As I considered what we know about Harry Lime up to this point, it only seems fitting that his rendezvous with Martins takes place on a Ferris wheel. In the scene we watched twice in class yesterday in which Harry’s face was illuminated by the light from above, his lips curl upwards in a playful way, revealing his lack of concern for the anxiety, toil, and innocent death his “trick” has brought upon Vienna. He repeatedly whistles tunes throughout the novelette, even at the moments before his death in the sewer. His whistling is another manifestation of his “playful” nature, exuding an air of inexplicable contentment with the present and his sinful self.
A Ferris wheel is a symbol of the thrills of youth, a source of excitement and personal amusement. It is on this Ferris wheel that Martins sees Lime for the first time “without admiration, as he thought: he’s never grown up” (370). Like the wheel that rotates again and again through its same motion, Lime’s understanding of the world and moral system has ultimately gone nowhere. Just as his youthful self, the present Lime fails to attribute the appropriate weight to important issues of his character, regarding the world with a disquieting amount of levity.
Additionally, the Ferris wheel takes Lime and Martins to a height where the people move like “black flies” (371). At such a height, the human race becomes something less than human to the eye, a mere speck in the face of a vast world. Lime asks Martins the question, “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving—for ever?” (371). By referring to the inhabitants of the earth as “dots”, Lime fleshes out further his flawed moral system, a Christian who believes in “God an mercy and all that” (372) but contradicts his faith by attributing little significance to the value of the physical human life. Everything is a tease, a game for Harry, and the people of the world are mere pawns in it. The Ferris wheel proves to be a powerful metaphor and device for Greene to reveal some of the most telling attributes of The Third Man’s primary villain.
Only somewhat related, but I think Anna has a similarly flawed moral system. She refuses to allow knowledge of Lime’s penicillin racket to mar her vision of him, saying “we’ve got to remember him as he was to us” (358). Her perception is so static, as she is relieved Lime is “dead” not as justice for his crime but rather because she sees it as keeping “him safe then—from everybody” (373). While Lime is guided by a flawed vision of the world stemming from the levity of his youth he still embodies, Anna is paralyzed by a refusal to adjust her initial perceptions of people even after discovering new truths.
Question: If you see any, what are some of Lime's endearing characteristics and how do you think he won Martins over intially?
1 comment:
Brendan is right: the "black flies" narrative is incredibly important. Lime points to a fairly common psychological principle, that killing is much harder when the thing (for lack of a better term) being killed is humanlike. As Lime says, the people from the sky hardly look like people at all, so killing them would be relatively easy. In our CSPI class, we talked about this in regard to abortion - the reason many are against late term abortions is because the fetus, at that stage, appears most human. Although there are many more complexities when looking at difficult issues like abortion, I found it really interesting that Greene would portray this principle so effectively.
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