Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (2 page)

But self-reliance requires an aversion to conformity; it is individualist through and through. Despite their differences, then, and putting aside the nuances overlooked in this admittedly simplified distillation of the two figures’ philosophies, it is clear that the Franklinesque and Emersonian models of identity share a foundational belief in individual choice. And this
agency
, according to Cullen, is the “bedrock premise” that “lies at the very core of the American Dream” (10). Without self-determination there can be no dream. But this premise also creates a problem: how to create a cohesive community composed of self-interested individuals. Cullen finds in the Puritans a balance between individualism and community that “straddles … the tension between one and many” (32); this is a balance that few noir protagonists achieve. Instead, in pursuing happiness they find themselves alienated, cast out, defeated; worse, their end seems fated, as if they have played only a minor role in engineering their own lives. As Ken Hillis comments, noir protagonists come to recognize “the difficulty—if not impossibility—of achieving modernity’s implicitly cosmopolitan promise that an individual, by dint of hard work, education, and reason, can develop a politically robust subjectivity” (4). To put it another way, film noir often paints the pursuit of happiness as a chimera and shows self-creation constrained by forces beyond individuals’ control. If, as John Orr proposes, the noir protagonist initially believes that “America is the dreamland of opportunity, where all possibilities can be considered,” his or her story ends with an awakening into a chastening reality (160). The obstacles aren’t merely character flaws; they are features of society. Thus, as Hillis notes, when noir protagonists do reach the top, they discover that life there is “as rotten as it is at the bottom” (7). In short, social mobility is seldom possible in noir and irrelevant when it does occur. Considering these patterns,
John Belton suggests that noir registers a “postwar crisis of national identity” related to the “dissolution of the myth of Jeffersonian democracy” (qtd. in Chopra-Gant 152). Noir, that is, posits an inversion of equality whereby almost everyone is equally trapped. Made during a period marked by social and political upheaval, films noir test and critique both the principles of the American Dream—individualism and self-determination, liberty, equality, upward mobility, capitalist enterprise—and their practice.

Among the many forces that converged to create the phenomenon we call noir (I outline others below) were 1930s gangster films. Movies such as
Little Caesar, The Public Enemy
, and
Scarface
are fables of American entrepreneurship camouflaged as exposés or action thrillers. As Jack Shadoian notes, the 1930s gangster is “a paradigm of the American dream”: an immigrant who, by ruthless force of will and relentless energy, rises to the top of his “industry” but is eventually punished for the very qualities that have fueled his elevation (3). Shadoian astutely observes that gangster films expose a fundamental contradiction in the American psyche: “It’s fine to get ahead, but it’s wrong to get ahead. It’s good to be an individual, but then you’re set apart from others.” Such films, he continues, are often “disguised parables of social mobility as a punishable deviation from one’s assigned place” (6). In them the Franklinesque and the Emersonian visions of identity collide head-on.

Shadoian’s summary of this conflict also fits a substantial segment of noir, but the postwar milieu alters the prewar archetypes. World War II fed anxieties about identity: whether spent fighting or at home, the war years sliced a gap in citizens’ lives, and the question of authenticity became, in the postwar years, a dominant American concern. Should we forget and discard the values and personae that bind us to our former selves and start over? Or is such forgetting impossible and, when attempted, merely invites the return of the repressed? And is our country the same? Faced with such troubling questions, many citizens yearned, as Jackson Lears writes, for “a solid sense of truth beneath a tissue of misleading appearances” (
Fables
346). The issue of authenticity dwells at the center of many films noir—especially those, as I show in
chapter 4
, that explicitly concern forgery and portraiture—and manifests itself in noir’s notoriously frequent doppelgängers, double-crosses, and duplicitous dames. Adding to this crisis of identity was what Lears describes as the “heightened expectations of authenticity”
that characterize modernity: the “conviction that everyone would experience ‘something thrilling and vivid’ in the normal course of events, that a failure to do so meant that one had not ‘really lived’” (356). This quest for authenticity as an essential component of the pursuit of happiness propels noir figures as diverse as former detective Jeff Markham in
Out of the Past
, bored bachelor Harry Quincy in
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry
, and
Gun Crazy
’s sociopath Annie Laurie Starr.

