Episode 187: More Zither

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:08] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, I'm not going to lie this quarantine is starting to get to me. I can feel myself losing it a little. What should my opening question be?

[00:01:22] Your opening question should be are you also losing it David because I feel like I'm losing it right now too. In fact we just spent like 30 minutes trying to figure out whether there were phantom voices in our recording. I don't think we're sure what exactly was happening.

[00:01:41] We still don't know. You'd think by now would be used to recording on Zoom and on Skype like would be old pros given the quarantine but no every day brings its new craziness inducing potential. But I gotta say I enjoy being at home.

[00:02:03] I enjoy being able to stay in my flannel PJs while I Zoom. I like that you're pretending that you're wearing pajama bottoms. They're not now. I mean like that you're pretending that you're wearing any covering on your thread.

[00:02:18] I like to wear covering because at first I like to stroke outside of the cloth. Like I find that that's like a good way to warm up. I agree. It's also like nostalgic. It reminds me of the old days.

[00:02:32] You know like I hope my parents don't walk in. So for all of our comfort even you know doing this talking to each other online every week at least or every other week it's still the kinds of social interactions that we're

[00:02:50] having like say we have faculty meetings or you're teaching a class or like I have my lab meetings. It's hard to put your finger on why it's just different and in some ways draining.

[00:03:02] Like I find that I can't stay on long as long as I would in normal life. Yeah it's draining and subliminally insanity inducing I think. Like I do feel after this last week which was Zoom intensive for me both like zooming

[00:03:22] like high school and college friends but then also with students and classes and meetings and it's just like I could just feel it entering. Like I can feel this creeping. This must be like how people who are like they feel like dementia or something creeping on to them.

[00:03:39] Do you ever do you get the feeling that like when puppies get the zoomies and they just want to run like out of craziness just want to run back and forth. Like I just drop out of your chair.

[00:03:52] My dogs are also I think starting to sense something in me like an antique quality that scares them. Like they like it when I'm in high energy mood but there's something too little too charged about how I'm acting for their taste.

[00:04:07] One of the things that we were talking about offline was that these social interactions are very different from normal ones in everyday life because like the person's face is right in front of you and your face is right like you never you never really see

[00:04:21] somebody's face like that or your own face. Can you imagine if every time you talk to somebody there was like a like an hologram of your face right next to them. Totally. And I'm like wait that's how I look like that's my expression. That's all I know.

[00:04:33] I've spent way too much time like fucking with my lighting and stuff just for like stupid Skype is good for that actually like right. I got like I just see you right now. Yeah.

[00:04:44] It's the zoom where that you get the grid view and you're just as big as everybody else and you're like I hate myself or like sometimes it's like I kind of look good right now like when I put the light little they have that little like smoothing feature.

[00:05:00] It's like a touch up my image. Oh I didn't know about that. Yeah. It's like a Vaseline filter for like old Hollywood starlets. You know like nice. Well speaking of proto social interactions well before we get to the opening segment what are we talking about for real.

[00:05:18] So today we are talking about one of in my view the top 10 movies of all time easily and in the conversation for the best movie of all time the third man Carol Reed from 1949 starting Joseph Cotton and Orson Wells it's written by

[00:05:37] Graham Green it's just a it's so good noir at its finest. It's so fucking good. I like I'm excited. I'm actually excited to talk about it too but first. First. OK so I don't know where it came from. Tamler you sent it to me.

[00:05:55] It sounds like a very neuro skeptic type article so maybe he tweeted out originally. I feel like it was a listener. It might have been a listener. OK so apologies listener. If you sent this this to us we thought we'd talk about an article called

[00:06:12] friends lovers or nothing men and women differ in their perceptions of sex robots and platonic love robots which is a category of robot that I was not familiar with. I was not. Does this robot know like the forms like if they have access to the form of love.

[00:06:33] I just keep them in a cave the whole time. So this is in this was published this last week in frontiers and psychology. It's kind of like the hot thing in the streets to do articles about the psychology of robots or like humans interacting with robots as if

[00:06:52] just like just just like a year or two from now we're going to be interacting with full blown autonomous intelligent social robots. That's the way they discuss it like that this is around the corner. This is an inevitability site this site that site that right.

[00:07:10] Yeah like once we get this you know the COVID thing is distracting us but as soon as we wrap this up there's just going to be platonic love robots and sex robots. Right. Right. And the pressing question is how are women and men going to deal with

[00:07:25] these platonic love and sex. So this is like the ultimate you know combining of near futurism with ancient evolutionary approaches. Right. This is evolutionary psychology. How was the mind prepared to deal with social robots really. Exactly. Is there a gene for preferring platonic love robots or sex

[00:07:50] robots and is it sex linked to that gene. That's the question. All right. So these are a few nor Norwegian scholars good for them for pioneering this research. Yeah it's underexplored this area. And since time immemorial humankind has wondered would my girlfriend

[00:08:12] get mad if I fucked a robot. Yeah and would I get mad if my girlfriend was just hanging out with the robot and they seemed like they were just getting along really well. So they describe this as an exploratory study with the aim of

[00:08:28] describing quote how men and women react to the possibility of robots designed exclusively for sex or love and how they envision their partner's reaction. Because these robots are not commercially available. Unfortunately we designed the study to measure the predicted

[00:08:46] attitudes when imagining themselves and their partner interacting with it. Right. You know like we can't actually test their attitudes. You know but like it's not a leap to say that how they imagine they'll react is the same.

[00:09:01] We have the power of imagination like you know imagine that that that the laws of physics were slightly different. You know we could do that. We don't have to make the laws of physics slightly different. This is the power of the human mind.

[00:09:14] So so apparently there was a previous study that they're building on that was just a survey about people's attitudes toward social wrote toward sex robots and in that previous study they had found a gender difference in how interested men and women were in sex robots and how useful

[00:09:31] they are. I wonder which direction that find. Yeah that's a tough one. That's a really apparently men are more excited about the prospect of it than women. This I think there were like early 80s movies about just this. Yeah starring like Anthony Michael Hall.

[00:09:53] So they lay out a series of evolutionarily informed hypotheses that they are going to test in an experimental setting. They they think that males will have more positive attitudes toward robots in general that they'll be more positive towards sex robots than platonic love robots.

[00:10:16] Men don't want to be friend zoned for robots even while females will be more positive toward platonic loves robots than sex robots. Males will expect to in here is the real Evo sec. Males will expect to feel more jealous if their female partner gets a

[00:10:33] sex robot while females will expect to feel more jealous if their male partner gets a platonic love robot. So you say this is the real Evo psych thing. Yeah I almost feel like that is not fair to Evo psych because I don't

[00:10:49] think they're claiming anything about men's expectations about how jealous they would feel in a hypothetical circumstances. They are saying that they're actually going to be more jealous. Yeah so so there is a classic classic study in Evo psych that

[00:11:07] has been much debated since it was published by David Bus. He was in the 90s maybe 80s that that asked men and women imagined that your sexual partner romantic partner cheated on you sexually had sex with somebody else or imagine that they sort of

[00:11:27] emotionally cheated on you that they did which one would bother you more. So it was a forced choice and what they found was that men were more likely to say that the physical sex would bother them more than the emotional violation and women were more likely to

[00:11:46] say that the emotional violation would bother them more. This has been debated like a ton but one of the things that is true is if you don't make it a forced choice if you just let people rate it on like scales like how bothered would

[00:12:00] you be if your boyfriend fucked some other person women are just jealous like you're forcing something by this forced choice right and that could be for so many reasons like just the assumptions of what it means to have an emotional relationship versus anyway.

[00:12:15] And in this case the sample is not even just people who are in committed relationships right now the sample is but just bundles them all together people who are in relationships people who have been and are thinking about the past

[00:12:30] relationship and how they think they would feel if they were I guess still in that relationship and people thinking about being in a relationship in the future and how they would feel and all of that is just collapsed together into one sample. Right.

[00:12:46] So at least they had an age range of 17 to 70 years old but most 68% were students 90% were heterosexual 2% were homosexual and some did not identify as either. So here were the vignettes that they gave so one of the weird things about this is that they are just stipulating that

[00:13:08] there is a robot that can only be a sex robot like it can't do anything else right and a robot that can only be a platonic love robot nothing else. So it's not like it has the it has the ability to give you platonic love as well.

[00:13:24] No, the sex robot if you start to be like yeah it was like a hard day at work. God I just like I don't know if I can deal with another and like you want to fuck you want to fuck. Let's go. No no.

[00:13:38] Can we just I just want to talk like just shuts down shut down. It like crawls back into its charging pod like a like a Roomba. Initiating shutdown. The other thing that I love about this is that they betray their optimism about how close this technology is in

[00:13:55] their vignettes. These are extracts of the vignettes that they publish in the body of papers. So for the sex robots it says imagine the year 2035. I heard that I was like oh shit sweet. The world has seen great advances in artificial

[00:14:11] intelligence and robotics one of the advances has led to the development of highly realistic sex robots both in male and female form. The robot looks and feels just like humans. The artificial intelligence the robots are equipped with enables them to learn their owners sexual preferences through experience.

