Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  As the multiple images of Alice suggest, she plays several roles in what follows—siren, victim, accomplice. When she invites Wanley into her mirror-filled apartment, he follows her through the looking glass into Lewis Carroll terrain, where he plays a topsy-turvy chess game in which his every move is wrong and where authorities hound him until he is finally cornered. Yet in the wonderland of his unconscious Wanley also becomes a dashing hero, a man who would yield to temptation instead of just reading about it—a man who would, like Harry Quincy, even kill if necessary. That’s what he does when Alice’s lover, Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft), breaks in on them and attacks Wanley, provoking the professor to stab him repeatedly with the scissors Alice provides. As they clean up, the two are repeatedly framed by mirrors to represent the redoubling of identities in the aftermath. If Alice is both a portrait come to life and a mirror of Wanley’s desire, Mazard also embodies Wanley’s impulses: as Gunning notes, “killing Mazard [is], in a sense, killing himself” (302). Later, Mazard’s former bodyguard, a man named Heidt (Duryea), blackmails Wanley and Alice until they try to poison him with Wanley’s medication. They fail but inadvertently set up Heidt to be killed and identified as Mazard’s killer. In short, not only does Wanley frame Heidt; in an important sense Wanley is Heidt.

  Professor Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is entranced by a portrait of his dream girl (Joan Bennett) in The Woman in the Window. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  Wanley also frames himself. Throughout the investigation he makes incriminating “mistakes” when discussing the case with his friend, District Attorney Lalor (Raymond Massey): he knows the killing occurred at night; knows the body was dumped over barbed wire; almost leads the police directly to the scene; and even shows Lalor the arm he scratched on the fence. Certainly Wanley wants to be caught, but these inculpating acts are not merely a guilty conscience at work: to be recognized as the killer would also validate him as an adventurous and virile man. But, ironically, instead he must efface his identity by burning his coat and hiding his monogrammed pen.

  Distraught over his failure and certain of his guilt and its imminent discovery, Wanley poisons himself. As he sits in his chair at home, slowly losing consciousness, Lang dollies in and holds on Wanley’s face (meanwhile, his breakaway robe is removed and the “wild” home set is replaced by the club set), then pulls back as a club employee wakes him.14 The whole experience was Wanley’s dream. The gimmick (similar to those in The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry and The Chase) is hokey, as Lang himself recognized; yet its thematic and psychological plausibility largely redeems it, as Wanley and the others are retrospectively transformed.15 For example, we now realize that the portrait’s appearance as Wanley’s appendage had already told us she was a projection of his psyche. Like Heidt, Mazard, and the rest, Alice is Wanley’s self-portrait. He is their author—and they are his.

  Yet in this film the frame is invisible—if it exists at all. The absence of cuts in the awakening scene, that is, implies that no line exists between the dream and waking worlds.16 Slavoj Žižek thus argues that the ending means not that it was all a dream and Wanley is a normal man but that “in our unconscious, in the real of our desire, we are all murderers.” He continues: “we do not have a quiet, kind, decent bourgeois professor dreaming for a moment that he is a murderer; what we have is … a murderer dreaming … that he is just a decent bourgeois professor” (16–17). But this formulation is too dualistic: Wanley is simultaneously a bourgeois professor and a murderer. Just as Alice is both inside and outside of the portrait, so Wanley exists in two realms at once. We may feel cheated by the ending. But if so, Lang has caught us doing what Wanley does—conflating the real and the imaginary. As Harris puts it, “Like him, we too have passed through the window: in our unconscious, we are all naive spectators” (8–9; emphasis his). The ending, then, both invokes the power of cinematic authorship—as if Lang were announcing, “I can change this all into a dream, for a movie is just a dream anyway”—and its limitations: “this is merely a fantasy that ends when you exit the theater.” Wanley’s face is a portrait of ourselves watching it—an image of how film pulls us through the looking glass, inviting us to dream new selves as a professor or murderer or model or prosecutor, or all of them at once.

