Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Their solution is the same one Americans in trouble have sought for centuries: light out for the Territory, or in this case, for Calico, Bud’s ghost town. At first the plan seems to work, as the lovers drive there in Garwood’s new Caddy and set up housekeeping in a shack, like any two kids starting out. They dance to “Baby” again (its title now given a double meaning), and Garwood pledges that “our kid’s gonna be on the beam the second he gets into the world!” There’ll be no lousy breaks for her! But as so often happens in noir, the past catches up with them. The recording of their song also includes the sign-off by the man Garwood murdered: “The cost of living is going down. … I’ll be seeing you, Susan.” No; the cost of their living is about to rise precipitously. As Garwood’s luck would have it, Susan goes into labor in the middle of a storm; and he, for once doing the right thing, drives to the nearest town to fetch a doctor, unaware that Bud and his wife plan to surprise them in Calico.

  To induce the reluctant doctor to accompany him, Garwood shows him his (no longer valid) badge. The doctor determines that the baby’s heartbeat is normal, but Garwood’s is not: agitated, he paces around, now staring out the window rather than peering in from the outside. That’s not too difficult, since their house doesn’t even have a door. Worse, Susan has begun to realize the truth about him and, having seen him take the gun he swore never to touch again, accuses him of having deliberately killed Gilvray. Though he denies it, he has lost his accomplice. After the birth of their baby girl, the doctor drives away before Garwood can stop him, taking with him the baby and Garwood’s car keys. Susan has spilled everything to the doctor, and the police are on the way (the doctor recognized Garwood from newspaper stories). Garwood desperately justifies himself: “I’m no worse than anybody else. You work in a store, you knock down on the cash register; a big boss, the income tax. A ward heeler, you sell votes. A lawyer, take bribes. I was a cop, so I used a gun. But whatever I did, I did for you.” As the bank robbers in They Live by Night would say: they’re just thieves like us. The American dream of upward mobility is just an excuse to steal from others before they rob you. “How am I any different from those other guys?” he cries to Susan. “Some do it for a million, some for ten. I did it for sixty-two thousand.” Now she knows the whole story: his phony rejection of her, the “accident,” the courtroom lies—all a plot to take her money. Finding his spare car key on the floor, Garwood tries to flee, but his passage out of nightmare alley is, ironically, blocked by Bud’s approaching car, as if the vestiges of his own better nature are conspiring against him. All alone, with the police in pursuit, Garwood tries to escape by climbing a sand dune that represents his quest for upward mobility. As he reaches the crest (with Susan watching from the window), he is shot down, tumbling to his death in a cloud of dust. He can’t escape his unpaid debts.

  Webb Garwood is not so different from Nightmare Alley’s Stanton Carlisle, whose rise and fall I chronicled at the beginning of this book: both are cynics who exploit others to fulfill their selfish dreams of success. But Carlisle is tormented by guilt over the death of Pete and rendered vulnerable by Lilith; his final abjection and possible rebirth hold out a shred of hope. In contrast, Garwood is unredeemed and perhaps unredeemable. And whereas many of Carlisle’s victims (particularly Griswold) are venal strangers who deserve or even welcome their victimization, Garwood’s primary victims are those closest to him. The problem is not merely that he lacks a scintilla of empathy or guilt; it is that he has internalized the values of a society that believes self-interest rules and whose history proves that, beneath its noble-sounding principles, its real goals are to conquer and steal from others. In this regard the setting of the final scenes—a former Indian village converted into a mine and then a ghost town—is telling. Calico embodies the history of American exploitation, of stealing land and killing those who once held it, of plundering the earth of its riches, and then abandoning it once it is used up. Garwood is merely another American who pretends the past is irrelevant, that no costs are incurred in such pillage.6

