Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (4 page)

With their often darkly expressionist mise-en-scènes, their complex narrative structures, their violent, sexual stories, their sense of doom, and their skeptical treatment of American ideals and identities, noirs provide an ideal opportunity, as Maltby notes, for an “interpretation of American culture through its shared daydreams” (42). This recognition seems to call for a psychoanalytic approach akin to that of Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo, who see in noir evidence of “condensations and displacements between various concrete anxieties over race, sex, maternity, and national identity” (xv). Yet Oliver and Trigo offer virtually no historical context for their assertions. My approach is less psychoanalytic than cultural—an effort to chart noir’s political unconscious. I argue, therefore, that noir’s alienated characters act out antisocial urges shared by their audiences, being sanctioned to enact what others keep hidden. These characters—amnesiacs, ephebes, cynical men on the make, convicts; feckless adventurers, gullible youngsters, detectives enticed by mysterious women; gangsters and thieves, traumatized veterans, female professors, boxers—become sites where anxieties about identity, class, agency, individualism, technology, consumerism, race, gender, and trauma are played out, thereby reflecting and shaping the consciousness of a
culture. Film noir, in short, was an underground theater where Americans staged the most urgent concerns of a society in transition.

I have argued that the film
Nightmare Alley
dramatizes a conflict in American conceptions of identity, mobility, and success. I concentrate in
chapters 1
through
4
on similar themes to elucidate noir’s critique of individualism and its ethos of self-making. It is odd that, despite the frequent description of noirs as “dreamlike,” no critic has thoroughly analyzed the films’ dream sequences. The first chapter, “Someone Else’s Nightmare,” does just that, drawing from psychoanalytic theory to explore oneiric scenarios in films such as
The Chase, The Dark Past, Spellbound, Strange Illusion
, and
Uncle Harry
. Noir dreams, I find, expose pathologies that represent not just individual maladies but widely shared anxieties about self, sexuality, and, most of all, about the relations between past and present: virtually all noir dream sequences concern a character’s crippling attachment to the past. Only by severing oneself from history, these films suggest, can individuals restore an integrated identity; those who do not are doomed to remain trapped, like Stan Carlisle, in a vortex of repetition. The noir dream films, like the works treated in
chapters 2
and
3
, dramatize a collective neurosis: the conflict between remembering and forgetting.

The second chapter, “Missing Persons,” investigates noirs involving amnesia and switched identities
(Street of Chance, The Killers, Out of the Past, No Man of Her Own, Dark Passage
, and
Hollow Triumph)
, discovering in them an even more pessimistic outlook on self-fashioning. In these films, characters change their names or faces—like many real Americans who started over after the war—to escape the consequences of past actions. But unlike those in the dream films, these characters’ reformations seldom succeed, and some of them experience total self-erasure. Staging, then subverting, the Protestant conversion narrative and the immigrant success story, these films challenge an essential American myth, as noir’s missing persons become synecdoches for a society of mobile individuals anxiously suspended between a traumatic past and an uncertain future.

Casual viewers associate film noir with the stereotypical hard-boiled macho detective, but noir actually depicts a diverse array of masculine types. Films featuring cognitively disabled veterans
(Act of Violence, The Blue Dahlia, Cornered, High Wall, Somewhere in the Night)
, for example, use disability to explore shifting attitudes about masculinity, achievement, and power. These films, analyzed in
chapter 3
, “Vet Noir,” expose seams in the ethos of self-determination through their haunted ex-soldiers’ attempts to heal their fractured psyches by paradoxically
reenacting the traumas that have shattered them. Though the films show that self-recreation is possible, they also demonstrate that discarding the past may require amputation of key parts of the individual and national consciousness.

Chapter 4
, “Framed,” focuses on art forgery and portraiture films (such as
Crack-Up, The Dark Corner, I Wake Up Screaming
, and
Scarlet Street
) that ask vexing questions about representation, identity, and replication. Like the counterfeiting films I have analyzed elsewhere, the forgery films simultaneously celebrate and interrogate cinema as a medium of representation.
¹²
By blurring the lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, the real and its representations, these films imply that all identities are to some degree forged and that human character is too malleable and complex to be captured by any medium, including cinema. They thus train a skeptical eye on the American dream of self-reinvention, disclosing a suspicion that such operations are often a pretext for exploitation or a pathway to madness.

