Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  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.

  The geek is a main attraction in Nightmare Alley’s carnival. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  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.

  Through Lilith and a wealthy client, Mrs. Peabody, Stan meets Ezra Grindle, a rich industrialist who carries a burden of regret over the death of Dorrie, a girl he loved and lost. Lilith and Stan engineer a swindle whereby Stan will receive $150,000 to “recall” Dorrie and permit Grindle to speak to her again. To do so, however, Stan must persuade the reluctant Molly to perform as the dead girl.5 Although Stan exhorts her to help him save Grindle’s soul, Molly demurs: mentalist acts are one thing, but this is “goin’ against God.” They might be struck dead for blasphemy! Stan assures her that his séances are “just another angle of show business.” When Molly threatens to walk out, he resorts to his final ploy: phony sincerity. Admitting that he’s a hustler but professing undying love for her, he persuades her to play Dorrie, complete with turn-of-the-century garb and parasol, in a scene staged for Grindle. (Goulding and his director of photography, Lee Garmes, employ deep focus and fog to make the bower resemble a late nineteenth-century postcard.) But the trick fails when Molly, moved by Grindle’s pleas, breaks the illusion: “I can’t, not even for you!” she cries, then flees (in the novel Grindle tries to grope Molly). Exposed as a “dirty sacrilegious thief,” Stan—or at least his plan—is ruined.

  No matter: he already has the 150 grand, which he retrieves from Lilith, who has been holding it for him. But Lilith turns out to be a bigger con artist than he, hav
ing replaced the roll of high denominations with one-dollar bills. When Stan tries to get the money back, she retreats into her psychologist persona and insists that he suffers from delusions. “You must regard it all as a nightmare,” she informs him. Having learned from her research that Pete’s death was “self-administered,” she coldly tells Stan that his guilt is merely a “homicidal hallucination” and that he has made a “strange transference” to her. Just in case he doesn’t get the picture, she also reminds him that she has recorded his sessions and can, if necessary, implicate him in fraud. Confused and desperate, Stan sends Molly away: along with his money he has lost the only person who loves him; perhaps worse, he has lost the swagger that enabled his success.

  His fall is as precipitous as his rise: he begins drinking heavily, moving from one seedy, dark hotel room to another, hearing the geek’s howls wherever he goes.6 Before long he has become a hobo giving stock readings to other derelicts in exchange for a slug of cheap liquor. Echoing Pete’s earlier words, he scoffs at his credulous listeners: “Every boy has a beautiful old, gray-haired mother. Everybody except maybe me.” At last he seeks work as a carnival palm reader but is told that they don’t hire boozers. On second thought, there may be a job for him—a temporary one, just until they can get “a real geek.” Stan accepts the gig: “Mister, I was made for it.” This is where the novel ends, but the film adds a semiredemptive epilogue (probably the work of producer Darryl F. Zanuck) in which Stan—shot amid deep shadows on the barred carnival set—goes berserk, then rushes into the arms of Molly, who happens to work in the same carnival. The film gestures toward the salvation narrative that the novel deliberately eschews. We are even given a moral, as one man, echoing Stan’s question at the film’s opening, asks “How can a guy get so low?” Answer: “He reached too high.” This pat wrap-up does little to soften the disturbing tale we have witnessed and warns audiences that pursuing the American Dream may lead one down a nightmare alley. But Stan’s fault isn’t that he reaches too high; it is that he doesn’t believe in his own greatness. Like many a performer, he is actually solitary and fearful, and the alienation that permits him to rise above the masses eventually pulls him down. He wants to feel superior to others yet dreads being different, thus exemplifying the gangster’s paradox that Shadoian outlines. Indeed, the film suggests that Stan lives out his destiny, that he has always been and always will be a geek. His “geekness” lies partly in the willingness, shared by many noir protagonists, to do anything to get what he wants. Unfortunately, however, Stan doesn’t know what he wants—or, rather, he wants conflicting things: both admiration and pity. We do as well: watching him, we at once relish our moral superiority and identify with him, suspecting that we, too, are secretly geeks.

  Carlisle is just one of the film’s objects of criticism, as it places him among gullible audiences who line up to be cheated and wealthy citizens duped by the elaborate con games called religion and psychoanalysis. Pursuing happiness through amusements or therapy, these citizens hope to fashion new identities out of consumer purchases, but their commodified selves are as bogus as the ghosts in his séances. Yet Carlisle’s fate forcibly exposes the underside of the American Dream of upward mobility, singular achievement and fungible identity: his mobility isn’t freedom; it is merely restless appetite. Nor does he ever have a home—the carnival being the antithesis of home—and his constant changes only bring him back where he started, to the no-place of the geek. This nonidentity, a subhuman persona that lacks even a name, is the accursed share of the pursuit of happiness. Nightmare Alley suggests, then, that Carlisle’s decisions only push him to a destiny already ordained. His commodified identity as The Great Stanton is exposed as a hollow shell, inside of which dwells the geek. Individualism personified—caring for no one else; severed from community, lovers, and friends—Carlisle is a failed Franklin brought down by the Emersonian truth that no matter where he goes, he will meet himself—someone who is, at the core, nobody at all.

