Sins of Omission in “On the Waterfront” (1954) (Part 2)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “On the Waterfront.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of on the Waterfront. We were just talking about pigeons and stool pigeons and what they represent, whether it's care or passivity and being exploited or falsity and betrayal and so on. Actually, one thing I forgot to mention is that I think Terry also makes the remark to Edie that pigeons are monogamous. 0:56 Erin: Yes. 0:57 Wes: So we get one more positive connotation there. 1:00 Erin: That's right. 1:01 Wes: So maybe we should talk a little bit about how critical Edie is. You know, you made the point that he has this seed of goodness and caring in him before anyone even works on him. But she is pretty critical in getting him out of this corrupt system. There's no way that he would ever have gone on to take the enormous risks that he does to rebel against Johnny Friendly and even to take that walk at the very end of the movie. It's hard to imagine him being psychologically capable of that before his love of her actually helps transform him. And that's kind of what makes the ending a little bit more believable for me than maybe it is for some people. But what about Edie? 1:46 Erin: I think that's. Right. That she's crucial. I was thinking about how this film could be a metaphor for online culture almost because Terry is so passive. Right. So 50 years later, Terry would have been just like some guy on the computer in his brother's basement. 2:02 Wes: Right. 2:03 Erin: Like for me, what's. You know, obviously there's a lot of. 2:05 Wes: The only way to escape that is to start a podcast and. 2:08 Erin: That's right. 2:09 Wes: Re. Establish connection with the world. Sorry, go ahead. 2:11 Erin: Yeah, we're not the poster children for activity. There's even a reading of this I want to do where, like getting Joey to the roof makes Terry like some sort of equivalent of like a social media influencer. Like he's encouraging people to do things that are going to. But anyway, I'm just thinking of the scene where he's sitting on the. Is it the bags of coffee beans? I think when he gets the cushy job, right, where he just does nothing but sit around all day. This is the primary image for this silly reading. 2:43 Wes: At least he's reading. 2:45 Erin: He's reading. 2:45 Wes: It's a girly magazine. 2:46 Erin: Yes, exactly, exactly. He's looking at bikini clad women in these magazines, which is another. 2:54 Wes: It's Playboy. But he's reading the articles, which are really good too. 2:59 Erin: He's not engaging with real life. Right. Like the work is going on around him, but he's not working and he's. 3:06 Wes: He's being a bum. 3:07 Erin: He's being a bum. He's not actually going out there. And I mean, this seems to be a world in which there is one woman, and that is Edie. But actually there are some moms. Right. Of other longshoremen. When Joey gets thrown off the roof. 3:19 Wes: And the bad women in the saloon. The racy women. 3:22 Erin: That's right. Well, and the. 3:24 Wes: No, they're not all bad. There's older couples dancing and the bride. 3:28 Erin: Yeah, right, right. 3:30 Wes: A more raucous scene that Edie doesn't belong in because she's so pure and innocent. Right. 3:37 Erin: Yeah. She can't handle the wedding. 3:39 Wes: She's the wedding guest who should have stayed outside and talked to the Mariner. 3:42 Erin: Yeah, she would have loved that. She would have been really sympathetic to the Mariner story. 3:47 Wes: That's true. She would have. She would have taken him in under her wing. Yeah. 3:53 Erin: She would've been like, do you have six toes by any chance? Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So obviously we get this idea that maybe Terry has abdicated all forms of active life and is just reduced to looking at pictures of women in magazines rather than going out there and really forming relationships with women and putting himself into an arena of action and responsibility and engaging with real people. So I think that's one of the reasons why Edie is so crucial. It's also, I think that she hits him. Right. Isn't that something that happens when they're picking up the tabs? When he first sees her, I think when she's standing over Joey Doyle's body. Or maybe he's not within eye shot of that. Maybe by that time he's gone to inside the bar or something. 4:38 Wes: I think he might be gone at that point. 4:40 Erin: Okay. So when he does actually first see her, we learned they have a past history. But when he first sees her, it's when she comes down to the docks the next day. She's like, later, when Kayo gets killed, she's weirdly like, on the ship or something. So she's way too involved in this, in the goings on of the waterfront. But anyway, she comes, she comes down. 5:01 Wes: It's a little suspicious when a nice girl like that hangs out. 5:04 Erin: Hangs out at the docks. That's right. 5:06 Wes: One wonders. But go ahead. 5:08 Erin: She's a blonde, though, so you know it's true. That means she's an angel. And innocent. 