My Life and Thoughts

Last night I saw Carol Reed’s The Thin Third Man again.  It’s one of those masterpieces where you find something different in it on each viewing.  The last time I saw it, as a literature graduate student, I was particularly struck by the scene in which Holly Martins, fearing for his life, is picked up by an unknown taxi driver, spirited through noir Vienna, and deposited with screeching brakes at the British Cultural Reeducation Service, where he is forced to answer questions like “Do you believe in the stream of consciousness?” and “Where would you place James Joyce?” before an audience of literary expatriates who keep walking out in disgust.  “How like life,” I remember thinking.

Watching Reed’s masterpiece again, this time as a D-list writer, I realized that The Third Man is actually all about the existential condition of the D-list writer.  Holly Martins, an obscure pulp novelist, rushes to Vienna for no reason other than that a school friend has sent him a free plane ticket and offered him a nebulous job writing for a “medical charity.”  This makes perfect sense to me now.  A real obscure writer would totally do that!

On this viewing, the taxi scene immediately reminded me of the night n+1’s Marco Roth and I were rushed through Leipzig to read from our work at an abandoned cotton mill, as part of a literary festival whose organizers, like Harry Lime, had only to offer us free plane tickets in order to lure us to the Germanic East. The young man who drove us to the Baumwollspinerei actually had a blue police light mounted on his dashboard—a joke, but he really was driving very fast.  Fortunately, nobody was dead when we got there, except J. S. Bach.

Another aspect of Martins’s experience, now very familiar to me as an obscure writer, is that he is constantly obliged to introduce himself as a writer to people who have no idea who he is.  He is all like: “Ever heard of Death at Double-X Ranch?”  And they are all like: “No.”  Except for one character, Major Calloway’s comic sidekick, Sergeant Paine, who comes to Calloway’s defense when Martins tries to punch him in a bar:

CALLOWAY:  It’s all right, Paine.  He’s only a scribbler with too much drink in him.  Take Mr. Holly Martins home.
PAINE:  Holly Martins, sir?  The writer?  The author of Death at the Double X Ranch?

The reason I bring this up, dear readers, is that the denouement of The Third Man is in fact a poignant illustration of the tremendous value placed by obscure writers upon their dear readers.  For the whole last hour of the movie, Martins is vacillating about whether to turn Lime in to the police—right up to the famous chase in the sewers, when Lime finally clinches things by shooting Sergeant Paine.  I hadn’t realized before that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, more powerful even than the sight of all those children with meningitis: they killed his most loyal reader.  Martin takes Paine’s gun, runs after Lime, and shoots him dead.  A lesson to us all in reader appreciation, chers collègues.

Bay Area—based dear readers can still see The Third Man on Wednesday at the Castro Best of British Noir series.

Tags: academic life, comparative literature, d-list, German literary culture, Germany, money, n+1, the stream of consciousness

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