  Why Noir?

  Nightmare Alley is a particularly potent challenge to the dream of upward mobility, but it is not an anomaly in film noir. But how did such pessimistic and politically provocative themes come to appear in these crime films? An answer often given is that film noir was created in part by European (mostly German Jewish) émigré directors who brought their psychologically probing, highly mannered expressionist visual style and doom-laden worldview to American cinema as war broke out.7 Other critics trace noir’s origins and themes to American hard-boiled fiction writers—Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and Woolrich—though many fail to note the wide disparities in style, politics, and sensibility even among the four authors named.8 These studies are valuable for unveiling noir’s links to particular literary and cinematic traditions. My aim, however, is to locate noir within its more immediate social, cultural, and political context: the United States in the wake of World War II.

  The war and its aftermath were by far the most significant cultural influence on noir. Frank Krutnik has suggested that noir’s obsession with criminality and violence was a means of “displacing a critique of the ‘social murder’ legitimized through the war” (Lonely 54). But its effects are even more broad and profound. As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, the war’s echoes and effects are everywhere in noir: in the numerous traumatized veterans that populate the films; in their many missing or displaced persons; in the tensions noir records regarding women’s role in the workplace and the domestic arena; in the postwar anti-communist backlash. Moreover, noir’s seemingly obsessive focus on psychic disorder—which helps to explain the frequent appearance of psychiatrists in the films—may suggest what Krutnik calls a national “breakdown of confidence in the defining and sustaining cultural regimentation of identity and authority” (Lonely 55). As Philip Kemp and Warren Susman have argued, noir represents the reemergence of a “suppressed element of American culture” (Kemp 270; Susman is quoted in Neve, Film and Politics 152). Its role as a cultural barometer is one reason why noir has come to be recognized as a watershed in American cinema and why the wealth of recent scholarship has assumed such a wide array of approaches.9

  There can be little doubt that noir is a product of a period of enormous upheaval. Massive population shifts occurred as veterans of both sexes returned home, producing dissonances in gender dynamics and definitions of domesticity. Increased racial agitation and organizing (CORE, for example, was formed in this period) occurred as African American citizens protested in equality and police brutality, and as black veterans discovered that Jim Crow practices lingered on the home front. The most popular music of the period was jazz, a hybrid, black-originated style that encouraged emotional liberation. A burgeoning consumer culture fueled the desire for self-improvement and social mobility while limiting its scope; and the postwar economic boom was accompanied by massive layoffs, renewed labor unrest, and heightened concerns about the stability of money and the plight of the worker. Strikes and antifascist political activism prompted a crackdown by reactionary governmental and nongovernmental forces.10 Meanwhile, fears of communism and news of the Soviet Union’s A-bomb tests terrified citizens and triggered an atmosphere of paranoia and prying. Noir both reflects this postwar hangover (residual anxieties about identity, gender, disability, and labor) and registers new fears about race, representation, capitalism, technology, privacy, and security. Amid this turmoil, films noir ask whether the American Dream of liberty and democracy is still viable and, if so, how it may be altered or fulfilled.

  The above paragraph provides a version of what is dubbed (usually with pejorative connotations) the “Zeitgeist” theory: the idea that film noir (itself subject to varying definitions) reflected and shaped a peculiarly downbeat or anxious postwar mood and, as Kemp declares, exposes “the symptoms of a deformed society” (268–69; see also F. Hirsch 21). Recently this theory has come under attack. Richard Maltby, for example, observes that the Zeitgeist theory is “notoriously difficult to substantiate,” since it depends “on t
he selective presentation of its evidence”; it may even be circular, as angst-ridden narratives are used as evidence of social problems that allegedly generated the angst-ridden narratives (41). Will Straw remarks that noir criticism is plagued by a contradiction, having come “to be understood, conveniently, as both a conscious, programmatic intervention by politically engaged filmmakers … and a cluster of symptoms through which collective or individual psyches betrayed themselves” (132).11 This apparent contradiction has led Steve Neale, perhaps the Zeitgeist theory’s most voluble critic, to announce that the entire category called film noir is hopelessly incoherent (174). But Straw’s observation actually exposes complexity, not contradiction: noir was in some cases the product of conscious interventions by politically engaged film-makers and, at other times, a phenomenon betraying a set of subterranean anxieties. A substantial number of crime films were made by radical leftist writers, directors, actors, and producers who, I suggest in chapter 8, deliberately set out to critique certain cherished American beliefs and values in order to awaken audiences from their slumbers. But the anxieties, hypocrisies, and frauds illuminated by these filmmakers were part of a larger set of fears and dissatisfactions that simmered beneath the surface of the culture and exerted pressure on the daily activities of ordinary people.