5:14 Wes: Pretty. Angelic. 5:15 Erin: Yeah. Just like a white blonde. When they throw the tabs up in the air and all the men are scrambling for them like pigeons, as we already talked about in the last episode, she runs in to try and grab a tab for her father, because even though his son has just been killed, the night before Pop Doyle is down there looking for work so that he could pay for the funeral. So she wants to get a tab to give it to her father so he can get a day's pay. And she runs up to Terry and struggles with him over this tab and says, give it to me. And I think at one point, she does slap him kind of lightly across the face, if I'm not mistaken. And that, of course, is like anybody who's Catholic, and this is such a Catholic movie, you know, this has Got to be baked in. Thinks of that moment at one's confirmation, which is one of the seven sacraments that you receive as a Catholic. There's a moment in confirmation where when the bishop is confirming you, he. You know, it's a tap, but he's. It's symbolic. He hits you on the face. And confirmation, of course, is about receiving the full gifts of the Holy Spirit. It's sort of the completion of the infusion of grace, if you will, that you get in baptism. And it's supposed to be your entrance into adulthood and into full responsibility. And so there's something in the slap that's supposed to kind of wake you up, you know, and make you. Make you aware of one's responsibility as an adult in the world, someone with agency. And so I think that there's a little bit of. And I should have. I'm kind of just putting this together now. I should have done a little bit more research into. I'm sure there's a long theological reason I could get into as to why that happens. That slap in the confirmation, I think, you know, Edie, in this way, is an expression of grace. And she's also like, if we're gonna take this kind of literally, right, like, the bishop has to confirm you. So she's also kind of giving him a sort of parental tough love in that moment. Like, she's not only kind of grace itself, which I think is, you know, a big part of her symbology as a character, but in this instance, she's sort of, like, raising him, like, parenting him. Give me that. It's not a joke. It's not funny. This is real life. You're really an adult. I really need that tab to give it to my father and wise up. And that, I think, is, like, crucial in the kind of relationship that Terry needs, in which. And in all relationships, in all romantic relationships, right, where you have to kind of, like, grow up, perhaps in really profound ways and not in, like, Distorted ways where you're a child and you need to grow up, but in profound ways where you have to help each other to become complete good people in relationship to each other. There's a sort of parental mechanism that must happen in relationships. I'm just speculating here. 7:53 Wes: It's interesting because you're reminding me that she sort of is the engine or she's the spark for the catalyst for everything that happens later in the film. I mean, it starts with the death of her brother, which, of course, is not having anything she has any control over. But she shows up at the scene of the crime. She shows up to see the corpse of her brother, and the priest is there as well. So. And I think Father Barry at first wants to be quite passive. She wants to find out who killed Joey. And I think the father is encouraging her to not worry about that. And he uses. He says, remember, time and faith are great healers. So we get a depiction of religion which is more consistent with what we might think of it stereotypically. We might think of it as quiescent, we might think of it as inactive. Right. So you turn the other cheek. You let people do what they want to you, and then you don't do anything about it. If I'm remembering that correctly, that's the way it starts. And then she sparks something in him. She says, father, my brother is dead. And you talk about time and faith. And she'll end up saying something like. She'll say, I want to know who killed my brother. I think what's important about that is it's an interest in the truth. I put in my notes, there's something about here about religious mystery versus a criminal mystery versus a crime mystery. Although it really isn't a mystery. Everyone really knows. It's not much of a whodunit here. People kind of know from the beginning, but there's a relationship, obviously, between spiritual or religious truth seeking and the kind of truth seeking that will put a group of people in opposition to the mob. And she starts that whole process off by, in a way, reminding Father Barry of who he really is. Reminding him that that is part of his function in the community is not just to, say, time and faith, but to help people do something about what's actually going on. 9:52 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. You're reminding me that Edie's role here. I think in the last episode, you made a really great connection between the idea that Edie represents the realm of the spiritual. Right. As well as this kind of connection to the brain, because she's studying to be a teacher. She's in a college. 