Society as Swindle in “The Third Man” (1949) – Part 2

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die. Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.” 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. Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1949 film the Third man, directed by Carol Reed. I think we were still in the middle of a conversation about language and the confusions of location that it causes in the film, the difficulty that it makes understanding and people being able to make themselves understood to each other, the repeated plays on people's names. And this comes up too, in Holly's conversations with Anna. I mean, he first sees her on stage performing, of course, in German, and says that he understood what was going on, but it's clear that he's kind of lying or he's just, you know, he really doesn't know German at all, so he couldn't possibly have understood what was happening. And later he wants to run lines with her. Right. And he doesn't even understand the difference in the script that she has between the stage directions and the actual cue that she needs. You know, the line before hers. There's a huge disconnect between them, which seems to be sort of embodied in this difficulty that he has with German. Even though she's not even Austrian, she's supposed to be Czechoslovakian. So this connection with language, the stage, Holly, as I mentioned in the last part, calling the army money stage money, and maybe even something like what you're calling the romance of post war Vienna. Is there something stagey about the whole place? Because it's. It's being staged in another sense of the term. But it just seems that Vienna is this particular nexus which is designed for misunderstanding, and that these misunderstandings seem to be the. The only people that could thrive in these types of conditions are people who make a living in misunderstanding or in adulteration of language or in lying and manipulation of language. Maybe these army forces, too, are a little bit implicated in that, though not as. Not as strongly. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything more that we could say about that, but I just wanted to mention the importance too, of the Stage quality and how it seems to give us an early indication that the relationship between Holly and Anna is not going to work out well. 2:40 Wes: Yeah, that's an interesting relationship because, well, they think Harry is dead. Of course, it's a little fast. 2:51 Erin: One other thing I just wanted to mention too, is the papers. You need these papers to walk around the city. And that's another thing where you have like, you know, you have papers written in a certain language which claims you. Certain country. You know, again, it's language needing a script, needing a little document, a little, you know, novelette to carry around with you. And all of that too, seeming stagey or staged because it requires props and the sort of falsification that Harry can provide Anna and the help that he could provide her to make her props check out is far more useful, though it has an expiration date. It's far more useful to her than Holly not even being able to help her run her lines for her performance. One of them understands the stage and the other one doesn't. 3:40 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think there's something here about Holly is, in a way, living out his fantasy, which is to be an outlaw in a frontier situation, in a wild west type of situation. And he's gonna find out that it's not as great as he thought it was. It's much more sinister and much less romantic. So the romance, in a way, is the right. The quote unquote propaganda and the false identity, I think, which is part of what you're getting at, the staged thing. And that's what Holly is in the business of doing. And the gunfight, so to speak. What would be the big showdown between him and the sheriff? But of course, the sheriff is really the bad guy. Turns out to be. It's a showdown with his friend and he's more in the position of the sheriff. But it doesn't turn into a gunfight. Well, I mean, it does in the very end. On the Ferris wheel at least. It's just a speech. It's a battle of words. And the winner is the one who can defeat the other with a kind of disillusionment. So we find out that Harry's big superpower is just to be ruthlessly, remorselessly amoral. And he gives that big speech with a lot of great lines. I don't know, should we talk about that now or do we want to? 4:58 Erin: Yeah, let's talk about Harry. We're just wild about Harry. 