  Garwood epitomizes the uglier side of this early American Dream, which was, for the native peoples, a nightmare. He also represents its more contemporary vanities: hollowed out by the pursuit of “happiness” at any cost, he embodies the worst aspects of radical individualism. The cash nexus has reduced him to a set of appetites. Money, which has no smell, no feelings, and, as Body and Soul’s Charlie Davis reminds us, no memory, has become the measure of all. Unattached and unfeeling, it merely moves from one hand to another; the costs of living never cling to it. Like Garwood, it is void of humanity. Hence, The Prowler does not merely condemn a bad apple. Rather, Losey, Butler, and Trumbo declare that the American Dream has become a sham, that the remorseless pursuit of wealth and upward mobility has left in its wake wrecked lives and hollow citizens. The dream of domesticity and home ownership? Just a thin scrim covering a history of theft, violence, and exploitation. The film’s emblem of postwar America is not Gilvray’s house but the half-built shack where Garwood and Susan set up housekeeping or, better, Garwood’s motel—a symbol of the rootless, grasping persons who briefly occupy its rooms.

  For these filmmakers—understandably disillusioned by their recent experiences—and, indeed, for most of noir’s creators, America’s founding principles had been voided or defiled. Individualism, as dramatized in films such as Dark Passage and Hollow Triumph, had turned people into a set of interchangeable, depthless faces. Upward mobility, as the car films imply, had been blocked by those fiercely guarding their possessions and social standing. Self-reinvention may be possible but only after traumatic experiences obliterate what existed before; otherwise, one mistake dooms you to a life of constant insecurity. Free enterprise masks rapacity, and meaningful collective action is possible (and only briefly) in the underworld. The new technologies and consumer items that promised liberation, security, peace, and luxury instead made us paranoid, hypercompetitive, and insecure.

  Yet some vestiges of the Dream remain. A few noir veterans manage either to reintegrate their prewar and postwar identities or start anew, in so doing modeling a means of recovering from the war. These films propose that we must remember trauma, recollect the selves we once were and the values we once held, so that we can either reaffirm or discard them. The portraiture films also moderate The Prowler’s gloomy conclusion by implying that the malleability of identity may be liberating insofar as it enables us to evade exploitation. Female filmmakers challenged discrimination by working within and around the studio system to create complex portrayals of the woman’s condition and to offer intelligent, sophisticated analyses of marriage and gender roles. A few noir jazz musicians, albeit blackened by associations with antisocial behavior, employed improvisation to engender flexible, hybrid American identities. Leftist filmmakers trenchantly criticized the depredations of capitalism and the perversion of American values, despite being hounded and jailed by self-styled patriots. Perhaps most important, the very existence of the films proved that thoughtful and committed artists were still able to present intellectually, morally, and politically challenging works within a conservative corporate system and that their work was met by audiences willing to watch and listen to them. We should do the same.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. At that time (1947) the word geek bore none of its current associations with computer engineers, their allegedly poor social skills, or their highly developed analytical powers. Yet the word’s current connotations—describing a creature at once superhuman and disabled—may derive from this earlier incarnation.

  2. Gresham, like so many writers of the period, had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s; he later married poet Joy Davidman (to whom Nightmare Alley is dedicated). He underwent psychiatric treatment and later became a devout Christian. None of his other works achieved the success of this, his first novel. See Polito’s “Biographical Notes” in Crime Novels for further details (980–81). In an irony appropriate to his grim, determinist
ic tale, Gresham committed suicide in the same hotel where he wrote Nightmare Alley (Williams, “Naturalist” 137).

  3. Because the film’s Stan is an orphan, the movie omits most of the novel’s Oedipal conflict, in which young Stan, after witnessing his mother having sex with her lover, is bought off with a toy magic set (Gresham 618–22). His magic acts automatically invoke his filial betrayal, and his guilt over this betrayal and his confused feelings about his parents make him susceptible to Lilith’s machinations.

  4. In the novel she tells him he has imagined himself as his mother’s lover and deliberately takes the mother’s place (688). She is said to be “hooked” to him by “an invisible gold wire” (689); in the film her power is illustrated by the weblike barred shadows that surround her in her office.

  5. In the novel Grindle had impregnated Dorrie and persuaded her to have an abortion. The girl died of septicemia afterward, and Grindle has been tormented ever since. In 1947 Hollywood it was forbidden even to mention abortion, so the film cleans it up, thereby obviating Grindle’s most powerful motive.

