Guilt, spectatorship and The third man

Abstract

Though no longer as strong a current in film theory as once it was, psychoanalysis presses upon one in looking at a film that looks as much like a film noir as The third man. If, in addition, one wishes to examine the theme of guilt in the film, then a psychoanalytical approach might appear inescapable. This paper seeks to escape it, not because it is wrong, but because, in relation to this particular film, at least, an alternative approach could prove revealing. Besides drawing upon some invaluable contextual work by other scholars on The third man, this paper seeks that alternative in an account of spectatorship and perception culled from Bishop Berkeley and Samuel Beckett. It is an approach that reveals the film's preoccupation with being as well as with power, and with the significant absence of certain religious concepts or preoccupations, which seem to have left the shape of their evacuation behind them in the film. It thus sheds light on the persistence of religious categories in modernity, and it brings into focus radically incommensurate points of view (e.g. of morality), whose clash the film dramatizes.