Sins of Omission in “On the Waterfront” (1954) (Part 1)

Terry Malloy and his fellow longshoremen on the New York docks are witnesses to union corruption under labor boss Johnny Friendly, but won’t testify against him because of his violent intimidation tactics, which ensure that union members remain “D and D”—that is, deaf and dumb—to any illegal activity. When Terry’s collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey’s sister, Edie, he’s forced to reckon with this D and D policy, as well as his own passivity, guilt, and naivete. Wes & Erin discuss Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so-called “sin of omission” while asserting that its opposite, truth-telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism. 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When Terry's collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey's sister Edie, he's forced to reckon with this D and D policy as well as his own passivity, guilt and naivete. Today we're discussing Elia Kazan's 1954 film on the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so called sin of omission while asserting that its opposite, truth telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:26 Wes: Okay, so Erin, it's been a long time since I've seen this movie and the only scene that really stuck with me is that famous scene in the cab with Terry and his brother Charlie and Brando doing that amazing performance, which I'll read in a moment where he says he could have been somebody and calls himself a bum. So that's something. When I was looking at some of the background for this, I was interested in seeing how many actors praised Brando for that performance. It is a great performance, but I didn't really think that much about it when I was watching the film because I was watching for other things. Scorsese said, everything that we know about the power of great screen acting relates back to him. When you watch his work in on the Waterfront, you're watching the purest poetry imaginable in dynamic motion. Kazan himself said, if there's a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is. Al Pacino says he couldn't move. He was so touched by the performance. And then Anthony Hopkins said, when you Brando in the famous cab scene and on the Waterfront, it's still breathtaking. So I think that's one reason why the cab scene is so memorable. There's a real pathos to the scene. And then Brando pulls it off very well for the second act. It's the climactic scene which leads us into everything that follows in the third act. So I thought we'd start out by talking about the scene a little bit. And I was going to ask the question of, well, what makes him a bum? And why is he using that word in particular? And it comes up in the movie several times. So he says, do you want to read this and do. And do your Brando imitation? 3:02 Erin: Yeah. My famous. 3:03 Wes: Pretty certain you have a Brando impression that you do in private that you're unwilling to do in public because you're so good at so many other impressions. 3:13 Erin: Thank you. 3:13 Wes: Yeah, I think you've done Katharine Hepburn on the show. But that's. 3:17 Erin: That's as far as I'll go. I'll go as far as from New Haven to Hartford, but no further. 3:22 Wes: All right, well, so I'll read it, and then I'm going to be doing the Brando voice in my head, but I can't do it. So in the cab scene. So Charlie has said, you could have been another Billy Conn as a boxer. And he blames it on the manager. He blames the loss of the fight on the manager, when really it was. The fight was rigged by Johnny Friendly. And Charlie played a part in that. So Terry says, you was my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me a little so I wouldn't have to take dives for short end money. So that was Terry speaking, and Charlie says, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money, Terry, you don't understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody. Could have been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it. It was you, Charlie. So it's interesting, he talks about wanting to have been taken care of because that is thematically part of the movie and it involves taking care of the pigeons. But we'll get. We'll get to that. But I wanted to start with this concept of being a bum. 4:22 Erin: Yeah. At the end of the film, not the very end when Terry goes down to the docks. But prior to that, when he testifies and he comes back and talks to Edie, he says, they always said I was a bum. Well, I ain't a bum, Edie. So something about him being restored to non bumness occurs over the course of his decision to testify for this waterfront crime commission. But I was thinking about that, too. I was thinking a lot about Terry's passivity and how speech is something that restores this active quality to him. Maybe the film locates the origin of his becoming a bum with the moment that he throws the fight, which, of course, happens prior to the timeline of this film. But we learn later on that however many months or years earlier, he had deliberately thrown a fight and thereby lost out on having a great