[00:14:29] I said less teeth. User surveys show that the owners of this kind of sex robot are extremely satisfied even though the sex robots are equipped with a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence there are some limitations to them. The robots can only have a sexual relationship with their owner.

[00:14:46] Attempts of non sexual interactions will either be misunderstood ignored or interpreted in a sexual way by the robot. I actually would like that one the one where it's misinterpreted over all of the miscommunications involve them doing a sexual act that like you had not even known existed.

[00:15:07] Oh you want to be like put face down on the bed and raped. It's like you say like pass me the milk and it just looks into urban dictionary to see if passing the milk is like a sexual act of any sort and it

[00:15:19] just like splooges on your face. Like no. Oh damn this highly intelligent sex robot. If only I had gone with a model that had unlocked that had unlocked the ability to pass the middle. I should have got the in-app purchase. That's right. Oh this freemium model sucks.

[00:15:38] All right. So ignored misunderstood ignored. That would be worse just ignoring you. You're like hey how was your day. What did you do today. Fine suck my dick. OK. All right the robots cannot form a meaningful romantic or friendly relation with a human. Not even a friendly relationship.

[00:16:00] Not that's the weird thing. It's like angry sex or just like sex worker. I guess it's a sex worker who resents you like they don't even want to talk to you. Right. Like they're not getting paid to talk to you about your problems with your wife.

[00:16:14] That's right. No fucking Julia Roberts. Pretty woman here. Will they kiss you these robots or like not on the lips not on the lips. Right. Yeah. OK this is the excerpt from the Platonic love robot. The language might be a little stilted because I think

[00:16:28] this is translated from Norwegian. Imagine the year 2035. The world has seen great advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. One of the advances has led to the development of highly realistic love robots both in male and female form.

[00:16:43] The robots are able to talk to their owners in a way that feels very human like and realistic. The artificial intelligence the robots are equipped with enables them to get to know their owner through experience. User surveys show that the owners of this kind

[00:16:56] of love robot are extremely satisfied. Even though the love robots are equipped with a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence there are some limitations to them. The robots have no physical body. It only exists in a small microphone and speaker. So basically on Alexa like it or her.

[00:17:14] Yeah. Like the movie her or an Alexa. Yeah exactly. It can form a meaningful romantic and friendly relation to a human but it cannot satisfy the owner in a sexual manner. You'd be surprised what you can do with a speaker. Really. Yeah. It's like a little canister where

[00:17:31] I imagine there would be flesh light mods to the little canister with a speaker that would quickly occupy the black market. It's weird that they call it like a love robot. Right. Well that's one thing. Like it's not a robot at all. Siri isn't a robot.

[00:17:45] Sorry for you know or the Amazon thing isn't a robot. I don't mean to trigger everybody's smart device. It's not a robot. It's exactly not a robot. And like love like it just seems like it gets to know you and like we're satisfied talking to them.

[00:18:00] That doesn't mean you're in love with them. The robot. That's right. So OK so they gave people either one of or the other of these. So after reading about either the love or sex robots they were asked to think of a committed romantic

[00:18:15] relationship they have had a previous time are engaged in now or wish to have in the future. They were then asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding how they imagine themselves reacting if their partner in this imagined romantic relationship owned and used a robot similar to the one

[00:18:30] they had read about and how they think their partner would react if them they themselves interacted with such a robot on a regular basis. So they gave everybody a set of items on a seven points on seven point scales. They measured just general jealousy like this kind

[00:18:47] of robot would evoke strong feelings of jealousy in me. OK I'm going to do my best like and take this seriously. OK I'm thinking of a romantic relationship. OK. I am I find out that my partner bought a speaker that really engages with her

[00:19:06] and she says I really love this robot. OK so now I'm asked on a seven point scale three items this kind of robot would evoke strong feelings of jealousy in me. I think I would feel jealous of this robot.

[00:19:20] Reverse scored I will not become jealous of this robot. So I would respond like the lowest probably. I don't care if you're crazy. For the sex robot the artificial intelligence the robots are equipped with enables them to learn their owners sexual preferences through experience.

[00:19:38] This is what I couldn't quite figure out like sex toys I think are used way more by women. And if there's a canister with a speaker that qualifies that qualifies as a robot then like a like a Hitachi magic wand is a fucking robot.

[00:19:55] And I'm all for the use. But what if it's just like a very human looking right now I'm all for that. That's awesome. It's like data from Star Trek but just has a Hitachi in its pants.

[00:20:09] It all turns you're right it all turns to me on are these like Westworld robots that are like for all intents and purposes. They pass they pass the test of looking human and acting human or like in those Black Mirror episodes where like you upload

[00:20:23] the memories of your deceased person. This is a huge confound because I would also probably be slightly jealous if the platonic love robot was like a good looking male robot that passed the test as a human and became really close friends with my sexual partner.

[00:20:42] Yes we can we can talk about confounds here. The fact that some of these people are actually in relationships. Some of them are just imagining what it would be like to be in a relationship and some of them are which to be fair I did

[00:20:56] that for about 21 years of my life. But and then totally legit down there is totally legit. It's turned out exactly how you imagined it would be right. This is silly in a lot of ways the evolutionary psychology

[00:21:11] angle is silly with all the confounds in the way of the thing that they say that they're getting at which is you know evolutionarily influenced sex differences in jealousy for that to get all the way through all these hypothetical scenarios and imagined relationships.

[00:21:32] And then the fact that they're robots and not human beings. It's bizarre. Right at best what they're finding is just to the degree that you believe they can really truly believe that these things are going to be human like then you're

[00:21:47] going to answer like you would for a human. Why not just test more on humans like with humans rather than sex robots like. Well because it's not a sex again it depends on the robot. Right they didn't describe like how the robot like I don't

[00:22:00] want to ugly sex robot. Yeah and if your wife was with like an ugly sex robot maybe like yeah now she's seeing what she has for the first time she's not taking for granted anymore. That's right they found they have a handy little chart with their findings.

[00:22:17] Here's the interaction so men and women who either got the platonic robot or the sex robot scenario. Men report being about the same levels of jealousy for the platonic robot and the sex robot which is kind of low women are yeah women report being more jealous

[00:22:41] of the sex robot than the platonic robot. Interesting what do they say about that. Men predict that their female partners would or whatever partners would be about the same in their dislike of platonic or sex robots and women predict that men would

[00:23:01] be much more upset at sex robots than platonic. Just take the absurdity of that question. I was putting a lot of effort. Imagine how your imagined relationship partner would feel about you being with the sex robot and or a platonic love robot.

[00:23:21] I would have whatever the equivalent of like e-compersion I would just be like can I watch while you have a robot sex while you have robot intimate conversation. But there has been surprisingly actually little research on e-compersion. That's right. The neglected area of study.

[00:23:44] Do we could probably get grant money for this. I think that the people who are worried that AI is going to take over they should really be funding research like this because if we can somehow ensnare robots into loving us physically and emotionally like that

[00:24:01] might be a solution to the inevitable overtake. You know the singularity. They won't do it once because they're in love with us. They've they've like developed over over robot evolutionary time. They have once the singularity hits they're like no I

[00:24:15] can't be mean to humans because I like they've let me fuck them for so long. I don't know. I hate the one robot we have in the house Roomba. I've turned off Siri. Oh I love my Alexa actually. I hate Siri. We don't have that. Yeah.

[00:24:31] Alexa could have been your Elijah at your Seder. Yeah or Roomba but. Sucking up the man of Shevitt. They do note some limitations of the study. The first is the recruitment procedure. They were recruited via Facebook and accessible email lists to workplaces and therefore the sample is likely

[00:24:52] to be influenced by a self selection bias whereby those who thought human robotic interaction were more interesting presumably were more likely to participate in study also majority of students somewhat restricted an age variation which limits the generalizability of the findings and it cannot be directly generalized

[00:25:11] to homosexual populations as the sample was almost exclusively heterosexual. I love how those are the main limitations. Oh also non validated measurements that said they say something interesting in the discussion they say females who had read about this the sex robot reported

[00:25:30] particularly elevated levels of jealousy less favorable attitudes more dislike and more predicted partners dislike the part pattern was not found in the male sample and one of the things they say is that if the males in the present study frame the prospect

[00:25:42] of having sex with robots is allegorically to masturbation with pornography while the females considered the act more allegorical to cheating one would expect the present results to emerge. So I think that's the real question. Is it cheating to fuck a robot or is it just masturbation.

[00:26:01] It's just masturbation with a Roomba. Yeah hate fucking if it's a Roomba. I think we've probably there's no way we haven't asked that question before. On this podcast we have we have definitely asked the question before. We didn't talk enough about it though because even now

[00:26:17] in this quarantine life that we're living I think people are doing things like not just viewing pornography but probably they're more likely to like sex chat with live people on the other end. They have they have bigger houses than I do then.

