Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  The past comes flooding back: his name is John Ballantine; he ran into Edwardes at the resort while recovering from “nerve shock” due to his war experiences and saw Edwardes die in a skiing accident. Constance explains that he took on Edwardes’s identity to prove to himself that the doctor wasn’t dead and hence that he couldn’t have killed him. Swift, accurate dream reading, cathartic cure: it’s all too pat.25 As Jerrold Brandell observes, the film permits only one correct interpretation, which explains not only the “distal causes and pathogenesis” of Ballantine’s disorder but also the particular form it takes (“Eighty” 66). Yet the dream also invokes a theme that reverberates throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre and the noir canon: a “wounded past envies the present and prevents its rejuvenation” (Brill 240).26 It also exemplifies the pattern I have been investigating: like Al Walker, Paul Cartwright, and Andy La Main, Ballantine is debilitated by his attachment to a traumatic past event. In breaking the chain through dream interpretation, he may be free to reinvent himself.

  Or maybe not. Hitchcock dissolves over the lovers’ triumphant embrace a police report stating, “new evidence uncovered. Makes surveillance essential.” The phrases hint that psychoanalytic surveillance has uncovered new evidence freeing JB and that he has exercised loving “surveillance” over Constance to unearth the warmth beneath her icy exterior. In terms of the plot, however, the lines mean that the police have found a bullet in Edwardes’s body, which proves that he was murdered. A brisk montage covers Ballantine’s arrest and jailing; those newly opened doors seem permanently closed once again. Constance’s colleagues urge her to forget it all and bury herself in work. But she is not satisfied, and her suspicions are further aroused when Murchison offhandedly mentions that he “knew Edwardes.” The words echo in her mind as she stands in a Green Manors doorway, for if Murchison knew him, why didn’t he recognize Ballantine as an impostor? Again she walks upstairs to confront a colleague, but this time it’s Murchison. When she asks him to analyze Ballantine’s dream, Murchison’s self-protective instincts collide with his scientific curiosity. The latter wins, as he unpacks the very dream images that incriminate him: the gambling house is Green Manors, and Murchison is himself the proprietor, angry at the bearded man (Edwardes) for taking his job. The dream exposes Green Manors as a hotbed of professional jealousy and sexual rivalry, a gambling club where practitioners employ a mix of gamesmanship and guesswork. The seven of clubs leads (through condensation, or metonymy) to the 21 Club in New York, where Murchison angrily confronted Edwardes. The wheel? A revolver (synecdoche)—which Murchison now points at Constance. We shift to Murchison’s point of view behind the gun as Constance, softly talking, walks out the door. Then he turns the gun on himself and shoots—us.

  In a sense Murchison has already turned the gun on himself by analyzing Ballantine’s dream. Indeed, whereas in JB’s dream the eyes are snipped, the rest of the film depicts the psychoanalytic eye as a cutting weapon capable equally of salvation or soul murder. Just as the old Ballantine and the phony Edwardes (not to mention John Brown) died because of psychiatric scrutiny, so Murchison kills himself by reading a dream through Ballantine’s eyes. He is thus exposed as Ballantine’s double—an impostor, both doctor and psychopath, an amnesiac who has “forgotten” a crime he committed. In this final turn psychoanalysis is at once glorified and debased, presented as a partial solution to its own murderous tendencies (Freedman 86). The final point-of-view shot also implicates the viewer in this analytic scrutiny. In the course of the film we have been both psychoanalyst and patient, experiencing Ballantine’s dreams and participating in their analysis. Thus, in a sense we are as guilty (or innocent) as JB or Murchison—guilty of using our eyes to cut people up, guilty of blaming and of loving them. Someone else’s nightmare is now our own. To be cured of our neurosis and our complicity in such murderous gazing, we too must be killed. Ultimately, then, the revolver—through the metonymy of dream logic—becomes the camera, a small wheel held by a man whose eye exposes our hidden desires.

