The customs agent is himself, in an oblique way, connected to Saroyan's film, and to its themes of denial and responsibility.
But its themes of denial and self-justification, of good people closing their eyes to their own complicity with evil, certainly have resonance today as well in both Middle Eastern politics and the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.
When she forcibly turns a thumbs-down gesture into a thumbs-up one, it seems too obvious an expression of the work's theme of psychological denial.
An international cartoon competition has been launched in Iran around the theme of Holocaust denial, reportedly in response to the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed by Charlie Hebdo magazine.
In 2015, the House of Cartoon and the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Complex in Iran organized a competition in which artists were encouraged to submit cartoons on the theme of Holocaust denial.
With this new film, Michael Haneke returns to his classic themes of guilt, denial and violence as the mysterious symptom of mass dysfunction.
According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs" such as the post-war expulsions and alleged Allied war crimes like the bombing of Dresden, is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial; phenomenon she calls "immoral equivalencies".
The judges awarding the Commonwealth Writers Prizee to Jack Maggs summed it up: "The themes of colonial self-denial and the search for the recovery of the original self are here... in a narrative that forces us to reflect on the meaning of history".
The theme of Act One was denial.
While recognising that the book grappled with some of the author's favourite themes of memory and denial, he felt it was "an ungainly fable that reflects none of Mr Ishiguro's myriad and subtle gifts".
