Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Peter de Bolla observes that “forgery … inserts the possibility of multiple personality, or no identity at all, into the paper-thin circulation of trust in a speculative society,” thereby destabilizing “self, society and certainty” (73). In short, forgery severs the relation between object and representation, thus releasing the anchor of social relations—the belief that people are who they claim to be, that a signature belongs to the signer. Chris’s consenting to the forgeries casts him adrift in a world of floating signifiers. For Lang this is his most damning self-betrayal: a denial of the authorship that confirms and cements an artist’s identity.

  Chris’s plight, like that of Hollow Triumph’s John Muller, epitomizes the dilemma of the forger—the only artist whose success depends on not being recognized. His paintings, that is, acquire value because they are signed by a young attractive woman rather than by a meek male nobody. Ironically, only by effacing his identity as a painter does Chris actually become one: his lie allows him to assume what he thinks of as his “true” identity. But Chris’s identity is very much in question, as evinced by his “masterpiece”—a painting of Kitty entitled Self-Portrait. As Chris reads about Kitty’s solo exhibition in the newspaper, this painting dissolves over a medium shot of Chris in his cashier’s cage, sitting beneath his name. For a moment “Cross” is written across Kitty’s face, the o covering her mouth. Earlier Chris had told her, “It’s just like we’re married, only I take your name.” Now she takes his. Who is crossing out whom? In painting Kitty, Chris paints his own self-portrait not just as a painter and forger and lover but as a woman. As in Laura, the creation of a forged identity is linked with gender transgression. Gunning speculates that Chris’s identification with a woman “could be seen as a revolt against the hypocritical ideal male identity embodied in the portrait of Homer Higgins,” and that his “cross-gendered identity” enables him to trick Homer (331–32). Seen from another angle, however, this gender crossing sends him to a limbo between an unformed feminine self and an inchoate adventurous, passionate male self. Though no longer himself, he can’t be Kitty. Chris can’t cross.

  Flushed with his victory over Adele, he rushes to tell Kitty he is free to marry her. But as Chris stands outside her window, he witnesses her embracing Johnny (to a recording of “Melancholy Baby” that repeatedly sticks on the line “in love”). Here Lang revises Renoir’s rendering, in which Legrand is the focal point of the internal frame. We see Lang’s lovers from Chris’s point of view, boxed in by the window to resemble a painting. This portrait of the Freudian primal scene shocks Chris, whose subsequent effort to claim Kitty is even more pathetic than Legrand’s. Laughing derisively, she berates him as “old and ugly.” As she begins her diatribe, she turns away from the camera, so that we see her face only in the mirror’s reflection. It is as if her head has been severed from her body, just as her real intentions have long been separated from her ostensible ones. Kitty is two people again—only one of whom Chris kills by stabbing her four times with an icepick, finally enacting the piercing lust he has kept caged.

  With remarkably bad timing, Johnny drives up in a light convertible. In contrast to Renoir’s busy street, however, only one person sees him, but he is enough to verify Johnny’s presence and get him indicted for the murder. In the swift trial scene montage, testimony establishes that (1) Kitty was an artist, (2) Chris is not an artist but a forger and thief, and (3) Johnny is a low-down son of a bitch and pathological liar. Yet in framing Johnny, Chris must frame himself, for his life depends on disavowing his identity as a painter. The newspaper headline sums it up: “Famous Painter Slain.” Chris’s painter self dies along with the lover and the cashier. The shell, however, endures a death-in-life, superbly rendered in a chilling, expressionist sequence in which Chris enters his dark hotel room, whistling “Melancholy Baby,” then is driven to (unsuccessfully) hang himself by the taunting voices of Kitty and Johnny. As a reporter told Cross after the trial, “Nobody gets away with murder,” because we all carry a little court room “right in here. Judge, jury and executioner.”20 Like Joe Wilson in Fury, or child-murderer Hans Beckert in M, Cross is tormented by ghosts. Worse: Johnny still possesses Kitty, and Chris is denied even the relief of suicide. There is no escape from his self-made frame.

