Our Man in Havana (PATREON PREVIEW)
Unclear and Present Danger
Jamelle Bouie
4.7 • 660 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2022
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this week’s Patreon episode, Jamelle and John cover the 1959 film “Our Man in Havana,” an adaptation of a 1958 Graham Greene novel by the same name. We talk Graham Greene, director Carol Reed, and Alec Guinness, the star, as well as esoteric topics like motivated reasoning, the nature of intelligence work, and the power and peril of propaganda. We also, as always, looked at the news for the day the film was released, December 30, 1959.
Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.
To hear the full episode, subscribe to the Unclear and Present Patreon and get access to our show on the films (and television) of the Cold War, as well special mailbag episodes, monthly entry into a movie raffle, and whatever else we can think of.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The And it's such an interesting |
| 0:36.6 | contrast with real life, just to bring up the Iraq war example, because there, you know, it's such an interesting contrast with real life just to bring up the |
| 0:39.1 | Iraq war example because there you know it's very quickly I have such strong memories |
| 0:44.1 | right of you have shock and awe in March 2003 and you have American troops you know |
| 0:52.9 | going into Baghdad. |
| 0:57.9 | I grew up in a very conservative place, a conservative military town. |
| 1:02.5 | So we actually, I think in one class, like watch some of this on TV and like classmates for cheering. |
| 1:06.2 | Not great. |
| 1:08.5 | I have a lot of stories like that. |
| 1:09.6 | They'll come out over time. |
| 1:15.5 | And it was like the next month where they were reporting, or we can't find the WMD. And there was like a whole bunch of speculation, |
| 1:20.9 | right, about where the weapons might be. Maybe they were buried somewhere. Maybe they were |
| 1:25.1 | hidden. Maybe Saddam. Wiley, Trixie Saddam put them somewhere. |
| 1:29.4 | And there was a reluctance for a long time among policymakers, among commentators who supported the war and cheer led for it. |
| 1:40.3 | A reluctance to sort of say they had and they'd been hoodwinked, right? |
| 1:45.8 | In this movie, the people who had been hoodwinked, acknowledge it and then rust to cover it up. |
| 1:56.4 | At least in this one example in real life, the investment in the shenanigans is so strong |
| 2:07.9 | that there's an unwillingness to just say, yeah, we were had. And this gets back to the |
| 2:14.3 | motivated reasoning thing. Like you want it to be true. You want the intelligence to be true. |
| 2:20.0 | You want the source to, if not be trustworthy, even to be giving you reliable stuff. |
| 2:24.7 | You want all of this to be the case. |
... |
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