Enter the Minds of a Pathological Liar and an Alzehiemer's Patient

Wow. Last Year at Marienbad, what a trip-tastic mind-bender of a film you are. From floaty camera shots to the hauntingly gorgeous landscapes within the crawl out of your skin creepfest of a hotel we all were forced to visit, not to mention the stalker-esque manner in which our protagonist(??) hung about the apple of his eye like a vulture to a dead carcass, all these elements grab a hold of you with their ghostly little hands and yank you right into the midst of this other dimension. Never before have I been witness to all these things at once, and never before have I ever been left feeling so unnerved after watching a movie. From the opening scene, feeding the audience a looped monologue and shot after shot of endless, empty hallways, I felt trapped; a denizen to a haunted old motel, stuck in purgatory for infinity.

And indeed, our purpose as an audience seems to be just that. We are destined to enter the psychological hell of of our main man, X, lost within the labyrinth of his own mind in the attempt to distinguish between the truth of events and his own fabrications. Is he nothing more than a pathological liar, clinging to his obsession of his supposed mistress, A, taking his fantasy to the extremes and back? Or is this man merely trying to reaffirm his own reality through this woman by making sure the events that happened between them a year ago were not merely a trick of the mind, doubting the world outside the confines of his own mental state?

From one viewpoint, his tale is one of an anti-social personality type, slinking after his prey like a deranged and disturbed psych ward patient. In nearly every scene, X is trying to convince this woman of their scandalous affair sprawling across the hotel and garden, romanticizing about statues and old photographs, seemingly making up every word as he goes along. Several times he recalls events that he does not like, immediately altering them to become more form fitting to image of how he himself wanted the summer fling to play out. Merely a lunatic out to hold dominion over a sexual conquest this man may appear to be, and with good reason.

However, I absolutely love the idea of a man struggling to determine some form of undeniable evidence of a consistent outside world, not only because it results in a far less disturbing outlook on the film, but also because of the philosophical questions such a stance would attempt to tackle.

"I think, therefore I am." The famous words rung out by Rene Descartes from within the pitch black of an oven, have forever given us proof of our own existence yet leave us amiss when it comes to distinguishing what is real outside ourselves. X may have the memories of a sizzling love affair between the gorgeous A from his vacation in that freaky little hotel one year ago, but how can he be sure that the people, places and things from those events were real? How can he be sure that the woman he shared a bed with was indeed his lover and not a dream in which we all are convinced are real night after night?

Thoughts of the movie, Memento, continually flash into my mind. A man with a past but lacking the ability to make new memories photographs the key events in his life, tattooing the clues of his own mystery to his body, making them true. He ends the movie by saying he needs to make a world outside of his own mind, not to be merely trapped within it. Is this not what X is trying to do? By barraging A with an interrogation of countless recollections, the man is trying to hear from a mind outside of his own an agreement on what happened within the outside world. Or at least that's the position I'd like to take. Far less creepy and way, way more intriguing.

The Third Man is Officially a Crazy Carnival Game Run By a Vampirical Madman

What can I say about The Third Man? As a film, it's just about as elusive in revealing its conceptual ideas as the mystery man himself, purposefully jostling our brains about with its unpredictable camerawork that captures a foreign, late 1940s Vienna not only flipped upon its head by the horrific perils of war, but one filled with a horde of secretive, slightly disturbing characters. Now there's a recipe for utter turmoil and confusion if I ever saw one. I'd like to say there's not a whole lot a director would have to do with a film like this to completely screw with an audience, but there's little need to say the contrary: this is not the case. Throw in a web of a story spun around the maniacal prankster that is Harry Lime, then have a clueless schmuck of a writer we find in BFF Holly Martins try to figure out just what the hell is going on around that place and we've got ourselves a bonafide brain-twister on our hands.

To be honest, I still don't have a solid grasp on what we've all just witnessed. If I had to guess, my bet is on the assumption that this is just what Carol Reed had in store for us. The man has devised a dastardly plan to leave us mind-numbingly perplexed upon seeing something so drenched in its own eerie atmosphere. Originally, I thought Lime had it all figured out, oh so perceptively seeing through the transparency of such an idea as good and evil, right and wrong, honesty and deceit existing within a place so riddled with contradictions and a skewed sense of morality. Being pure seems as likely as Lime's actions being just. However, even though the man reeks of corrupt evil, a capacity for love remains. We see it in his blind faith in friend turned traitor Holly, his apparent love for Anna, his child-like charisma. It's qualities like these that help chip away at his stone-cold heart. Thus, as the movie ends with the scarce straight-angled shot of the movie's very own heart-throb, he leaves us with the concept that love is the only truth, when everything else can't ever be concrete.

But wait a second. Lime threw away his love for Anna for the sake of his own freedom and ability to ensure the fact that he was indeed very much alive would remain concealed for eternity. Casting aside the fact that the man neglectfully killed countless people for the sake of his philosophical pondering is one thing, but this debunks everything I had perceived about the man. Is what The Revenant of Vienna suggest, in fact, true? Is Lime truly a vampire and I have been, this whole time, infatuated with the man, only to wind up as his prey? Perhaps not entirely. But nevertheless, what I had mentioned previously, though clever as I thought it was, could never be. So should we simply accept that fact the movie is merely artistic expression or the trappings of a film genius? Nope.

Let's put it in perspective. The movie is shot in a war-torn, late 1940s Vienna at a time in which the city is currently split up into several occupied sectors, thanks to a victorious United States' incredulous foreign policy in the form of macho, bravado bullshit. Carol Reed is a British director who, on top of probably being fed up with an endless wave of American gloating, stubbornly went against the grain of every vogue Hollywood trend of film. A streamlined, commercialized style of squeaky-clean shooting had been replaced with the shaky, lopsided, artistic approach to film making. What results is a movie of two American men, one who deceptively messes everything up (Lime), and another who has to wade through all the crap he left behind (Holly). This is a political shot at America through and through.

Reed's crazy carnival theme seems to carry the film's message as we see Lime continue to act as if the troubles there were indeed just a child's game to entertain one's self. Although intelligent and clever, the man doesn't appear to realize exactly the devastation he is creating. When I envision Lime, the image of that unsettling little boy creeps into my brain, passing his ball back and forth between a cast of characters obviously emotionally devastated by the problems at hand in the movie. Holly is to me nothing more than the phony of a writer he proclaims himself to be, wrapped up in a string of problems he can't hope to solve; a rabbit blindly following the carrot on the end of its stick. In the same vein of ignorance, Holly can only find resolution through shooting his former friend Lime, a violent comparison to the violent outcomes of a destructive war finished by America. Carol has succeeded in creating a dynamic, tag-team duo to mock us out with.

But even with this political attack appearing to be at the heart of this turbulent piece, the film as a whole just seems too damn wacky and weird to simply be labeled as such. Its true beauty comes from its eccentricity and open-ended nature. There is something to the idea of interpreting the uncanny narrative, mind-bending shots and borderline lunatic inhabitants of this strange little hole in time and space to be endlessly appealing. Getting lost in it seems to be more important. Good luck finding your way through this one; I bet Holly Martins would say the same thing.