The next four chapters expand the focus to explore a spectrum of social phenomena depicted in noir, each chapter targeting a cultural formation in crisis and addressing one source of the social, political, or cultural anxiety described above. “Noir’s Cars” examines how automobiles, in films such as
They Live by Night, Gun Crazy
, and
Kiss Me Deadly
, function as amoral spaces. While driving their cars, disenfranchised characters express antisocial urges and pursue fantasies of social mobility through automobility. Fittingly, the most common auto in film noir is the convertible, which perfectly symbolizes the American belief in mobile identities: convertibles, that is, represent the promise of self-convertibility. Yet the films analyzed in
chapter 5
portray this vision of freedom as a trap sprung by fearful or hypocritical citizens who envy the liberation that cars allow; as a cynical ruse to entice gullible people; or as a Trojan horse used to introduce more deadly technologies that will increase mechanization and conformity and threaten American citizens.

Chapter 6
, “Nocturnes in Black and Blue,” proposes that jazz in noir signifies shifts in racial attitudes and notions of masculinity. In
Black Angel, Nocturne, Detour
, and
Nightmare
, jazz melodies provide clues to forgotten events—often a musician/protagonist’s own violent act. Although African Americans seldom appear in the films, white musicians are “noired” through jazz’s affiliation with blackness, decadence, psychic disturbance, illicit sexuality, and interracial contact.
Sweet Smell of Success
alters this pattern, portraying jazz as an island of integrity set against a continent of corruption; and two films featuring female
jazz singers
(The Man I Love
and
Road House)
present improvisation as the basis for a creative selfhood. Contravening Hollywood’s general demonizing of jazz, these latter films reveal the potential for emotional and sexual liberation through a music that exemplifies America’s own hybrid, improvised nature.

Whereas the femme fatale embodies a dubious brand of empowerment, another set of films—very much like the two I’ve just described—that I am calling
femme noirs
offer more nuanced portrayals of women caught between two forms of labor: motherhood and nondomestic work. These pictures, most of them written, produced, or directed by women, are significant both for that reason and for their provocative content. Yet they have never before been studied as a group.
Chapter 7
, “Femmes Vital,” rectifies this neglect by analyzing how women filmmakers both challenged and reflected cultural contradictions in their work. Like
chapter 3
, this chapter sounds out postwar gender dissonances and probes the fissures that these social changes exposed. These femme noirs offer critiques of marriage
(Caught, The Bigamist)
, dissect gender politics
(Gilda, The Damned Don’t Cry)
, and condemn patriarchal institutions
(Caged, Possessed)
, while also mirroring a divided society in their ambivalent portraits of working women in films such as
Mildred Pierce
and
The Accused
. The multivalent efforts of producer-director-actress Ida Lupino, whose jazz singers provide a positive example of the mobile self, also best represent the ideal of the femme vital, through her revolutionary approach to women’s creative labor and pioneering contributions to cinematic authorship.

The final chapter, “Left-Handed Endeavor,” and the conclusion, “American Nightmares,” analyze an important group of noirs made by committed leftists such as Joseph Losey, Abraham Polonsky, Cyril Endfield, Jules Dassin, Robert Rossen, and Dalton Trumbo
(Body and Soul, Force of Evil, The Prowler, Try and Get Me!)
, demonstrating how they portray class barriers, unfettered capitalism, and hypocritical institutions as obstacles to equality and democracy. In these so-called “films gris” (Andersen, “Red” 257), which I have renamed
red noirs
, crime is portrayed as what a character in
The Asphalt Jungle
calls a “left-handed form of human endeavor.” For these films’ lower-class characters, indeed, crime seems the only pathway to success in a society in thrall to conformism and corporatism. Expanding the analogy between crime and capitalism advanced in 1930s gangster movies, these pictures dramatize how the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the American Dream camouflages the rapacious pursuit of power. Though these artists were blacklisted, their challenges to the status quo stand as one of noir’s
most enduring achievements and remain trenchant today—a period similarly marked by war, economic and social upheaval, rampant greed, and ubiquitous uncertainty.