  Lang’s epilogue contrasts starkly with Renoir’s. It’s Christmastime, but Chris’s present is a lonely afterlife. Homeless and doddering, he watches incredulously as Katherine March’s Self-Portrait—his self-portrait—is sold for $10,000 and loaded into a truck. “Well, there goes her masterpiece,” remarks the dealer, as “Melancholy Baby” plays on the soundtrack. “Why do you grieve? / Try to believe,” the lyrics recommend, but there is no silver lining here. Whereas Renoir was at pains to define his characters—and partly redeem them—by placing them within a lively social context, Cross’s plight, as Kaplan notes, is an “individual tragedy” (“Ideology” 36). Cross reenacts Wanley’s strangulating self-enclosure, as Renoir’s vision of radical freedom is transformed into “powerlessness … not once but twice” (Welsch 61). Far from being liberated by his self-reinvention, Cross, like John Muller, Ole Anderson, and Vincent Parry, merely moves from one prison to another. As he gazes at Kitty’s picture, we are drawn back to the opening of Woman in the Window: the same actor stares at a portrait of the same actress through what could be the same window on the same street. We watch ourselves watching him watch. We have stepped through the looking glass, but it’s no longer clear which side we’re on.

  Though La chienne depicts Legrand as a dupe, he is at least freed from the prison of self and permitted to exercise his creativity by living rather than by painting. Scarlet Street, in contrast, dramatizes a world of obsessive reiteration and implacable fate where Chris’s best instincts—his capacity for love, his artistic passion, his integrity and credulity—are ruthlessly exploited and then utterly obliterated. Chris, seduced by the American dream of starting over, loses everything; worst of all, he is stripped of his agency. For Lang, any artist who allows his work to be overwritten by others also loses his soul. In remaking La chienne, however, he avoids Chris’s fate because in repainting Renoir’s masterpiece, he signs it not as Chris Cross but as Katherine March—the one who fashions a self-portrait by appropriating the work of another.

  A Little Fractured

  “All of a sudden I don’t know myself,” admits George Steele (Pat O’Brien), the disoriented art critic of Crack-Up, who has become the target of a forgery ring. Steele’s confusion isn’t his alone. Crack-Up also dramatizes its makers’ ambivalence (or confusion) about their own aesthetic aims: while the film purports to champion a realist, near-documentary aesthetic of “truth”—the kind found in representational art—it also presents forged works as authentic ones. And while the film diagnoses cracks in American ideals, it leaves them unhealed: like the portrait noirs, Crack-Up does not resolve the questions it raises about originality and identity.

  The film opens with a bang, as Steele shatters the window of a museum and knocks over a large sculpture before being subdued by a guard. On coming to, he can’t remember how he got here and admits to being, like the male sculpture he toppled, “a little fractured.” He then launches into an account of his day for the onlookers, which include the curator and a Dr. Lowell (Ray Collins). Steele’s flashback—his framed narrative—is, we eventually discover, also the narrative of a frame designed by forgers seeking to discredit him. They know he’s smart: during the war he was Captain Steele, famous for finding “all those forgeries” in the Nazis’ collections.21

  Steele had proved himself a menace earlier in the day by delivering a lecture mocking modernism and advocating the use of X-rays to detect forgeries. First unveiling Jean-Francois Millet’s 1858 painting Angelus—which depicts two peasants praying over a basket of potatoes—he declares that it’s not the judgment of “phony” critics and collectors that make it valuable but the fact that “people like you over the centuries appreciate it. Because Millet was successful at communicat
ing what he felt was a beautiful moment.”22 Steele’s populist aesthetic principles are based on a commonsense notion of “truth”—emotional honesty and representational verisimilitude. Modernist art, in contrast, is associated with European radicalism and disdained as “nonsense.”23 This contrast is dramatized when he scornfully displays a surrealist painting (a pastiche of Salvador Dalí) at which the audience laughs derisively—all except one man with a foreign accent, who charges that Steele lacks “sensitivity to abstract emotional values.” The foreigner is jeered and thrown out. Yet the introduction of Dalí cracks open a window into a fascinating corner of art history. Steele earlier noted that the old masters sometimes painted over images they had originally placed in a work. Though he doesn’t mention it, that is what happened with Angelus. Dalí, a great admirer of Millet’s painting, long insisted that it was really a portrait of grief, that the couple were originally praying over a child’s coffin.24 An X-ray of the canvas confirmed his suspicion: Millet painted the basket of potatoes over a shape resembling a child’s coffin (“Jean-Francois Millet”). As the film proceeds, similar erasures are repeated in Steele’s lapses of memory, just as forgery comes to represent the blanking out and rewriting of history itself.

