Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  These films’ analyses also target their own medium; that is, they both affirm their status as reliable representations of identity and consciousness and question that status by showing how easily images can be misread. Although dream sequences interrupt their realist narratives and direct us to read them as psychoanalysts, this reading can be accomplished only in retrospect, because many of the films disguise the fact that they are dreams. Moreover, some of noir’s dreams—like real-life dreams—incorporate the tropes and devices of other films, as if to remind us that they are “only” movies; meanwhile, the characters, unaware of their fictionality, wander in partial blindness through their dreamscapes. Audiences’ visual decoding compensates for the characters’ lack of sight. The dream films’ frequent motifs of blindness and vision thus invite us to scrutinize the cinematic medium itself.

  The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

  The parallel between cinema and dreams is almost as old as film itself. Early surrealist filmmakers, for example, saw the mental production of dream images as analogous to the cutting necessary for film editing (Gabbard and Gabbard xxi).3 But movie dreams are not solitary: as C. J. Pennethorne Hughes observed back in 1930, cinema is “the transmuted and regulated dream life of the people” (qtd. in Lebeau 4). And if films are dreams, so dreams are often films: Jean-Louis Baudry reminds us how often a dreamer will wake and say, “It was like in a movie” (qtd. in Lebeau 32). Hollywood is not called “the dream factory” for nothing. Not only do movies influence American dreams in a metaphorical sense, by furnishing stories that shape audiences’ ideas about success, self-transformation, love and a host of other themes; they also provide images and situations for actual dreams, which may resemble thrillers, horror movies, detective stories, or romances. Indeed, some of the cinematic dreams I examine below generate a kind of mise en abyme: a dream within a movie that alludes to other movie dreams. Thus, as Vicky Lebeau notes, because dreams inevitably partake of the culture at large, dream theory supports a “psychoanalytic study of culture” (23).

  Films noir serve this function better than most movie genres, for they are full of bad dreams; indeed, the picture many describe as the first film noir, Boris Ingster’s 1940 Stranger on the Third Floor, features a lengthy dream sequence that fosters the protagonist’s change of heart and forecasts his incarceration. More generally, Nicholas Christopher remarks that the noir cycle constitutes the “complex mosaic of a single, thirteen-year urban dreamscape” (43). Given this fascination with the oneiric, it makes sense that noir is heavily populated by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts—both good and bad—along with its psychopaths and psychics.4 Ordinary citizens were increasingly exposed to psychiatry through its role in treating traumatized World War II veterans, and a large number of Hollywood personnel underwent psychoanalysis in the 1940s (see Thomas 72). Yet American cinema has seldom offered a realistic portrayal of psychoanalysis—perhaps not surprisingly, since, as Alain de Mijolla notes, real psychotherapy is far from cinematic (197). In most Hollywood films (then and now) the psychiatrist is depicted as a detective who solves problems that are immediately “forgotten once a culprit has been identified” (Gabbard and Gabbard 58–59).5 Presenting a homology between psychoanalysis and detective work (Freedman 91) permitted Hollywood filmmakers to appropriate the analytic situation into conventional narrative patterns of repetition, delay, and recuperation (Doane, Desire 47). As a result, Hollywood cinema overrepresented the talking cure, often illustrating the method through tropes of vision and insight (Gabbard and Gabbard 28; Doane Desire 47).6