  This final turn further complicates the motif of self-creation, for the eye can save as well as shoot. Constance’s eye imagined a new self for JB, one that, as Marlisa Santos explains, is neither the old Ballantine nor his blank double but a “‘third self’—the product of the unity of his blank self and his phantom ‘other’” (xxii). Perhaps it would be more accurate to call this a fourth or even a fifth self, one conjured out of the combination of Ballantine, Edwardes, and the selves exposed in his dream. Further, in reading Ballantine’s dream, Constance reads herself, for Ballantine saw—and created—a different Constance. Brill thus concludes that at the end “Constance and John at once remember and learn who they are” (256). Or perhaps, as Thomas Hyde determines, she forges a new identity by “tapping a suppressed capacity within herself for feeling and committed action” (154). The word forge points to conflicting possibilities, one of which is that, by assuming a series of roles, Constance learns that the life she has been living is an impersonation (see Morris 150). Like Ballantine and Murchison, she kills herself by using her eyes, and now she will be reborn as someone else: Mrs. Ballantine.27 But if her emotions led her to believe in Ballantine, it was her intelligence that let her see through Murchison’s lies and trap him into self-incrimination. Like JB, she ultimately becomes neither her original self nor her second (the lover) but a unique entity melding disparate elements.

  Perchance to Dream

  What dreams may come to noir characters? We have examined three major types: (1) trauma rendered into recurrent nightmares, as in The Dark Past and Spellbound. In them the dreamer is victimized by a double bind—desiring to forget what he can’t quite remember; (2) a forecast or message from beyond, as in Strange Illusion, where the dream becomes the apparition of a dead patriarch, urging the son to act for and transcend his father. The Big Night, though its nightmare is implicit rather than explicit, also fits this category, as George becomes at once his father’s agent and his rival; and (3) a warning coupled with a wish-fulfillment, as in The Chase and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, where dreams dramatize alternate futures in which a character’s unconscious wishes come true—and, somewhat disturbingly, enable him to repress them again.

  We may further distill these categories by analyzing the dreams’ tropic arrangements and emotional content. According to the psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, who has published extensively on dreams, the most significant element in any dream is not its specific imagery but its dominant emotion, which induces the dreamer to combine images and associations from various parts of the brain to create explanatory tropes (Hartmann 4, 119). In other words, what matters is less the vehicle of the metaphor than the tenor it aims to convey. With that in mind let us review the dominant emotions in these noir dreams:

  The Dark Past: terror, hatred

  Strange Illusion: fear, jealousy

  The Big Night: hatred, envy

  The Chase: self-hatred, illicit sexual desire

  The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry: jealousy, illicit sexual desire

  Spellbound: guilt

  Guilt, in fact, motivates each of these dreams: it is the definitive noir dream tenor. And what is guilt but an attachment to a past action that prompts a need to relive it and make it right? Guilt leaves noir dreamers cowering under a table, trapped in a stifling house, steering a car that someone else is driving, or forever skiing down an endless slope. How to escape from these nightmare alleys? By re-enacting the event and then forgetting it. Yet if these noir dreams imply that the American Dream of self-reinvention is possible, they also leave a residue of doubt. For example, the surreal quality of The Chase’s conclusion raises questions about the durability of Chuck’s new self; Uncle Harry’s ending fails to erase the disturbing aspects of the protagonist’s psyche that his dream has unveiled. In reminding us of their own constructedness, these two films alert us to the artificiality of their happy conclusions. Similarly, Spellbound’s love story is acceptable only if we agree that women are bette
r off as lovers than as doctors, and The Big Night furnishes a dubiously sacrificial, even masochistic, image of manhood. Only Strange Illusion and The Dark Past offer relatively straightforward endorsements of self-reinvention, and they suggest that looking backward is valuable insofar as doing so frees one from the past. The self, newly cleansed by psychotherapy or the power of love, may be infinitely renewable, but only if its eyes are at least half closed.

