market them in America.
But I think this film is doing more than that, isn't it?
It is kind of... I mean, part of the point of the movie is that there's this guy... Well, it's using... It's taking the idea that like, well, of course you have to talk about an American.
Because otherwise how do you sell it to Americans?
Americans, you can't have a funny accent person in an American movie.
You gotta have like, you know, but like using that as a way of like kind of asking interesting questions.
Holly Martins is so incredibly American.
He's even a writer of Westerns.
He's a Western writer.
I hope we can talk about that.
Yeah.
No, I feel like that element gets left out of a lot of analysis of this film.
And I hope we do.
Talk a little bit about that here in a minute.
Yeah, sure.
But what it's doing is it's taking somebody who basically doesn't understand what the war was from a European perspective.
He wasn't in it.
He didn't fight in it.
He's only just come to Europe pretty much immediately after the war.
And he doesn't get it.
He just does not get post-war Vienna.
And he's treating the people in the place like he's still in America, and the film is very much about this guy's slow, grinding learning process, that he's not in America anymore.
Isn't the backstory like he was selling... Wasn't he there selling black market cigarettes or something?
Am I misremembering the story of the film?
Because the whole idea is that Holly Martins and Harry Lyme We're, like, working together in, like, pre-war and during the war, and then, like, he kinda goes back home and is continuing to write, or am I misremembering something?
I don't know.
I've never got the impression that Holly was ever involved in anything, like, married business.
I mean, I don't think he was fighting.
Okay, I thought they worked together, and so, like...
Yeah, one of us is wrong, at least one of us is wrong, and so I can't wait to hear people yelling at us in our comments.
There's a line of dialogue that suggests they used to go to speakeasies and places like that during Prohibition when they were much younger men, you know, but I don't, I don't know, I don't remember- Okay, so maybe they worked together like back in the 30s or something, and they separated and then like in 1949 Harry Lyme sends a message to It's ambiguous, isn't it?
I'd never got the impression that Holly was ever involved in Harry's business.
My impression has always been that Holly is just this guy that hangs around with Harry, you know?
And sort of watches from the sidelines as Harry does his stuff.
I just kind of assumed it was kind of one and the same, and maybe that's kind of a personal thing.
I've only seen this film a few times, actually.
Although, one time I did get to see it on the big screen.
I don't know if you've ever seen it on the big screen.
I haven't, no.
No, I'm envious.
There was a review theater where I got to drive in and see it at one point.
It's glorious on the big screen.
I bet, yeah.
No, I've always thought of Holly as kind of just this complete innocent, you know, that Harry drags around behind him while he's doing his dirty deals, almost as an amusement.
And it's an interesting question, you know, what those two see in each other.
What was their relationship before this film?
What was it actually like when Harry and Holly hung out together?
I mean, it's implied that they were childhood friends, isn't it?
And it's like, I don't know, it could be that they grew up both on the same street on the wrong side of the tracks and as happened a lot of the time in those sorts of situations, you know, one thing would push one of the friends one way and the other one another way and one would end up legit and the other one would end up basically involved in the rackets all his life.
Well, one of them ends up, like, kind of on the gray or black market, like, selling cigarettes or whatever, and the other ends up as a Western writer.
And I feel like, in 1949, those are kind of equivalent.
Well, careers, right?
As we learn when the book group, The Reading Club, decides to interview Holly Martins.
Oh yeah, I love that.
It's one of the funniest scenes.
I mean, it is the funniest scene in the movie, and one of the funniest sequences from any movie of this era.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
I don't know, we haven't really talked about the movie at all, but Holly Martins is a writer of westerns.
Who shows up in Vienna and kind of gets taken on by this book club, by this, you know, reading society or whatever, forget these, I try not to use, but, and they kind of bring him on and it's like, Oh, you're an American author.
Well, we'd love to host you.
We're happy to pay for your, and they expect him to be like James Joyce or kind of whatever, and like talk about like big heady ideas and like what American literature is.
And they don't realize that like, no, I, I write, I write books about horses and guns.
Yeah.
Which, you know, that genre fiction is now considered, you know, there's a lot of great stuff written in that era, right?
Oh yeah, like in the film it's, you know, one of the people at the talk that Holly is forced to give in return for being put up at the hotel, asks him what are his major influences.
Zane Grey, to which Mr. Krabbins, the guy that runs this, says, that's just Mr. Martin's little joke.
Zane Grey is a writer of westerns, as if that's just self-evidently not something anybody could get.
And Zane Grey gets like theses written about him now, you know?
Yeah, no, no, and and I mean, I think even even at the time, I mean, I I looked up a bit about Zane Gray as I was doing research for this podcast episode and like he was, you know, he Not a terrifically great person, let's put it that way, but hugely influential.
It's a pretty safe bet that any pulp novelist in the 20s and 30s and 40s... Not a phenomenal person, but not a Nazi, but definitely had his issues.
Low bar, not a Nazi!
I feel like, you know, Western writer in 1923 didn't turn out to be a Nazi.
All right, thumbs up.
We're ahead.
I'm fine with that.
Ahead of the curve.
But within the context of the film and within the context of this podcast of us talking about Like kind of far-right figures and, you know, white supremacy, etc, etc.
What I find interesting in that sense is that, you know, Hitler himself was inspired by the genocide of the Native Americans in terms of his, like, genocide of the Jews.