career as a prize fighter. And so the first time we see Brando, when he's coming up from that shack on the edge of the docks having had a meeting with Johnny Friendly and his men, I noticed that Brando is always sticking his right arm in his jacket. To me, it looked like he was sort of holstering it. You know, he was pulling his punches, maybe. So something about being a bum has to do with the fact that he's no longer active. He's given something away. He's not performed to the best of his ability when he could. He's deliberately pulled punches, held back. And something then about speech and about his testimony restores that activity to him and makes him no longer a bum. It cures this passivity and this inaction. And I was really interested in that transformation and whether or not speech is enough to affect it. Which is maybe a slightly different question than this idea of being a bum, but I think it's related. 6:08 Wes: Yeah. So whether or not speech is enough, as in needing violence, needing to beat up Friendly. 6:14 Erin: No, but that's where one's mind automatically goes, right? Because what would be better than speech? You know, I'm not saying that there's necessarily an answer to this, but, you know, it's silly because I think I want something that isn't speech, that's somehow more than speech, but isn't violence, you know, and maybe that middle ground doesn't. But I think there's something about Terry being a prize fighter. And this whole final scene when he's beaten up by Johnny Friendly's men, where it's located in the film, it's a form of penance for the action that he's already taken. So it's not quite part of that action. It's the fallout of it. And he's outnumbered by so many men that he can't fight back. And so he just takes this beating. But that, too, strikes me as being really passive. Like, he actually tries to physically defend himself and to fight back, but ultimately that's fruitless. And so. So all of that to say, I don't know what the solution would be. That would involve not violence, but more than speech. I keep reaching for something more than 7:15 Wes: that, but I think walking up to the warehouse workplace, it is interesting because we see him testify, and one wonders at that point in the film, is that the climactic moment? Is that the defeat of the antagonist? And it turns out, no. And then you see him get into the fight with Friendly, and you wonder whether he's going to kill Johnny Friendly or he's going to get killed. I mean, I honestly forgot. I didn't know if there was a tragic ending to this. 7:42 Erin: Right. 7:42 Wes: And then the really, you know, the genuinely climactic moment, of course, is not the violence, but walking into the warehouse, ultimately stumbling because he's been beaten up so badly, but also getting everyone to follow him and wresting control, essentially wresting control away from Johnny Friendly, away from on behalf of the people, on behalf of the little man, the common man. And that wresting away of control is not something that is accomplished through violence or even that can be accomplished through violence. It's more about changing people's mindsets in such a way, because they. They outnumber the mobsters, obviously, but changing people's mindsets in a way where they can cooperatively stand together, which is, of course, what a union ultimately represents and what makes the infiltration and corruption of that such a terrible thing. But to restore that cooperative spirit, that unity between people, is the only way to go. And that seems to be the middle ground that you're talking about between violent action and mere speech, which, of course, is what we get when he testifies. 8:45 Erin: So you're. You're convinced by that ending. It's satisfying to you? I mean, I. Don't get me wrong, I think that when he walks in, it's tremendously moving, but it's also, you know, the film ends very quickly, and it comes with that conclusion is sort of the knowledge that he's now beaten the entire corrupt system and everything is going to be restored. And so I know that some people have thought that's maybe a little bit easy. I mean, I like the reading that you're giving of it, that it's beyond speech and the restoration of this unity. And obviously inherent in the cab scene as well, and throughout the whole film is this idea of what a union is, what a family is, what relationships are, what we owe to each other. And so restoring that is. Seems to me to be really crucial. At the same time, it's given such a kind of, like, Hollywood ending. It strains believability for me just a tad. Yeah. 9:32 Wes: Yeah, I get that. I think thematically it works, and I think it's emotionally impactful. I am someone who's bothered by plot holes a lot. It wasn't enough of one to bother me for me in this case, but I get what you're saying. So I think with the concept of being a bum, you were talking about passivity and him pulling punches, and I think that's great. In a sense, everyone who's being exploited by the mobsters is a bum in that sense. Right. And I think there's a lot in here about exploitation and the concept of exploitation