5:04 Wes: So he doesn't even really seem to care about Anna that much. Even as he traces a heart and Anna's name in the window. In the steam of the window, more empty words. Ferris wheel, carriage. Yeah, and then that's what you know. And then Holly accuses him of that, you know, not actually caring about Anna. And Harry says he has a lot on his mind. So his schemes, his rackets are bigger than anything else. They're bigger than any particular relationship, whether with Anna or with Holly. Similarly, Holly will accuse him of betraying Anna. So he's trading safety in the Russian zone for giving her up. At a certain point, Harry gives a speech which seems designed to wisen up the kind of guy like Holly, who's kind of immersed in these fantasies of cowboys and Indians and sheriffs and all that. He'll say, what do you want me to do? Do you expect me to give myself up? Holly says, why not? Harry says, it's a far better thing that I do. Holly, you and I aren't heroes. The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories. I've got to be careful. And then when Holly asks the question about what? About the victims of your racket. Harry says, would you feel any pity if one of these dots. He's pointing at people down below. If one of those dots stopped moving forever. If I offered you $20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. That's when taxes were a lot higher, I think. So if you're going to murder people for 20,000 a pop, yeah, it's a lot less enticing if there's a lot of tax. What's the marginal tax rate? And then there's some suggestion that he'll kill Holly right there, right? I carry a gun. I don't think they'd look for a bullet wound after you hit that ground. And then he backs off that as though I would do anything to you or you to me. And then finally we get this bit about governments. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. So why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and so have I. So he rationalizes his amorality and his exploitation by way of comparison to governments that he thinks his claim is that really the governments per se are just exploitative. And so why shouldn't he be? Why shouldn't he put himself in that same position? 7:47 Erin: I had forgotten that he quotes A Tale of Two Cities there. He's referencing the end of A Tale of Two Cities, which is a moment of sacrifice, right? One character is dying in place of another. And he says, this is far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known. Something like that. Anyway, so the last lines of the book, and it's a moment of sacrifice. And so he's saying that. He's quoting that ironically, as if to say that it's sacrifice that's the real racket. And of course, another little piece of novelistic claptrap or something like that, right? A sort of idealized fantasy kind of relationship where one man is sacrificing himself for another. Maybe something like what happens probably in Holly's types of novels, his pulp novels, certainly, if he's trying to avenge his best friend, you know, Right. 8:41 Wes: If the outlaw is your hero in one of these novels, you are making the similar sort of argument, which is that the institutions are so corrupt that vigilante justice is the way to go, right. And then one can make a similar sort of accusation against morality, per se. Morality is the racket, right? Altruism is the racket. People are only pretending they're hypocrites and it's just a cover for exploitation. That's how you be a cynic and become enough of a cynic to steal penicillin from kids, right? 9:12 Erin: Well, the $20,000 for every dot underneath the Ferris wheel. You know, I was trying to, like, figure out this whole third man thing. You know, is there the significance to the third man? And I had always heard the third man in relationship to the idea of this phenomenon where people would be in dire straits and then someone would show up to assist them, like that would provide assistance that they would either actually physically see or just feel the presence of another person that gave them the strength to go on, say, if they were dying in the middle of the wilderness or something like that, in these really life or death circumstances where it's almost like someone, a force is sort of intervening almost like narratologically in their story to help them continue their story, to help them live this moment. Made me think of the third person where Harry, as a black marketeer, he's the third man in a transaction, in this economic transaction where he's intervening economically between the buyer and the seller. So he's like a middleman. He's a third man in this regard. Rather than being a third man in this way that people are describing where it's almost like an angel or a divine presence is coming down to help them. He's coming in and he's intervening in this transaction to estrange these two sides from each other so that he could profit off of the, you know, the difference. And he's also selling these tainted goods too. So he's degrading every part of this interaction and maybe even. Even doing something like, you know, changing the narration to suit him, changing the arc of the story so that both sides get especially the receiving end. Right. In terms of what he's diluting are getting a bad outcome to their story rather than a good outcome or a better improved outcome to their story, where instead of them surviving, they either die or they're left permanently maimed or something because of his intervention. 