Resurrecting ‘Lucifer’: The Transmedia Mythology of Harry Lime

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the transmedia mythology of the popular but also ‘evil’ character, Harry Lime, who, in The Third Man (1949) written by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed, is shot dead in the sewers of postwar Vienna. The romance of Lime begins with a famous ‘Wellesian’ performance, with Orson Welles drawing on a tradition of Shakespearean ‘heroic-acting’, and Reed’s alteration of Greene’s ‘happy’ closure that effectively underscores Hannah Schmidt’s hero-worshipping of a cult criminal figure. Both creative interventions established the platform for Lime’s ‘resurrection’ in the radio series, The Lives of Harry Lime (1951–52), the television series, The Third Man (1959–65), and Orson Welles’ film, Mr. Arkadin (1955). I argue that the moral rehabilitation of Greene’s fallen figure is indicative of postwar conformist entertainment industry and folk nostalgia for the wartime black marketeer as well as the differing ‘moral codes’ operating across transmedia platforms. But, whereas the radio and TV serializations conscript Lime into the detective-agent genre by burying the evil results of his penicillin racket, Mr. Arkadin de-romanticizes Lime and in turn exposes the cultural amnesia of the 1950s by returning to the 1949 film’s morality and Faustian image of a sadistic racketeer. Written in the spirit of Hans Blumenberg’s theory of myth-adaptation as ongoing ‘points of departure’, this essay debates the ethical issues at stake in this character-oriented misappropriation whereby the protagonist’s moral status is transformed across media platforms.