Such pursuits were, in the postwar period, increasingly linked to the material aspects of the American Dream—wealth and prosperity. As Lary May argues, the war reoriented “democratic dreams and values from the public to the private realm of consumption” (157). A character in Don DeLillo’s first novel,
Americana
, puts it pithily: “to consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream” (270). What Lears calls “packaged intensity” (
Fables
357) was increasingly available in the form of consumer goods (whether they were cars, appliances, or sessions with psychiatrists), which advertisers promoted as emblems of upward mobility, freedom of choice, and individual distinction. Religion or pseudoreligion contributed to this “therapeutic ethos,” as consumer items and psychoanalytic therapy were understood as comparable modes of self-improvement (Lears, “Salvation” 11). The creation of a new self became, as Mary McAleer Balkun remarks, equivalent to “the creation of an object” (12).

The identification with consumer goods and the chance to remake identity into “a shiny commodity without a past” (Hillis 9) actuates numerous noir protagonists. Thus, for example, Maud Eames’s finishing school in
Caught
transmutes her into a marriageable property;
Kiss Me Deadly
’s Mike Hammer sculpts a hardened, cool persona by way of sports car, answering machine, and disposable women;
Body and Soul
’s boxer Charlie Davis is reduced to a “money machine” for promoter Roberts. At the same time, however, certain consumer products were associated with an idealized past, particularly with the faded folk communities memorialized in products such as Quaker Oats and Uncle Ben’s rice. These advertisements’ rhetorical strategies “dissolved the tension between past and present in the soothing syrup of pseudotraditionalism” (Lears,
Fables
383). Paradoxically, these commodities were marketed as symbols of a realm outside of commodities. As such, they cemented a fraudulent sense of “continuous, coherent group identity” (384).

But the result was often the opposite. Fredric Jameson has analyzed a condition he calls “seriality”: a sense that “the uniqueness of my own experience is undermined by a secret statistical quality. Somehow I feel I am no longer central, that I am merely doing just what everybody else is doing.” Yet “
everybody else
feels exactly the same way” (76; emphasis in original). Hence, while the burgeoning consumer economy offered fungible goods as the means to happiness, it also induced further fragmentation, because those satisfactions remained private and required constant renewal. Noir diagnoses this fragmentation, demonstrating the fraudulence and ineffectuality of the therapeutic ethos as a remedy for anxiety and alienation. The pursuit of wealth, like the pursuit of mental health, is portrayed as a means of exploiting the disenfranchised or dissatisfied, of gulling the naive or impulsive with fantasies of achievement or perfection. The therapeutic ethos, as it links psychiatry to consumerism, ties both practices to American ideals of self-reinvention, class mobility, free enterprise, and the pursuit of happiness. These beliefs and associations are all displayed in
Nightmare Alley
, where Carlisle’s enactment of the dream of upward mobility fuses what Cullen calls “earthly goals and heavenly means” (97).

Though Stan admits to the carnival’s owner that he is fascinated by the geek (“you’re not the only one,” the owner replies; “why do you think we’ve got him in the show?”), he doesn’t understand how anyone can “get so low.”
¹
Yet he loves the carnival life—the sense that carnies are “in the know” and audiences are “on the outside looking in.” “I was made for it,” he crows to Zeena (Joan Blondell), the star of a mind-reading act. The carnival worker indeed exemplifies the mobile self: one day freakish or superhuman—geek, strong man, or “electric girl” (the role played by Molly [Coleen Gray], Stan’s soon-to-be lover)—the next day, or the next hour, a fire-eater, mentalist, or retail clerk. Never part of the masses, the carny exploits them, gives them what they want, then moves on to the next town. Yet, as Tony Williams points out, many carnies are “one step away” from “poverty and destitution” (“Naturalist” 133). In other words, these traveling entertainers are always, in some sense, geeks. And so,
Nightmare Alley
implies, are their audiences, hungry for the shows’ packaged intensity to light a spark in their drab lives. Simultaneously titillated, disdainful, awestruck, and credulous, the crowds see in the carnies what they both wish and fear to be. Thus, as Zeena performs—answering questions written on cards that she never reads—the camera sits amid the crowd, shooting upward at her and Stan, who seem larger than life. But when we go backstage, we learn that Zeena’s telepathy is a trick: the cards are given to her husband, Pete (Ian Keith), who sits below the stage and feeds her their contents as she gazes into her crystal ball.