11:10 Wes: He's like the inverse of a mentor figure. Right. So often if there's a hero and an antagonist or a villain, then you might have a mentor figure in a film if you've been reading your Joseph Campbell, to help the hero mature enough to the point where he becomes capable of defeating the villain. So the third man, so to speak, or the mentor, is like a spiritual midwife. And in this case, Harry is a corruptor. Although he does. Right. He still performs that function by the end of the movie by, obviously, I think Holly is going to come away from this being less convinced of his own romanticization of the outlaw status, for instance. So he is psychologically delivered, in a sense, by this confrontation with what Harry really is. But you're making me think now. Yeah. We should try to unpack some of these various meanings of the Third Man. So at a more literal level, they've staged or they, I guess they've run over Joseph Harbin in the street. Right. Is that what's happened to them? 12:17 Erin: Yeah. 12:18 Wes: So Harry is one of the people helping carry the body. And then they put Joseph Harbin in Harry's grave. So it's that whole, I guess, three-card monte thing at work. And then it occurs to me that the outlaw. Right. So any Thirds we can think of will be applicable here. Right. So it's not just there's the law and then there's those who are subject to the law. Right. If they're obedient to the law. Or there's the haves and there's the have nots, these Thirds. Right. You could be the outlaw, but an outlaw serving vigilante justice, or you could be a black marketeer, but not someone who's fully a villain. Right. Just Sort of in a gray zone. Maybe. Maybe that's one other way to get at this idea of thirdness being in a gray area as opposed to a black and white area, but it's one that turns out to be more black. There's the third man in the sense of the Ubermensch, the one who is beyond good and evil. And we get a little bit of that flavor in Harry's final speech in his amoral, you know, his argument for amorality. And then he even ends it by saying, In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock. So. That we need a little corruption and conflict and all that to produce an environment that will help foster great art. And perhaps Holly's novels are more like the cuckoo clock in the end, but than they are like Michelangelo, but. Yeah, so that kind of speech makes me think of the. Right. So Harry's probably self conception as being beyond all these moral concerns of ordinary mortals. That's another type of thirdness in the sense of being not among the evil, not among the good, but just above all that. 14:24 Erin: Yeah, above it. Above it is certainly right. I like that. The idea that I had where I was thinking of this third man phenomenon, which on Wikipedia is called the third man factor or the third person syndrome. And that phrase, third person syndrome also made me think of the third person, the grammatical third person. One of the moments that stood out to me on this watch was in that early bar scene when Calloway and Holly are talking to each other. Holly says, I guess no one knew him like he did, like I did. So he drunkenly refers to himself in the third person. Though, of course you could also read that as nobody knows Harry like Harry knows Harry. But there's a. You know, there's this idea of the narrative and what the story is, who narrating the story, you know, Holly seems to believe throughout the film that he knows that he's sort of the real narrator in a way that he's like going to uncover what's really going on and tell the real story. The true narration that Calloway somehow has closed off, doesn't want access to, isn't curious enough about. And then when we're at the top of the Ferris wheel and Harry is looking down, talking about the little dots, you know, one thinks of playing God, of course, but also of this third person Narration, looking down at people. So rather than being in, like, an I thou relationship with someone, you know, you're looking at people in the third person as your pawns or your victims or your. I mean, actually, Harry doesn't like the word victim, as he says. Right. But. Because it sort of impugns him, but looking down on people, manipulating them. So I was also thinking about the third person to add that to your list. And then I also looked up, as I think I mentioned before, I looked up how penicillin was diluted. This is really interesting because I thought. I thought at this point, of course, you know, penicillin would be administered in a syringe. Right. So I was thinking about water, the sewers, you know, okay. Like watery. How would they water down penicillin? And what I found was that penicillin was actually a powder, and it would be mixed with saline just before injection, but that it would exist in a powdered form. And so unless he was getting to each syringe, you know, like right before it was put into somebody's arm and diluting it individually, he would have to be diluting the powder. And how it was diluted was with chalk. Harry Lime. Right. So chalk is also the third substance, if you will. There's the penicillin, the saline, and then the chalk would be the third substance, which would be diluting the penicillin. And so I was thinking about that in terms of lime. I mean, I also even noticed I'm a big. I'm really into trees. And, you know, I even noticed that the path, the graveyard path that Anna walks along a couple of times is lined by linden trees, lime trees. So in addition to this kind of, you know, the weirdness of his name being a fruit or a tree or, you know, a stone or a mineral where there's this kind of flexibility. I also just thought that lime could itself be the third substance, the third thing inside the syringe. 