Yeah, yeah, like Levenstrom was based on that and in fact he was he built a lot of his He was a big fan of I forget the name of the the Native American character But there was a Native American character in Germany at the time that was Uh, reference Standing Glorious Bastards, among other things.
And that was a, uh, you know, it was about, like, kind of this, like, clearing of the land.
It was about this, like, this whole, like, kind of thing.
And so this idea of, like, manifest destiny, um, that comes from the American West and the, kind of, the American Western tradition.
Absolutely influenced the Nazis like like the literal not like the original Nazis like those Nazis Yeah, not even like it's it's a complete.
It's a thing that we have to like grapple with if we're going to kind of understand this American American pop culture influenced this right and Adolf Hitler himself was influenced by this and so like having a Whether it was intended by Graham Greene and by the makers of the movie or not, I feel like the idea that we're going to bring a Western writer into Vienna in 1949, there's subtext there.
I don't know exactly what it's trying to say, but there's something going on.
There's some idea that's being put there, right?
That we should grapple with.
I mean, just in genre terms, the film is kind of covertly a Western.
Sure, you know that the stranger rides into town and His friend has been murdered and he's trying to find out and you know Calloway is like the sheriff and he meets his friends girl, right?
You're right and bad day at Black Rock is like what five years away I think I think it's 1954 and yeah this you know, both great films.
Oh, yeah, I actually personally prefer a bad day at Black Rock to the third man and Punish me.
It's fine.
But both both both films that have like similar structures.
You're right.
Absolutely.
I hadn't even thought about that.
But yeah, I strongly suspect that's conscious.
That's a very Graham Greene sort of thing to do.
Sure.
And Yeah, I think you can look upon it as a kind of a Western.
And of course, they're actually in the East.
Holly has gone East.
And that's, I don't know, again, I don't know how intentional or conscious this was.
I suspect probably not very.
Although, Graham Greene, God, that's an entire kind of huge topic just by itself.
You know, you could do an entire series of podcasts just about the politics of Graham Greene.
I read a bit of Graham Greene in high school.
What's this big book?
The Quiet American?
Not The Quiet American, the other one.
Like the power and the glory or something like that.
And the only thing that I remember from reading this book was that there was a man who fed, who had a bunch of cockroaches in his shitty apartment and drowned them in his toilet.
And that's literally all I remember.
From my reading of Graham Greene when I was like 16 years old or whatever.
Yeah.
That's probably most mid-20th century English literature to be honest with you.
I'm pretty sure that happens in Orwell and just about every other one of them.
You're just killing cockroaches.
That's really the idea.
Yeah.
Complaining about your false teeth.
That's the other one.
What I was trying to get at is I'm not deeply enveloped in Graham Greene's You know, in what he's written.
Although I know he did a bunch of screenwriting, and he even did touch-ups on other scripts.
Oh yeah.
He did a ton of stuff in the film noir.
He was just a Hollywood screenwriter, which is kind of this like, you know, so few great authors end up going through that process.
So it's kind of… No, it's kind of great.
It's pretty painful for them.
I mean, I know Raymond Chandler did it, and he had a pretty bad time, and I'm trying to think.
Who's the other one?
Take the money and run, I think was what Raymond Chandler said.
Oh, Brecht, of course, tried to work in Hollywood.
That didn't work out terribly well.
And then particularly in like the 30s and 40s.
It's like well Hollywood is this kind of new thing and you know, they'll they'll throw money at you Because they know your name and you just kind of like you put your name on it.
You take the money and you move on Yeah, and I wonder how much you like the third man because like kind of famously in the third man.
He wrote a novella about In order to sort of understand the story.
And then with the screenplay off the novella, without any of the sense of like, I'm going to publish a novella, he just writes a novella in order to understand what the movie is.
And then years later, once the movie is a classic, the novella gets published, which is fascinating, right?
In terms of authorial process.
Process, yeah.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's the other one I was thinking of.
He worked in Hollywood.
And it's usually a pretty miserable experience.
Douglas Adams once described trying to get a script made into a movie in Hollywood like trying to cook a steak by getting a succession of people to come into the room and breathe on it, which I like.
But yeah, Graham Greene, huge topic, let's skip over it completely.
We're just going to leave it aside.
It is a Western, the third man is a Western set in the East and that's interesting because as you say, loads of Nazi ideology is based upon.
American Manifest Destiny.
They take the Nuremberg Laws from Jim Crow.
They think of the East, you know, Poland and Russia, etc., as their West.
They're going to go out there and subdue the natives.
Go read Hitler's American Model.
Yeah.
Go read Hitler's American Model.
Hitler's American Model, yes, indeed.
And actually, we mentioned Norman Finkelstein.
He's written about this as well.
But it's also worth, you know, before we give the Americans too much stick, it's also worth mentioning that Hitler deeply admired the British Empire and modelled... Well, I mean, Nazism as an ideology is inherently based on Aryanism, which has its origins in the ideology of the British Empire, the British Raj.
So there's plenty of blame to go around.
Right, and I mean, ultimately, I think that, sorry, this is a complete aside, something that I'm going to say, and you're going to respond to, and then we're just going to have to leave behind.
Yeah.
But I think the influence of the conquest of Africa, and kind of the late 19th or 20th century colonial era, and the way that it influenced fascism, and the way that it influenced a particular kind of Hitler's conquest of Europe, Is understudied, in my opinion.
Like, it doesn't get referenced enough in terms of that.
But I don't think that you can understand Hitler without also understanding, like, King Leopold of Belgium.
Absolutely.