10:11 Wes: Well, she's doing it with nuns, right? 10:13 Erin: With nuns, yeah. Yeah. And yet Father Barry's passivity, though, we would think it would be of this kind of more feminine variety. Right, because he's a spiritual guy and. And he's advocating nonviolence. He's actually, like, disconnected from emotion. So he, too, I think in the scene, it shows that he's become denatured in this fundamental way, maybe by being, like, overly feminine. Like, Edie seems to be a pretty balanced character in that she has the proper reaction here. It's an emotional one, but it's one of anger. And Father Barry is kind of encouraging her to skip over all the processes of grief and just go to acceptance. You know, his parishioner Joey is dead. Joey's sister is right there. Like, this guy has just died, and he's like, you know, time and faith, time and faith, you know, empty platitudes. Completely disconnected from the emotions of this moment. He's just fallen from the roof. Edie has the proper emotion, which is. Which is actually anger. You know, I think about the moment in the Bible which. Which I believe Thomas Aquinas later used to develop this. What would eventually become this just war doctrine in. At least in Catholicism. I don't know if other. I'm sure other Christian religions have this idea of the just war, the moment in the Bible where Christ turns over the tables of the money changers and the people selling things in the temple in this moment of anger. So this idea that anger, righteous anger, has a place in fighting injustice. You can't have passivity, full passivity. Sometimes you have to act, and sometimes that you need to access that anger in a positive way. It can be harnessed when there is injustice. So Father Barry is, like, disconnected from that. He's, you know, as Edie will accuse him of. He's hiding in the church. She said, have you ever heard of a saint who hides in a church? Saints are in the world, right? They're. They're reckoning. Yeah. So she's a catalyst for this emotion to come out in him as well. And I think by that same token, the longshoremen aren't just flesh with no spirit. And Father Barry can't just be spirit with no flesh. I think that's maybe what's going on. And they both have to come and sort of Father Barry has to basically become incarnate and go down to the waterfront, go down to the docks and actually, like, minister to these men and Reckon with them. Reckon with his own. With his own flesh, with his own physicality. And kind of like enter the world in that way. 12:34 Wes: Yeah, that's great. So she works on the father. She works on Father Barry, and she works on Terry. And we started out mentioning one way she does that. She's, you know. I like your account of the slap. The struggle over the tab. Right? It's called a tab. 12:51 Erin: Yeah, I think. 12:52 Wes: So the way that may have sort of slapped, you know, be the beginning of slapping, in some sense, into him. And the same thing with Father Barry. And then we get a whole progression of her relationship with Terry. And it starts out with that scene we've already talked about. Where he's talking about the Hawks and then they're in the bar together. So that scene, the previous scene was on the rooftop. And you have Terry working very, very hard to win Edie over to his cynical way of looking at the world. You know, it's in the bar that he talks about. He'll say, my philosophy is to do it to him before he does it to you. And she says, I've never met anyone like you. No spark of sentiment, romance, human kindness. Knock people aside when they get in the way. Which is a reference to something he said about pigeons as well, being on a perch and knocking others aside. You know, eventually he'll say, everybody's got a racket. It's every man for himself. And then he'll say, there's nothing I can do. So the passivity sort of goes along with this cynical way of looking at the world. She presses him on Joey, on finding out who killed Joey. And he says, quit worrying about the truth all the time and worry about yourself. Which is something that in the following scene, Johnny Friendly is going to say to Terry. Terry's going to get slapped around on the train tracks, I think. And he's going to be told to wise up, right? So, same line, essentially. Quit worrying about the truth and worry about yourself. This is wisdom as in self preservation. Not wisdom as in philosophical wisdom. Or wisdom as in caring about spiritual truths. Or wisdom as. As in being able to relate to people so care about self preservation. But something has changed for him, right? Because by the time we get to the scene after the act, you know, the supposed accident where Kayo Dugan has been killed, Terry will jump in. You know, they're trying to, I guess dock workers and mobsters are trying to get the priest to shut up about the crucifixion and all that. You know, it's a very inspiring speech. He Gives. But they're trying to get