17:31 Wes: I think lime in certain situations can serve as a kind of catalyst. Right. And the point of the catalyst is to get two other things together in a chemical bond. 17:41 Erin: Ah, ha ha. 17:42 Wes: Which I don't think is literally what's going on with the penicillin, but in a way you could think in a looser sense, like the chalk is like a catalyst that helps the penicillin powder get together with the saline. Is that what you said it was? 17:53 Erin: Yes. 17:54 Wes: And as we said, the mentor figure would be a kind of spiritual catalyst. In this case, I think of adulteration or I think of the kind of Catalyst that maybe is corrosive or something like that. So instead of serving to create the right bonds, whether it's between materials or people or whatever, or institutions or the parts of institutions, to fix things in the sense of helping things function. Right. So to speak, helping the mechanisms of government or social relations work, he fixes things in the sense of. He. I don't know. It's not necessarily that he's going to prevent those ordinary operations or chemical reactions from occurring. It could be that, I suppose. But whatever it is, he gets into the crevices of things. He gets into the. The gears, so to speak, into the machinery as a way to exploit what's going on, to exploit these interactions and reactions. So it's almost like he's a catalyst for himself. And of course, he does adulterate. I mean, in the end, what he's doing with the. He's the wrong sort of third thing for the penicillin, because what are they doing? Are they just over diluting it? 19:12 Erin: Yes. 19:13 Wes: Yeah. His own desire or greed or whatever, his own desire to exploit robs the combination of what it needs to become fully what it is to become effective, to help with sickness. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is what he's taking is, in a way, the spirit or the operating mechanisms or the interactions and reactions, the kind of the functioning itself. He feeds off of that well. 19:40 Erin: And I like this idea that he's the sort of the bad catalyst. You know, he's also narratively this catalyst as well. Right. He's bringing together the two sides of the black market transaction. And this makes me think about what we were talking about at the beginning of Part one with why is. Why is Holly here at this time? In the end, Harry loses precisely because for whatever reason at this moment, he brings Holly in to the equation. You know, he's the catalyst for Holly and his scheme, or Holly and the police or whatever, you know, to get together ultimately and cause his own destruction. Right. So there's like a bad narrator quality where somehow getting Holly involved with this and being the catalyst for bringing Holly in, which he thinks is going to work in his favor, is the thing that actually causes the end of his story. It shuts down the narrative for him. It shuts down his racket. 20:40 Wes: Jung has this idea of a shadow ego. Have you heard of this? 20:43 Erin: Oh, yeah. 20:46 Wes: Okay. Well, then I better get it right. You have to correct me. There's a lot more pressure if you know. So I think. Tell me if this works. One might see Holly as a sort of disavowed, weaker version of Harry. Right. So when someone like Harry who's become cynical and a bit grandiose and amoral and all these things intrapsychically, they've tamped down the vulnerable dependent part of themselves. Right. They've got to be third, they've got to be beyond the dyad of the, you know, the one who depends and the one that's dependent on. They're above that, they're self sufficient and so they disavow. So it could be an effeminate side, it could be a weak side, it could be the sucker. And that's the part of oneself that can come back to bite you. It's not always a very stable place to be in the kind of state that Harry is in. If it doesn't happen, literally, if your sidekick friend doesn't come in and screw everything up for you, it can happen intra psychically where what you've tried to repress or disavow or push to the side comes back and bites you. 22:01 Erin: I like that a lot. You're saying Holly is the shadow of Harry, not the other way around. Or could it work both ways? 22:09 Wes: Well, it could go both ways. So it's whatever. The shadow self will be a repressed unconscious part of the personality that someone rejects that they're and possibly are ashamed of. Right. So you would think normally of someone who wants to think of themselves as macho and in control and they might be trying not to acknowledge a more dependent or feminine or whatever part of themselves that they're ashamed of. They don't want to be weak, they're strong. So you could look at this. It kind of reverses the perspective and almost like puts Harry in the position of the protagonist even though he's not part of the film for until the end. Right. So it's a bit of a reversal to think in this way. But yeah, Harry becomes the kind of tragic protagonist who is defeated by this part of himself that he thought he had gotten rid of, but that comes back to get him. And why does it come back to get him? Because, well, he thought he was going to integrate it into the racket. Right. He thought he was going to be able to make use of Holly to perpetuate the racket in some way, apparently, but instead Holly turns out to not just be a weak and repressible because there's a bit of a moral fiber there that hasn't been extinguished. 