Yeah, or indeed the Kaiser, you know, pre-Hitler German imperialism, the destruction of the Homero, Herero, and the Makwa people, etc.
I hope I'm getting those names right.
And the real researchers, the people writing books about this, do track that, right?
But certainly within the popular imagination, within the way that we think of this context, It's almost like Hitler arrives out of nowhere, and in the good versions it's like World War I happens because there are squabbling empires, and then Hitler gets fucked over in the war and then comes back and says, and now I'm gonna go kill all the Jews.
And that's sort of like the story of World War II.
That's the story, yeah.
And that completely absolves the history of colonialism from European powers, right?
You know, I get to say that as an American, I get to go, this is the one thing we weren't 100% responsible for.
It was only after the war that we really got involved in that.
Yeah.
But no, I absolutely agree.
Just on a crude level, Hitler's two favorite movies were Lives of a Bengal Lancer and King Kong.
And I think that's... If you're just thinking about this in cultural terms, I think that's very, very interesting.
And I think to kind of scoop back round to where we started, so to speak, I love that we're not even beginning to talk about the third man.
We haven't even begun to talk about the third man.
It's all about the third man.
These are our bonus episodes, right?
These are our bonus episodes.
We're going to do the third man, which is like, we're not even going to begin to talk about the third man.
It's great.
It's all about the third man.
You've got to think, what's the word?
Holistically, that's it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hopefully people are going to love this!
I hope so!
Hey, look!
It's great.
Anyway.
It is what it is.
But no, to kind of scoop back round into the direction of what we're supposed to be talking about, I think that simplified morality, you know, ahistorical morality tale version of World War II that's so omnipresent now in culture,
That's something that's kind of been gradually built through this cultural dialectic in our representations of the Second World War and its aftermath, of course, that the Third Man is very much an early part of.
And I think it's interesting because if you look at, apart from a few Admirable exceptions here and there.
Our modern depictions of the Second World War are incredibly, as I say, ahistorical and decontextualized and simplified.
Not, you know, not to imply that there's some sort of moral nuance about the Third Reich that we should be, you know, absolutely not.
But...
As you say, Hitler wasn't just this demonic evil that appeared out of nowhere, you know.
And you have to situate him in the history of European colonialism, and that is not something that turns up in our modern cultural representations of the Second World War.
Any sort of moral complexity or historical complexity just doesn't.
And yet, in The Third Man, I think you have a very questioning piece.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, I would push back just to talk about one of the books that kind of made me who I am, and that, like, it's very nice that you read it when you're 17, as opposed to, you know, in that Slaughterhouse-Five, which is very much about, like, Kurt Vonnegut, kind of his experience in terms of being in Dresden.
during the bombing and kind of realizing, like, well, if I had been born in a different time or different place, I would totally have been fighting on the German side.
And, you know, like, ultimately these things are all kind of built on, you know, elites massacring, like, ordinary people, you know, and maybe we should just all learn to not kill each other, you know.
You know, like, like, there is, there is, there is really, I mean, it sounds really kind of simplistic when I say it that way, but like, that's kind of the point of Slaughterhouse-Five, you know, which is a book that I've read many times, although not, not too recently.
There are kind of complicated things in which it turns out that he was relying on a source that David Irving There's some complicated politics there, but I think there is a real thing in terms of this humanizing thing.
The German soldiers were soldiers.
They were people, just like you and me, who were in this terrible regime.
Yeah, you don't have to rely on David Irving's falsification of the numbers about people who died.
I mean, the fact that whether it's 20,000 or 80,000 or whatever, I forget the exact numbers, but the exact numbers don't matter.
The firebombing at Dresden was a terrible, terrible event.
That's it.
Which pales in comparison to the Holocaust, but absolutely should not have fucking happened.
Yeah, there's debate about this, but I think there's a very good case for saying that a huge amount, if not all, of the Allied aerial bombing raids on civilian targets were completely unnecessary and didn't help the war effort and were just terrorism.
Letting aside the firebombing of Tokyo and all Yeah.
Again, let's not re-litigate the entire history.
Let's re-litigate the entire history of World War II and not talk about Orson Welles at all.
That's what this podcast is going to be about.
The third ban, was the firebombing of Tokyo valid or not?
I don't know, when we first decided to talk about this film, it was in the context of you talking about, oh God, what's his name, Terrio, Eugenio Terrio, have I got the name wrong?
Enrique Terrio.
And his selling of fake diabetes cures, or what was it?
Sure, yeah.
God, the history of this.
I don't have that article in front of me.
But so Enrique Terrio.
Relax, guy.
Be vague.
Yeah, just be vague.
Yeah, it's fine.
Just don't do... express details.
Leave all that out, and nobody can challenge me.
Anyway, Enrique Terrio was the leader of the Proud Boys until very recently, and he got arrested for bringing some extended clips into Washington, D.C.
And Washington, D.C.
has some of the most draconian gun laws anywhere in the world.
Rightly or wrongly, it's just true.
Enrique Theriault knew that.
Everybody who goes into D.C.
who was a gun owner knows that D.C.
has terrible gun laws, or restrictive gun laws, we can say.
Morally neutral, right?
Another huge topic that we're not going to get into at this point.
We're just going to table it.
But he brought some of us in clips that were literally branded with the Proud Boys logo, so I think he knew what he was doing.
If you must have them, just store them safely, Lauren Bobert.
Yeah, don't put them behind you on that.