  Along with an identifiable set of stereotypical characters, one plot convention in psychiatry pictures encompasses all genres: the cathartic cure (Gabbard and Gabbard 28). Most positive portrayals of psychoanalysis involve the “derepression of a traumatic memory,” often through dream analysis (Gabbard and Gabbard 28). Classic psychoanalysis laid itself open to such simplifications by arguing that pathology usually stems from the repression of “disturbing impulses, memories, thoughts or feelings” (Ringel 169). In Freudian theory a dream consists of a manifest content (the particular images or situations within a dream) that camouflages latent content (the motivating emotions or memories). The dream-work transforms that latent content through condensation and displacement, the former permitting a single image to represent several ideas or emotions, the latter enabling a motivating emotion or image to be replaced by related ones (Freud, Interpretation 312–44). Both processes (which, as Bert States observes, are forms of metonymy and synecdoche: 100) contribute to “overdetermination”—the recognition that “for any given manifest content, there can be more than one latent content, or [that] any one dream can express several quite separate wishes” (Wollheim 80; cf. Freud, Interpretation 342–43). Even so, for Freud all dreams are wish-fulfillments whose meaning may be discovered by interpretation. Freudian dream-interpretation is, in short, a theory of reading, in which the analyst extracts hidden emotions and traumas through thoughtful, attentive explication of the manifest content. Recent dream theory deemphasizes symbolic hermeneutics, instead stressing dreams’ emotional contexts and contents, but midcentury Hollywood’s dreams were Freudian through and through.7 Yet the films generally reduce Freud’s methods to a one-to-one mapping in which a symbol (say, an umbrella) is determined “really” to be, say, a table, or rain a memory of blood. Hollywood overlooks overdetermination in pursuit of melodrama, with the psychiatrist serving as stage manager or dramaturg. Traveling the royal road to the collective unconscious, films noir focus mostly on the destination, which is usually a traumatic memory or familial conflict for which the dream functions as a rebus.

  Freud understands the dreaming psyche as a site of conflict where the dreamer’s mind is torn between “wish and defense, wish and censorship, wish and repression” (Lebeau 40). The dreamer, he insists, is blocked from understanding his or her own dream—a contention that many theorists now dispute (Rieff 52; Lebeau 76).8 For Freud, the dreamer is a divided entity trying, as Peter Gay puts it, “to dispose of unfinished business” (146) but unable to do so because “the desire to recall is countered by the desire to forget” (Gay 128). In this respect the psychoanalytical subject mirrors the noir subject—a creature obsessed with the past, unable either to let go of it or to embrace it. As Richard Wollheim remarks, there are “two separate people amalgamated in the dreamer, one of whom has the wish whereas the other rejects it, and it is only the former who is satisfied” (78). In Freudian theory, then, every dream is someone else’s. Noir films capture this condition by placing viewers in conflicting subject positions, first bombarding us with disorienting, disturbing images, then requesting that we scrutinize them dispassionately. We are asked to serve as both dreamer and analyst, while gaining a vantage point superior to both: only we both have the dream and understand it.

  Midcentury Hollywood, with its plethora of psychiatrists onscreen and off, helped to engender the “therapeutic ethos” I outlined in my introduction, which “replaced religious or moral sanctions with considerations of mental hygiene, psychic balance, and above all personal ‘growth’” (Freedman 79). Psychiatry, along with self-help books and all manner of commodities, promised to make people into better versions of themselves, almost by magic. Hollywood eagerly purveyed conversion narratives in which antisocial values belonged to “characters’ earlier rejected selves” (May 151). But film noir gave audiences a chance to have things both ways—to undergo a “cure” or whitewash of their former selves while also experiencing pathology as package intensity. Noir psychoanalysis thus betrays a deep ambivalence: as Krutnik explains, it is represented as a science that successfully treats disorder and deviance, while also exposing and exploiting a fascination with a “destabilizing undercurrent of excessive and disordered desires” (Lonely 53). Noir dreams—whether nocturnal or diurnal—thereby open “the royal road to the cultural unconscious” (Freud, Interpretation 647; Lebeau 6).