him to shut up. And I think throwing fruit. And Terry says, let him finish. So I think that's the first point where we're going to see Terry have some spark of life in him where he's going to be able to engage in some sort of rebellion. The other notable parts of the progression of their relationship are. Edie comes onto the roof looking for Terry. So right after the murder of Kayo. So she comes on the roof looking for him. And he's lying there looking very childlike. And she's brought him Joey's jacket because she says, yours is coming apart. And then he mentions again, the pigeons are nervous. The hawks were around before, and there's this look of incredible agony. And then they kiss. I bring that up because before she says, you know, patience and kindness is the cure for all of this. And ultimately love is the cure. And that. That's part of what she's doing with Terry is to show him real love. And that's bringing out this other side of him, this caring side of him. Working against the cynicism that he's tried to tempt her with. Essentially, she's undergone a temptation. 16:04 Erin: Yes, there's the love scene. And then the next day is when Terry goes to the confessional. So it's not enough to hear the sermon. This really long scene of Karl Malden doing his best speechifying. The combination of that and the love scene is what induces Terry to go and confess the next day, which is the really pivotal moment. The idea of the confessional, of course, is built into the Catholic symbolism of the film. Is this idea of confessing one's own sins and accepting responsibility for one's guilt. I'm thinking about what you said about how it's not really. The film isn't really a whodunit. And you're right, you're making me realize that so much of the film seems obsessed with this idea of who is responsible for this. Right. Like to name a single person we know the whole time that whoever is responsible, they're just Johnny Friendly's heavies. And it could have been anybody up on the roof. It could have been those two guys that are the real life ex prize fighters. I can't remember their names, but they have great faces, character actor faces that are watching this unfold while standing outside the bar with Terry. It could have been them. It wasn't them. It was two other guys that probably look like them. Right. And so this idea of who did this, which Edie is obsessed with and which Father Barry also is kind of obsessed with this idea of, like, finding out who the perpetrator is. When everyone pretty much knows it's just Johnny Friendly by proxy. Almost seems like a kind of like a red herring in the film or something. Because who they're trying to find out becomes, I think, Terry himself. They're almost externalizations of Terry's own conscience as it builds up with guilt. Over the course of the film, the thing that has to be revealed, the thing that has to be the whodunit. Is for Terry to recognize that the call is coming from inside the house. You know, that he actually is right. That he's actually guilty of something by being the one who lured Joey to the roof. 18:00 Wes: Right. 18:01 Erin: So the idea that then he's moved to confess through this combination of love and Father Barry's speech. It's about accepting responsibility for his own sin and his own complicity in the system. All of that to say that you're making me realize that it really is kind of a bait and switch through the whole film. Because the figures that push Joey off the roof are these shadowy figures. We don't see them. And everyone is obsessed with knowing exactly who did this. But it's really kind of ultimately the wrong question. Or is it a question? I'm kind of. I'm, like, throwing this to you, but I'm just curious what you think. Is it a question about that's supposed to make Terry realize that it's him, that he's the responsible one? Or are we supposed to be legitimately interested in finding out who killed Joey Doyle? 18:47 Wes: No, I don't think we're supposed to be legitimately interested. 18:51 Erin: And yet that's what everyone is wondering. 18:54 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. It starts out that way. And it ultimately becomes about defeating the mob. But I think your point about the confession is spot on. Because I think Father Barry won't hear Terry's confession at first. And Terry follows him outside and then tells him his story. And Father Barry redirects him to Edie. 19:16 Erin: Right. 19:17 Wes: And there's that great scene on the rocks, shot at first from a distance. And then you get. I think it's all silent except for the steam whistle. The steam blaring steam whistle. And you see Edie get upset and running away. And then the priest reacting. Father Berry reacting grimly. And although I think he's taking out a cigarette as well at that point. 19:38 Erin: Right. 