A Point of View: Are Tyrants Good for Art?
Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony - a point made rather memorably by a certain Harry Lime, says philosopher John Gray.
“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.”
When Orson Welles spoke these lines as Harry Lime, the charismatic villain at the heart of the film The Third Man, released in 1949, Welles can’t have realised how they would resonate ever after. Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay, credited the lines to Welles, and it seems clear the actor added them when some extra dialogue was needed while the film was being shot.
The lines became lodged in the mind because they encapsulated an uncomfortable and at the same time compelling idea. His history may not have been factually accurate - the Swiss were a major military power in Renaissance times and the cuckoo clock originated some time later in Bavaria - but the idea that culture thrives in conditions of war and tyranny has an undeniable basis in fact.
We know that art can flourish under despots, but we’re reluctant to admit it - if creativity and tyranny can co-exist, the value of freedom seems diminished. Welles’s lines seem to express a dangerous truth, one we’d like to forget but can’t banish from our minds.