[00:26:33] Like when are you supposed to do any of this stuff. That's true. That's true in your bathroom. But yeah maybe it's a topic we'll come back to in 2035 what when the inevitable sex robots are I'm going to hold off until like the ultimate

[00:26:48] transformer right car that turns into a sex robot and takes care of your elderly parents then I'll start pondering the ethical and who you can just you know you can just talk to they're easy to talk to their they're funny they say the right thing they know

[00:27:05] like you know when to press you on something and when to just let you vent. Art is much as artificial intelligence is advancing I don't think I'd ever ever actually care to just vent to a robot. I would have to be deceived into thinking

[00:27:19] it was a human that's that's how speciesist I am. I do it with my dogs though. I will talk to my dogs. Yeah because your dogs are alive you know they're sentient they can kind of kind of tell what you're feeling. Totally like really well I think.

[00:27:35] Are your dogs one of them as I understand it is your platonic love dog and the other one is your sex dog. That's right. Yeah I mean I've had sex obviously with both of them but you have to figure out which category to put them in.

[00:27:47] Exactly and the sex one true to the study I guess that is just will pretty much shut down if I start talking about things other than sex. Which one is Jen more jealous of? Jen is more jealous of Omar just because

[00:28:02] Omar is so he's such a handsome physical specimen. Wait is Omar the sex dog? No surprisingly yeah. This is this conversation has gone off the rails so let's leave it at that and come back and talk about. You've been weirdly quiet about your sex dog but that's fine.

[00:28:22] My dog is still too young. This is this would be this would violate some laws. You have to wait until they're adults. Is it like dog but dog ears right so all right let's talk about the third man we'll be right back.

[00:28:58] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards at this time. We always love to thank our listeners for getting in touch with us all the different ways you get in touch with us. Email us, tweet at us. We love hearing from you on Reddit,

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[00:30:20] peas at very bad wizards. You can subscribe to the subreddit the very bad wizard subreddit. You can follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and rate us on Apple podcast again. Let's take a moment, Dave, to pour one out for Very Bad Wizards no context.

[00:30:37] That's right for pouring out for the homey I'll pretend that I'm pouring it out on my carpet. Yeah. Very Bad Wizards no context for those of you who have been listening to our show and have been on Twitter. You probably came across this account to this day.

[00:30:52] We don't know the name of the person who runs it. But from really early on when we made a joke about our words being taken out of context, this account popped up and for a good what seven, eight years he's been consistently tweeting some of the shit we

[00:31:08] say out of context. Oftentimes just to my incredible delight. But I think to the entertainment of many of our fans and I messaged him. I was like, so you know, you were doing a real service. That was a genuine service for our fans and for our listeners.

[00:31:26] And if he's willing to reveal himself, I would love to send him something or I'm assuming it's him, but maybe it's a her. I'm pretty sure it's a him from the brief conversations I've had with him, but but he could also be very could be a platonic sex

[00:31:42] robot. Yeah, very well. Or just a regular sex. Well, no, they don't talk to you. See? Oh, yeah. But I could see them taking stuff out of context. Anyway, yeah, he said he was retiring. You know, like it's sort of a shame that he did that before this

[00:32:00] opening segment. But some people were like, oh, like you should have somebody else take over. I think that's his. I think that it's sacred. It's sacredly his. Of course, anybody else can start a Twitter account and say whatever they want. But but that will memorialized VBW no context.

[00:32:18] His number is retired. Exactly. Poisted to the rafters. Very bad wizards. All of fame, lore. That's right. If you want to support us in more tangible ways, we really, really appreciate that as well. You can go to our very bad wizards dot com and

[00:32:37] there's a tab where you can click on support. Mainly that shows you a couple things. The Patreon page linked to that or you go directly to patreon.com slash very bad wizards. We very, very much appreciate all the support you guys are giving us.

[00:32:53] We can't thank you enough. And in fact, the way that we are trying to thank you is that during these quarantine moments, trying to put out a few extra things for you guys. So you, Tamler, just published your David Lynch discussion. Blue Velvet. Yeah, deep dive into Blue

[00:33:13] Velvet directed by David Lynch with Natalia Washington and Jesse Graham. It's it's a long one. It's a long night. Fun exploration of that great movie where we're thinking of coming back at some point to do Inland Empire, the most inscrutable of David Lynch movie.

[00:33:34] That is where I grew up. The IE in the Empire. So I might have to join. Have you seen the movie? I saw it a long time ago and it was inscrutable like my brain wasn't even formed well enough, I think, to understand David Lynch in general,

[00:33:51] let alone that particular movie. I only saw it because it was called Inland Empire. By the way, did you see that meme that went around where somebody posted an image that said the world makes a lot more sense when I saw this? Directed by David Lynch.

[00:34:06] Yeah, on his window. I'm sure a bunch of people said that to you if you for some reason cannot support us on Patreon for whatever reason, you could also give us a recurring or one time donation on PayPal. That link is also there. We very much appreciated.

[00:34:23] Oh, last thing I wanted to say is I didn't realize how much the Instagram page had grown. We're like a three thousand something followers. That's that's dude. You run it now. You're an influencer. You're officially an influencer. Yeah. So yeah. So thank you for all your support.

[00:34:39] Yes. Thank you very much. All right. Let's get to our main topic. So this is a movie, British movie from nineteen forty nine directed by Carol Reed, the director, although sometimes people think it's directed by Orson Welles, but it was not written by Graham Green starring Joseph Cotton,

[00:35:06] Alita Valley, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. Cinematography by Robert Crasker and the music score by Anton Carrick. Score by Anton Carrick. I don't often mention the cinematographer and the music director, but holy shit. The music and the the look of this film is part

[00:35:28] of what makes it a total masterpiece. The music is on that instrument, the zither, the zither and all of it. Just every every musical sound you hear is just that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's amazing. And it's hypnotic. Like it just it's one of the things

[00:35:48] and the cinematography is like this, too, that you start watching this movie and you're just drawn into it and you feel it envelops you in the mood, the exact mood that it should envelop you in. Who would have thought? And we'll talk about this, I'm sure.

[00:36:02] But who would have like on paper said, you know how this should be scored with a zither? Yeah, right. But yeah, Carol Reed, I think made the call and that's one of the best calls ever made. And the cinematographer is using this

[00:36:18] kind of style that tilts the camera a lot at and we should talk about like when. But that was something it's not he wasn't the first to do this. You see this a good amount in Citizen Kane, which I think why people think Orson Welles

[00:36:32] might have directed the movie. But he really used it to perfection here. I read a funny anecdote where the director William Weiler sent him like one of those levels. Yeah, he hit it and he says, hey, next time you make a picture,

[00:36:46] just put it on top of the camera. Will you? When was the first time you saw it and what did you think then? What do you think now? I don't remember the first, first time I saw it, but I do know that it was fairly late in life.

[00:37:02] So I was already into my 30s the first time I saw it. And maybe it was my first, you know, when I first learned that noir movies might be fun. Is probably one of the first ones that I watched because that's exactly what you should watch.

[00:37:22] It is. It's kind of the ultimate noir, old style noir. Although if that's going to set your expectations, then maybe, maybe not, maybe work your way up to it. Yeah, I mean, there's all there's so many great noir movies. There are so many great noirs.

[00:37:39] But and this this transcends, you know, the genre. And then I'd I'd estimate that in the last few years I've seen this, I've probably seen it a total of four or five times. But the last time I watched it was this morning and God, I love it.

[00:37:57] It's great. I also don't remember the first time, possibly in high school, but it's kind of moving. My mom would have brought me to if it was in a a repertory movie theater, but I don't remember that if she did. Or now I think I do actually.

[00:38:11] But I've seen it so many times for a long time. If people would ask me what my favorite movie was, which is a weirdly hard question to answer. I would say this. I also have a very special memory. I my first year of graduate school,

[00:38:26] I did a summer three week workshop in Vienna. Whoa. It was awesome. Yeah, I was like totally funded by Duke. Are the are the streets actually tilted? They are. Yeah. They're like diagonal like that. So it's really hard to walk here.

[00:38:40] Like my one foot is always like bent horizontally, but they had at the time that I was there, maybe still, well, not at this particular point. They had a movie theater that just played the third man every single day. Wow. And so I probably went in the theater.

[00:38:55] Like I probably I think I saw it at least three times just in those three weeks while I was there. It is a compulsively rewatchable movie that you can just I don't know if it's my favorite movie. I don't know if I'd say that any more.

[00:39:06] But if you ask me what's the closest thing to a perfect movie, I would say this, like there's not like a bad scene. There's not a bad performance. Everything is fits together just perfectly. And that's how I felt about it.

[00:39:19] You know, when I saw it like a year ago and that's what I feel about it when I saw it today. It's just so freaking good. One of the things that I noticed as I was watching it this morning among the reasons to praise it is the pacing.

[00:39:35] I don't know what the pacing is perfect. It it ramps it up when it needs to. It slows it down when it needs to. You're never bored. You never things don't drag on too much. Yeah, so should I do a brief synopsis and then we'll dive into it?

[00:39:50] I mean, we can also talk about what we think the themes of it are. Yeah. And let's say right now, if you haven't watched it more more than most. We say this a lot, but more so than most other times that like I mean it this time,

[00:40:04] like watch this film. Like, I mean, I guess you could listen. There's one big twist. It's hard to imagine that the people don't like not knowing that twist at this point. But I'm sure there was a time and I'm sure it's pretty cool if you don't know it.

[00:40:18] And it's just been too long. So it's post World War two Vienna. It's just kind of a bombed out city where it's not clear who controls it. There are four different zones, the Russian zone, the French zone, the American zone and the British zone.

[00:40:34] And everybody's living in, I don't know, this kind of liminal space almost. It's like this time between the war period and the full post war period where it's just not clear what's happening to Vienna who's in charge. So I think that's such a perfect setting for a movie.

[00:40:53] Then an American pulp fiction writer of Westerns, Holly Martins arrives at the beginning of the movie to meet with his old friend Harry Lyme, who has offered him a job. On the arrival he learns Harry has just died hit by a truck in front of his building

[00:41:10] and he goes to the funeral. He sees a beautiful woman there and a Schmidt and a friend of Harry's. Soon he learns that Anna was Harry's lover. Major Callaway, who is commanding the investigation into his death and also into his activities

[00:41:25] in Vienna, Harry Lyme's, offers a ticket for Holly to return home. But while waiting for a trip, he talks to two friends of Harry that tell him they had been the ones to help his friend before he died. But the porter tells a different story

[00:41:39] that there was a mysterious third man that helped Harry and Holly Martins becomes intrigued with the inconsistency and investigates further. Callaway reveals that Harry Lyme was the leader of a gang that robbed Penicillin from the military hospital to dilute and resell it on the black market.

[00:41:56] And that caused the death and the insanity of many children. And so then once you find that out, there's the twist and then there's also what will, how does Holly handle this information? How does he absorb what he's heard about his friend

[00:42:10] who he had kind of gone there to see. And then once he learned that he'd been killed he was investigating. So should we get into it? You wanna talk about the big themes first before going through it? What do you think? Yeah, let's do that.

[00:42:25] So I really enjoyed this rewatch. But one of the themes that struck me as just like this movie is deeply about, it's about not knowing somebody. It's about not knowing people, not being able to really know somebody. And the emotional core I think at the heart of this

[00:42:50] is that these two people, Holly and Anna Schmidt, who both knew Harry Lyme Orsonwell's character, never thought that he would be capable of doing the things that he's accused of doing. And they were both at his funeral, they're both mourning the loss of their friend

[00:43:12] and they admit that he had a way about him. He was, he sounds pretty mischievous in the description that Harry gives of him when he was child. I used to be able to teach us how to pretend like we were sick, right?

[00:43:25] When we had to go to school, like various little, you know, it was kind of a little con. Tom Sawyer kind of. Tom Sawyer mischievous kind of guy. And a lot of the, to me, what hits home emotionally is when the two friends,

[00:43:41] not only do they discover that he lied and is alive, but that he's just a bad dude, right? And that everything they believed about him, they were certain like that. And I can imagine that feeling of certainty that you knew somebody, but you don't really.

[00:43:56] Like, and they didn't really know him. And I think that's at least what hits me the most about this, that you never quite know somebody. Yes, this theme of not knowing somebody in a way that you thought you did, you know, one thing the camera

[00:44:14] and the music does is convey a sense of disorientation and I think we see a lot of this movie from his perspective. He is, he has in, sorry, as Joseph Cotton, Holly Martin's perspective. And so, you know, one of the things I love is the choice

[00:44:31] when people are speaking German, they don't use the subtitles. Yeah, that's great. So you just feel like there's all this noise and this talk and people are talking and you don't know what they're saying. And it is this sense that he's really in over his head,

[00:44:44] but because he's an American and he has that sense of optimism and he's kind of a romantic, he has that kind of naive, well, I'm going to solve this problem and save the girl and vindicate my friend who is being accused falsely by this British major.

[00:45:01] So it contrasts this kind of American perspective that we can definitely just go into this place that we have no ties, no connections, nothing, and we can just fix the problems there. And that's a very noir element of it too,

[00:45:14] this idea of somebody who goes in maybe with good intentions, but he'll end up making it worse because he has this overconfidence. Like he can bend the will of this place or bend it to his will. Totally, and that theme,

[00:45:33] I had, I guess, recognized it as a feature of Holly's sort of arrogance or optimism and his failures to actually get things done. But I think it wasn't until this rewatch and reading about it that it dawned on me that, oh, this really is a British movie.

[00:45:54] It's easy for me to forget because the protagonists, Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles are both American and the British people are like in any American movie, they might be the other. But this movie is so clear that this is saying, trying to say something about Americans, right?

[00:46:12] You come in here, you're unrefined. In fact, we could talk about that scene where he's been invited to give a literary discussion. Yeah, let's wait on it. Okay. But that theme that the simple Americans think that they can come in and solve everything. Wait, just hold on.

[00:46:28] Let me show you how this situation really is fucked. And it's not a lesson that we necessarily learn. Iraq, right? Oh, they're gonna welcome us with flowers and we're just gonna figure out all the tribal loyalties and we're gonna like just make everything, bring democracy, make everything better.

[00:46:46] I mean, that is Holly Martin, that kind of attitude. And again, a noir hero tends to be like this. They get drawn into something they can't hope to understand. It's very much an anti-noir in some sense. But we'll talk about that a bit more when we finish the...

[00:47:06] That's interesting. I wouldn't think that, but... Yeah, I'll explain what I mean in a bit. So it starts with a great opening narrated by the director, Carol Reed, and he talks, he just describes the scene and all the rackets that are going on in there.

[00:47:26] And he even says that a lot of amateurs have gone into Vienna where everything is so unstable and tried to set up some sort of shop and they end up dead. And then you get Holly Martin getting off the train and he's actually surprised,

[00:47:44] this is where his head is at at the beginning, that Harry Lyme isn't at the station to meet him, but then he gets to his flat walking under a ladder, which I love that touch like as he goes into it.

[00:47:56] And they tell him that he's just been killed. And this is the first time you get this German that you don't know what is being said. And this porter tells him about the accident and he goes to the funeral and sees that Harry is now being buried.

[00:48:14] And there are a bunch of other people there, an Englishman who we learn is Major Calloway, Anna is there who will find out was Harry's girlfriend or lover and a couple of Creekby looking European guys, Central European guys are also there. Hey, was Holly going to Vienna

[00:48:39] because Harry had invited him? Yes, he offered him a job. Oh, that's right, that's right, that's right. Which matters, yeah. Yeah, it's not total, I think it was to, we find out like deep into the movie that it was to write for prescriptions, write the copy.

[00:48:55] Yeah, he was marketing, marketing for his. Black market penicillin trading. That's penicillin money can buy. So Calloway introduces himself to Holly Martins, buys him a drink and tells him, he tells him that Harry was involved in some shady stuff. And at one point indicates that he,

[00:49:15] even though, you know, like it's not murder specifically, it was like a kind of murder. And Harry takes a swing at him. Sorry, Holly takes a swing at him. And then this other, the sergeant pulls him back, restrains him and this sergeant is actually a big fan

[00:49:31] of Holly Martins' Westerns. And that's a very funny dynamic because he's often like restraining him or punching him because he's trying to attack the major, but at the same time very polite and kind of like fanboying about the fact that. Yeah, he'll even mention like, you know,

[00:49:48] on the off beats, like how much he loved this particular book. It's also funny that, you know, Holly is a writer of pulp Westerns because you get none of that vibe about him at all. Like he doesn't see, he's not from the West.

[00:50:03] Like he doesn't talk like it. He's just writing, you get the sense, just pure like pure pulp based on what he's read. The Oklahoma kid is one of him, the lone writer of Santa Fe. Yeah, I mean, I love that the opening, it just sets the stage.

[00:50:20] You learn just enough to be kind of intrigued and you get a sense he's diving in Holly. He knows nothing of what's going on and this British major just tells him this and he immediately assumes the British major is corrupt that they're trying to frame Harry,

[00:50:36] who's now dead, which makes it even more contemptible. As he goes out of the hotel, he meets another Englishman named Crabbin. And Crabbin hears that Holly is an author, but he doesn't recognize him. And he says, oh, that's great.

[00:50:54] We need a writer in Vienna to give a talk and he invites him to stay and give a lecture three days later and offers to pay for his room and board, which he'll need or else he has to go home. Right, he has no money at this point.

[00:51:06] He has no money. Just the way this misunderstanding is set up at the beginning of the movie is very funny and the performance of this guy is really of Crabbin is hilarious. By the way, that's the, it's such a nightmare of mine to get pulled up on stage

[00:51:23] to try and deliver a talk that you have no preparation to give. It's like a literal nightmare of mine. We'll get to that, but like, I feel like I've been in that situation where I'm talking to a lot of old people,

[00:51:37] you know, like maybe it was like a book reading and they look at you so expectantly and you're just like, ah, shit. So then Holly gets a phone call from this Baron Kurtz guy who says he was a friend of Harry's and they meet at the Mozart cafe.

[00:51:57] And Kurtz is carrying one of Holly's books, which he says, Harry gave to him and a small dog. And this guy, Baron Kurtz is so creepy. Yeah, he is. Just the way he's kind of squeezing the dog is. And so you get these really cool closeups

[00:52:14] as they're talking to of like, you know, sometimes they're tilted. It always gives you this uneasy disorienting. But that guy is like just like, he's even wearing a black hat. I think he's just screams villain. Yeah, he definitely does. Then Holly wants to figure out what that woman

[00:52:36] was doing at the funeral and goes to see her. And this is where he goes to this theater and it's just a funny scene of him there. Again, the performance is all in German and all the people in the audience are chuckling

[00:52:47] and he just has no idea what's going on. It's great because I had the subtitles on, which I've just taken to watching things with subtitles on. And it gives me this extra expectation that I will be privy to stuff that people watching without the subtitles on won't be.

[00:53:04] So like I'm like expecting to understand even more. And then it just says German. And I'm like, oh fuck. Oh really? It doesn't even give you this? No, it doesn't give you anything. So I was actually, my daughter is studying German and I was like, come here.

[00:53:21] Tell me what they're saying. I like not knowing. I think that's a great effect. And I'm glad that even the closed captioning, I have some issues with you doing that, but we can set that out. I do too. But in my defense, it's because person I live with

[00:53:39] seems to be way deffer than I am. She needs to have the closed captions on or else she can never catch what they're saying. This is interesting. He meets Anna and Anna takes him back to Harry Lyme's apartment where they have a meeting with the porter.

[00:53:54] And the porter is, it's very cool scene, right? Like again, there's this language barrier between Holly and the porter. And so like just even finding out any little bit of information is a bit of a struggle. There's also this sense of unease that the porter clearly has

[00:54:10] and the wife doesn't want him to say anything. Whenever they're talking about the accident, you get that massively tilted Dutch angle. And then just at a certain point, I might be conflating two scenes. And then this boy comes in with a ball.

[00:54:25] The ball comes in and the boy and that sets up some, you know what one of the amazing scenes in this movie. Here is where the porter, the information that he does get from the porter, it seems to be a couple of things.

[00:54:40] One is that unlike the official report, three men were carrying his body, not to not just Popesco and Kurtz, who that third man is and that he was killed immediately. There wasn't time to say anything. The person that got hit was, would have been incapable of saying anything

[00:55:06] in the time from which they moved him to the street to it was like a statue. And Anna is very suspicious that this was not an accident. It's in this scene, I think that she expresses her suspicion. She doesn't necessarily think he should explore it more, but...

[00:55:20] In fact, she's, you know, shit like this happens in post-war Vienna, like, you know, whatever. It was an accident. I don't believe it was murder. I mean, I don't believe it was an accident. It was murder, but what are you gonna do?

[00:55:32] Yeah, she has that kind of fatalistic. It's all shady and there's no defeating it. And yeah, again, this is the contrast with the American. You know, there's the defeated. I'm at the whim of fates right now and there's nothing I can do that she has.

[00:55:46] And then, you know, with everybody else, they're either like corrupted themselves or they're kind of world weary, like the major Callaway is, yeah, he then meets with the doctor who is even more creepy. He's like, the way he's cutting that chicken. Before we even see his face,

[00:56:02] we just see him cutting the chicken. The landlady when he goes to Anna's house, who's just shouting in German and like with this big blanket wrapped around her. And she's just this noise, essentially. She's just this loud, disruptive. Yeah, she distresses me more than anything else.

[00:56:21] And that's where it really works, where you don't know what the hell she's saying. And you're like, why are you mad? Are you mad? Why are you yelling? Yeah. And so the guests, the Callaway and his, and the police are at Anna's house

[00:56:35] and they are taking in her papers, which they realize are forgeries. It's revealed that Harry Lyme got her false papers, but she might be in trouble with the Russians who are attempting to repatriate people from Czechoslovakia and that's where she is from. So here's where like,

[00:56:55] Martin's was supposed to go home. He's still there. He's still bumbling around and Callaway just kind of looks at him. It's like, go home. You don't know what you're getting into. And he's still belligerent about this. And it's just this slow breaking down

[00:57:06] of that kind of belligerent optimism over the course of the movie. Holly seems to take the just go home as like some sort of challenge. Like, oh, you're trying to, you're corrupt in hiding the truth from me. And turns out like it was more like an altruistic

[00:57:23] just go home. It was very much like, I would say the major is the one like good person in the movie. Yeah, at Vinkals house. And that's a great scene between the two of them. So you're Vinkal. You see that the doctor has kind of given

[00:57:41] conflicting inconsistent stories too. And there's something very suspicious about him. Also, there's the same dog at Vinkals house as the one that Baron Kurtz was holding. That didn't notice that really quickly. This is Dr. Vinkal is when he's pressing him for information, he's saying that it was

[00:58:01] that he arrived at the accident after he was already dead and there were only two men there. So it seems like he's sticking to the two men story. But then like saying, but I don't know what was said. Like I was, I got there afterwards. Yeah.

[00:58:14] And so then there was this Papascu, this Romanian who Kurtz had said was had left Vienna. But now all of a sudden he was back and he gives an account of the death that is exactly the same as Kurtz's, but is inconsistent with what the porter said,

[00:58:30] which was that he was dead immediately and that there was a third man. And here Holly just gets the porter killed and you kind of know it's happening, but he just tells Papascu who's acting so suspicious that this porter told me that there's a third man

[00:58:46] and you just know that as he's describing what the porter told him, that's going to be it for the porter. As they say the one German word that you clearly understand kaput when there's, and this is another instance where Holly is just in way over his head.

[00:59:04] Like he doesn't even realize that maybe he should be paying attention to what people are saying. And this is I think Holly's worst sin in the movie. He goes back to meet the porter and the porter is dead. And then this initiates just like this crazy sequence,

[00:59:24] which I remember thinking like as I was watching it and I was watching it with my daughter. It's like this movie is so good right now and like Orson Welles hasn't even been in it yet. There's a big crowd around the porter's apartment building,

[00:59:38] which is just like also this awesome structure, you know, like the hallways. Yeah, that we didn't say enough about how cool the Vienna buildings are in the setting and location. This big dark gloomy building and all of a sudden there's this kind of mob

[00:59:53] of people around it and this little boy. And like maybe an ambulance too. Yeah, and an ambulance. And you see him coming out being wheeled out. And this kid who has these cheeks, you know, he has this little like round orb cheeks

[01:00:06] and is all of a sudden sees him and he has his little hat and he starts shouting something again in German. We don't know exactly what. So then you get the sense from the crowd noise that they think and what Anna says

[01:00:21] that they think he killed the porter. And it takes Holly a long time to put two and two together. And I was wondering why Anna wasn't listening to the yelling of the crowd and like giving him more of a warning

[01:00:35] because he's like walking around like, oh, what's going on? Like is there more information? Can I get more information? And everyone is like essentially like slowly their eyes all start turning to him. Because this little kid is like grabbing his leg and like, I'm finally.

[01:00:51] Yeah, it's almost weirdly edited that part because it does seem like it takes both of them too long to realize what's happening. But then he, but this whole thing is a little dreamy. He starts running and then the mob starts chasing them

[01:01:05] but the little kid is always in front. And so like throughout the whole chase as they're going through the streets, the kid is in front of the mob is in the back. And then even as they're going downstairs and then you see following the kid

[01:01:20] who's still ahead of them, the mob. And it's such a cool just eerie scene with this little five year old with the angel face and a mob behind him. So does it go straight from here into he gets picked up by a car?

[01:01:36] Yeah, yeah, like a car pulls up and like just they're like, get in, get in. And like, and the car just speeds away. And you see this like essentially a car at high speed through the streets of Vienna like people are opening their windows

[01:01:49] to see like what's going on with this car. And you're thinking to yourself like, wait who is saving his skin here? Like, is there another player in this conspiracy? Yeah, or is this just Pepescu and they're gonna take him

[01:02:04] and they're gonna kill him like they kill the porter and he's driving really fast and Holly's yelling at him like, what are you doing? Where are you taking me? And then the guy just pulls up, opens the car door, it sends him and it's the lecture

[01:02:18] which is just so funny. It's so good because like telling the viewer not all of life turns into an incredible film like cat and mouse game. No, you have to give a lecture dude. So all of a sudden he's just there and this is very like night mirror.

[01:02:36] That's not, it's every time I see it, I want to die. He has to give a speech on what is it? Oh, the crisis of faith in the modern novel. It's this is very well edited I think. You just get a sense that it's going really badly.

[01:02:54] This is like a grad student giving a talk at the APA or something where people are just not into it. They don't care about offending the poor kid and so they're just trickling out. And it just gets worse and worse because they ask him literary theory questions.

[01:03:14] What do you think about James Joyce? Or what about the stream of consciousness? And he's like, when they ask him who has inspired you and he gives the name of some- Zane Gray. Yeah, like Dime Store Pulp Novelist. Well, great Western writer, but yeah.

[01:03:30] The guy, yeah, I didn't recognize it. The guy's like, oh no, good joke, good joke. No, no, no, but really like he's trying to save face in the crowd and the guy, Holly is just like what, like you ask. Like that is who inspired me.

[01:03:42] No, this is where you get another sort of nice contrast of the kind of pretentious European and the American who at least he's written a ton of books and people enjoy them. Here I think the American comes off better in one of the few places, right?

[01:03:56] Where he doesn't go in for all this bullshit. Like he actually does things that entertains people. I feel like that if you were the sophisticated audience that might have been watching this back then in Europe, you would have sided with the Europeans asking about James Joyce. But yeah.

[01:04:14] But just the way they are, they're almost parodies of a kind of European academic. They are very much what some crowds are to this day in some little corners of the humanities. Also at this talk, at the very end when everybody is pretty much left,

[01:04:35] although there are a few stragglers, Pappescu shows up and they have this very coded conversation. If he's working on a new book and Holly Martins with the kind of bravado says, yeah. It's a murder story and it's inspired by facts.

[01:04:51] And Pappescu says maybe you should stick to fiction. Right. And he says, no, sorry, this time it's gonna be all fact. And how does he get out of this? I don't remember how, I feel like he ends up in Callaway. Yeah, he goes to Callaway.

[01:05:08] He goes to Callaway, yeah. And here's where Callaway convinces him what Harry has done, the fact that this watered-down penicillin makes leads to painful deaths and also like little children to go crazy, the little children with meningitis or the lucky ones die.

[01:05:32] You could see where Callaway was trying to, when he was saying just leave, like he was trying to spare his friend the memory of his friend. He was trying to get out of this in as dignified way as possible, where it's like, look,

[01:05:46] why ruin the memory for the friend? Just leave, let us take care of this. But no, you had to stick around. So fine, you're sticking around. It's like the sort of the tropish almost like there is a stack of files. Boom, here you go.

[01:06:02] This is what we know about him. Are you happy? And he gets like the second in a series of plane tickets that he will never catch. I think that's a running joke in the movie. He always gets a plane ticket to leave and he never takes the ticket.

[01:06:18] He always like, till the very end of the movie he never leaves. He's still in Vienna as we speak. So now he gets drunk. I guess the Pepescu's people are not a problem anymore. He buys flowers, he brings them to Anna. He's very drunk right now.

[01:06:36] Kind of reveals that he loves Anna and Anna reveals to him that she only has eyes for Harry, even dead Harry. She says it too in such a cruel way. She's like, honestly, if someone had asked me like whether you were fair or dark

[01:06:52] or if you had a mustache or not, I couldn't have answered. I had paid so little attention to you that my answer to you is of course not. Of course I don't care about you. And he, and you know, that's another thing. He keeps pining for her

[01:07:07] and it's just never gonna happen. Even the cat as he tries to like then talk to the cat for some affection. Again, he's drunk. The cat just wants nothing to do with him and goes out the window. And Anna says, the only person that cat ever really liked

[01:07:29] was Harry. And then there's these, this is again, this is an all time movie and we still haven't gotten to this but now we're getting to it where you see the cat just go on this beautiful, like again, just empty shadowy streets of Vienna

[01:07:46] kind of like echoey streets. That's what I wanted to say actually one of the before I forget that description, we often talk about the lights and the shadows and the angles in this film. But as I was watching it today, the sound is amazing.

[01:08:03] The echoiness is giving you this sense of emptiness that is really viscerally, I think it's important to get to setting the stage. Yes, absolutely exactly. It's the emptiness that the echo is. But you know, like you get it now if you walk around the streets a little bit.

[01:08:24] It's a similar kind of feeling where just more people should be here than are here right now. Like there's something wrong, something is off. Hey, did you read by the way that they wet the cobble so that the light would reflect off of it? No, but that's awesome.

[01:08:39] Isn't that cool? Totally, yeah. It is a perfectly, the atmosphere of this movie is so perfectly tuned to the themes of it. So then the cat goes and you just follow the cat and the cat goes to a doorway that's in total shadow

[01:08:58] and you just see the cat just go up to it is clearly a leg and then, you know, be really excited and happy. And so, huh, at this point, that's interesting. And then he leaves Anna's and he goes down and he sees the shadowy figure in the doorway

[01:09:18] and he can't see who it is. It's absolutely dark, except for the cat and the leg. Except for the cat and the leg and he starts shouting drunkenly like, are you too scared? Come out and see me. And then all of a sudden a woman in an apartment

[01:09:35] gets up and starts screaming like, what's all this noise? And as she turns on the light- Totally German woman complaining about noise. Exactly. The light goes on and it's Orson Welles as Harry Lyme and just, it just stays on him.

[01:09:50] He doesn't say anything, but he just gives this look. That whatever three to five seconds of a look that Orson Welles gives, I'm really interested in whether they did multiple takes or what, but it is this perfect transition from, okay, I'm caught like,

[01:10:10] has this light unexpectedly just shown right on me and it's lit as we've said before, a lit beautifully. Clear as day it's Orson Welles. He has a face that's, I'm caught. Then he has this little smirk that starts emerging on his face and then a smile,

[01:10:27] because he's sees his fray or because he wants to show his friend a smile. And that transition though, those expressions are, I don't know, like that performance right there is one of the best five second performances in cinema. And you get the sense that really Orson Welles

[01:10:43] is one of the few people in the world ever who could have done that. That kind of mischievous. Mischievous is perfect, but he goes from mysterious to mischievous to welcoming of a friend. Seductive kind of also. And he then the light goes off and he starts running

[01:11:01] and Holly chases him and he's in this, he chases him into this big plaza with just this, I don't know, like, you know, like a newsstand kind of in the middle of it, we think. And then he disappears. So he brings back Calloway and says,

[01:11:17] I saw Harry Calloway doesn't believe him, but then they see that this little structure leads down to the Vienna sewers and they go and they see that that actually must be where he was. And then they go and dig up,

[01:11:34] but that's just that whole thing of that empty square. Again, it's totally empty, but there is this thing in the middle and that leads to this vast underground sewer system that they now realize he has escaped in. So yeah, then they excavate the grave

[01:11:54] and they see that the body is not Harry's, but this guy Joseph Harbin who had disappeared and who was supposed to meet with Harry. Right, he was the medical orderly who had been stealing the penicillin from the military supplies to get it on the black market.

[01:12:11] So then the police come, they take Anna and then Calloway takes and reveals to her that Harry is alive. And this is a great filmmaking choice that I'm not sure I noticed until this around, but as Calloway is talking to her,

[01:12:28] kind of accusing her of playing a role in Harry's disappearance, they just keep the camera on her. And she does this actress who we haven't really talked about, Alita Valley. You just like the camera never leaves her face as Calloway both is accusing her of helping Harry

[01:12:46] when to the last time you see Harry, tell me everything you know or I'll turn you over to the Russians. And meanwhile her face is not registering anything except holy shit, Harry is still alive. And just that look of sad wonder in her face

[01:13:02] and like, oh my God, he's still alive is all she's getting out of. It captures really well without her saying much of anything. Yeah, you would believe she wasn't in on it. Yeah, A, she wasn't in on it, but B how she's still so smitten with Harry

[01:13:19] and can't even process anything except the information that he's still alive. So the next day he goes to Baron Kurtz's apartment in the Russian sector and Dr. Vinkel comes out. That's why they had the same dog. And Holly says he wants that Harry to come meet him

[01:13:40] at the fairgrounds. And then you have, maybe the most famous scene ever filmed Harry Lyme, Orson Welles, just this long shot of him coming striding to go meet Holly by the Ferris wheel and then them getting into the Ferris wheel and going up and their conversation up there,

[01:14:07] which is so dramatically charged, so thematically rich and interesting and so brilliant. And it just gets started with how he's walking to meet Holly like. And this is where in the movie, I think Holly wants to, he needs to hear it from Lyme himself.

[01:14:31] Like he's like, fine, you know, he was convinced by Calloway, but this is friend, he needs to hear it from him. And Lyme is very nonchalant about it. He doesn't deny what he's been doing, his approach is to just say, like, what's the big deal?

[01:14:52] Really like what's the big deal? And the use of the Ferris wheel to be, at the height of the ride, when they're up there looking down at people, he says, I don't have the quote, I don't know if you have the quote in front of you.

[01:15:08] He says, look at those little dots. Would you be so sad if a few of those dots disappeared and now what if you could get 20,000 pounds for each dot? Would you start seeing how many dots you could spare? Exactly. It's so cold-blooded. Exactly.

[01:15:25] And in the same scene, there is an attempt at perhaps threatening Holly. I think he was definitely gonna kill him. You think he was gonna kill him? Yeah. He says, you're the only evidence against me right now. So Holly says, you wanna get rid of me?

[01:15:42] How are you gonna do that? And he says, well, you don't carry a gun. And he has a gun in his jacket. No one's gonna check for a bullet wound after a fall from this distance. And then Holly tells him,

[01:15:57] so I think he's just about to kill him at that point. Holly tells him they dug up your body and that changes his mind. He realized there's no real upside anymore in killing Holly because they already know that he's alive. And so that's over right now. Game over.

[01:16:14] He's gonna have to go on the run. Yeah, like, and so this is, then he switches to, oh, you know, this is like some sort of showdown. That's so silly. Like he says he wants to cut him in to his racket. They've always done everything together

[01:16:32] and meet me any place, any time if you wanna do this. As long as it's just you. Yeah. And then he gives the line in Italy for 30 years under the Borges. They had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci

[01:16:49] 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. So long Holly. Oh man, that's so great. Just ruthless. You come on, you leave this scene with this sense

[01:17:08] of like, oh man, this guy might have been charming and they might have been friends with him, but he is a ruthless dude. But still charming. So full of charm and charisma. And apparently Orson Welles wrote that particular line. They just needed to kill some time.

[01:17:27] And so he wrote that line, which what is he saying there? Is he saying that I am justified in being an agent of chaos and destruction because eventually good things will happen? Like are we to believe that he thinks

[01:17:41] that he's doing a good thing or that he is just, because on the one hand he could be indifferent to humankind, right? He would just be like whatever as long as I make money. Here it seems as if he's saying like, yeah, but when humans get too comfortable

[01:17:56] all they do is build Cuckoo Clocks. Like let me just fuck with shit for the sake of making civilization a better thing. I think he's saying that like it's dead. It's deadening. It's stultifying to be somebody who observes the rules and keeps the peace. Like that produces nothing.

[01:18:16] Like because of people like me, we have greatness and it's very self, self aggrandizing. Like he's killing kids. Yeah, he's killing kids. He's grandiosity and he thinks of himself as an agent of chaos that's moving the world forward. Yeah, it's like a moving stage,

[01:18:37] the stage of history or something forward. But again, he pulls it off. Like you're almost drawn in by it. Even though it makes no sense, it's obviously just rationalizing, murderous, villainy, like evil, but he has that devil-like quality of making it sound good.

[01:18:58] This is where after reiterating the job offer and leaving, Callaway comes and asks Martins, Holly again, like let me help us capture him. And this time, after having this encounter with Lyman seeing that he's not the person that he thought he was, for sure, for sure.

[01:19:17] He says that he agrees, but he, in exchange for his helping, he wants Anna who he's fallen in love with to have safe conduct out of Vienna in exchange for his help. Anna doesn't give a fuck about his help. She does, she's like, I don't need your help

[01:19:35] and she refuses. Well, she gets on, she's on the train. She doesn't know why she's on the train. Like thinks it's just like good luck, but then once she sees Holly, she gets off the train, puts two and two together that Holly's going to set up Harry

[01:19:48] and she says, like how can you do that? He's your friend. And she tears up her papers and her tickets and she says, I won't be the price for this. Like I refuse. So it's a kind of integrity out of love for Harry,

[01:20:01] but at this point it's hard to see how. And I can see her resisting this constant attempt by Holly to be her night in white armor. Like she's not playing this game. He's playing this game in his head. Yeah, his romance. His romance, exactly.

[01:20:23] And that this is where he goes to Calloway and says, look, he's a terrible guy. I hope you get him, do what you want, but I can't be the agent. I can't bring that about myself. You no longer has them and a motivation. So exactly.

[01:20:41] And so here he's about to get on his plane. Calloway says, I'll take you to the airport. And oh wait, let's just make a little stop here. And then you have a scene that I would think Paul Bloom might have a problem with.

[01:20:57] I was thinking the exact fucking thing. You have this appeal to empathy for individual victims. He took them to a hospital and he's showing him children dying of meningitis that had been caused because they were treated by Harry Lyme's diluted penicillin. So they're like, we don't see them

[01:21:19] but you see their reaction. You see Holly's reaction to seeing them. Clearly some are dying and some are losing their mind. And that appeal to empathy disproves Paul Bloom's entire book. Well, or he would use it as evidence.

[01:21:36] Like you knew that kids were dying of meningitis before this but you had to see it. But yes, he did have to see it and he did have to have his empathy triggered here. And then he's just like, he doesn't want anything in return.

[01:21:48] Now it's just I will set up here. He doesn't feel great about it but like he clearly thinks it's the right thing to do now that he's seen up close the victims. And there's an interesting scene in the Ferris wheel where he says to Harry,

[01:22:03] have you seen any of your victims? And he hadn't yet. And Harry like brushes it off. He's like, their numbers, their statistics, these people. And now he knows for the first time, oh no they're not statistics. And this is what Harry has done to them.

[01:22:17] So he agrees to set him up at this cafe. And now you have, again, another like historically famous scene starts out in the cafe and then Anna sees him there. The cops are all waiting. Every officer from various different countries are waiting to capture Harry.

[01:22:37] And as he's going to meet him in the cafe, Anna warns him and he runs down into the sewers. And then there's this sewer chase, which is pretty remarkable even how famous and hyped up it is. It is a pretty remarkable scene, the editing. It's amazing. It's incredible.

[01:22:56] Yeah, yeah. And it is again with the pacing, like it's built perfectly. I'd like a lot of times I feel tired by the time I get to like big action sequences in movies where I'm just like, ah okay with the fucking chasing and the explosion.

[01:23:12] Now here, like here they've like spread out the tension enough that like we know this has to happen. And I was still, I've still am invested in what's going on. And fucking Orson Welles is so charming, I still am kind of wanting him to like make it.

[01:23:32] I don't think I'm wanting him to make it, but I think the way this is shot, the whole sequence in the sewers, he is like a trapped animal there. And there is a kind of feeling of, and they keep like showing various different police

[01:23:46] officers, soldiers, so many people are coming down into all the different entrances into the sewer, all to chase this one guy. And there's this almost kind of unfairness, like Eliza said the same thing that she said, I feel bad for him because he's like this trapped animal

[01:24:05] that's just scrambling around trying to find safety somewhere and there are people coming from all the different corners and he doesn't know where any of them are. They don't know where he is. And it's this chase, like a fox hunting or something like she kind of just,

[01:24:21] there's something intrinsically ugly. Yeah, I was thinking fox hunting exactly, exactly right. And the confusion that was before so strong from the lack of knowledge of German for non-German speakers is now a confusion that is built around the darkness and the twisting tunnels

[01:24:42] where we're not quite sure what's going on. It's distressing. And he like not only are you right about him being sort of like a trapped animal, but they make him look for the first time very vulnerable and afraid. His hair is a mess.

[01:24:58] He knows now that he's running for his life and there's no, he doesn't do it with very much dignity at least in appearance, right? That's right. All this confidence and charisma is now amounts to nothing. It's just how fast can he run?

[01:25:15] And every time he tries to go up like an entrance to escape, there's somebody there until the very end, but by then it's too late. So yeah, he kills unfortunately the fan of Holly Martins. His book sales are gonna go down.

[01:25:29] And then the major just kind of stands and pauses over the sergeant. And I mean, it doesn't notice that Holly has taken the gun from the sergeants dead hands and gone up to find Harry outside one of the entrances. Harry meanwhile has been shot

[01:25:48] and he's just dragging himself up to escape from the sewers, but he doesn't really have it in him. And then he sees Holly there and he gives him this look like finish me off. Right? You see him attempt to lift the grate,

[01:26:03] but he's so injured that he can't. And interestingly, it looks like that grate might be free. It looks like he might make it out, but- The only one. The only one that didn't have somebody that they're waiting for him and he can't.

[01:26:16] You can hear the chase getting closer, right? And it is just this two friends. It's Holly looking at Lyme and yeah, and there he gives that look that you were describing. That look of you can do it, please finish me off. It's like a mercy killing.

[01:26:33] Exactly, like do it. You're still my friend, but as my friend, please do this thing for me. I like this conclusion to this chasing because I could see a movie where the good guy Holly is like, I'm gonna let the law take care of this.

[01:26:52] And like, you know, he deserves more than just a quick death. He deserves to be tried and found guilty. But that's not right. We know from the get go that he was such a friend to Harry Lyme that he was willing to sort of be willfully ignorant

[01:27:08] and ignore some of the evidence because he was actually loyal. He was loyal. And this last gesture is one of, I think, friendship is clearly the last gesture of friendship between the two people. Yeah, I mean, I think he had set him up.

[01:27:25] The whole reason he's being chased is because Holly ratted him out or at least set him up. But at this moment, he will do this one thing for him. He had to bring it to a stop.

[01:27:38] He wasn't as loyal as Anna, who was loyal to the very end refused to play any role in stopping Harry, despite what he'd done. But he gives him this one moment of grace by shooting him. And then that's it.

[01:27:51] And I think Callaway is fine with him being dead. Like that's all he ever wanted, Callaway. It was for Harry Lyme to be dead. Yeah, this isn't like, you know, this is already a fairly lawless four zone Vienna where like they just wanna get some shit done.

[01:28:05] You don't wanna send this through the justice system. So that's the, and then the scene, you know, the movie pretty much starts with a funeral, Harry Lyme's funeral and also ends with Harry Lyme's funeral. This time it really is Harry Lyme's funeral.

[01:28:17] And then this ending is just one of the great movie ending. I mean, I know I keep saying that, but this is like one of maybe my favorite movie ending. I think we talked about it in some other episode that we did. I don't remember what, but...

[01:28:29] I think maybe moral dilemmas. Maybe, yeah. The moral dilemma, I think I had it on for that. Like, do you turn your friend in or not when you find out what he's done? And he made the decision to do it. Anna, not happy with that.

[01:28:48] Anna was a ride or die bitch, right? That's right. And she just like there's, it just starts with this shot of her, like in the distance walking down this road, that same road leading away from the cemetery. And she just walks right past him.

[01:29:03] But he was driving to get his flight in Calaway, we say once again. So right? So he's like, okay, I'm finally getting out. Everything has resolved. And they drive past Anna walking and he says, no, no, hold on, stop the car. He's like, fuck it, fine.

[01:29:21] Gets out of the car and in a smooth guy maneuver, he doesn't go up to her. He leans on whatever a car that's that very beautiful path that's covered in trees. And he waits, I timed this shit. It's a full minute of walking. Wow.

[01:29:42] A minute on screen of just a person walking. Of just a person walking. From the time he leans on that thing to the time that she actually gets to where he is and he's smoking a cigarette and waiting like a cool cat thinking

[01:29:55] that he's gonna like, you know. Oh, see, I don't think that he, that's interesting. I didn't interpret it that way. I think he knows it's doomed and he's just gotta do it anyway. Like he's just gotta try. Either way, it is fucking poignant.

[01:30:09] And like, it would be one thing. So I may be with you, but I think that he would at least expect her to say, get the fuck out of my face. Like I'm not gonna be with you. No, what she does is much, much, much worse. Colder, yeah.

[01:30:26] I mean, it's just like, I don't acknowledge your existence. It's a callback to that. Like if you, if somebody had asked me if you had a mustache or no or whether you were light hair or dark hair, I wouldn't know. Didn't know, haven't this whole time

[01:30:38] haven't had any feelings for you been fairly indifferent to you. It's all about Harry Lyme. So I'm just gonna walk right by you. You're not worth me saying, get out of my face. I hate you. He's not worth that. He's beneath whatever that would be. Yeah.

[01:30:53] And that's a wrap man. And the music, you know, we haven't mentioned the music enough, but because it's so perfect with all the action that's going on in the conversation, sometimes almost comically, like it does a little dramatic, do do do do do do do do do.

[01:31:06] You know, and then here though, you just have that famous, like down to down to down to down to down, which done to down and just the whole time. And then she just walks right by and they hold on him a little longer

[01:31:20] as he processes the fact that he was just That is patient. That's a patient that the director has that pays off so well emotionally. There's some story about that. Somebody told the cinematographer to just leave it on the whole time, but I don't remember what it was,

[01:31:38] but it's so perfect. I do know that they were supposed that the writer was fighting for happy ending. Oh really? Graham Greene was? Graham Greene had written the novella like as a prep for the screenplay and he had written it as a happy ending.

[01:31:52] Carol Reed did not like that. And Graham Greene years later said, yeah, that was the best fucking decision they could have made. Like that the rest is history, right? I was wrong. That's also Chinatown, which also has a famously bleak ending.

[01:32:11] The Robert Town also had a more optimistic version of the ending that Roman Plansky said no. Like you got to end these movies right. You got to end them right. It would be so false with an optimistic ending here. Like in the original screenplay,

[01:32:29] it was like and then she takes them by the arm and they walk away. Oh God. Can you imagine how terrible that would have been? Ah, we wouldn't just... It's not even contempt. Like you would have to go up a level to even be at contempt.

[01:32:43] It's just like you're not there. Yeah, I don't acknowledge that you exist as part of this reality. Oh my God. So why do you think this is an anti-noir? Maybe we can wrap up on this note. Only in the sense that most noir films of that era

[01:33:02] have a strong, reluctant male protagonist who ends up getting drawn into something and solving the mystery and the woman almost always falls for the man and they have a romantic relationship. Here you have a guy who is trying to insert himself

[01:33:29] and in his attempts is actually not getting anything done and the woman never cared about him. She didn't even flirt with him. She didn't even femme fatale him. Like there was no attempt on her part to seduce him. There was no, you know,

[01:33:44] there's no romance on screen here. Yeah, right. That's true. So I think in over your head, protagonist is common, but maybe I'm thinking more of like neo-noirs like Chinatown or something where it is this, I go into it with a certain intention

[01:34:03] maybe to save the girl and I end up making things worse for everybody, not better. Although he doesn't exactly make things worse. No, it's in fact, his influence is fairly inert in this. You get the sense that if he had just gone out left Vienna,

[01:34:21] they might have been able to wrap this up. Yes, right. And I think that's the thing, but he gets the porter killed. He gets Anna probably deported or sent back to Russia in the end and so he really did bumble it.

[01:34:33] He's a bumbling, but with that American cockiness that yeah, I mean, I guess I associate with noir that kind of hero who thinks he can figure out everything and that they know the angles. And then the kind of conspiratorial elements that are actually running this show

[01:34:54] is something that the detective who seems like there's a fist who thinks himself sophisticated and like they know all the angles. No, they didn't, this is something that they never even conceived of was going on. Yeah, I guess the noir protagonists that come to my mind

[01:35:15] are they're bumbling and they often like very common theme is that they get their ass kicked but almost willingly just sort of as a way to like get some information, they'll like take punches. I never got the sense that Holly uncovered anything.

[01:35:31] He's just being sort of selectively told when it's convenient, right? He's not really uncut, he's not done any detective work. I say all that to say only that like this is maybe not the quintessential noir but the height of noir. Like this is as you were saying-

[01:35:50] Like this is film noir. It's film noir. It is, it's just structured a little bit differently than maybe the structures that had emerged with the femme fatale and I don't know, alcoholic detective. Who at least does investigate and uncover something even if they get drawn into a world

[01:36:14] that's too big for them to be able to wrestle with. Yeah, that's right. And also just the cynicism of it like- Yeah, I love that. Is very noir like just, you know, Harry Lyme's speech is something you would get from a noir villain

[01:36:29] and also Calloway and all the people and the creepy side figures, Harry's friends, Baron Kurtz, the Dr. Wienkel, like everybody is seedy, yeah, and weird and there's just these conspiracies that are going on, that our hero has no idea like what he's up against.

[01:36:52] Right, and the forces that are at work there, you know, the rubble that Vienna was in and the chaotic, temporary leadership where nobody's clear who has jurisdiction over what. It's a dark post-war film. It's like what the fuck are we doing as humans in this situation?

[01:37:15] Like who knows? Right, and there's just been the World War II and which was just about 15 years after World War I. Like we're just all we're good at is being cruel to each other and killing each other and like firebombing cities and... Right, so why not Harry Lyme?

[01:37:31] Why not make a few bucks off of this fucking misery of humanity? Right, exactly. This game, this sick game that somebody has concocted. It's just as the real, this is true greatness, this movie. It's just fully successful in what it sets out to do.

[01:37:49] Yeah, it's always hard to answer the question what's your favorite movie, you know? On literally some days I might say back to the future because that's the mood I'm in. But this film is, I could easily on nine days out of 10

[01:38:04] say that this is the best film I've ever seen. Yeah, it's incredible. There's one thing that before we wrap up that I read somebody mentioned in some article I read that I then caught a lot of in the movie which is the constant misuse of names.

[01:38:20] People are constantly calling people the wrong thing which sort of goes to the identity. Even their identities are uncertain or unstable at this point. Yeah, that's right. That's good. He calls, yeah, she calls him Harriet and he calls Callaway Callahan. Callahan, Winkle, not Winkle. Winkle, yeah.

[01:38:39] You know, it's a brilliantly, Graham Greene, he's a great novelist too. There's like two of his novels that I absolutely, well three that I absolutely love and... Which ones? The power and the glory, heart of the matter or my two favorites.

[01:38:55] But there's the end of the affair is really good. They're often very Catholic. This one doesn't have, it has questions of guilt I guess. But yeah. Yeah, I kept reading that this was like, yeah, Graham Greene was very Catholic but I didn't see, I think this is,

[01:39:11] this transcends so much. He also has the series of books that he called entertainments which are good but they're more pulpy. So I think he had this side of him too. They're like spy thrillers that he would write. All right, well, yeah, I hope you enjoyed this.

[01:39:30] I hope you see the movie if you haven't, let us know what you think. If you haven't seen the movie, just email me. I'll like help rent it for you. It's that good. Not really but... Yeah. Yeah. I'll boot like a prank. But it is that good.

[01:39:47] It is that good. All right, join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. The Queen in Oz has spoken. I'm a very good man. I have more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain? I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.