  The Eternal Triangle

  The most typical dreams, according to Freud,
involve the Oedipus complex (Interpretation 294–300), in which the son faces a paradox: “be like your father (be a man, love a woman) but also do not be like your father (you may not have all that your father has; you may not wish for your mother)” (Lebeau 80). The Oedipus myth underlies many noir dreams, including Al Walker’s in The Dark Past. Let us revisit the scene: police psychiatrist Andrew Collins, his family, and friends have been taken hostage by the twitchy, hyperaggressive Walker, who is also afflicted with paralyzed fingers on his right hand. Noticing that Walker is fascinated with a book he finds on his shelf—Sociological Aspects of Insanity—Collins draws him a rudimentary diagram of the mind, explaining that the conscious and unconscious minds are divided by a “sensor band.” Criminality and insanity result when the unconscious crosses the barrier. The idea seems to be that neurosis—that is, the repression of impulses—is necessary for civilization (as Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents 110). Unable to repress his, Walker is tortured by guilt compounded by violent hatred. Collins’s job is to expose the source of his emotions and actions and thereby dispel them. And so, after hearing Betty describe Walker’s dream, Collins gradually induces his reluctant patient to discuss his childhood. We learn that Walker’s father was an abusive hustler who abandoned his family and, when he returned, monopolized his mother’s attention. Therefore, Al hated his father. Using word association, Collins helps him recall the origin of his nightmare in a traumatic incident. As Walker finally tells his own story, the ghostly negative footage used in Betty’s account is replaced by point-of-view shots showing the child Al leading police to a saloon where his father was hiding. While the boy cowered under a table, the cops shot his father, who staggered to the table and collapsed upon it. Al picked up his father’s gun as dad’s blood dripped down onto the boy’s hands.

  The dream’s bars were policemen’s legs, the umbrella a table. The rain? Paternal blood. Everything in the dream—once converted via metonymy and synecdoche, or condensation and displacement—is now explained, and Walker’s history of violence traced to this single incident.9 The cause of his pathology—and of his paralyzed hand—is oedipal guilt: whenever Walker kills someone, he is shooting his father again, both to eliminate him and to gain some of his (phallic) power. Voila: once Walker’s nightmare is unraveled (he’ll never have the dream again, Collins assures him), his paralyzed fingers loosen. Unfortunately for his criminal career, he is also unable to kill: when he takes aim at a police officer, the man’s face dissolves into that of Walker Senior, and Al can’t pull the trigger. His cathartic cure thus results in his capture. Curiously, the presentation of the originating incident—seedy saloon, card players, guns—mixes artifacts from 1930s gangster films with the trappings of a western: it is less a dream than a Hollywood pastiche. If this dream testifies to Walker’s rather impoverished stock of mental props, it also implies that both his memory and his criminal persona have been borrowed from movies, just as his hostage-taking plan seems to have been pilfered from such films as The Petrified Forest.

  The Dark Past offers the most positive treatment of psychoanalysis in all of noir, while epitomizing the conventions of movie psychiatry: the tracing of pathology to a single event (often involving an oedipal complex); the linkage of specific manifest images to particular latent sources; the shrink’s role as detective (Collins is, after all, a police psychiatrist); and the magical cure. The film presents Walker’s dream as someone else’s nightmare, not only because of Betty’s and Collins’s interposition between dream and viewer but also because it places us in the positions of both analyst and dreamer: we are both Walker and Collins and neither of them. Once Walker is cured, the nightmare is permanently out of reach, for it belongs to the man he will never be again.

  The film also has a social agenda: Collins’s flashback is meant to prove that criminals can be cured by psychoanalysis. Mental illness, he tells his listener, is a “festering” disease, and Walker’s pathology is no different from that of another young man whom Collins picks out (before the flashback) as curable. If treated early enough, he confidently declares, such delinquents will never become Al Walkers. Psychoanalysis is thus represented as a form of social engineering that, applied broadly, would ameliorate crime. These naive liberal sentiments reveal how noir uses individual dreamers to represent larger segments of society whose problems stem from a debilitating attachment to the past.

  Few noirs share this confidence, but oedipal dreams are far from rare. A prime example occurs in one of the earliest noirs, Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1942 Strange Illusion. A pastiche of Hamlet written by Adele Comandini, the film traces the predicament of young Paul Cartwright (James Lydon), whose father, Albert, a judge and former lieutenant governor, was killed two years earlier in a mysterious train accident.10 Like Shakespeare’s protagonist, Paul believes that his father was murdered and is troubled by strange dreams. In the dream sequence that opens the film, Paul’s mother (Sally Eilers) tells him his father has returned in the form of her new lover, but Paul shouts, “You’re not my father,” and asks for help from his sister, Dorothy (Jayne Hazard), to whom her mother’s lover has given a bracelet. A hurtling train crashes, after which the usurper intones, “Just what I’ve been waiting for.” A Schumann piano concerto—Albert’s favorite piece—begins to play, and Paul’s protests go unheeded until he wakes up.