  Steele reminds his audience—in what seems a veiled critique of commercial filmmaking—that although a forgery can be as old as an original, “a good technician with nothing to say is a very dangerous man.” Art critic Mark Sagoff offers a more sophisticated version of this argument. A painting, he writes, advances “a theory concerning the way we see things or the way they can be … seen. … In this sense a representational painting is an experiment.” A forgery, however, lacks “cognitive importance: it merely repeats the solution to a problem which has already been solved” (146). But why is that dangerous? The answer lies in Leonard Meyer’s contention that forgeries undermine “our most fundamental beliefs about the nature of human existence: beliefs about causation and time, creation and freedom” (92). Similarly mistaken beliefs about time and causation also lurk behind the fracturing of Steele’s identity. In a sense, we learn, Steele is himself a forgery, a man whose past has been painted over by skillful, dangerous technicians.

  Steele remembers being called away from dinner with his friend Terry (Claire Trevor) by a message that his mother was ill. On the way to visit her, he became convinced his train was about to collide with another one. As the second train approaches, we see Steele and his reflection in the window: visually he is “a little fractured.” A series of quick cuts shows Steele from outside the window in full-face and in profile, both images tightly boxed within the window so that he resembles nothing so much as a portrait—of overpowering terror. He pulls the brake cord, stops the train, and collapses. But his mother was not ill, he has no train ticket, and no train wreck occurred yesterday. Perhaps, hypothesizes Lowell, his traumatic war experiences have affected his cognition. Steele is like those cognitively disabled veterans discussed in chapter 3: he can neither fully remember his traumas nor completely forget them. Yet his visual fracturing also links him to the cubist shapes and terror-ravaged faces portrayed by European modernists. Hence, his false memories indicate a rupture in his own realist aesthetic, based as it is on a congruence between representation and shared reality. Can we trust what we see or recall, especially if others don’t share our perceptions? “All of a sudden,” he confesses to Terry, “I don’t know myself. In twenty-four hours everything has become unfamiliar.”

  When Steele reenacts his train trip, looking for a clue, director Irving Reis repeats Steele’s visual fracturing, again resorting to expressionism. As the second train approaches, Steele’s face is again confined within the window frame as the train whistle grows louder; his eyes widen and he appears to panic. This time the train passes without incident, but then the entire frame surrounding his face goes black, and he recedes rapidly into an abyss and disappears. Then the shot reverses itself, and his face grows to refill the frame. Like Laura and Wanley, Steele has died and been reborn; he has fallen back through the looking glass.25 The reenactment of his flashback helps him recognize that he is “in somebody’s way”: in replaying the frame tale, that is, he discovers that he is being framed in someone else’s crime story.

  Steele learns that a Gainsborough painting, allegedly lost at sea, and the museum’s Dürer—The Adoration of the Kings [Magi], which he had displayed during his lecture—are both forgeries. Locating the Dürer on a ship’s hold just as a fire starts, he rolls up the painting and flees with it.26 After gaining access to an X-ray machine with the help of Terry and a museum employee, he examines the painting. In the original Adoration, he explains, Dürer painted over an unfinished figure in the upper left; Steele compares its X-ray to one of an eighteenth-century forgery that has no such figure. He then examines the X-ray of a second forgery, the “Scola copy,” which is different yet. Placing that X-ray next to that of the museum’s Adoration, he realizes that the museum has been exhibiting the Scola forgery.27 As these images fill the frame, the film itself becomes an X-ray, proposing that cinema is the sole reliable vehicle for discovering truth. But of course the film’s paintings and images are forgeries—in fact, forgeries of forgeries, since there never was a “Scola copy.” Once again the film authorizes realist representation on one level while undermining it on another.