  6. These scenes in the novel are much more gloomy and expansive, as Stan is driven crazy by violent, paranoid fantasies. Gresham implies that Stan is caught in a classic double bind: all along he has desired to be his nemesis—his mother’s lover, Mark Humphries—but once he has become him, he can do nothing but ruin him (771). While on the run, Stan also meets an African American Communist labor organizer, Frederick Douglass Scott, who is on his way to fight Grindle’s union-breaking efforts. Scott’s presence indicates Gresham’s political allegiances and, as Williams notes, signals a path that Stan “could have taken” (“Naturalist” 129; Gresham 767–76). Stan then kills a policeman whom he confuses with his father (Stan’s demons are all associated with gray stubble): this is his “own personal corpse” (781), the alter ego he both fears and inhabits. Finally, Stan shows up at a carnival, and on the novel’s last page, he is given the geek job (796).

  7. This influence has been analyzed in many critical books on noir. Among many others see Foster Hirsch (53–58), Andrew Spicer (11–16), and Brook, who (not always persuasively) finds in American noir a specific set of German Jewish cultural tropes and patterns. For an erudite reflection on this influence see Elsaesser (420–44), as well as studies of individual directors; among the best of these latter is Gunning’s magisterial book on Fritz Lang.

  8. Recent illuminating books examining noir’s debts to hard-boiled fiction include those of Abbott and Irwin.

  9. Critical studies have treated noir using methods ranging from psychoanalysis (Oliver and Trigo; Žižek), narratology (Telotte, Voices), gender and race theory (Kaplan; Flory; Krutnik; Wager, Dangerous), to philosophy (Conard) and urban planning (Christopher; Dimendberg). New scholarship has unveiled further contexts and concerns: “Un-American” Hollywood includes pathbreaking essays about the Hollywood Left; Biesen’s Blackout helpfully traces the war’s material effects on early noir; and Hanson and Grossman have challenged conventional wisdom about women’s roles in the films.

  10. Dennis Broe notes that the one-year interval following V-J Day was the “greatest strike period in US history” (32).

  11. Steve Neale likewise comments that Zeitgeist adherents “find themselves arguing that noir registered a dominant ideological mood that was at the same time subversive of dominant values. Such a position is hard either to sustain or to verify” (158).

  12. See Osteen, “Face Plates.”

  CHAPTER ONE: “Someone Else’s Nightmare”

  1. Negative footage was also used in the dream sequence in an earlier version of the story, the 1939 film Blind Alley, directed by Charles Vidor. Both films were adapted from a play by James Warwick.

  2. For versions of this statement see, among many others, Borde and Chaumeton (24), Christopher (206), and Oliver and Trigo, who describe noir as “a type of Freudian dream-work marked by condensations and displacements of unconscious desires and fears” (xv).

  3. Siegfried Kracauer wrote in 1927 that “the game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of dreams in which the fragments of daily life become jumbled” (qtd. in Dimendberg 143).

  4. Santos provides a useful survey of the roles of psychiatry and psychiatrists in noir.

  5. Ringel cites two midcentury psychoanalysts who explicitly compare psychiatrists to detectives “searching for clues to uncover the mystery” (173).

  6. Gabbard and Gabbard note that the work of the psychiatrist in cinema is often “indistinguishable from that of clergymen, caseworkers, school guidance counselors, or even newspaper advice columnists” (xxiii).

  7. Ernest Hartmann, for example, argues that dreams’ symbolic material is much less important than their dominant emotion, which can be expressed through a variety of scenarios (3–4, 117).

  8. Dream symbolism is, for Freud, the language of the unconscious. The dreamer’s conscious mind cannot gain access to the unconscious; if he or she could, the unconscious would wither away (Rieff 52).

  9. States, reinterpreting Freudian “condensation” in literary terms, argues that metonymy creates most dream imagery in this way (94–123).