  The dream’s oedipal elements are obvious enough. Unlike Al Walker’s dream, however, Paul’s blends his recollection of trauma with current events and forecasts of the future. But like Walker, Paul is tormented by guilt. He must both emulate his father and “kill” his influence, while also eliminating his rival, Brett Curtis (Warren William), the man with designs on his mother’s fortune. In the process he must also confront two patriarchal doctors: his friend, Doc Vincent (Regis Toomey), and Curtis’s co-conspirator, the psychiatrist Muhlbach (Charles Arnt). If Muhlbach and Curtis are sinister, Doc Vincent is sympathetic but skeptical: after Paul recounts his dream and reminds Vincent that, after the wreck, the train engineer saw a sign for the Acme Trucking Company, Doc dismisses him with “you’ve been working too hard at school.”

  Instead of appearing to his son as a ghost, the elder Cartwright speaks to Paul in more mundane ways. He has left a letter urging the youth to guard his mother from “unscrupulous impostors,” and when Paul first meets Curtis, the two men stand with Paul’s mother, Virginia, before a large portrait of Judge Cartwright, who looms behind them like an apparition urging Paul to “list.” Though Paul rejects his mother’s claim that Curtis “looks like father,” his own duty is to “look like” his father—to judge the scheming Curtis and finish the criminology textbook his father was writing when he died. Like Hamlet’s, Paul’s determination is tested as his dreams begin to come true: Curtis gives Dorothy the “traitorous gift” (Hamlet 1.5.42) of a bracelet, and the young man collapses upon hearing the Schumann concerto. Soon Paul finds in his father’s papers accounts of one Claude Barrington, accused but never convicted of attacks on young girls. A long slow pan left begins as Paul learns that Barrington was involved with a widow who drowned; as he finishes reading, the camera tilts upward and comes to rest on his father’s portrait. The judge has given him his orders: stop Curtis (i.e., Barrington) from marrying (and probably killing) his mother.

  After Curtis and Muhlbach consult about Paul (that “persistent little devil”), Muhlbach decides that the young man “sounds like a subject for mental analysis.” So their plan takes shape: admit Paul to Muhlbach’s sanitarium, Restview Manor, to get him out of the way and, after Curtis marries Virginia, kill him off. Paul provides the ideal pretext for the first step when he faints after hearing Curtis proclaim that this opportunity is “just what I’ve been waiting for.” The dream is coming true! Muhlbach informs Paul that when “filial devotion to a mother goes beyond the borderline of normality,” it can produce hallucinations. He concludes that “it is your emotional aversion to your mother’s remarriage which produces these neurotic symptoms.” In short, Paul suffe
rs from an oedipal complex.

  The film’s vision motif emerges after Paul is admitted to his room at Restview, where Muhlbach spies on him through a two-way mirror (this scene rhymes with the earlier scene in which Judge Cartwright’s portrait seemed to gaze down at him). As patriarchal authority is transferred to the psychiatrist, Paul’s goal shifts from completing his father’s unfinished business to throwing off all the paternal influences symbolized by these phallic, panoptic gazes. To do so, he must enhance his own vision. So when Muhlbach brings him to the roof of the clinic, Paul borrows his binoculars and spots an abandoned farm building not far away, while Muhlbach looks on with evil intent. Muhlbach (implausibly) then allows Paul to take a drive with Doc Vincent; though he watches them from the roof, he cannot penetrate the inside of the building, where the two discover the remains of a car, along with a mutilated sign for the ACME TRUCKING COMPANY. The sign—ME RUC OMP—is a rebus signifying the truth: Muhlbach and Curtis conspired to kill the judge by engineering the train crash.11 After Vincent enlists the district attorney’s help, Paul confronts Muhlbach, who again locks the young man in his room. The moment arrives for Paul to assert himself: smashing through the mirror, he enters the room beyond, shattering Muhlbach’s visual control. Indeed, in breaking through the looking glass to enter the realm beyond the dream, Paul has thrown off not just Muhlbach’s and Curtis’s dominance but his father’s as well.