Like, I saw a- Leave them with the magazine clips and on the mantelpiece in your house with kids in.
I saw a photo of like, hey, looking at Lauren Boebert, I was just thinking about Davis Arrheni and his skulls.
Yeah.
Like, he just moves the skull around wherever he shoots.
Yeah.
And I just imagine her like picking up her guns and like- She does the same thing with an AK-47.
But then I saw a tweet that was like, who did it better, and it was like Osama Bin Laden with his library of leather-bound books and one AK-47 hanging on a hook behind him, and then Lauren Boebert with her bullshit array of guns that are clearly light.
And it's like, no, no, Osama Bin Laden was a badass in that.
Look at that photo!
Not defending 9-11 or anything that Osama bin Laden ever did, but if you're just looking at the optics, you could learn something from Osama bin Laden.
Hey, well, he actually went out there and fought the Soviets, didn't he, when he was working for the CIA?
Yeah, he did.
Respect.
More than Lauren Barber ever did.
God, what were we talking about?
I'm sorry.
Enrique Tarrio.
Washington DC restrictive gun law.
So Tarrio brings in his guns.
He brings in these clips.
He gets arrested for it.
He's going to probably serve time over this.
And then it was kind of revealed in the, you know, it's like, no, Tarrio has previously talked to the cops.
He's previously informed on his comrades.
And he was previously, he served time for selling false diabetic test strips, right?
Yeah.
Which, wow.
So this was a thing that happened, I don't know if this was a thing that happened in your country, but like many, you know, like seven or eight years ago.
Around my area, you would see like signs, you know, they'd be like, you know, this kind of little like, you know, signs with a stake in them and whatever, and it'd be like, hey, have test strips, we'll buy them from you, you know, and then there's a phone number on them, you know, sort of thing.
All right.
And because of the nature of the capitalist infrastructure of The American healthcare industry test strips for diabetes, which where you test your blood sugar, got really expensive.
And so it turned out that if you had extra ones that you weren't going to use, or if you were poor enough that you needed the money more than you needed your medical equipment, you could sell them to one of these companies and then they would resell them at a markup, right?
It's terrible.
The whole process is terrible.
I don't know what you mean.
It sounds fine to me.
What's the problem?
From what I understand, and I have not looked deeply into his history, but from what I understand, he made it even more terrible by selling fake test strips in that time period.
That didn't work, or didn't do the thing, you know, whatever.
And we kind of saw that and thought, like, yeah, let's talk about the third man.
Yeah.
Because Harry Lyme's great crime, you know, is that he's a black marketeer, and he moves on to selling watered-down penicillin.
Which he and Holly Martins were previously, they'd worked together selling things on the black market, which a lot of people did during World War II.
Richard Nixon, Paragon of Virtue, apparently was selling tires or something.
And really, where do we draw the moral line between the black market and any other kind of market?
Right, between any other kind of market, but also you're providing a service to people who need it.
There's a gray area, and this is something that Graham Greene was very good at doing in his fiction, was exploring this kind of process of where are the lines in terms of what's the moral ambiguity here.
And so you could say, oh yeah, we were still in some...
stealing some rubber and selling it to people or we were kind of, you know, making sure people had food or, you know, kind of whatever, whatever you're doing on the black market, cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, you know, the making a living, I'm doing my thing.
And there's a line between that, however you feel about that.
And like, I feel like, yeah, you know, like you do what you have to do to survive.
And the film is absolutely stuffed with examples of people doing this in an innocuous way.
They trade each other cigarettes for information.
There's a bit where Anna offers Holly a drink from some whiskey she's been given and he refuses it and she says, oh good, because I wanted to sell it.
And even, you know, there's loads of transactions between people in the film.
It happens even like Holly giving the talk to the Literary Society.
Sure, yeah.
It's a transaction.
Everything is a financial transaction in this world.
In Vienna at that time, everything is a transaction.
Well, and even, like, I mean, we could, you know, hey, give me a dollar on Patreon, I'll give you an episode a month.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Vienna at that point in history is being used as a fertile metaphor.
Sure.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And on some level it's like, well, this is what you have to do to survive.
But also, well, kind of a bottle of whiskey is... I mean, it's great to have.
I've got a bottle of whiskey over there.
Might open it later, we'll see.
Not on mic, because I've done that already.
We should not do that again so soon.
I think you're the only person that doesn't love that episode.
I just I just I just kind of hate like, you know, I just try to I just try to be not that drunk.
That's the key, you know.
But there's a there's a line between what we see as You know, a sort of, like, ethical trade, and what we don't.
And Harry Lyme goes way, way over that.
And again, something that maybe, like, audiences in 2021 don't realize is that in 1949, penicillin was a very new drug.
This was a miracle drug.
Like, it was the very first antibiotic that would actually cure illnesses, that would save people.
Septicemia.
That would have been goners otherwise.
There's no There's no history of this up until this time.
It was the very first antibiotic, and if you've ever taken an antibiotic... I've had some lung issues where I had to take an antibiotic, where I spent two weeks coughing blood every day.
And then you take one dose of an antibiotic and suddenly, like, oh, now I just feel immediately better because suddenly I had access to the antibiotic.
Um, these are miracle drugs at that time, and these are desperately needed in this kind of, like, ruined infrastructure of post-war Afghana, right?
And Harry Lyme has been taking these vials and diluting them so that he can make more money off of them.
And the movie presents this, you know, accurately as, like, one of the vilest things you could ever do.
