Sunday Pages: "The Third Man"

A novella and screenplay by Graham Greene

Dear Reader,

Jack Smith’s careful insistence on presumption of innocence notwithstanding, the 38-count indictment unsealed on Friday by the Special Counsel makes it abundantly clear what sort of piece of shit Donald John Trump is. He took documents few humans are ever supposed to lay eyes on—documents spelling out secrets about U.S. nuclear weaponry, about the military capabilities of our allies, about contingency plans for war with hostile foreign powers—and stacked them in file boxes around a toilet, in the bowels of a tacky property where weddings are held, while he systematically rifled through them, ostensibly to find the most valuable ones to auction off. He has endangered the safety and security of everyone in the country, regardless of political affiliation. And he has allowed his valet—an ex-Navy guy who lugged around all those boxes, lied to the FBI about it, and, if Noel Casler is right, likely changed a few presidential diapers along the way—to be indicted as his co-conspirator.

But we always knew this about Trump. What concerns me now are his enablers, past and present. Anthony Scaramucci has spoken about Republican offramps for many scaramuccis now, but still, two impeachments and two indictments later, the GOP clings to its traitorous, treasonous FPOTUS. For every Chris Christie—who was helping Trump with debate prep as recently as 2020, when he caught covid-19 from the president, but has now seen the light—there is a Mike Pence, unwilling or unable to quit the MAGA standard-bearer. This is true of politicians, of businessmen, of rightwing donors, of Knights of Malta.

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?

The best example of this kind of scoundrel I’m come across in the popular culture is Harry Lime, the villain from Carol Reed’s 1949 noir classic The Third Man. The screenplay was written by Graham Greene, who served in the British intelligence services in the war, and knew a thing or two about human nature’s dark underbelly. (He first wrote the story as a novella, which functions as a film treatment in literary form.)

I won’t spoil it by giving too many details, but here is the set up: Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), an American novelist in Vienna to visit his old friend Lime (Orson Welles), has just discovered that his shady buddy has been watering down penicillin and selling it to children’s hospitals, to maximize his profits. Kids are dying painful deaths because of this. Oh, and Lime also probably murdered a man called Harbin.

In the climactic scene, a crestfallen Martins confronts Lime at an amusement park; most of the scene takes place high atop a Ferris wheel:

LIME: Old man, you never should have gone to the police, you know. You ought to leave this thing alone.

MARTINS: Have you ever seen any of your victims?

LIME: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don’t be melodramatic.

And now he gestures at the people far below, small enough to be ants on the ground.

LIME: 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.

MARTINS: A lot of good your money will do you in jail.

LIME: That jail’s in another zone. There’s no proof against me. Besides you.

And we are suddenly cognizant of how dangerous it is that the Ferris wheel car is so high above the ground, and we can see in Lime’s gleaming eyes that he is planning to throw his friend off. Martins sees this, too.

MARTINS: I should be pretty easy to get rid of.

LIME: Pretty easy.

MARTINS: I wouldn’t be too sure.

Just in case Martins missed the point, Lime says:

LIME: I carry a gun. I don’t think they’d look for a bullet wound after you hit that ground.

MARTINS: They dug up your coffin.

This stops Lime dead in his tracks. Now he knows the police know. Now he knows Martins will have to be charmed or bought off—not killed.

LIME: And found Harbin? Pity. Holly, what fools we are talking to each other this way, as though I’d do anything to you—or you to me. You’re just a little mixed up about things in general. 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.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Certainly today’s Republicans don’t. They rally around blastocysts and their brutal version of Jesus, but mobilize against living, breathing humans who are refugees, or immigrants, or trans people, or rape victims.

MARTINS: You used to believe in God.

LIME: Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and mercy and all that. But, the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils. What do you believe in? Well, if you ever get Anna out of this mess, be kind to her. You’ll find she’s worth it.

Here he is rationalizing killing innocent children for profit. Now the Ferris wheel is back on the ground. The pair clamber off. And Lime, changing tack, makes his final pitch:

LIME: Holly, I would like to cut you in, old man. There’s nobody left in Vienna I can really trust, and we have always done everything together. When you make up your mind, send me a message. I’ll meet you any place, any time. And when we do meet, old man, it’s you I want to see, not the police. Remember that, won’t you?

That’s his last line in the original script. He says something similar in the novella: “Those were the days, old man. Those were the days. I’ve got to leave you here. We’ll see each other—sometime.”

But in the finished film, Lime is not done. According to Hollywood lore, the scene needed to be a bit longer, for cinematographical purposes. So to keep up the dialogue, Orson Welles himself banged out one of the great mini-monologues in movie history:

LIME: And don’t be so gloomy. After all, it’s not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

This is pure nihilism, a callous justification for warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—and for the accumulation of wealth by profiteering. We can easily imagine Elon Musk talking like this, or Peter Thiel, or any of the more articulate Ultra MAGA.

But the key line in this entire exchange is: Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Implicit in that first word is a modifier: important, say, or powerful, or rich. Nobody important thinks in terms of human beings. Nobody powerful thinks in terms of human beings. The rest of us don’t rate at all. Including Martins, his old friend, the only man in Vienna he can trust—who Lime was actively contemplating shooting dead and hurling off the Ferris wheel.

These two men used to be pals. But Lime has turned. He has been corrupted—seduced by the lure of great wealth. And now he is monstrous. How many politicians can we say this about? How many captains of industry?

Donald Trump is one of these monsters. He is incapable of thinking in terms of human beings. He thinks only of himself, and of how many dots he can afford to spare, free of income tax.

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ICYMI

On what was a banner news day, Jennifer Taub and Zarina Zabrisky joined us on The Five 8 on Friday to talk about the Trump indictment and the war in Ukraine.

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Photo credit: Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins in The Third Man.