and corruption. And it had me thinking about the meaning of those things and why people would engage in it. Right. So there's. Obviously, there's financial motives for mobsters, but there's also. It's actually a lot of work to be a mobster, it turns out. It's not just strong arming people and killing people and engaging in the risk of being killed. But, you know, there's an accountant, and they're essentially running a business, so why not just run a legitimate business? And it, you know, towards the end of the movie, Johnny Friendly says, we're going legit for now because I'm under scrutiny. And undoubtedly they could look good legit, and they'd probably be a profitable enterprise if they went legit. So the question for me was, why do people engage in this behavior anyway? And there's. There's lots of answers to this. Some of it is about freedom, being outside of the system. There's status and power that come with it. There's community, a kind of, you know, second family of sorts. But I think this need to exploit and turn people into bums is a very strong motive. So when you first see Johnny Friendly, for instance, I think he's watching a boxing match. He's ignoring his men who are trying to get him to pay attention to business stuff, which is really apt because I think we can wonder in retrospect whether that was just another rigged match, which means that he's not watching it for the suspense of the match. And he doesn't take that sort of inherent risk, right, of rooting for someone and not knowing whether they're going to win and then enduring the disappointment if they lose. It's all just rigged. But he's getting a kind of enjoyment out of that. And the enjoyment, in a way, is I think of this as rigging the scene. It's like he's outside of this scene, outside of this environment, looking into it in a way, like an audience member except he's in control of it. And in particular, anything internal to the scene, which is people's own work and their own good faith efforts, become false. Right. He can turn them into something false. So Terry becomes a bum by being controlled in that way. He allows his whole future to be compromised. He is prevented from doing his own real work in a way. He's prevented from doing something earnest and from participating in a kind of meritocracy, which I think is part of what the mobsters are transcending. So in other words, I think there's this need to spoil, not just to control it for financial gain, but there's a joy in exploiting it. And, well, not just exploiting it, but corrupting it and spoiling it. Spoiling is the word that I'm looking for, almost as if it's envied. So. And they need to do the same thing with the dock workers. They need to take what might be honest labor if it could afford the men who do it a decent living and if they had some sense of dignity. But it turns them into bums. Right? It turns them into. Like, they're like beggars. They have to stand on the docks and if they're lucky, they get some. Some work. 13:08 Erin: Hmm. I think in that moment when he's watching the boxing match, he turns it off out of frustration and he says something like, ain't nobody tough anymore. Which is really interesting with. 13:16 Wes: Okay, so I'm. I'm wrong about that then. 13:19 Erin: No, I think. I think I love this. This reading that you're giving to that scene. I think it's so apt and it reminds me actually, you know, if he did control it and he's still frustrated with the outcome, that's kind of even more fascinating. But it's reminiscent to me of the moment when the heavies are standing outside the bar right at the beginning when they throw Joey Doyle off the roof. And these heavies remark to themselves out loud, you know, somebody fell off the roof. So this is really interesting tension set up right away between, you know, the action that happens that we see as the viewers, that we know that they know exactly what's happened because they might as well have been, you know, they're interchangeable with the men who are actually on the roof pushing him off. So this tension between what's actually taken place and then what they verbalize, what they acknowledge aloud, which is a different sort of spin on the situation or, you know, a parallel narrative that they're constructing. So I love this idea that friendly is Watching this rigged fight and uses it as a way to say that no one's tough. Like to sort of bolster himself at the top of this sort of imagined hierarchy. If he's watching someone who he's paid to throw the fight and then gets to proclaim that this guy isn't tough, it's like even. It's even better, I think, within the universe of this film and the way that this idea of being a bum and a sort of failure of acknowledgment are laid side by side with each other or in which there seems to be a kind of active parody going on of proper relationships with this kind of warped relationship where lip service is given to something. And there are relationships which bear resemblance to what a proper relationship would be. But it's all. It's all twisted in some way. So it's like a parody. In which case that fight being