  With the forgeries destroyed, Steele explains, the forgers will possess the original Dürer and Gainsborough paintings. Thinking the originals destroyed, other dealers and collectors will stop searching for them. But this plot twist seems dubious: if art dealers believe the originals destroyed, the originals would be perceived as forgeries—and hence would be unsellable! This seeming incoherence, however, does suggest a set of intriguing complications. First, in such a case the authenticity of a painting would matter less than its mere uniqueness. Further, the case suggests that a forgery always matters as much as its original, because the former validates the latter. That is, since only valuable paintings are forged, the existence of forgeries amounts to a backhanded way of recognizing an original’s value, even as the forgeries seek to appropriate that value. A forgery thus enhances the value of the original by certifying it as worthy of protection. As Schwartz argues, “an object uncopied is under perpetual siege, valued less for itself than for the struggle to prevent its being copied. … It is only within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of uniqueness” (212). A unique painting is unique—and valuable—only insofar as it faces the possibility of being forged. Thus, if an original’s existence ensures a forgery’s value, the reverse is also true: a forgery ratifies the value of the original.

  But just as Steele makes his discovery, he is captured by the forgery ring, whose leader turns out to be Dr. Lowell. To determine what Steele knows, Lowell injects him with sodium pentothal, the same drug administered to High Wall’s Steven Kenet and to several other noir characters. “Odd, isn’t it,” Lowell asks, “that truth should be a by-product of war,” so infamous for spawning lies and myths. This drug has “placed honesty on a scientific basis” and generated a “direct method of communication with a man’s true self.” The ironies multiply: a forger promises to uncover Steele’s “true self” and integrate his fractured psyche with a truth serum in order to cover up his own falsehoods. Where does the truth lie?

  Lowell explains his motives. “Did you ever want to possess something desperately that was unobtainable, that you couldn’t buy?” He is defending great art from “dolts who can’t differentiate between trash and these masterpieces.” The truth is out: these forgers are elitists, the kind who, as Steele earlier defined them, want to turn art into a “private tea party.” Lowell’s words echo those of Lydecker and Cathcart: here is another collector who prefers artworks to people and treats humans as objects. According to Lowell, however, forgers are not criminals but guardians of the canon: his copies are designed to preserve the beauty and value of the originals. Far from criminals, forgers are the true art lovers.

&nb
sp; The original paintings are hidden right in the house, but Lowell will no longer enjoy them, for he is shot by Traybin (Herbert Marshall), a Scotland Yard inspector who then pulls the previously unseen Gainsborough from its hiding place. It is The Painter’s Daughters (1758), a dual portrait of Mary and Margaret Gainsborough as children. But not exactly: the painting he displays depicts only one daughter. In fact, this “original” is a copy of a copy—a replica of a nineteenth-century imitation of the Gainsborough portrait—which portrays only Mary.28 Again, even as it condemns forgery, the film commits it: like Lowell and his gang, the filmmakers have created copies in order to defend originality. And like the creators of Laura and The Woman in the Window, these cinematic tricksters invite us into a realistically rendered world only to remind us that it is a fabrication.

  To further complicate matters, at the end Steele believes he has taken another journey, that “everybody’s nuts around this place” but himself. He remains suspended between his failure to remember what has happened to him and his inability to recover from his war injury. Here Crack-Up augments the other vet noirs’ challenge to the American ideal of self-reinvention. If Steele, a war hero and famous exponent of truth, can’t start over, then can anyone in postwar America do so? And from what fragments will we paint our new self-portrait? Neither the shards of demolished European high culture nor embattled pictorial realism seem quite up to the task. The split portrait thus comes to represent America’s fissured psyche as well as the film’s—and indeed, film noir’s—divided aesthetic. All are a little fractured.