CHAPTER 9

Spectacles of Suffering: The Third Man

The image in “Of Walking Abortion” of “little people in little houses – like maggots small blind and worthless” possibly in part comes from The Bell Jar. Protagonist Esther watches a friend exit the water at the beach: “His body was bisected for a moment, like a white worm. Then it crawled completely out of the green and onto the khaki and lost itself among dozens and dozens of other worms that were wriggling or just lolling about between the sea and the sky” (160). But another possible source occurred to me: the “dots […] down there” pointed out by amoralist Harry Lime in The Third Man from atop a big wheel, looking at the citizens of post-WWII Vienna below. Lime, accused of stealing and diluting penicillin on the black market, explains his philosophy to his friend and future executioner Holly Martins:

Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. 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.

Harry’s monologue justifies murder via the principle of scale and the limits of human knowability: we can’t know all those people, we can’t care for them individually, so how can whether they live or die make any difference to our conscience? “I pushed a button and elected him to office and / He pushed a button and dropped a bomb” sings NIN’s Trent Reznor on “Capital G.” “I need to watch things die / From a good safe distance […] Much better you than I” sings Tool’s Maynard James Keenan on “Vicarious.” All three songs indict the silent acquiescence of the Western citizen: we live in comfort while our governments rain down bombs from above at tiny dots of people in countries far away from us, people we will never know or meet, whose grief we will never know. Is Harry Lime an amoral lone wolf, or the guilty conscience of any of us?

In the end, the film resolves this ethical dilemma by having Martins convinced by British officer Major Calloway to help deliver his friend to justice. This resolution occurs by way of a visit to the hospital, where he will witness in person the sick and dying children that Lime’s watered-down penicillin has maimed. This direct contact, this visual witnessing in first person of the effects of Lime’s actions transforms those “dots” into living, suffering creatures, human innocents. Martins needs to be shocked by this knowledge into ethical action, and what he sees — which is mostly hidden from the viewer, who sees only shapes and bandages in hospital beds — rouses him from the comfort of amoral apathy and the charisma and appeal of Lime’s economic cynicism.

The Holy Bible comes up against the notion, theorized by Baudrillard and others, that we live in an era in which we have become desensitized to the suffering of distant others transmitted by media, that we have surfeit of it and cannot feel for victims of tragedies removed from our immediate surroundings. Social media has arguably changed that view. We are much closer connected now, in real time, to the emotional response of others to disaster and collective grieving. The Holy Bible re-enacts and intensifies The Third Man’s ethical awakening through shock tactics, affirming and overcoming Lime’s seductive amoralism, seeming to argue that the role of the work of art is to shock you into ethical action by means of exposing you to the horror that you are complicit in. It takes this to extremes, the shock turning inwards, repeatedly, as it makes human suffering come alive now and forever, amplifying it toward a totality that threatens to occupy the whole of the human soul and consume it completely.