like a parody of a fight and his reaction being a sort of parodic reaction or ironic or, you know, however we want to put it, I think would be really in keeping with that. 15:06 Wes: Yeah. So I think I hallucinated this fight being rigged thing. So it turned out he was watching a real fight and got frustrated by the outcome. But the same point holds, right? He's rigged fights. And the larger point is that there's this antagonistic relationship to the concept of earnest effort and honest work and people who try to get by in life by doing that. So whether you're a prize fighter or a dock worker, essentially playing by the rules, I think Johnny Friendly and probably mobsters in general, that's something that they see as being exploited. Right. You get all this stuff at some point. Terry himself says. So everyone has a racket. He says about the priest. What's his racket? Everyone has a racket. Everyone's exploit. Either exploiting or being exploited. Relationships are being reduced to that. I think that's the twistedness that you're pointing to. And I think there's the desire to turn all relationships into that. And in particular, to make others dependent, turn others essentially into beggars in the context of the relationship. There is an actual bum in the movie at a certain point. 16:19 Erin: Right, Right. 16:20 Wes: Who Terry tells to screw off at first. Terry himself. He's been made to depend in a certain way on Johnny Friendly. And there's a. It seems a little bit like a father son relationship in the beginning. Right. Because that's. So there are elements of dependency which are actually positive and a normal part of intimate relationships. But, you know, as the movie Progresses, we see that Terry is just being used. He's a bum to the extent that he's allowing himself to be used, to be turned into a beggar and to be idle. Right. So he gets rewarded with a cushy position on the docks where he gets to sit up in the loft and read. So there's that sort of idleness involved in being a bum. And the mobsters themselves are avoiding honest work and they're parasites, so they're bums. So everyone has to be turned either into a bum or beggar in the sense that they have to rely on the mobsters for what they want or become a mobster themself and get everything by violence. Not through effort within the system, not as part of a meritocracy, but as part of an organization where the only effort involved is violence. 17:37 Erin: Yeah, I love that. You know, thinking through some of what you said, I'm thinking that, you know, so much of this movie is about work, honest work and the dignity in work. And so whenever someone kind of isn't working, you know, something is. Something is broken. And thinking about how relationships are their own sort of form of work, I love this idea that you bring up about. I think you said, being a beggar in the relationship, you know, that implies the twisting of this responsibility. Right. In relationships, which are a form of work. I mean, I guess I don't like when people say, use that term, you know, that, like, relationships are hard work. It implies that you've been sentenced to something, you know. But they are, in the lightest form of the term in that we have responsibilities to each other, we owe each other something, and we have to fulfill that obligation, which takes effort, if not work. Right. And so, you know, thinking back to the cab scene, maybe getting to sort of the first layer of signification or something underneath that scene, you think, well, Terry is just once again kind of blaming his brother. Right. Like he's once again blaming someone outside of himself. Right. He fails to take responsibility for his part in Joey's death, and now he's failing to take responsibility for getting involved with a mob, for throwing the fight. Right. It's all Charlie's fault. But what's interesting about that is that it is Charlie's fault. Terry has correctly, I think, located something about this relationship that has become twisted, that has made Terry a beggar. Charlie has a responsibility to his brother. He did need to look out for him because Terry is his younger brother. And instead he's running Terry's life in this negative way, which. Which keeps Terry A bum which keeps him incapable of this kind of action or keeps him in this state of passivity. Charlie and Terry's relationship is kind of a microcosm of that between the union and the longshoremen. You know, the union has. Is supposed to be protecting their members, and instead they've exploited their responsibility to their men by both kind of leeching off of them and keeping them passive. And, you know, the men, in turn, have ceded a certain kind of responsibility by participating in this, by taking it, by not speaking out, though they have very, very little agency in the film's telling. Right. So Terry is also responsible for putting up with this. But really, you know, the responsibility, the chief responsibility, is that of this kind of paternal, when it's working. Paternal in a positive way. Responsibility, which is like the. The first mover in the relationship. Right. It's the primary activating force in the relationship. So that Terry and the longshoremen bear less responsibility for taking the consequences of crime than the men in power do for instituting those criminal practices in the first place. Of course. Right. So I think Terry is right to locate the origin of his being a bum with his brother's abdication of responsibility. 