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Tuesday
Greg Olear of the substack Prevail has written a smart essay comparing Trump and his enablers to Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Olear draws on both the 1949 film and the Graham Greene unpublished novella on which it is based (Greene wrote the work so he’d have a narrative basis for his screenplay) as he uses Lime’s monstrosity to cast a light on Trump’s.
While I think Olear’s observations are spot-on, I want to push the parallels further since Greene depicts different levels of complicity with Lime’s crimes. In doing so, he provides insights into those who enable monstrosity as well as those principled souls who, despite previous loyalty, turn their back on it. We see examples of all of these in the Trump saga.
Let’s start with the monster first. Newly discovered penicillin is like gold in a post-World War II Vienna that is divided between the Americans, the British, the Soviets, and the French. Major Calloway, a member of Scotland Yard, explains shortages of this life-saving drug have led to it first being trafficked on the black market for exorbitant prices (“a phial would fetch anything up to seventy pounds”) and then, even worse, being diluted with water or sand. The consequences are horrific:
That isn’t so funny, of course, if you are suffering from V.D. Then the use of sand on a wound tht requires penicillin—well, it’s not healthy. Men have lost their legs and arms that way—and their lives. But perhaps what horrified me most was visiting the children’s hospital here. They had bought some of this penicillin for use against meningitis. A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads. You can see them now in the mental ward.
Lime is no more concerned for these victims than Trump is for the victims of his various grifts. In the famous scene where Lime and his childhood friend Rollo Martins (Holly in the movie) are gazing down from the vantage point of Venice’s giant ferris wheel, the monster explains his reasoning:
Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds 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. Free of income tax. The only way you can save money nowadays.
And further on:
Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. 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 plans, and so have I.
To which Olear, referring not only to Trump but to those who enable him, bursts out,
Who are these people? How do they sleep at night? Why are their moral compasses so defective? And why has our society allowed monsters like this to accumulate so much power, money, and influence?
Like Lime, Olear observes, there are people in today’s GOP who don’t think in terms of human beings. They “rally around blastocysts and their brutal version of Jesus,” he writes, “but mobilize against living, breathing humans who are refugees, or immigrants, or trans people, or rape victims.”
Olear observes that Greene “served in the British intelligence services in the war and knew a thing or two about human nature’s dark underbelly.”
As I say, however, there are levels of monstrosity, which is important if some of these people are to be peeled away from today’s extremists. Here’s how the different character’s in Greene’s novella shake out, along with their Trumpist equivalents:
–Holly Martins is a principled man who initially is willing to punch anyone who criticizes his childhood friend. When he hears about the penicillin scam and sees pictures of the children, however, he turns on Lime and helps the police track him down. Think of him as the former Republicans who have broken, not only with Trump, with his GOP enablers—which is to say, with most members of the GOP.
–Anna Schmidt is so in love with Lime that she cannot leave off her affection for him, even when she discovers what he has done. In the film (although not in the novella), she warns Lime that the police are looking for him. Think of her as those who feel so loyal to Trump that they are willing to keep supporting him, even though they wish he didn’t do some of the things he does. They also refuse to countenance Lime’s enemies, just as Anna in the film’s last scene gives Martins the cold shoulder.
–The other characters, more prominent in the novella than in the film, are those grifters who benefit from Lime’s schemes. Baron Kurtz is hand in glove with Lime, as is Winkler, a doctor involved in helping Lime fake his death early in the story. Think of them, perhaps, as the Roger Stones, Steve Bannons, and Rudy Giulianis of the Trump circle. On the other hand, Major Calloway thinks that the American military officer Cooler, while a beneficiary of Lime’s crimes, is not fully immersed in them. At any rate, Calloway lacks evidence that “he was in on the penicillin racket.”
Finally there is Herr Koch, an innocent bystander who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his case, he’s seen enough of Lime’s fake death to cast doubts on the affair and so must be bumped off. See him as one of the countless multitudes that have been harmed by Trump placing his own needs above those of his country.
Lime, Kurtz, Winkler are lost causes. But Calloway gets Martin to turn on his own friend and Cooler would rather be with the winners than the losers. With Anna, I suspect, it will be a matter of time before she breaks with the man she loved—she needs time to grieve—but his crimes are so substantial enough to eat away at her loyalty. And with Koch, as with those Americans who think they can stay out of politics, we see that there is no safety to be found in just keeping one’s head down. Better to align oneself with those who represent responsible governance.
The NeverTrumpers represented the first schism in Republican ranks. Third Man shows that, when the pressure is ramped up, more schisms can arise.
Further note: Apparently the most famous quote from the film was written by Orson Welles rather than Greene. It is chilling in its amorality:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.