If Stan feels contempt for his audiences, Zeena resembles them: she, too, believes in cards—tarot cards. She and Stan scheme to dump Pete and start a romance and a new act using a code system (a set of verbal clues to the contents of the cards), but when the tarot predicts failure (the death card is found face down on the floor), Zeena backs out: “I can’t go against the cards.” Stan scoffs at her belief in “boob-catchers,” but he is not immune from the allure of the inexplicable. That night Pete, now a beaten alcoholic, nostalgically recalls when he was “big-time,” launches into his old act, and gives a “psychic” reading of Stan’s early life. “I see … a boy running barefoot through the hills. … A dog is with him.” “Yes,” Stan responds. “His name was Gyp.” Pete breaks the spell: “stock reading. … Every boy has a dog!” The shadowy mise-en-scène encourages us to recognize the fine lines between mind reader and geek, duper and duped. Stan, who had earlier bought a bottle of moonshine, takes pity on the old trouper and gives it to him. But when Pete is found dead the next morning, having drunk a bottle of wood alcohol that Zeena uses in her act, Stan blames himself for giving Pete the wrong bottle, and this (possibly unconsciously deliberate) mistake, along with the geek’s howls, haunts him for the rest of the film.

Pete’s death opens the door for Stan to become Zeena’s assistant, but his big break comes when a sheriff tries to close down the carnival. Exuding a sincerity spiced with folksy references to his “Scotch blood” and blending biblical quotations and platitudes (many taken directly from William Lindsay Gresham’s searing source novel: 596–99), Stan senses that the sheriff feels unappreciated and exploits his religious beliefs to save the show.
²
In the novel Zeena remarks, “Not much different, being a fortuneteller and a preacher”—or an alcoholic: later in the novel, Stan exults, “They drink promises. They drink hope. And I’ve got it to hand them” (556, 599). In the film Stan recalls learning to fake religiosity in reform school.
³
He seems to have no religious feeling himself. But he wishes he
could
believe in something to help him conquer the feelings of meaninglessness and helplessness that trouble him—the recognition that humans merely stumble “down a dark alley toward their deaths” (579)—and that motivate the recurring dream of enclosure alluded to in the title (587).

In both versions Stan’s success prompts him to leave the carnival and, with Molly, begin a new, classier act as The Great Stanton, a nightclub “mentalist.” At one show a woman sends him a card asking if her mother will recover; Stan discerns that her mother is actually dead, then exchanges gazes with the woman—Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker)—to acknowledge their kinship. And indeed, Lilith, a “consulting psychologist,” performs a function similar to Stan’s, delving into her patients’ darkest fears, doling out reassurance or advice, but most of all making them feel important. In their early scenes together Stan and Lilith are presented as two of a kind, placed at the same level of the frame in matched singles or two-shots. The power differential begins to change, however, after a visit from Zeena brings back Stan’s memories of Pete’s death; tortured by guilt and haunted by the geek’s howls, he goes to Lilith for advice. In earlier scenes Lilith had worn masculine suits and hats, a composite figure combining the parents Stan lost.
⁴
In this scene, however, she wears her hair down, dons a flowing robe, and, like a forgiving mother, reassures Stan of his normality by telling him he is “selfish and ruthless when you want something; generous and kind when you’ve got it,” just like everyone else (Williams, “Naturalist” 135–36). He feels guilty, she says, only because he profited from Pete’s death. Because of her advice, Stan pledges to proceed into the “spook racket,” holding séances in which bereaved survivors contact their deceased loved ones. This is his ticket to the big time: “I was made for it,” he declares.