19:39 Wes: Which is what you do when something depressing happens or something good when anything happens back then. But anyway, she's the one who ultimately hears the. Really is the one who hears the confession. And she's the one who has to forgive him, which ultimately he does. And that is part of his transformation. So she's not only slapping and not only loving. What else does she does? She slaps. She loves, forgives, she forgives. Is there anything else she does? 20:07 Erin: All the Sonya in Crime and Punishment or something, but more active than that. Right, but she's in the sense that she's like the female redemptive catch all, 20:16 Wes: you know she is, yeah, but playing an obviously thematic, symbolic level. Playing a Christlike or angelic, let's say, role. 20:25 Erin: The fact that Father Barry doesn't want to hear his confession is actually a really interesting sign in that it's a good sign. It just continues to affirm Father Barry's effective transformation, which is he's angry and fed up with Terry and also is maybe saving Terry. Like, maybe. Maybe the redirect to Edie is about the fact that Terry isn't quite ready to make a complete confession. Like, Edie is the way station. Maybe she's the step he has to take along the way to actually fully examining his conscience. Father Barry's angry with him, and that's natural. He's fed up with him, which is good. Which means that Father Barry is, you know, successfully accessing his more aggressive emotions now, which is a good thing. Also, he's potentially saving Terry from making an incomplete or maybe even an invalid confession because maybe he recognizes that Terry doesn't fully. He has to, like, be fully honest with himself in order to make a good confession. At some later point when you go to the confessional, you have to have, like, a full recognition of what you've done and a resolution not to commit that same sin again. That isn't always borne out by what actually happens post confessional. Right. But you have to have, like, an actual understanding of what you. You've done and a resolve to try to not commit that sin in the future. And I think, you know, there's something about this interaction that you can kind of tell that Father Barry knows that he's not really ready, he's not really there, and he needs to go to Edie first. So it's not like he's like, oh, he just has to confess to Edie and then it's all going to be okay. I think, like, there's still something that needs to happen before he can be rightfully absolved of the sin. And, you know, you could argue that the whole last movement of the film is about his confession is the testimony, and then his penance, which, you know, you're given a penance at the end of the. Of confession. His penance is the physical beating. 22:13 Wes: Right. 22:14 Erin: That he gets the physical suffering. So that is kind of thematically what enacts the real confession at the end of the film. And he still has a ways to go in order to get to that place, I think. 22:24 Wes: Right, good point. You're making me think of the fact that being a stool pigeon and doing confession are related. Right. You're telling the truth. 22:33 Erin: Yeah. Though interestingly related to that is the idea that the priest is forbidden from ratting out the. You know, so it's. It's. It's a private thing. Right, right. And a great movie that maybe we can do someday on the podcast is I Confess Hitchcock film with Montgomery Clift, where he plays a priest who's implicated in a. In a murder that he did not commit, but his has been told he's the murderer, actually came in and confessed to him. And the priest, Montgomery Clift, can't break the seal of confession even to exonerate himself. If you're a priest and you break the seal of confession, you're immediately excommunicated. So it's extremely dire that you can't rat on someone confessing to you. So it's a slightly different relationship. But there is this idea that in the confessional, the confessor unburdens himself and does kind of rat on someone, but kind of himself. Yes, exactly. And the priest has the obligation, the mortal obligation, to keep that in confidence and not rat on this guy, even if it means saving himself from prosecution. 23:37 Wes: Yeah. So the priest, though, on that analogy, is parallel to, let's say, the judicial system. And instead of handing out a punishment for a crime, he's handing out, well, on one level, hail, Hail Marys. Right, Right. So there's a sort of punishment that goes to it. But as you. You pointed out, what, you know, what stands in for punishment is actual understanding of the truth, and then this resolve to act differently in the future. But it is, you know, it is on a religious level, it's what corresponds to what is punishment in the judicial system. And I think you're right. We can't get a believable understanding to the final part of the film where he becomes a hero. That transformation is not going to be believable without this step. And I think, as you pointed out, he's trying to take the easy way out by just saying it to Father Barry. Father Barry knows that by himself, he's not going to be able to give an effective punishment, which is to say give an effective inducement to self reflection and to change. Because Terry really is trying to backslide at that point. The rebellion