20:31 Wes: Yeah. And I think Charlie himself is also an object of exploitation. So he's come under Johnny Friendly's wing as well, I think, at an earlier point. And because there's talk of his brains. Right. He's a smart guy. Terry doesn't think of himself as a smart guy, and he seems to think that this way of life is necessary. If you're not a smart guy, if you're going to be somebody and you're not smart and you can't be a boxer, then you have to be a mobster. You know, you don't have the brains. You use the brawn. And there's a certain point where Terry is talking to Edie. He talks about admiring his brother's brains. She's just said she wants to be a teacher, and he says he admires brains and that his brother Charlie is a very brainy guy. And she says it isn't just brains, it's how you use them. So something that Charlie has that would, like Terry's prize fighting ability. Charlie could have done well at an ordinary job because he's got brains. Right. But that's been corrupted by Johnny Friendly. And his brains have been channeled into something that requires some degree of cleverness, but isn't a full use of that capacity and is also criminal and corrupt. Obviously. I also like your point about this paternal responsibility and Exploitation instead of protection, right? The union is supposed to protect, but in fact, it's a protection racket. It's an interesting way in which these honorable terms get corrupted. Same thing with wisdom, right? And you know, brains relating to wisdom, they're wise guys, so they're not brainy in the ordinary sense, but they're clever in the sense that they're cynical. They see through the bullshit of trying to get ahead in society through brains or some other ability like boxing or anything that involves actual effort. They see that as the racket, that as the corrupt thing. So wisdom, truth, brains that gets turned into wise guys, protection gets turned into protection rackets. And as you've pointed out, relationships get twisted at paternal, you know, a seemingly paternal relationship between Johnny Friendly and Terry and Johnny Friendly and Charlie that turns out just to be exploitative rather than protective as well. That turns out to be a misuse of paternal responsibility, as you put it. I want to say one final thing, which is that Terry himself, I'm not sure that he fully understands this, right, because he understands it better at the end of the movie. But at the point where he's in the cab, he sees not being a bum as having won the fight. It's about winning. He could have been somebody. And there's. There's an element of truth to that. But it's not so much about winning as being able to be his own man and rely on his own actual effort instead of, again, extracting oneself from that realm, from that scene and living as mobsters do outside of it and trying to exploit and control it from the outside, but also spoil it, right? In the sense that to put gum in the whole system, the whole meritocratic system or the whole system of effort, to just gum that up and spoil it for everyone else as well. So it's not just that they're running a racket. They could do a lot without ever having to rig a prize fight. They could make a lot of money without having to exploit the dock workers. But they have to do that anyway because they have to spoil all that. So would Terry have actually won the fight? He thinks he would have won the fight. Maybe he would have. He was holding the guy up for certain rounds. He would definitely, you know, but that kind of. We would expect anyone to say that sort of thing, to have that sort of bravado. It's not clear that that's actually the case. So the important thing wouldn't have been becoming somebody by winning the fight. It would have been been not having engaged in the dishonesty of throwing it and not have not having been exploited in that way. So in the end, right, we see a recapitulation of this because he doesn't win the fight at first. People say, oh, he's still got, you know, he's still got his boxing chops because he does get Johnny Friendly good in that fight. But in the end, he can't do anything about the number of people who are on top of him beating him. What he can do though, is he can reintegrate himself into something honest by doing that walk and getting people to follow him into that place. So that's the way to be somebody. That's the way not to be a bum. 24:54 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about this fascinating idea of the removal of agency and of passivity being twinned with the longshoremen union. You know, like the nature of this work itself, which is. Which seems to me to be so physical. So it's funny that this whole. In the same way that Terry's prize fighting past seems to run at cross purposes with this