  La chienne likewise evokes its own artificiality and elides it. It begins with puppets disagreeing about the story to come, until the last puppet declares that it’s “neither comedy nor drama” but a realistic tale depicting “plain people like you and me.” On one hand the film’s cluttered mise-en-scène, constant ambient sounds, and cramped living spaces lend it a meticulous verisimilitude. On the other hand a curtain comes up at the beginning and goes down at the end, drawing our attention to the story’s theatricality, and its plot contrivances and emphasis on the constructed nature of truth insinuate that we should be skeptical about all representations. Renoir thus both pulls us into this world and holds it at a distance, warning us neither to believe in fantasy nor to trap ourselves in Legrand’s brand of cynicism.

  Shackled to his shrewish wife, Adele, who calls him “the laughingstock of the neighborhood,” Legrand has good reason to be cynical. The compositions show his entrapment: as she chides him about his painting hobby, he stands to the left of the frame facing her; between them looms a large oval portrait of her first husband, Alexis Godard, a hero killed in World War I. He was “a real man,” she asserts, adding later, “a regular lady killer.” Legrand will never match this smug, uniformed icon. Yet he tries to enlarge his male identity after he meets Lulu (Janie Marèse), a prostitute he believes he has saved from a beating by her pimp, Dede (Georges Flamant). A month later Legrand has set her up in an apartment and let her believe he is a wealthy, successful artist.

  Soon we watch Legrand paint a self-portrait. As we observe, three Legrands become visible—his reflection in the mirror, his image in the unfinished painting, and his body, shown from the rear (a similar composition is used in Hollow Triumph’s scarring scene). Split between his identity as a cashier (we’ve already seen him working in his cage) and his new self as Lulu’s sugar daddy, Legrand is now painting a picture of himself as a painter. Yet he remains surrounded by frames, including the one revealed as the camera pulls back to disclose a window through which we can see a neighbor.17 Legrand doesn’t notice the neighbor; he prefers his narcissistic obsession. More important, perhaps, this camera movement invites us to recognize that the entire scene has been created by a painter named Renoir.

  This self-reflexive layer unfolds further after Dede’s friend instructs him about capitalizing on Legrand’s work: “the only thing that counts in art is the signature. And since you can’t use a famous signature, you’ll only get chicken feed.” The two then come up with “Clara Wood” as the pseudonym with which Lulu will sign Legrand’s paintings. Voila—they have made a painter! But Lulu must endorse this picture, as she does soon after, by signing over a check to Dede; her signature now ensures both aesthetic and economic value. This moment reminds us that the essence of forgery lies not in the act of copying but in the act of signing (otherwise the thousands of “art prints” for sale online would be subject to prosecution). It also raises broader questions about the nature and limits of authorship and identity. As K. K. Ruthven observes, every signature is to some extent a self-forgery, in that no two are exactly identical (156). Furthermore, a signature may always be close to a forgery because to sign a document is to endorse the notion of a consistent, essentially unchanging self (Thwaites 6)—a notion that all these films (as well as much modernist and postmodernist art) challenge.

  But are the paintings really forgeries, since Legrand consents to the scheme? And are they his creations, or hers, or even Dede’s? After all, Dede invented Clara. And upon seeing Legrand’s paintings, a dealer boasts, “We can make painters, you know.” In a sense, then, he also “makes” the paintings. Renoir here insinuates that artworks are collaborative products of painters and the entrepreneurs who turn the artifacts into commoditi
es. This matrix encompasses film-making as well. Who is a film’s author? The director? Or is it the screenwriter, actors, production company, or all of them at once? In effect, the film offers a critique of auteur theory avant la lettre. But when Dede induces Lulu to romance a wealthy man who wants her to paint his portrait, Renoir unveils the darker side of collaboration: by permitting others to write over his name, an artist becomes a prostitute.

  As both a forger and a forgery, Legrand shares this distinction with M. Godard, who suddenly reappears with a false name and no money. Through a farcical stratagem, Legrand reunites him with Adele, leaving himself free to marry Lulu. But when he goes to break the news to her, he catches her in bed with Dede. As Legrand opens the door, Renoir cuts to outside the bedroom window. The camera moves right, then holds Legrand within the window frame, and the next two shots frame him within the door. The meaning is evident: Legrand is trapped within the picture he helped to paint. Thus, when he confronts Lulu the next day as she lies in bed cutting the pages of a novel, she replies, “Take a look in the mirror.” He berates and beseeches her; she laughs at him. Then he takes up Lulu’s knife and … Renoir takes up his, cutting to a shot outside the apartment, where a crowd gathers around some musicians. We don’t need to see the murder to understand that Legrand has at last matched Godard: he has now become a lady killer.