might have ended right there. Right. This is just after the docks where Terry has just gotten his first spark of life, you know, saying, let the father finish. And then he's established a relationship with the father, with Father Barry. And it's like, okay, here's my friend now, and he can make it all right. And then he won't have to do anything. He won't have to turn on Johnny Friendly. So I think instinctively, Father Barry seems to understand he's nominally coming to confess, but really he's trying to backslide. So he has to redirect him to Edie, to the one that he's wronged, and suffer the agony of seeing her hurt by that and feeling betrayed by that. Only she can actually hear the confession and forgive him in a way that will get him to again, just to repeat what you said, have an actual understanding of what he's done and resolve to act differently in the future. 25:45 Erin: Yeah. My favorite scene in the movie, outside of the cab scene, is when he then comes to Edie's apartment and breaks down the door. 25:52 Wes: Yeah. 25:52 Erin: Which is, you know, what's that about? Read, read wrongly. Maybe that looks like he's just like forcing Edie to kind of forgive him or almost like intruding upon her psyche in a way. He's putting himself on the line. He's actively pursuing her even to the extent that he's going to like break down the barriers which he himself has put in place. Right. Like his actions have caused her to close the door against him because he's committed this sin against her brother. Right. And so he has to. He's like undoing that by breaking down the door. It's another kind of form of, I think, penance that he's kind of doing. Symbolically speaking, it's not really a penance, but he's trying to undo what he did and break down the barrier which he has erected between them through his betrayal of Joey. 26:35 Wes: This is the first step and resolving to act differently. So this is the first. The breaking down of the door is the first scene of Act 3. And the plot point that has pushed him into that is the cab scene, his talking to his brother, even having a gun pulled on him by his brother and being profoundly disappointed in his brother. He doesn't react to that as if, oh, my God, I could be about to be killed. He just reacts with sorrow and disappointment, which already reflects a certain amount of transformation. Right. He's no longer just thinking about his own self preservation. And then he gives that ultimately speech about could have been a contender. And then Charlie relents and lets him go free. And Charlie, of course, goes on to his own death. And then the ball is now rolling downhill at this point to some extent. Well, that's the wrong way to put it. There's momentum now, you know, Right. There's momentum towards the climax of the movie at this point, or it's become inevitable. And he's desperate. He goes to Edie's in a desperate state. But what it reflects is his interest now in love, his complete surrender to that. And he goes there and he says, you know you love me. She's saying, stay away from me, saying you love me. And then on from there, he's going to go down to find his brother dead and they almost get killed and all of that. 27:55 Erin: But, but yeah, yeah, I'm thinking through then the testimony scene is this metaphor for confession. I mean, I think that through this whole conversation I've been wanting to get to a point at which we can say that mere truth telling is something like a physical action. I think that maybe the answer was in front of me the whole time in this metaphor of the Catholic confessional, because there are actually physical air quotes, physical consequences that result from the sacrament of confession in Catholic theology. So to the extent that we could think of the soul as having a kind of form to it, a kind of essence or substance, the idea, metaphorically speaking, and again, it's. This is kind of an imaginative exercise, but there's, there's supposed to be some kind of quasi physical truth to this, that sin stains or damages wounds, negatively affects the quality of the soul in some way that is, you know, a soul isn't a physical thing, but it's best understood as a kind of physical degradation of some kind. In other words, it matters. Like committing a sin actually changes the substance or essence of one's soul negatively. So say that it's like a window, you know, the soul is like a window and sin stains it or clouds it in some way where you can no longer see through it as well as you could before, or the light can't get through it as well. And so the idea is that in the confessional, through confessing one's sins and receiving absolution that physically is cleaned in some substantive way, those smudges, or whatever, be it larger, small, are wiped away through the confessional. So there's. There is a. You know, it's difficult to speak of these things in physical terms, but there is a quote unquote, physical transformation that occurs to the non physical entity of the soul, the substance of the soul. And so there's something active in that action. When we're speaking of this in terms of the confessional, in terms of the sacrament of confession, which the testimony scene is clearly attempting to mirror, we could think of this in terms of an action being performed that goes above the verbal and somehow enters the realm of the physical. It's cleaning something up, you know, so maybe it's not necessarily like putting something out into the world. It's cleaning one's room, you know, it's keeping things tidy, undoing something that has been done. But I still think there's an action as opposed to a passivity there that goes deeper than just something that's verbal. There's a shift in substance. There's a certain kind of change being made to reality. 