idea of his passivity, you know, the very nature of the work itself, of the longshoremen's work is extremely physical too. And yet they're very passive. And I've just been thinking about the way that the longshoremen, they're kind of the disenfranchised children of Johnny Friendly. For whatever reason, Terry is the son with whom he's well pleased. Right. So Terry gets in this sort of father and Christ figure kind of perversion or the turning inside out of that relationship. To a certain extent, the longshoremen are like the disenfranchised children of Johnny Friendly's anti benevolent father. And they're forced to contend with none of the favoritism that Terry gets. And especially Charlie, right? Charlie doesn't seem he has to do any of the hard labor because he's just purely in the administrative wing of this corrupt union. But I'm thinking about the way that it's specifically that it's dehumanizing these workers who in a way, I think are speaking out truth telling as redemption for them, I think works a bit better maybe than it does for Brando's character, who, I mean, after all, we're talking about the scene in the cab and he, he knows how to give good speech, right. It's famous for his. For his speechifying and for his ability to kind of articulate what the problem is. It comes late in the film and after some development and growth of his character. But also we think about, you know, the Inciting incident of the whole film. The drama of the whole film comes from something that Terry says, right? He goes down to Joey Doyle's apartment building and lures him out with a lie. But it's a speech act from the very beginning. I'm thinking about the longshoremen as being treated like animals with this deaf and dumb idea, right? So that this passivity can be in terms of, like, brains. You know, this brains brawn distinction that you're making. Where they're supposed to sort of just shut down their brains and become like animals, like beasts of burden. Where they're deaf and dumb and they do the physical labor and that's it. So they're sort of shutting down part of their humanity and becoming animal. Like. It seems to me that for them, this idea of speaking out, as I said, is really an antidote to kind of balance the state. And I think about Edie coming in this teacher. And also maybe this, like, feminine force where, you know, these. These men are almost like parodies of this hyper masculine, extreme state in which you're just. As a man, you're just a sort of silent working body who just takes all the crap that everybody throws at you and you just sort of keep working through it. And you don't really get to access your consciousness in any kind of way to fight back or your brains, right? Like, you. You can't articulate things. You can't speak. You just have to, like, take it and work and do the hard labor. And Edie kind of comes in as this force of articulation and expression, right? She's really the one who forces Father Barry to act. And she gradually works on both Terry and her father over the course of the film. Part of what you were saying is that those two things, the brains and the brawn are out of balance. And in the Longshoremen, I think that's especially true more than it is for Terry. And so in a proper relationship, one in which the men are not being exploited in the way that Johnny Friendly is exploiting them, their brains would not be taken out of the equation. They would still be, like, fully, fully human. In a relationship that's actually a relationship and is not exploitative, but that's actually working. It would retain their humanity. So in this thwarted union system, they're being dehumanized or denatured in some essential way. Because the relationship has been denatured. And Johnny Friendly, too, is like, by participating in this, by setting up this kind of relationship, he's dehumanizing himself as well. He's missing out on his obligation to be an actually responsible union boss and he's thereby dehumanizing himself as well in this equation. 29:00 Wes: Yeah. One of the reasons I have down for why it is a mobster wouldn't go legitimate or what the appeal of that sort of life is, I phrase it as rejection of inwardness. So that means book learning, education and Edie, as you've pointed out, as a counterpoint to that. Those things can be seen as soft and effeminate, of course. Right. They prevent men from being real men, from relying on their strength and their aggression. But also the spiritual is part of this. So there's. There's an enormous sacrifice for men in giving up aggression for human beings in general. But I think especially for people who have large amounts of testosterone in their bodies, there's a. There's a sacrifice in giving up the world of action and aggression for this more constrained, internalized world. Right. So sublimation into work, whether it's physical labor or boxing or something, or a white collar job or creativity, something artistic, it all involves this movement to something more inward or religion itself. And that's something that I think they reject. And they reject it again because they see it as something that