Well, I wanted to ask you about the science of this because the movie portrays children with meningitis being given the penicillin from the batches that Harry Limer sold on the black market and diluted and that causes them to be Paralyzed?
Or put in comas?
And I don't know the science of this, but is that plausible?
So I don't know the details of whether meningitis was like, but there are plenty of illnesses that like, and I know meningitis is one of them, where if left untreated, It can lead to paralysis and coma and all these sorts of things, which if you treat it with antibiotics, you can just kill the bacteria right then and there, and then people get up and live a better life.
The polio vaccine is kind of another example of this, where You know until we had a vaccine there was a You know people would live their lives in an iron lung because they had to Because they got this one virus early in their life, and it created this like kind of debilitating condition So I don't know about meningitis in particular because I'm not I'm not a medical doctor And I didn't look that up because I didn't expect you to ask that question, but I like that's completely reasonable that
I mean, I think that's accurate.
I would trust that the film is accurate on that.
If it's not meningitis, there were plenty of illnesses for which the access to penicillin would have been not just life-saving, but would have been an avoidance of a debilitating life, right?
I think it's implied that the problem is caused by the fact that people think they're treating the illness and in fact they're not.
Right. - Right. - I mean, that's, We can actually get a sense of something like what it felt like at the time for people Who have this numerical drug, penicillin, because we are in the middle of a global pandemic and we have just acquired a series of vaccines at just what, you know, by previous precedent, miraculous speed.
And these vaccines are, they appear to be very effective.
They're being rolled out.
You know, there's, I mean, again, another huge topic.
There's all sorts of huge problems with Yeah, it'll be like 2025.
and copyrights on medicines, and the fact that the global south and poorer countries aren't going to get access to it for ages.
Yeah, it'll be like 2025.
It'll be like 2025 before it actually ends up in most people's arms in the developing world.
And that's just a crime.
An obscenity, yeah.
It's a crime against humanity, for sure.
But the fact of the vaccine allows us to have some semblance of an idea of how people felt at the time, when suddenly, you know, penicillin comes along, suddenly diseases that would blight your entire life, they're treatable, you know?
Not the least of which were STIs.
There was a time where you contract an STI, you're cursed for the rest of your life.
You take it and it's gone.
A wound that would kill you from blood poisoning, you take a bit of penicillin and it's gone.
You get gonorrhea and you're pissing blood for 40 years.
You take a dose of penicillin and it's gone.
Yeah.
And that's like, you know, and how much, how much does that affect your life?
How much, you know, just, just in terms of like your willingness to go like fuck other people and have like a good time.
Yeah.
Right?
Like as, as little as that sounds like, right?
Like, but like your ability to, your, your willingness to go out and because you could spread it to other people and they would go piss blood for the rest of their life.
You know, like, Yeah.
But then suddenly a dose of penicillin would make this huge, huge difference.
And so, it's, again, in 2021, I think it's very easy to overlook how important penicillin was in 1949.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Like, you know, yeah.
And... It's a miracle drug.
Literally a miracle drug.
What I'm, what I'm thinking when I'm... Imagine if we had a, imagine if we had a drug that would just like kill colon cancer tomorrow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That would be the equivalent.
Yeah, absolutely.
But even so, the appearance of these vaccines for COVID-19, they give us an echo, you know.
But what I was thinking watching the movie this time, over and over again, I was thinking in those sections where they're talking about this, the watered down penicillin, the kids in the hospital, etc.
I was thinking about the way in which the system, the capitalist system, the big pharmaceutical companies, etc., it has allowed us to develop us.
It's allowed human society, human civilization to develop this incredible palliative and treatment, the COVID vaccine.
Incredibly fast and that's undeniably a boon and a benefit and a wonderful thing and a miracle and it's a testament to science and progress and etc, etc, etc.
And the dedicated, tireless work of a huge number of people, etc.
And yet at the same time, Covid is to a very, you know, in a very real sense and to a very great extent a product of what we're doing to the planet.
With capitalism.
And we are not going to treat everybody that needs that vaccine and not going to get it.
And that's going to happen because of the prerogatives and the priorities of capitalism.
The fact that it's going to be copyrighted.
The fact that it's going to be treated as a profitable commodity.
The fact that governments are going to play politics with it.
The developed Western nations are going to hog it first, etc.
etc.
Again, huge topic.
And the other thing, very, I mean, not to downplay anything I've just said, because in many ways that's actually the bigger issue, but the other thing that kept occurring to me was, what is like our nearest modern equivalent of what Harry Lyme is doing?
And I was coming back over and over again in my head to the anti-vax movement.
And I was coming back over and over again to anti-vax conspiracy theories and Covid conspiracy theories and Plandemic and all that nonsense and it's all tied up now with QAnon and I was thinking, you know, these people, these essentially fascist influencers, these conspiracy theory influencers and hucksters and con people who peddle this stuff, whether they really believe it or whether they're just cynical people making coin from it, it doesn't really matter to me ultimately.
They're the Harry Limes of today because what Harry Lime is doing is watering down this treatment that could cure meningitis in people that need treatment or other diseases and it's needless, it's just for profit and really I think you can read Harry as As somebody who does this just for the sake of doing it, ultimately, it's not even really profit, it's just who he is.
And I think, I kept on coming back to this, it's these people, it's these people who spread this disinformation, these conspiracy theories, who tell people that vaccines aren't safe, that they'll kill you, that they'll put microchips from Bill Gates in your bloodstream, that they'll give you autism, you know, horror of horrors, that's much worse than having COVID, obviously.