  2

  Missing Persons

  Self-Erasure and Reinvention

  Mr. Flitcraft of Tacoma is blessed with a wife, two children, a successful real estate business, and the “rest of the appurtenances of successful American living” (Hammett 442), including a golf game at four o’clock each afternoon. Then one day a beam falls from a high building, barely missing him; that day he leaves Tacoma without telling anyone, wanders for a few years, and ends up in Spokane. There, as Charles Pierce, he marries, has a child, owns a prosperous automobile business, and gets away for a four o’clock golf game almost every afternoon.

  Private investigator Sam Spade tells this story to an unimpressed Brigid O’Shaughnessy in Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon. Neither Spade nor Hammett explains this curious, meditative digression in an otherwise fast-paced tale. Spade does, however, delve briefly into Flitcraft’s motives. After the beam falls, Spade says, Flitcraft feels “like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works” (444). He had believed life to be a “clean orderly sane responsible affair,” but the falling beam had shown him it was none of those things. This good citizen-husband-father could be wiped out between office and restaurant by a simple accident. Neither orderly nor sane, human life is but a collection of random occurrences governed—or not governed—by luck. He was out of step with the workings of the world; to bring himself in step, “he would change his life at random by simply going away” (444). But the most interesting part to me (and, I think, to Spade) is that Flitcraft reconstitutes the life he had left: “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling” (445).

  Although John Huston’s film adaptation omits this vignette, it nonetheless introduces a major theme of film noir: that of an absurd cosmos ruled by unseen forces that limit human agency. You cope best by forgetting its absurdity, but you must remain alert, for a beam could fall on you at any moment. Foster Hirsch reads the episode as a coded defense of Spade’s philosophy, linking it with the detective’s later assertion that “when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it” (581–82); Hirsch writes, “In the face of uncertainty and duplicity, Sam Spade retains his honor” (31). I wish to use a different reading of this story as the keynote for this chapter.

  Everyone in Hammett’s novel pretends to be someone else: Brigid first gives her name as Miss Wonderly, then fakes love for Sam, then plays both ends against the middle; Gutman swears that he loves Wilmer, his gunman, like his own son, but barely hesitates to set him up as the fall guy when their plan to take the falcon fails; even Spade feigns anger when he doesn’t feel it. In The Maltese Falcon identity seems fluid, as fungible as the falcon, which inspires each character’s dreams (it’s “the stuff that dreams are made of,” according to Spade’s memorable final line in the film version). But near the end of the novel—just after the line that Hirsch quotes—Spade explains why Brigid must pay for murdering his partner, Miles Archer: “I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, … but it’s not the natural thing” (582). Similarly, Flitcraft starts a new life that ends up identical to the one he abandoned. The novel and vignette thus reiterate the Emersonian tenet that one cannot change his or her nature: I may travel to Spokane, but when I wake up, “there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from” (Emerson 48). If you’re a detective, you’re one forever; if you’re a businessman, changing your name, spouse, and job won’t make you an adventurer.

  As I pointed out in my introduction, this view contradicts the Franklinesque faith that self-invention is not only possible but desirable. If, as Cullen observes, the “cornerstone” of the American Dream is that “things … could be different” (15), those “things” begin with the self. Americans have always been a restless, mobile people, and the years after the war accelerated that movement. The 1950 census, for example, shows that more than 2.6 percent of the population had moved to another state in the previous year; if this rate was consistent for a decade, more than one-fourth of the American populace had moved between states in the 1940s (1950 census; Table 4B, 13; the rates are higher for men and women under thirty years old). Moving to another state means leaving behind jobs, loved ones, friends—most of the communal ties that define one’s social self. It also means beginning anew—perhaps even becoming someone else.