is itself exploitative. Right? Oh, I got to go to school and do this. Or oh, someone's giving me the opium of the masses, religion in order to keep me obedient. I got to do a stupid job that doesn't pay very well. They see again, that whole system as being the thing that's exploitative. And so one has to stand outside of it just in order not to be exploited by it. And that goes for inwardness as well. Inwardness just makes you soft and easily exploited. So we get that scene early on, this whole speech about, from Johnny Friendly about having had a hard life and growing up on a widow's pension and basically suffering the trauma of having been exploited. And that's why he has to do what he does. I think this helps us make a transition to the idea of what it is to be a pigeon. Pigeon does a lot. The idea of a pigeon does a lot of work in this movie. It means different things, but at one point Terry talks about pigeons being in the park and hawks descending on them. He says, so she says, I wouldn't have thought you'd be so interested in pigeons. He says, I just go for it. Which is a really weird response. I'm not just noticing it in the transcript, but I thought that when I was watching the movie as well. 31:36 Erin: He goes for Them, he's, you know, it's like ice cream. Pigeons. Yeah, yeah, I know you know what it means. It's absurd. 31:43 Wes: It's just. Yeah, yeah, he's, it's, it's something he's in, he's into and he doesn't know why. And then, and then he says, you know, you know, the city is full of hawks. That's a fact. They hang around on the top of the big hotels. They spot a pigeon in the park, right down on them. Okay, Obvious subtext. And there's a lot of good subtext in the dialogue, you know, that's makes for good dialogue in a movie is this type of thing, the hawks are the mobsters and the pigeons are the bums or the passive innocent people. People trying to live by the rules. That's the pejorative concept of what it is to be a pigeon. Of course, then there's the idea of a stool pigeon and the idea that he is a pigeon. And this had me looking up, I looked up stool pigeon. I was wondering what the origin of that was, this idea. And apparently hunters would tie a pigeon to a stool and it would flutter around in a. Attract other pigeons. So you can see it's being made to betray its own kind. So to attract other pigeons so the hunters could kill them. It looks like it was the 1840s that it was first used to describe police informants. So this idea of disloyalty, but also and of being something like a decoy or betraying one's kind, it inverts the concept of honesty and truthfulness. Right? Because the pigeon is actually being truthful, they're not being false. From the standpoint of the mobsters, it's falsity. But in a more absolute, absolute sense, pigeons are just honest and they're just people who are more interested in truth than the corrupt way of life that they're rebelling against. And so that gives a transition into this concept of the pigeon in the non pejorative sense in the movie where it's about care. So Joey Doyle takes care of pigeons and that helps get him killed. Right, because he's lured up to the roof. How does he, how does Bran. How does Terry lure him up to the roof again? 33:33 Erin: He says he's gonna bring the pigeon up. Pigeon had flown away. Obviously not. But Terry says that it has and that he would meet him up on the roof to put the pigeon back in the cage. 33:43 Wes: Right. So Terry is gonna, you know, he's gonna collaborate with Joey's taking care of the pigeons and Then after Joey dies, he takes over that very caring activity. And so, you know, when he says he just goes for it. There's a side of him, right? There's this caring side of him that runs against the side that thinks that caring and being cared about are just weakness and exploitation. That cynical view of it. Edie says to him, at some point she would cure people of this sort of thing by. Or of their hardness, by patience and kindness instead of using something like violence or force. And finally, I think at some point in the film when he's being called a pigeon, I think he says, no, you're all pigeons. I don't know if I'm misremembering that, but it's a pigeon, you know, I'm not a pigeon for ratting out the mob. You're pigeons for letting yourself be passive with the mob. So the dock worker passivity is pigeon like. And there's kind of an echo of this in the father saying, you know, every time you let this happen, it's a crucifixion. So, sorry for running all through those. Through all those different pigeon ideas in one speech. But, yeah, maybe that'll help us explore this a little bit. 34:49 Erin: Yeah, I really like the idea of. Care to go back a little bit. Like, it's just very funny that, you know, Terry uses a pigeon to get the pigeon. You know, it's. It's a little bit, you know, when he stands underneath Joey's window holding the pigeon and basically acting like his own. Like a stool pigeon for the mob. Right, right. I like learning about this etymology. I didn't know it. So he's. He's doing exactly what a stool pigeon does. Right. By staying down. Down below and getting the other birds to. Well, he's sort of flushing them in a way. Right. 