23:26 Erin: Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing this up because I was thinking a lot about Whether or not Harry is really the protagonist. And there's part of me that wants to say, I almost want to read him as not even being real or being symbolic. Right. One could argue that he's a symbol of war itself or the effects of war. I'm sure there are a bunch of other symbols that we could attach to him, but it seems like he's not quite corruption itself. Or maybe he is. Maybe he is for Holly. He represents something that might have become corrupted in Holly but hasn't for some reason. 24:02 Wes: Yeah, I think what I was saying before. So you can look at it from the perspective of Holly's psyche. Right. And see Harry as an ideal. Something that starts out as an ideal but doesn't turn out to be so great in reality. So Harry is the outlaw in one of Holly's novels, but turns out to be just a real villain. Holly's fantasy of being the outlaw but the noble outlaw turns out to be immature. 24:28 Erin: Right. 24:29 Wes: And he has to find that out. 24:31 Erin: And maybe I was thinking about this in terms of maybe Harry being something like war itself. That this idea of resistance, of authority which Holly is really attracting. 24:40 Wes: And little boys fantasize about war and suggest war. 24:43 Erin: Exactly. And it always turns out to actually be something really ugly and not at all about nobility and everything about just exploitation. And I suppose I also was thinking about Harry as war because of his psychological impact on Anna. And maybe we could transition to talking about her. Unless there's something. 25:02 Wes: Yeah, let's do that. 25:03 Erin: More that we want to say about Harry. But that ultimately seems to be what Anna is about or what her hang up is and why we all know, I think that she can't and won't move on from this relationship. And you know, Harry was good to her. She believes that he sacrificed for her or helped her out in some way. She's never going to give that up and she's never going to believe that he's anything other than noble. And so her relationship with him seems to be one which is just. She's never going to be able to get over it. She's never going to be able to have a normal life. So the effect that this relationship has on her is like someone who's just been a victim of something like a war, who can just never move on from that. They carry these psychological scars and they maybe can't form normal relationships with other people after this experience. 25:53 Wes: Yeah, this makes sense. And she does seem traumatized. I mean, I have in my notes, like, what do she and Holly see in someone like Harry? Like, you know, that's why I associated them with being callow or naive. 26:07 Erin: Oh, my God. 26:08 Wes: It does seem to me they have to be either self destructive or. 26:14 Erin: Now I can't say that I see something great in him because I, you know, it's very revealing. 26:19 Wes: Well, okay. And we all, I mean, I think there's something of admiring the outlaw in all of us. Don't get me wrong, I'm not. 26:27 Erin: Yes. And there's also just like. 26:28 Wes: I can't. 26:29 Erin: There's also just my, as I think I've mentioned before, Orson Welles. Crush on Orson Welles. 26:34 Wes: Yeah, yeah, he's great. So, yeah. Aside from his charisma. Aside from his amazing charisma, which really 26:41 Erin: makes this work, actually. I mean, that goes a long way, right? 26:45 Wes: Yeah. It definitely would not work without that. And he is the strongest character in the film and the best actor in the film and all that. 26:51 Erin: Yeah. 26:52 Wes: What do people like Holly and Anna see in someone like Harry? I think there has to be an element of self destructiveness in it. And I think maybe that's what you're getting at with Anna and her trauma, I think must proceed. You get the feeling that there's a trauma that precedes her susceptibility to someone like Harry and the trauma has something to do with the war. Although I don't think we really learn anything specific details about what she's gone through. Just like we don't learn about, you know, what were Harry and Holly doing during the war? Was Holly in the war? You know, I don't think we learn about her. I don't think we'd learn about anyone's war trauma. 27:28 Erin: Right, no. 27:30 Wes: Hers included. But she seems that way. I mean, do you get the same feeling that she seems? 27:35 Erin: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when she says that Harry never grew up, that the world grew up around him and buried him. You know, she seems to be speaking from kind of strange experience there or maybe talking about herself in a way. She's just viewing him through the lens that she wants to view him through that has no relationship to reality. I mean, there's nothing about him that seems not grown up. You know, there's nothing about him that seems boyish. Holly seems boyish, Right, Exactly. 28:03 Wes: Yeah, Very true. Yep. 28:04 Erin: And so that seems to be entirely projection on her part that she would somehow. She's been stunted. 