You know, and I, I was, I was thinking this is a, this is a really relevant film today.
Absolutely.
And it's interesting that, um, I mean, my, my response to be watching the film was like, Harry Lyme is a piker.
He's a nobody in terms of the evil that we see.
It's funny that in 1949, Harry Lyme is so terrible that once his crime is revealed, it's just kind of obvious he must be hunted down and killed.
What he's doing is cutting down penicillin to make money off of it.
To essentially, like, sell the empty vials, because the vials are worth money.
And that's, like, our entire economy is built on that, right?
Yeah.
Like, that's just what we do, is we just kind of do that.
But, like, even beyond that, like, even within the, you know, thinking about this in the context of the pandemic, you know, we've seen people who are, like, true believers in the, like, kind of the COVID-19 conspiracy theories or whatever, who will leave the vaccine out of the freezer So that it loses effectiveness because of like technical reasons it loses effectiveness if it's above a certain temperature.
Uh, and so they're planning to, like, inject it in people and then go, like, yeah, no, those people got COVID, so, uh, they're, you know, and then they're found out and then they get charged.
But, like, as terrible as that is, and that is reprehensible, like, that's much, much more moral than, like, what, what Ariel Lime is doing.
But ultimately, the whole, uh, process, at least that's, like, You know, believing in something.
Harry Lyman is just trying to make a buck off of it, right?
Yeah, but you have these horror stories about people working in emergency wards, and they're literally trying to save the lives of people who are dying, and while they're doing it, these people are screaming at them, I haven't got COVID, COVID's not real!
And somebody has told these people this.
And they haven't worn a mask, they haven't socially distanced, they haven't stayed at home, they've gone to church, they've gone and seen their families, they've spread it around, they've caught it themselves.
Because, you know, and they're in hospital dying, still insisting that it's not real.
And somebody told them that, and somebody told them that, and somebody told them that, and somebody told them that, and even the fucking president basically told them the same thing, you know?
And... Just inject bleach.
Inject bleach, and you'll be fine.
Yeah, no, no.
No, I agree.
And then like kind of the anti-vax stuff, which you mentioned earlier in terms of, you know, a generic anti-vax stuff, but also like the COVID vaccine and the, you know, within following this kind of like far-right infrastructure, which I've been following, like in the early days, they all kind of believed like, oh, we're all going to die from COVID.
And then they, Sort of realize like like yeah, I don't know anybody who's actually died from it and I don't know people who got sick from it and they believe the count on the stories and Suddenly, it's like no, it's not real.
This is just something that's meant to lock us down It's meant to be something that's like controlling us and I like that the way that these like kind of stories get told and like most of these people are Fairly young and healthy, and some percentage of those people are going to get it and suffer and die.
But the vast majority of people that get COVID, even get a full case of COVID, are going to get sick for a few days and then recover and be fine.
That's always been the thing.
We've always known that.
That's what it does.
Some tiny percentage, you know, 10% or so are going to get sick enough to be hospitalized, and some tiny percentage of those are going to need extended hospitalization and are going to die, right?
But the tiny percentage of people who get it who are going to die, COVID-19 is still like the leading cause of loss of life in the United States in the year 2020.
Above all other causes.
Yeah.
Except for I think heart disease might be slightly above it, because heart disease kills a whole lot of people, right?
But it's a huge killer of people.
It's this massive killer of people, because it's not literally a flesh-eating disease that acts like zombies, to which every person that is in contact with it gets Disastrously sick and gets into the range of dying.
It's just like kind of a nothing thing.
It's like, no, you have to look at it big picture, right?
And there's this famous scene on the Ferris wheel in this film where Orson Welles is like, they're at the top of the Ferris wheel.
And he's looking down on the ants on the street and he says, you know, like, what if I, what if one of those ants, what if one of those people just like falls over and dies, but it's worth like $10,000 to you?
How many of those people would you be, would you accept to die?
Yeah.
If it meant that you got to, and it is a metaphor for, it's a famous metaphor for, it's kind of like the indifference to human life that comes from, and in the film it's Harry Lyme personally diluting a vaccine, right?
Not a vaccine, but penicillin.
But in our world, that's our entire Structure of government within the hemisphere, right?
All of the institutional factors that rule my life, that have far more control over me than anything else that you can imagine, treat all of us with the same disregard that Harry Lyme, the villain, the ultimate villain of this film, treats people.
That's how I've been treated by my entire society.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, and I think the film is using Harry Lyme and the black market and the trade in watered-down penicillin as, I don't know, maybe metaphor is a bit strong, but I think it's thematically interested in the ways in which the behaviour of governments And certainly the behavior of markets mirrors that.
I mean, you know, Graham Greene was far from a political radical.
But, you know, in many ways, just being in the center in 1949 was to the left of even being on the left in the mainstream today, you know, it would have... I mean, Graham Greene, political moderates to the left of Bernie Sanders, for sure.
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's arguable.
But yeah, I think the film is very deliberately concerned with questioning.
As I say, it's a very morally questioning film.
The central question is, you know, how do you evaluate the claims of loyalty and friendship and personal love against the claims of social responsibility or even just justice?
And what does justice mean, etc.?
You know, Holly actually vacillates back and forth about what's the right thing to do.
And it's not just because he's indecisive.
He actually does have to, you know, he goes back and forth several times about what's the right thing to do about Harry.