  We have seen how fantasies of self-reinvention pervade noir dreams. A second group of noirs, involving mistaken or switched identity, often accompanied by amnesia, also stage narratives of conversion that parallel the Protestant redemption story and invoke—only to challenge—the Franklinesque ethos of self-renewal. The protagonists of Street of Chance, My Name Is Julia Ross, No Man of Her Own, Dark Passage, and Hollow Triumph—and those of the more celebrated films The Killers and Out of the Past—are faced with, or forced into, changing identities. In so doing they enact a prototypical American story: that of the immigrant or internal exile.1 These mistaken-identity films present an alternate life—whether as service station owner Jeff Bailey, shady Danny Nearing, psychiatrist Victor Bartok, or a wealthy heiress named Patrice—as a chance to enact unconscious urges, discover hidden desires, cross class boundaries, or erase a mistake. Yet what often results (sometimes in spite of the narratives’ manifest content) is the bad dream of American optimists: the persistence of the past or even the total loss of selfhood. These films thus expose flaws in the ideology of individualism, reminding us that an autonomous self is often an alienated self—perhaps so alienated that the self may be rendered unrecognizable. In other instances the story’s outcome illuminates the theme of the Flitcraft episode: that the more one alters the trappings of identity, the more one’s inner self is revealed and, paradoxically, the more inauthentic that original self seems. These movies offer a pointed critique of American values by suggesting that individualism, faith in the pursuit of happiness, and self-creation actually foster isolation. In these pictures the community that might mitigate this isolation exists only as a distant promise.

  Like the noir dream films, the mistaken-identity movies question the cinematic medium. In one sense the geographically and socially mobile audiences watching these characters shift shapes may have felt they were seeing themselves as in a mirror. But those mirror images may also have raised as many questions as they answered. For if the dream films at once affirm and challenge movies’ status as authentic representations of our inner and outer worlds, the switched-identity films are more radical, suggesting that there may be little or no correspondence between inside and outside, image and inner reality, or, conversely, that the outside is the only reality. They leave us with two extremes, each one untenable: that one’s essence remains unchangeable, one’s past sins inescapable, or that the self is but a series of performances, a process in constant flux with no center at all. If the latter is true, then identity is something that neither photos nor movies nor writing can ever capture.

  We Move Anything

  Walking past a sign with these words (the slogan of Empire House Wrecking) one day, a man (Burgess Meredith) is hit by a chunk of falling plaster. He is shaken but unhurt—except that he doesn’t recall why he is on this street or where he has been. He does know that his name is Frank Thompson. So why do his hat and cigarette case bear the monogram “D. N.”? When he goes home, he learns that his wife has moved away, although he believes he saw her that morning. And when he finds her living under her maiden name elsew
here, she tells him he disappeared over a year ago.

  This echo of the Flitcraft episode opens Jack Hively’s early noir, Street of Chance—the first of many noir adaptations of Cornell Woolrich novels—and serves as prelude for the missing-person noirs that follow it. “It doesn’t make sense,” Frank tells his wife. “It’s like a bad dream.” But once he returns to his office job with the excuse that he had a nervous breakdown, we may wonder which life is the bad dream. The enormous room behind his office window, presaging the hive-like, identical cubicles in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, similarly implies that Thompson is a worker bee. Perhaps he hated this humdrum life and longed to pursue happiness as someone else.

  Not only does this missing year remain an abyss at the center of his memory; he is also being pursued by a mysterious man (Sheldon Leonard) and has no inkling why. Revisiting the streets around the accident site, Frank encounters Ruth Dillon (Claire Trevor). Though he doesn’t remember meeting her, she knows him, insists his name is Danny Nearing, and chides him for disappearing, worrying that “all our plans, all our dreams, gone.” He soon learns that Nearing is wanted for the murder of a wealthy man named Diedrich and that the man stalking him is police detective Joe Marucci. Although Ruth is noncommittal about whether Danny is guilty of the murder (Alma, the dead man’s wife, and Bill, his brother and Alma’s lover, seem more likely suspects), she vows to protect him. At one point during their discussion Frank/Danny stares at himself in the mirror, as if to acknowledge that he possesses two selves, straight businessman and shady character. Yet he avers to Ruth that “the me that’s inside wouldn’t let me kill anyone”—that his Emersonian “aboriginal” self is good. But since he doesn’t know who Nearing is, what he has promised or done, how can he be sure?