28:12 Wes: He needs me to save him. 28:14 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Even though he's saving me or you know, like she sees him in this pure way where he's purely her savior, no matter what he is proved to have done. She won't believe it. 28:25 Wes: Well, he uses his powers for good, Right. The racket is about getting her passport. And as Popescu says. Right. Popescu talks a lot about duty, the Romanian guy. And he says some contradictory things like, oh, Harry couldn't have been part of a racket. He had a great sense. That's impossible. He had a great sense of duty. And then in another place, you have to break the rules sometimes. Humanity's duty. So it's a duty to break the rules. And he's talking specifically about Harry fixing Anna's papers there. And then, of course, also says it was the duty of the porter to give evidence. Of course, as soon as he learns about what the porter's, you know, communicating, he goes and kills him right after saying that. But anyway, Right. Yeah, so much for duty. 29:09 Erin: So I think that's. All of this together is why it's like, okay, is Harry representative of the entire war? Because we have these contradictions. You know, on the one hand, duty, duty, that's the war. That's the buzzword of the war, is doing your duty for your country or whatever. But then at the same time, well, it's also your duty to break a few eggs, right? 29:29 Wes: It's your duty to go and murder people. It's not murder, but, you know, necessarily. It could be, but, yeah, it's your duty to go do something which normally it would be your duty not to do, which is kill people, but go. 29:39 Erin: That's right. Yeah. And then we have Calloway, who wants to just make sure that Harry is dead. You know, there's really no question of due process there or anything like that, though. He has all the evidence and he's willing to put on a slideshow for Holly's benefit. Finally, in the most ridiculous. Right, exactly. You know, has him look at fingerprints and all this. All this stuff. Yeah, Great. 30:04 Wes: Great. Little montage there of Holly getting disillusioned. 30:07 Erin: Right. We see him look increasingly forlorn. 30:10 Wes: Get more whiskey. 30:13 Erin: But the. Yeah. So the whole idea of an international police, or of gosh, it seems so. It's sad to say this, and it seems so. Like such a pipe dream now, but, you know, the UN becoming so popular after World War II, and everybody thinking that that was going to end all war. The very idea of an international police seems to be this. This. This idea that, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna fight the war to end war. We're gonna police the world so that war never happens. And so Harry, you know, this sort of like Vendetta against Harry in particular, when we can imagine that people are doing all kinds of horrible things. Harry can't be the only black marketeer in Vienna who's killed people. 30:52 Wes: But it's children. 30:53 Erin: But it's children. Yeah. 30:54 Wes: Specifically, if I bring you by the hospital, I think you're gonna agree he's the worst. 30:59 Erin: I don't know. It's Orson Welles. I'm with Anna. No. 31:03 Wes: All those cute little kids. Meningitis. 31:06 Erin: Sorry, 31:11 Wes: Have you seen a meningitis baby? 31:16 Erin: See, Harry doesn't kill kids. Meningitis kills kids. 31:18 Wes: It's not. That's right. 31:21 Erin: No. 31:21 Wes: But. 31:21 Erin: Yeah, war. War kills kids too. I don't know. I thought of other things that could be that he could be symbolizing or that this whole situation could be symbolizing. There seems to be Nazism or the Holocaust. Right. People not wanting to testify, people not wanting to come forward or. Or. Or put a stop to anything or to say, you know, to help. All of these ideas of collaboration. Right. It's all. 31:46 Wes: Holly tells Popescu. The porter didn't want to get involved. I think he uses the word. 31:50 Erin: Right. And it was his duty, even though 31:52 Wes: it was his duty. So the. Yeah, a lot of people don't want to get involved because they could get into big trouble just even if they're doing the right thing. 32:00 Erin: Exactly. Anyway, I want to read Harry as more of a. He seems bigger than a man. He seems like an entire force of nature or. Yeah, I mean, he literally puts himself in the position of playing God, of course, but he seems. Yeah, he seems to have this huge outsized effect on everyone around him. But I get the strong suspicion that Anna has been traumatized by something. That she had a terrible time during the war and that she's never going to get over it. And in a way, maybe she. It's just occurring to me now. I don't know if I even believe in this, but she too, could be a sort of larger force. Like she's all of post war Europe, hopelessly in love with Harry and unable to move on from him. Destroyed by whatever has happened and sort of unable to come back from it. Have you been to Vienna? 32:49 Wes: No, I've only been to Salzburg. The hills are alive. 32:54 Erin: Yeah, it's a lot cleaner now. 32:57 Wes: Oh, really? 32:58 Erin: They picked up all the rubble, but. Yeah, it's. 33:03 Wes: Well, that's the romance of it. 33:05 Erin: I know. Well, it's. 33:06 Wes: If I can't scramble around the rubble, I'll be. People are chasing me. Or into the sewer system, for that matter. Hey, we haven't talked about that, but yeah, that sewer system might be cleaner than our aqueducts. Do we have aqueducts? Nope. 33:22 Erin: Nope. 33:23 Wes: It's pretty. Looks like a little water park, but black and white, so who knows? 