30:28 Wes: Yeah, you're making me. I think you use the phrase speech act at this point. So it's something that's not just communicating information, but it actually changes the world. So it's the same sort of thing. For instance, when I make a promise or when I say I do, getting married, you're saying something, but by saying I do, it's a form of promise, but it's also a legally binding step in some sense. Right. So you're now in a, I want to say contract, but that doesn't sound very romantic. But now you're married. And of course, it's the conventions of the community that give certain types of. Of speech that power, but they have the power to do something more than just to relate something. So I like this idea, if that's what you're saying, of confession being this sort of speech act that changes the soul. It's something active, but also it changes one's dispositions, one's character in some way so that one is more disposed to act as well, to do something real. So even when he engages in the. The court scene and he's being a truth teller at great cost to himself and getting Johnny Friendly in trouble, that is not enough. You know, there have been. And the confession to Edie is not quite enough, and this confession is not quite enough. I mean, they are accomplishing this internal transformation. But to really complete it, he actually has to do something else. I think of this something else as entering, quote, unquote, entering the scene. I say entering the scene because I was thinking of Johnny Friendly. I called it rigging the scene, as, in a way, standing outside of the community, standing outside of work, outside of love, outside of the system as a whole, and needing to control it and rig it and spoil it, as I put it, from the outside. To change that, you have to go down and actually become part of it, to be within the system, within the scene, among the workers on the dock, not just in the loft being a bum, but actually doing something and part of a community in a relationship, engaging and being loving. So that's what happens at the. At the very end with the confrontation with Johnny Friendly and then the walk up to the warehouse. So, yeah, confession is a kind of speech act that creates a promise to actually act. And so I think the forms of confession that he engaged in to Edie and in court create the grounds for him doing that thing that you talked about that's important to confession, which is actually acting differently in the future. 33:00 Erin: Right. Yeah. And he even gets a redirect away from sort of retributive violence by Father Barry in the bar. Right. Because he has Charlie's gun on him. So Father Barry intervenes, and Terry's taking an action which will almost certainly end up with him going to prison for the rest of his life, and says, you know, do you want to hurt Johnny Friendly? Do you want to fix him? Do you want to finish him for what he did to Charlie? Then don't fight him like a hoodlum down here, because that's what he wants. I think something like that. Fight him in the courtroom tomorrow with the truth. Terry's impulse is actually to take physical action at that point, which is maybe a good thing. But Father Barry is setting up a kind of equivalence between this idea of telling the truth and taking a retributive action against Johnny Friendly, that these are similarly active ways of dealing with the problem. 33:49 Wes: Very good. Yeah. Action doesn't have to be violence, and that's part of the misunderstanding for the mobsters and for that way of life, Passivity isn't. It's not like one is violent or therefore one is passive and exploited. Right. It actually is to be loving or to do work. It actually is what is genuinely active. 34:08 Erin: That's great. 34:09 Wes: Okay. Next time we will discuss Philip Larkin's Aubade. Is that how I pronounce it? 34:15 Erin: I think so. Aubade. Aubade. 34:16 Wes: All these things that I've never abad or obeyed. 34:19 Erin: Yeah. 34:20 Wes: Okay. 34:20 Erin: I should know and. But I can't think of it. 34:24 Wes: I don't know if that'll be enough for full discussion or not, but we'll have another poem back up handy, so we may end up discussing something else as well. By Larkin. 34:33 Erin: Great. All right, thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com 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 enjoysubtext.