  Dede, who imagines himself as one, now drives up in his flashy convertible, goes upstairs and returns, all in full view of the crowd. He is quickly charged with the murder. Who is guilty? Like that of the paintings, the murder’s authorship is shared. Renoir even identifies Lulu’s two lovers through a brilliant camera movement in the police station. We see Dede, his back to the wall, lamenting his fate; then the camera pulls back and tracks right to reveal Legrand in the same position on the other side of the wall: they are two faces of the same portrait. But Legrand lets the police and jury view only one side and permits Dede to be framed for his murder. Ironically, he has at last come into his own as a painter—one capable of forging convincing representations of himself as a dupe and of another man as murderer.

  In the epilogue Legrand meets Godard again, both of them now homeless derelicts. Though Legrand says he “wouldn’t mind” being dead, and admits to being a murderer, he doesn’t seem guilt-ridden: the two jocosely share a smoke and gaze at some paintings through a store window. Legrand briefly spots his self-portrait being loaded into a car but is more interested in twenty francs that have fallen to the sidewalk. He snatches the cash, and the two depart for a feast. As the opened-up mise-en-scène indicates, in losing his bourgeois identity Legrand has been liberated from his constricted life and lethal fantasies. It doesn’t matter that he no longer paints; he has found a soul mate. By yielding control, Legrand discovers a new self.

  To remake this story, Fritz Lang teamed with Walter Wanger (who had produced The Woman in the Window) and Wanger’s wife, Joan Bennett, to form Diana Productions. The notoriously autocratic Lang usually treated collaboration as interference and clashed by night and day with his American producers. On this film, however, he was afforded a great deal of freedom. Ironically, Lang used this freedom to direct an allegory about losing it. He told Peter Bogdanovich that Chris Cross’s fate is that of “an artist who cares much more for his paintings than for gaining money” (205). Thus we may read Scarlet Street—the story of an artist whose works are appropriated by a prostitute and her pimp—as the self-portrait of a director harnessed to mercenary producers and studio heads who “steal” his pictures and put their names on them.

  Patrick McGilligan (Fritz Lang 321) writes that Lang and screenwriter Dudley Nichols failed to find a print of La chienne, and Lang recalled that they tried to be “absolutely uninfluenced by it” (Bogdanovich 205). But close scrutiny reveals that he imitated or carefully revised La chienne in pivotal scenes. Indeed, with its borrowed plot about lost identity and forged paintings, Scarlet Street is itself a kind of forgery or plagiarism, a painted-over Renoir to which Lang signs his own name. Yet despite his debts to the French master, Lang displays a quite different attitude about authorship and forgery.

  Protagonist Chris Cross’s unlikely name introduces an important set of motifs. First, it presages a series of double crosses: Kitty March betrays him by stealing his words, name, and money; Chris double-crosses Adele and her first husband, Homer Higgins, by forcing them to reunite; he crosses up Johnny by framing him for the murder of Kitty. These crossings constitute a series of exchanges: Chris for Kitty, Chris for Johnny, Homer for Chris. Perhaps more significant, the name signifies Chris’s erasure. Kitty rubs out Chris’s identity as a cashier and a painter and replaces it with hers; in complying with the forgery scheme, Chris commits self-erasure. In the end he even exes out his dream by testifying that he’s not a painter at all.

  In a sense, however, Chris’s erasure scarcely matters, for he is a nonentity from the start. In the opening scene, for example, his reward for twenty-five years of service to the firm of J. J. Hogarth is a watch—an appropriate present for a “fourteen-carat, seventeen-jewel cashier.” The metaphor—a trope for authentic representation and value—captures Cross’s mechanical existence. In this he resembles Professor Wanley: both are bored with their humdrum lives but too timid to escape.18 When Chris tells his friend that he once dreamed of being a painter, the friend replies, “When we’re young we have dreams that never pan out. But we go on dreaming.” Unlike Legrand, he doesn’t mention waking up. Though the lines are not delivered by Chris, they nonetheless pinpoint a primary difference between him and Legrand: whereas Legrand is fettered by his sense of superiority and finds release in being humbled, Cross seeks restoration in fantasy. After all, he is, like the immigrant Fritz Lang, an American, and he believes in self-remaking. Thus, when his paintings are later sold for a tidy sum, he enthuses, “It’s just like a dream!” No, it’s a nightmare, one that begins, as in so many noirs, with a single act—his “rescue” of “actress” Kitty March from a beating by her boyfriend, Johnny Prince.