Should I be loyal to my friend?
Should I try to leverage Harry's fate in return for saving Anna?
Should I turn him in because of this rotten thing he did?
Etc.
And I think the film is concerned with wider issues than that.
The whole speech about the dots, it's fascinating to me that it's framed as looking down on people and calling them dots.
And it's in the ruins of a bombed city.
So, it's almost explicitly a metaphor for allied bombing campaigns.
Yeah, four years after World War II, it's hard to not see it that way.
Yeah, exactly.
And certainly... Well, and made at the time.
Again, it's completely understandable that a modern audience doesn't necessarily see that, right?
Without thinking, oh, it's May 1949.
The film doesn't have to explicitly say it, but we have to kind of look back at the audience, the intended audience of the period.
Sorry, just to highlight that.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And I was talking earlier about how our modern cultural representations of fascism and Hitler and the Second World War and etc etc are now incredibly naive and simplistic and dehistoricised.
I think people would be astonished by the kinds of questions and considerations about the morality of war on the Allied side that were common Among people in mainstream culture at the time.
I think things that you would now be screamed off Twitter by the right, you would be cancelled by the right for saying things about World War II and Britain's conduct during World War II and who won World War II, etc, etc.
You know, they were commonplaces back in the day because it was closer and people weren't recycling an event that they only knew through this dehistoricised, decontextualised, neutered history.
They were talking about something they'd actually lived through.
And I think the film, as you say, the film doesn't need to raise this because it's being made in 1949 for audiences who know perfectly well what it's about, what it's implying.
And I think just showing audiences in the English-speaking world the denizens of the former Third Reich As human beings, you know, some of them are good and some of them are bad and some of them are silly, etc, etc.
That is an interesting move.
It's something that would be almost controversial today if you did a sympathetic movie about people in post-war Austria who hadn't been heroic defiers of the Nazis or anything like that.
You'd probably get controversy now.
Because it has to be made into this simple morality tale of goodies and baddies, which of course, as evil as fascism was, it wasn't a simple morality tale of everybody on one side being good and everybody on the other side being bad.
And treating people as humans and understanding that is...
Essential.
I think that's something that we try to do in every episode of this podcast.
It's something that, like, we just talked to Shannon Martinez, who is a former Nazi, you know?
Yeah.
Very much is in agreement with that, and that doesn't mean giving comfort to the ideology and to that belief, you know?
Understand that people are human and sometimes humans are like fucking evil shits and sometimes they get involved in something that's bigger than themselves and all that sort of thing.
And I agree that I think the, um, you know, sort of the, you know, the Oscar industrial complex, if, if you can coin a term here, you know, that was born, that was sort of born with a Schindler's list.
Um, um, Another future episode.
Which I've said we're not gonna do, but maybe we need to do it at some point.
I don't think we can not do it, frankly.
That was born with Schindler's List in some ways, you know, and that like, oh well, the way to get an Oscar is to talk about Nazis.
And the actual Nazis, the actual far-right people that I follow, they look at things like Schindler's List and they look at things that treat these things in this kind of morally simplistic way.
And they say, well, this is just a bunch of, you know, quote-unquote Jews manipulating you and treating you as unrepentant evil when you're somebody who wants to feed their family.
And there's a really complicated narrative there.
There's a really complicated thing, and I think that the fact that these movies, and the fact that these ideas that treat this thing really simplistically, despite the absolute evil of Nazi ideology, which I spend my life fighting against.
I'm saying this out loud, right?
But treat these things simplistically and don't treat them within a context and ignore that context in favor of a kind of simplistic narrative are building to a – are only putting fuel in the fire of the worst kinds of kind of political ideology in this world.
Yeah.
Well, the more you impoverish people's understanding of what it was and how it happened and why it happened, the more – you make it more likely to happen again.
So this ultimate sort of endless commemoration, which isn't actually commemoration at all because it's dehistoricised and decontextualised and moralistic and simplistic, it's actually amnesia masquerading as commemoration.
It makes it more likely to happen again because it's not about understanding it.
It's about making it into a fable, which is safe and easily commodifiable.
It is watered-down penicillin.
Yeah, the whole thing.
I don't think you've seen Inglorious Bastards, the Tarantino- I haven't, but I am going to watch it.
With an open mind.
It is actually, when you ask me what is my all-time favorite movie, that's kind of the one that I give.
And I fully expect you to hate it, for all the reasons that I like.
It's fine.
I'm not going to get mad.
I completely expect you to kind of come back and go.
I gripped my teeth through that so much that I literally burned down my incisors or something.
I fully expect that.
But one of the things that it does is it, uh, uh, it understands the Nazis as humans, you know, and I think that's one of the things that's really useful about it.
And I think one of the things that makes it a good, uh, counterpoint to something like Schindler's List, which, you know, doesn't seem to do that so much, right?
You know, there's a complicated narrative here.
And, uh, you know, I think that one of the things we're trying to do is to untangle that as in, Little ways here and there where we can.
But yeah.
I love the third man because it does deal with these moral complexities.
Hold on, the third what?
Are we still talking about the third man?
It's a movie with Orson Welles in it.
He plays the hero.
We've not even talked about Orson Welles, who was amazing in this film.
He's amazing.
We've reviewed The Third Man without ever talking about Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.
I genuinely think Joseph Cotten's performance in this movie is one of the greatest cinema performances.
I think she's just incredible in this film.
And Alida Vallee is absolutely amazing.
