The third man? OR maybe something deeper

To me the "Third Man" is definitely a way of presenting the United State to ourselves in a way, like a mirrored image of what we did, what we said, how we acted during WWII and post WWII. For many people living in the United States both prior, during and after the war we had this national pride and felt very heroic in liberating people from the occupancy of Germany, but at first many countries felt occupied themselves by Americans especially because of the language barrier that was occurring. I spent last semester in Milano, Italy. I took a class on the golden age of italian cinema. We watched multiple WWII and post WWII films and got a completely different perspective on the war and different countries feelings on Americans coming in to their land. Now I don't mean to sound anti-american at all, because that is not where I am going with this. However, the movie brought up a lot of similar points to other european films and ideology on the situation, especially Italy's perspective. Now this film is about a an America man who goes to Vienna in search of a job his friend Lime had offered him. He arrives and finds out Lime is dead and wants to investigate the matter. Along the way when he sees other things in Vienna that seem out of wack to him, he decides to be the hero and try to fix those matters as well. What he doesn't understand is that somethings are not meant for him to fix, somethings aren't there for him to save. Different cultures have different values, methods and life styles. Often we try to solve all of these differences and want to change the ways of people, even if we think it's for the best, it's not always the case. Arriving in Italy I noticed SO many different cultural ideas and values, but it wasn't my place to change those things. No matter how much they bothered me, I couldn't make people do things faster for me, or do things the way I was used to just because I am used to them my way. The whole thing is experiencing something different and adjusting to those differences, because it's not your thing to mess with necessarily. As much as I get the "hero" concept and the I will fight for their rights. It's not their law, it's not their way and as much as we look at it as corrupt, wrong or unfair it's not our place to make those changes and sometimes, no change has to be made at all. Sometimes and oftentimes it's another way. We need to learn to accept that more than force our culture on others. I think that the film maker is saying bluntly, look at this? Do you see that you can't save this? This is not your fight? I think it's something that honestly isn't said to American audiences because it may sound not patriotic, but it's not about not being patriotic it's about saying this is the situation. This is what American's did and in some cases all acts weren't heroic, some things didn't need to be changed because they weren't our place to change. Or maybe while trying to change something that was wrong, something that wasn't wrong got changed or messed up in the process of fixing the wrong thing. I think it's a little bit of self reflection thing to the audience.