35:20 Wes: Yeah. 35:21 Erin: There's one more element I can think of too, that, you know, the image of the tabs being thrown on the ground with all the men picking them up like pigeons, you know. 35:30 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah. Very good. 35:32 Erin: So the men are in this position of being beggars, as you already suggested. So, you know, there are all these valences, these negative valences, that they're beggars for work, that a pigeon is like a bum, I suppose. Right. Because you're, you know, pigeons are always looking for you to throw them some food and give them something. Yeah, right. So that's another. But I really like the fact. I mean, you kind of have to get almost all the way to the end of the movie or watch it a second time. In order to realize what exactly Terry's relationship is to the Joey Doyle pigeons on the roof. Because he's there, like, the very next day taking care of the pigeons. And this is one of the only. Or maybe the only thing that indicates that there's something in him that's what really positive before anybody else even gets to him and works on him. You know, before Father Barry, before Edie, it's this idea that he went up there and took responsibility for those pigeons and cares very much for them. Like when he. When he talks to Tommy, he. Tommy comes up to feed them in the morning, and Terry has already fed them and tells Tommy, I think, to be careful about spilling water because he doesn't want the pigeons to catch cold. 36:42 Wes: Yeah, Right. 36:43 Erin: And so this is a really strong indication that Terry has this paternal quality in himself and that he understands obligation and relationships to other things. And we know later that he'll be well matched with Edie because of Edie's tendency to take in stray cats. Right. So they're both. They both kind of have this inherent softness about them. And I think it's, like, really crucial that Terry is taking care of those pigeons before his actual intellectual transformation via influence occurs, so that we could see that he has this inherent goodness expressed really strongly through the idea of these pigeons. And the sense that he takes on this obligation and it puts him in. Again, in a positive relationship in which he owes something to these pigeons and performs those duties, those ministrations towards them, I think is really crucial to show his development or the possibility for his development. 37:38 Wes: Yeah, very good. One of the big losses in the movie is when Tommy kills all the pigeons. And this is someone who, earlier on, Terry has described as his shadow. In fact, he says, this bum here is my shadow. Says that jokingly. So this bum here is my shadow. So he has this paternal relationship to this kid. And then this kid does something so horrible, he doesn't just kill one pigeon and then throw that pigeon at Terry, but he kills all of the pigeons, which is really horrific. And then the question is, why does he need to do that? He's getting it back at Terry for Terry's betrayal. But why take it out on the pigeons? And again, one can see this, right, as a denial of one's own passivity and softness and even relatedness and therefore, one susceptibility to exploitation. So caring and relatedness can be identified with passivity and susceptibility to exploitation. So one might want to rebel against that by just eliminating the symbols of that and eliminating Even the possibility of taking care of them. So Terry can no longer take care of the pigeons once Tommy has done that. So it's almost like killing off caring, killing off vulnerability, killing off relatedness. And why? Because Terry has betrayed this twisted, to use your word, this twisted version of relatedness that comes with being part of this corrupt system. 39:04 Erin: I like that. Because you're redeeming Tommy from being just another budding psychopath to know to someone who represents Terry's inner child. Right. So it's. As long as we stay in the realm of symbol, we don't have to think about the fact that Tommy went in there and wrung every little neck. 39:23 Wes: It's just. I know, I know. 39:25 Erin: Yeah. 39:26 Wes: Tommy was helping out with taking care of the pigeons, so he had something of that. Terry's obviously a paternal figure to him. Oddly enough, he feels betrayed by Terry doing something that's actually genuine and non exploitative. He feels exploited by that. Okay, so we. We're gonna end part one right there. And I don't know if we have anything more to say about pigeons. We might. 39:48 Erin: We haven't talked about being pigeon toed, so that's an important part of this. 39:53 Wes: Oh, just joking, right? Of course. 39:56 Erin: Just playing word association games. 39:58 Wes: When did that happen? But anyway, we'll talk about other things probably. So you can listen to that next week, part two, or you can subscribe and get that right now. Thank you. 40:10 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subjectspodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter NYsubtext.