33:27 Erin: Well, and Paine says at one point that it smells sweet. I'm assuming he's being ironic, being sarcastic. Right. But it really is like they're just running around in regular water. 33:39 Wes: You don't get a sense of the filth, really. But yeah, those Germans are very clean Germanics. Are we allowed to call the Austrians Germans? They were to Hitler. They were Germans. 33:51 Erin: That's right. Well, doesn't Popescu call Kurtz an Anglo Saxon too? So those Anglo Saxons, they have funny ideas or so. I don't know. 34:02 Wes: But. Sorry, you were making a point about the. Oh, it's cleaner now. 34:07 Erin: Yeah, it's pretty darn clean in the film too. Yeah. I don't know. I think this is one of the best places on film ever. Another one that I think of, actually, which is like so much later than this and still quite destroyed by the war, is the Berlin of Wings of Desire, the Wim Wenders film, which is in the 80s and it's still has that post war malaise feel to it. Yeah. Vienna just. And I was expecting it to be a little more shadowy or. You know, I think it's significant to me somehow that the pictures I have of those statues are all cleaned up and white and shiny. You know, of course that's. That's what you do, but, you know, it's very, very different feel. And it made me feel a little eerie, loving the third man as I do, being there and finding it so clean. Wide streets and everything being white and just open. 35:03 Wes: Did you go to a Mozart opera based on a flyer that someone just handed you while you're walking down the street? 35:10 Erin: I did go. I think I did go to the Josefstadt while I was there. I broke into. I shouldn't. Probably shouldn't admit this. I broke into the cemetery where I jumped the fence of the. The cemetery where Mozart was buried because it was closed and it was my last night and I didn't know that it closed early and so we broke into the cemetery. Maybe that one. I don't remember. This was a long time ago. I was 20, so 14 years ago. And I did all kinds of things. I went to the Sacher hotel. Sacher. Sacher. I still don't know how to say that. The hotel that they put Holly up in that Austrians are not allowed to go in. S A C H E R and they have this Sacher or something torte. Which is famous. It's a famous Viennese dessert. And anyway, so you had to have that. And then there's. In the dining room, there are all the different opera stars, pictures, signed pictures on the walls of all the different opera stars that have visited there because it's right next door to the opera. So, yeah, I was in heaven. I saw all the. Everything Mozart related, you know, just. Yeah, it was filled with music. So I have no idea exactly what I did. I don't have to go back and review the photos. 36:29 Wes: Do you know the novel about Vienna right before the war, the End? Oh, the World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig? 36:36 Erin: I've not read it. 36:37 Wes: Okay. I mean, I've only read a bit of it, but it's an interesting memoir. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 because of Hitler, basically. But he wrote it, so he wrote it just before dying and he's recounting the history of Vienna from his childhood onward and then how it changed up to the point where Hitler was ruining everything. So it's very interesting. But yeah, I was just gonna say also. Yeah. In Salzburg, which I went in 1995, I think someone. You just walk down the street and people are handing you flyers for classical music and stuff. And I ended up going to see Don Giovanni. I think it was amazing. 37:18 Erin: His best one. 37:19 Wes: The culture is everywhere. 37:21 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 37:22 Wes: So it's a very. It's an interesting. It's quite a contrast between what a place like Vienna is in peacetime and then what it can be in wartime, you know. And this is similar contrast to what Germany represented culturally versus what Germany ended up doing in World War II, which is very dark. And that, of course, is the association that Harry makes between the capacity for high culture, he thinks is supposed to be connected to the capacity for darkness and amorality. So it kind of conceals it until it comes out, you know, so all that. Right. The white statue, statuary and the culture and on this inter. You know, on this point of view conceal this darker side. 38:06 Erin: Yeah. So, okay. I think. I think we just about covered everything. I mentioned that a lime is a kind of fruit and. And it's also chalk. 38:16 Wes: Yeah. Weren't you going to say something more about that? 38:18 Erin: No, I just. I went through all the limes. There are. I'm really glad I did that because otherwise, yeah, I would have been embarrassed. 38:25 Wes: Did you get the disease or is that. 38:26 Erin: Oh, that's with a Y. But that would have been a good one since the movie deals in homophones. That would have been a good one to mention. Darn. 38:33 Wes: Doesn't penicillin help with that? Or probably not. 38:38 Erin: Certainly not the kind that I've been getting from my Vietnamese supplier. 38:42 Wes: Oh no, yeah, only good. I'll show you where you get the good stuff. 38:46 Erin: Okay, good. 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 [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 at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext.