The Third Man and the ruins of modernity

And perhaps that is precisely the point. It would be comforting to imagine two Viennas: the luminous Vienna of Klimt, Mahler, Freud and Schönberg, and the dark Vienna of Harry Lime. One could then mourn the destruction of the former by the forces represented by the latter. But The Third Man permits no such easy separation.

The palace and the sewer belong to the same city. Enlightenment and barbarism are not simply successive historical moments, one destroying the other. They remain disturbingly entangled. The rationality that cures disease can also turn medicine into a commodity; the rationality that administers populations can also reduce persons to numbers; the civilization that produces extraordinary works of art can coexist with extraordinary forms of domination.

This does not mean that civilization is secretly barbarism, or that reason inevitably culminates in catastrophe. Horkheimer and Adorno's argument is more unsettling than that. Enlightenment contains possibilities of emancipation and domination simultaneously. Reason liberates human beings from fear, but when reduced to calculation, mastery and control, it can turn against the very humanity it promised to liberate.

Yet the film's most enduring image comes only after Harry Lime is dead. Following Lime's burial, Holly waits for Anna along the long avenue leading from the cemetery. Reed holds the camera still. Anna appears in the distance and slowly approaches, while Holly waits beneath the trees. Everything about the conventions of cinema prepares us for reconciliation: Lime is gone; Holly has helped expose him; Anna knows the terrible consequences of Lime's crimes. Holly remains, apparently, the decent man. But Anna simply walks past him. She does not stop or turn. She does not even give him a glance.

It is one of the great endings in cinema precisely because Reed refuses to tell us what Anna's fidelity means. She knows what Lime was. She knows about the children harmed by his diluted penicillin. Her devotion cannot be vindicated morally, and the film makes no attempt to vindicate it. Yet neither can knowledge simply dissolve attachment. Anna carries something with her that survives the exposure of every illusion she may once have entertained about Lime. Here, too, The Third Man resists the fantasy that enlightenment is sufficient-that once the truth has been exposed, the darkness will disappear. Anna has been enlightened. She knows; and still, she loves the dead man.

There is another irony in the figure she passes without acknowledgment. Holly Martins is himself a writer, but a mediocre one, a writer of formulaic Westerns who has wandered almost accidentally into a city once synonymous with some of the greatest literary achievements of European modernity. In the Vienna of Musil, Schnitzler, Kraus and Zweig, the writer who remains is Holly Martins. He comes armed with clichés-about friendship, justice, romance, perhaps even about how stories are supposed to end. He expects, as we expect, that after the villain has been exposed and eliminated, the girl should belong to the decent man who remains.

Anna refuses the story. Her long walk toward the camera therefore becomes more than the rejection of Holly Martins. It is the film's final refusal of consolation. There will be no restoration of moral order, no romantic compensation for catastrophe, no reassuring conclusion in which knowledge leads naturally to goodness and goodness receives its reward. The Vienna of The Third Man cannot be put back together that easily.

That is why The Third Man remains something more than a film noir. Harry Lime is unforgettable, but he is ultimately smaller than the city through which he moves. Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt are smaller still. They are figures wandering through the wreckage of something vastly larger than themselves. Vienna is the film's great body: magnificent, wounded, seductive and diseased.

And beneath its palaces and monuments, beneath the achievements of one of the most astonishing cultures modern Europe produced, the water continues to run through the sewers. It was running there all along.