  10. Comandini was an experienced screenwriter who had been working in Hollywood since the mid-1920s. Among her other credits is the 1934 adaptation of Jane Eyre and the 1945 Warner Bros. noir Danger Signal (“Adele Comandini”).

  11. Perhaps it is only an accident that the missing letters, rearranged, spell “act king.”

  12. If we consider director Ulmer’s biography (raised in Vienna, he arrived in the United States in the 1930s and directed a series of well-regarded Yiddish-language films before signing with the Poverty Row company PRC, where he made Strange Illusion), we may also find in the film the story of a man struggling to reconcile his Old World past (represented by Muhlbach, with his German name and continental accent) and his emergent American self. For further details about Ulmer’s life (as well as some dubious speculation about the “Jewish” characters in the film) see Brook 147–48, 158–59.

  13. The Big Night is adapted from Stanley Ellin’s novel Dreadful Summit, for which the passage from Hamlet serves as epigraph and in which the crude phallic symbols of gun and cane are even more blatant. Though credited to Ellin, the screenplay was actually written by blacklisted radicals Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner Jr.

  14. The film was originally told almost entirely in flashback, but producer Philip Waxman changed it during the editing: see Ciment 116–17.

  15. Young Barrymore’s relationship with his father was apparently not much different from that of George and his father. Losey spent a great deal of time on and off the set with Barrymore, in effect adopting him during the making of the film. In an irony worthy of noir, after Losey went to England in the wake of his blacklisting, the FBI employed Barrymore to trace and report on Losey (Ciment 116, 118).

  16. In this regard his words as he downs a Metaxa—“to the Greeks!”—acquire an additional, creepy significance.

  17. The novel’s singer, Terry Angelus, is obviously modeled on Billie Holiday, down to the flower in her hair, ubiquitous dog, and nickname, “Ladybird” (Ellin 111–14). In the novel her singing makes George yearn to pull out his, well, gun (112). In both versions, after the show he tries to compliment her but muffs it when he says, “I think you’re beautiful too, even if you are a ——” (in the novel he uses the word nigger: 114).

  18. The novel’s conclusion is somewhat different. Frances dies from complications of an abortion that Andy convinced her to undergo, and George’s mother is not married to another man but in prison. The novel also carries out Andy’s sacrificial role to completion: George shoots Judge after returning to Andy’s house, and Andy is killed by a policeman during a climactic struggle with Judge (Ellin 174–75). Flanagan tries to persuade George to let the police believe that Andy killed Judge, but ultimately George decides to emulate his father, who “took what was coming to him,” and clears Andy’s name by confessing (181).


  19. It is possible that Harry’s ending was influenced by that of Woman in the Window, which premiered a few months before Harry was completed.

  20. The question of whether Hitchcock is a noir director is a vexed one. Although some of his films display what are considered noir conventions, his work differs in tone and narrative style from most noirs. For thoughtful examinations of Hitchcock’s relation to noir see Naremore, “Hitchcock,” especially 267–71; and Orr, who adduces as evidence the director’s quite different attitudes toward gender (many Hitchcock protagonists are women) and murder, along with the famous Hitchcock transfer-of-guilt motif (156–64).

  21. Freedman notes that Spellbound marks the first time in American cinema that psychoanalysis is “the means of solving a crime, not a means of committing one” (83). Although Dr. May E. Romm (David O. Selznick’s own analyst) is listed as the film’s technical adviser, Hitchcock seemed to view the psychiatric elements mostly as a gimmick and once dismissed the picture as “just another man-hunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis” (qtd. in Truffaut 165). Hitchcock later distinguished between “psychological” films and “psychoanalytical” films like Spellbound, predicting that the latter were merely a “passing phase” (qtd. in Nugent 21). Spellbound’s simplistic depiction of psychoanalysis is but one of its many weaknesses (along with its overwrought score, implausible story, and stilted performance by Gregory Peck, as noted by Hyde 153). Yet it was also among the twenty highest-grossing Hollywood films released between 1945 and 1950 (Chopra-Gant 18). Hence, the film is a telling example of midcentury Americans’ fascination with psychiatry and dreams.