Oh yeah, she's amazing.
She's amazing, yeah.
Orson Welles is amazing.
The performances are just incredible.
Aren't we supposed to spend 45 minutes talking about the sewer scene and how gorgeous it is?
Isn't that the only thing to talk about in The Third Man?
Clearly, we failed because we didn't talk about the sewers.
The sewers look gorgeous.
The sewers.
The sewers that flow into the Blue Danube.
That's the only thing to talk about with the third man, Jack.
I don't know.
We failed.
We failed.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe one of these days we'll do Orson's The Trial, which I think is very influenced by the third man.
No, absolutely.
I kind of feel like maybe we need to do Schindler's List next, although people are going to hate us for talking about the third man.
We'll find something else to do.
Maybe we'll do Downfall.
We'll see, we'll see.
Just to wrap up, I want to say I love this movie because it is morally complex and it's deeply concerned with moral questions and it doesn't offer easy answers.
It's not didactic, it doesn't preach, it raises these deep moral questions and yet at the same time it doesn't take refuge in kind of fake nuance to the extent that it refuses to condemn.
It doesn't leave you, it allows you to feel, there's this wonderful chase at the end, you know, you can't, I don't know, maybe I'm speaking for myself, but you can't help feeling sorry for Harry Lyme at the end, this hunted creature.
I mean, his fingers reach out through the grill, you know, and freedom is so, is so close and yet so far away.
And then, you know, Holly kills him almost at his request, you know, as a favour.
And it's, you know, you can't, to borrow a line from Dracula, actually, you know, you can't help feeling pity for something so hunted.
But the film isn't, the film isn't, it makes no bones about the fact that what he did is just appalling.
It's just, you know, he is irredeemable.
Well, there's a medium and message kind of thing there, right?
Yeah.
In the sense that, like, because we're presented with Holly Martin, our lead character, who likes Harry Lime, who's been his good friend all the time.
And then, like, later we learn he's this fucking terrible person.
But, like, based on things that we never get to kind of see on screen, although we do get to see some of that on screen.
But even that, like, the film shies away from showing us the Direct consequences of that, right?
But that's not how we're presented with Harry Lyme.
And he's Orson Welles, who's like, the most charming fucking thing that existed in 1949.
Like, how do you not want to love Orson Welles?
Like, I would...
Yeah, what would you give to have Orson Welles' talent?
If either one of us had Orson Welles' talent, we would be like the biggest podcast in existence.
And Orson is just, I mean, not that Orson ever did anything as terrible as Harry Lyme does, but in every other respect, Orson is just playing himself.
Yeah, no, no, no.
It's very much Orson Welles.
It's very much Orson Welles showing up and being amazing.
And being charming.
Yeah, it's Orson Welles being charming.
He's a movie star.
You can imagine...
You know, in a modern version it would be like Brad Pitt.
You know, suddenly Brad Pitt shows up an hour and ten minutes in.
And it's like, you know, and you get the zither music and then suddenly it's like, I'm Brad Pitt!
Look at me being amazing!
You know, that would be the thing.
Because, you know, not to say Brad Pitt is as talented as Orson Welles, although I like Brad Pitt.
Like, he's great.
But it is like the big movie star who can just kind of waltz in and be Brad Pitt for twenty minutes and then leave.
Yeah.
And you can kind of imagine him.
He would be eating a shrimp cocktail on the Ferris wheel.
That would be the way that he would do it.
And that would be fine.
And everybody would love it.
Actually, now I want to see a remake of the third band with Brad Pitt and the Orson Welles role.
I think that's just perverse.
But we see the – Um, I mean, you know, like there's this kind of like the cinema itself speak like the language of cinema speaks for itself, right?
Absolutely.
As opposed to kind of the content.
And so we are told that he is a hunted down victim because The film tells us that through its cinematic language, as opposed to… But it chooses to do that.
But it chooses to do that.
And I feel like that's part of the brilliance of the film, is that it presents this truly terrible figure, who nonetheless is seen as sympathetic.
And it asks us to kind of have our own kind of moral response to that.
And while I think there is a case to be made that the film goes too far in that direction, I certainly have issues with the degree to which we're expected to sort of empathize with Harry Lyme in the film.
I think as a cinematic technique and as a film, as an experience, I think it's obviously a masterpiece and everybody should see it.
And hopefully if you've listened this far, you've already seen it.
So, you know.
Yeah, I don't know.
If you're listening to this without having seen it, I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, hopefully record an intro and tell people, go watch The Third Man before you listen to this, because we have done nothing to let people in on this that aren't already in on it.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, well, there's loads more that could be said about this.
This film is 70 years old, and we've said everything there is to say about it, clearly.
That's it, yeah.
It's the last word on this topic.
Nobody ever need talk or write about this, or even watch it.
In fact, all previous conversations about this film No longer worthwhile.
We have done it.
And about cinema in general, actually.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Nobody ever need talk about movies before or after this episode.
We have completed the medium.
It's done.
That's it.
So all the movie podcasts can just shut up shop and stop coming out every week.
It's done.
It's over.
It's done.
We won.
We did it.
We took care of it.
We took care of it for you.
You're welcome.
We won podcasts.
Also, also, if the Nazis would just go away, Jack and I would do this every week and it would be glorious.
Yeah, those are the two main evils in the world today, Nazis and podcasts.
We've seen off the second one, if we can just see off the first one.
That's it.
first one.
Yeah, yeah.
That's it.
Job done.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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