  That night Chris explains to Kitty his aesthetic principles. He doesn’t paint what he sees, but merely puts “a line around what I feel.” And what he feels is love: “every painting is a love affair.” Gunning describes Chris’s aesthetic as “semi-Expressionist” (327)—one similar to that of the American version of Fritz Lang. Indeed, Chris’s quasi-primitivist paintings are visual allegories that resemble Lang’s heavily symbolic films, a symbolism exemplified when Chris’s body is dissolved over an image of the wilting flower he brings home from the meeting with Kitty.19 In his painting, however, the wan bloom is large and erect. His imaginary love affair has already begun to restore his potency—at least in his imagination.

  In the real world of home, however, he remains emasculated; in one scene he even wears a frilly apron while doing the dishes—an abject image of the castrated male. But if Chris is a fake wife, so is Adele, despite being addicted to a radio show called The Happy Household Hour. The scene in which Adele castigates Chris about his paintings also proves that Lang viewed La chienne closely, for the composition and framing of the two versions are nearly identical. Like Renoir, Lang places Adele and her current husband on opposite sides of the frame (he left, she right); between and over them hangs a large oval portrait of the proudly smiling first husband (this time a cop who allegedly died while saving a woman’s life), his chest out, his arms akimbo. Homer is to Adele as Kitty is to Chris—an image of the ideal mate. But this portrait is as enhanced as Chris’s flower: as we learn later, Homer faked his death and stole money from the drowning woman. In copying this scene, Lang thus casts himself as Cross, with Renoir the heroic forerunner to be overcome.

  Kitty’s lover wields his own phallic power by wangling money from her and romancing her—whenever he’s not roughing her up. It’s Johnny’s idea to sell Chris’s paintings, and his idea—after they attract the attention of an art dealer named Janeway—to attribute them to Kitty. For these two as for Lulu and Dede, paintings are merely commodities, a
nd an artist is just a prostitute. Lang none-too-subtly depicts Johnny’s values in a characteristic lap dissolve: skulking outside Kitty’s apartment, he is superimposed over Chris’s painting of a snake. But if the dissolve conveys Johnny’s potency and sliminess, it also implies that he is a product of Chris’s imagination. That is, by endorsing the painting scheme, Chris creates Johnny, just as he later frames him for the murder of Kitty. The snake, like the flower, is Chris’s imaginary self-portrait.

  Still, if Chris’s paintings are forgeries, it’s not because they are copies of another painter’s work but because they are signed “Katherine March.” Hence, whereas Renoir implies that Lulu—the signer—is the forger, Lang assigns the role to Chris: he’s the one, after all, who makes a career, in Hillel Schwartz’s formulation, by “standing invisible behind names or styles in demand” (315). Indeed, his imaginary love affair embodies art critic Francis Sparshott’s explanation that “the primary erotic analogue of artistic forgery is the substitution, in conditions of desperation or poor visibility, of an alternative sex object for the loved one” (254). Chris tries to stand in for Johnny and Homer; like Cornell, Lydecker, Cathcart, and Wanley he loves not a woman but a portrait of one. Sparshott also contends that original art shows us something about the person who created it; forgery, by contrast, is a lie about the self (252–53). In that regard Chris, who pretends to be an unmarried, successful painter, is a forger from the moment he meets Kitty. And Kitty—more plagiarist than forger—perpetuates the fraud by parroting Chris’s aesthetic principles to Janeway; ironically, this lie ratifies her earlier lie to Chris that she is an actress (Janeway gushes that talking to her is “like talking to two people”). Likewise, Johnny pretends to be the boyfriend of Kitty’s roommate, Millie, and Homer pretends to be dead. All of them are self-forgers, their Franklinesque remodeling achieved for dishonest ends.