These crime melodramas diagnosed a spectrum of social ills and fears, promulgating troubling messages about American values and institutions in an era that prized conformity, celebrated capitalism, and championed law and order. Film noir, in short, challenged Americans to live up to the ideals they professed to endorse.

A ghostly man walks through an eerie, indeterminate space as driving rain falls upon him. Suddenly he is standing beneath an umbrella, but the umbrella has a hole in it, and though he frantically tries to plug the hole, water continues to drip through. The umbrella grows bars and becomes a cage. He is overwhelmed by guilt and dread, and he can’t get out!

This recurring nightmare constitutes the central enigma in Rudolph Maté’s film
The Dark Past
. As analyzed by Dr. Andrew Collins (Lee J. Cobb), the dream holds the key to understanding the dreamer, Al Walker (William Holden), a psychopath who has just escaped from prison and taken Collins and his family and friends hostage in Collins’s rural cabin. Collins explains Walker’s nightmare according to Freudian orthodoxy: it was “caused by something that happened when [he was] a child,” and everything in it “is a substitute for something else.” He eventually unearths its origins in Walker’s relations with his parents. But what is most strange about this dream—stranger even than its appearance as negative footage—is that Walker does not relate it himself.
¹
Instead, the dream is described by Walker’s girlfriend, Betty (Nina Foch), who asks Collins to interpret it and quell Walker’s mania for killing. In other words, this dream is presented as someone else’s nightmare. In fact, it is twice-removed from its dreamer, since Collins recounts these events later to prove that psychoanalysis can cure social problems.

It is a critical commonplace that films noir—with their bizarre circumstances, disorienting settings, and obsession with darkness—are “like bad dreams.”
²
Foster Hirsch further observes that noir directors, by maintaining a neutral, even clinical, stance toward their characters’ pathologies, treat the stories as if they were “
someone else’s
nightmare” (115; emphasis his).
The Dark Past
, as we’ve seen, records Walker’s dream in just that way—secondhand. But Hirsch’s phrase resonates in other directions and offers not only a means to understand noir dreams but a blueprint for a key aspect of noir’s role in American culture. Noir nightmares
are “someone else’s” in several senses. According to the Freudian theory that underpins them, dreams emerge from the unconscious. Their latent content or motivating wish is condensed or displaced into a disguised manifest content, so that the dream-work goes on, as it were, behind the dreamer’s back. Denied access to his or her own motives, the dreamer is at once him- or herself and someone else. Second, once the dream is recounted or written down, it becomes a text, not an experience—and thus no longer belongs to the dreamer. Third, noir’s tormented dreamers act as surrogates for audience members’ own struggles with renewal, reinvention, or return. But because the characters’ past identities are often abhorrent or irretrievable, they are severed from the self who dreams and from the audience as well: they become as much objects of scrutiny as of sympathy. Hence, noir dreams stage ruptures in identity and integration that are not just individual but collective.

I thus propose that noir dream sequences dramatize key questions about identity in the World War II and postwar period. Noir’s nightmares first of all register Americans’ ambivalence about the rapidly changing postwar world, which suddenly seemed to carry as much peril as possibility. The war had cut a gap in lives and minds (as rendered explicitly in the disabled-veteran noirs discussed in
chapter 3
) that required survivors either to fashion new selves or seek to integrate past and present selves. Because the war years were filled with violent trauma, a nostalgia remained for the prewar period, which now seemed more innocent, less fraught. Not surprisingly, virtually all noir dream sequences concern a character’s crippling attachment to the past: to a traumatic experience, a lover, a parent, or a violent episode. Discovering the meaning of the dream—whether through psychoanalysis or reenactment—is believed to free the character from that past. Only by severing oneself from one’s history, the films suggest, can one either start over or craft an integrated identity; those who do not become, like Stan Carlisle, enslaved to that history.