'A person doesn't change just because you find out more.’
Anna Schmidt, ‘The Third Man’

Vienna after the war is worn out, struggling to pull itself together. It’s a city of desperate poverty, bleak bombsites and crumbling baroque architecture. The Military Police search the seedy clubs and dank bedrooms for forged papers and contraband. Elderly men in homburgs and fur-collared overcoats scurry across damp, cobbled streets. Querulous landladies shout up spiral staircases with tatty walls. Nervous tenants exchange furtive glances and slam their shutters to the world. Children play in the rubble.

It’s the middle of the night and someone’s hiding in the darkness - in a doorway, with a cat at his feet.

‘Come out, come out, whoever you are.’

A light is turned on in a nearby apartment building and the mysterious figure is briefly revealed. He stares straight back at us, silent, knowing. He permits himself a smile. It’s Harry Lime, a dead man. 

‘The Third Man’ is a 1949 British thriller written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed. The film is a magical confection of shadows and light, shot at woozy, disorientating angles that suggest a world out of kilter. It is accompanied by the zither music of Anton Karas - mischievous and menacing.

‘It’s better not to get mixed up in things like this… I saw nothing. I said nothing.’

Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an author investigating the death of his old friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles.

Martins learns that Lime had a reputation as ‘the worst racketeer that ever made a living in this city.’ He stole penicillin from military hospitals, diluting it, and selling it on the black market. Many innocent people have died. 

Eventually Martins discovers that Lime has faked his own death and he tracks the criminal down to the Prater Amusement Park. They take a ride together on the famous ferris wheel. Challenged to defend his actions, Lime offers a chillingly cynical perspective. 

'Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.’

Lime draws Martins’ attention to the distant figures in the Amusement Park down below.

‘Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?’

Lime is of course a dark, amoral character. There is something disturbing about the way he objectifies and distances human beings in order to justify his actions. It still resonates today.

When we freely refer to people as consumers, cases and categories; as users, markets and ethnicities, are we not denying them their individuality, identity, personality and character? When we analyse them as data on a chart, as dots on a matrix, do we not strip them of their essential humanity?

It’s an easy mistake to make.

You may be familiar with the aphorism: ‘The plural of anecdote is not data.’ This is a helpful admonishment in the world of marketing, where we are often tempted to extrapolate grand themes and significant cultural change from a few isolated events. The heart sinks when a report begins:

‘We have a good deal of anecdotal evidence…’ 

But it’s equally important to look through the other end of the telescope. The singular of data is an individual’s experience. It is an incident in one person’s life. It is his or her particular story. The singular of data is anecdote.

The best strategists are capable of seeing the big picture and the small. They can join the dots to observe the contours of social change. But they can also look behind the dots to consider particular people’s lives with humility and insight. 

Perhaps Harry Lime has one opinion that should give us some encouragement. He suggests that good things can come of bad experiences; that culture emerges stronger and richer from times of crisis and upheaval.

'Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

 
'We walked in the cold air.
Freezing breath on a window pane,
Lying and waiting.
A man in the dark in a picture frame,
So mystic and soulful.
A voice reaching out in a piercing cry,
It stays with you until
The feeling has gone, only you and I.
It means nothing to me.
This means nothing to me.
Oh, Vienna.’

Ultravox, ‘Vienna’ (W Currie / M Ure / C Allen / W Cann)

No. 287