The Third Man

I love opera.  As with most things that are either thought of as highbrow, not commonly listed as "favorite"s, or both, answering the painfully common and unimaginative "What kind of music do you like?" this way understandably opens me up to accusations of elitism, hipsterdom, and other doucheries.  And accurate as the elitist label may be, my love of opera is as free and innocent of it as a sanitary napkin.  I love opera, not because it's deep, profound, or meaningful; it's often not.  I love it because it happens to combine several of the things I love in one form.  I love vocal music, I love acting, I love set design, dance, costume, spectacle, and drama.  A mere musical would successfully capture all of these things in one package, and I have quite a soft spot for those as well.  But there is one additional element that opera (often) includes, and it happens to be my very favorite thing in the world: language.  And so I love this casserole of some of my favorite things, not as an elitist, but rather in the more mundane way that I love seven layer nachos.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the reason I love movies.  Movies combine things that I love in the same way opera does.  I love books, and I love visual art.  A good movie has all the elements of a book--plot, character, setting, and maybe some meaning?--and those of a painting or photograph--mood, composition, metaphor--in one package.  So naturally I like them. 

Realizing this fact about why I like movies, as I did while viewing the undeniably brilliant The Third Man, also made me realize why I disagree so wholeheartedly with certain others who also love them:  we do so for very different reasons.  They seem to be able to look at the individual parts of a film and appreciate them, saying things like "It was beautifully shot" or "It created a very specific mood", things that one might easily say of a painting or photograph.  But I don't watch a movie for just those things.  I expect a film to do more than be beautiful.  I expect to be able to gaze at and be lost in it as I would a painting, and also to read it as I would a book.  That's why movies exist in my, and perhaps only in my, mind.  To do what another form could not on its own. 

So while The Third Man was Art, filled with careful and ingenious use of imagery, metaphor, composition, and mood, it was not literature.  All the tools I use to view a painting, and none of those I use to read a book, were applicable here.  Specifically, I was not able to take the individual elements of the work and tie them to each other.  In a good book, things that seem to be out of place, such as a lengthy fourth act sequence following a minor character through the sewers, would actually be keys to understanding the whole thing.  Here, however, they were merely the result of Orson Welles' agent doing her or his job well.