Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (15 page)

Certain autobiographical elements resonate here as well. Muller/Bartok is played by émigré Paul Henreid, and the picture was directed by Steve Sekely, born István Székely, in Budapest. Both artists changed their names, abandoned their original tongues, and remade themselves as Americans. Henreid, who also produced
Hollow Triumph
, tailored the role for himself. Their biographies not only lend the film an additional poignancy (how could they not have realized that the tale mirrors their own life stories?) but add veracity: who is better equipped
to comment on Americans’ individualism and self-obsession, our blind pursuit of happiness and liberty at all costs, than immigrants? Of course, viewers know that Muller is fictional, being enacted by a person named (or rather, renamed) Paul Henreid. The film thus projects mirrors within mirrors, as we watch a European man pretend to be an American man impersonating a European man.

Hollow Triumph
also asks us to trust our eyes, while reminding us that we can’t trust our eyes—or rather, that we err when we don’t look closely enough. By questioning the veracity of photography and cinema, the film challenges our reliance on surface truths, our intuitive faith that what we see is what is really there. Like all of the missing person films, it also suggests that America has become a nation of guilty bystanders, a people so alienated from each other that we cannot even recognize that others
are
ourselves. All these stories of mistaken identity and botched vision ask us to look more closely—or, indeed,
not
merely to look but to listen and to feel. They also gesture toward what is not there: active empathy, an antidote to the hyperbolic self-interest and pursuit of happiness that,
Hollow Triumph
and
Dark Passage
demonstrate particularly well, cannot occur without social connection. As Fuchs’s notes state, his film presents a “charge to the audience,” an “appeal … not to be brutish” (1–2). Likewise, the missing-person noirs reveal that Franklinesque self-reinvention is possible only insofar as the self is a product of others. You cannot truly change your nature because it is not really yours; rather, it is constantly molded by the other people who perpetually make and remake you.

“You oughta see me open a bottle of beer”: ex-sailor Homer Parrish, who has lost both hands in World War II, boasts of his hook dexterity to two other veterans in William Wyler’s
The Best Years of Our Lives
.
¹
War vets in films noir usually possess less obvious physical disabilities; more obvious ones are generally given to peripheral characters who function as counterparts to, or extensions of, nondisabled protagonists. Thus the deaf youth in
Out of the Past
serves as what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call a “narrative prosthesis”: a crutch on which authors lean for “representational power, disruptive potentiality and social critique” (17). Such characters enact a protagonist’s needs or other characters’ traits. Thus, according to Michael Davidson, the deaf boy mirrors Jeff Bailey’s “flawed yet stoical integrity, providing a silent riposte to the glamour of and tough-guy patter between the other males in the film” (57): he is a trustworthy alternative to the liars Whit and Kathie.

Elsewhere in film noir disabilities represent nondisabled protagonists’ moral flaws (Davidson 73). For instance, in
Murder, My Sweet
Philip Marlowe’s temporary blindness indicates his inability to recognize that B-girl Velma Valento has remade herself into wealthy matron Helen Grayle; the hearing impairments of gangsters Frank Hugo in
Ride the Pink Horse
and Joe McClure in
The Big Combo
symbolize the moral “deafness” of their films’ protagonists, Lucky Gagin and Lt. Leonard Diamond, respectively, each of whom is obsessed with revenge on his darker counterpart.
²

Cognitively disabled veterans in film noir, however, play more significant roles. First, they fit the typical noir narrative of an investigator’s quest for truth and identity. Marlowe’s pursuit of Velma, for example, is a pretext for his own search for selfhood through repeated encounters with alter egos such as Moose Malloy and Lindsay Marriott. In the amnesiac vet noirs, however, this quest for selfhood becomes literal, for these returning soldiers truly don’t remember who they are. These characters lend sociopolitical weight to the noir theme of alienation and
isolation by acting as synecdoches for a whole generation of displaced men and for American society in its postwar transitional phase.

The frequent presence of disabled returning veterans in film noir reveals broad cultural tensions and traumas. One such tension involved shifting definitions of masculinity, as veterans were forced to discard wartime rituals and roles. Thus noir’s traumatized veterans are often hypermasculine, aggressive, impatient with women, and incapable or unwilling to alter their warrior mentality for the humdrum realities of civilian life (see Polan 248). Such veterans—in
The Blue Dahlia
, for example—define masculinity
against
disability: if masculinity equals strength and achievement, disability must signify weakness and inadequacy. Hence, the vets hide their cognitive or emotional dysfunctions, if they recognize them at all. Noir veterans also struggle to transfer their emotional bonds from all-male soldier “families” to heteronormative relationships and conventional domesticity, a pattern apparent not only in
The Blue Dahlia
but also in
Crossfire
and
Dead Reckoning
. As Frank Krutnik has observed, these films “offer a range of alternative or ‘transgressive’ representations of male desire and identity, together with a … skeptical framing of the network of male cultural authority” found in the military, law enforcement, and psychiatry. In so doing, they expose a “crisis of confidence” about male-dominated culture (
Lonely
88, 91).

As Mike Chopra-Gant notes, these characters also embody anxieties about America’s inability to “settle veterans into productive postwar roles” (151). Thus
Cornered
’s Lt. Gerard suffers from fugue-like attacks and pursues a vendetta against the Nazis who killed his wife;
The Blue Dahlia
’s Buzz has a brain injury that induces debilitating headaches and murderous rages; Lucky Gagin’s war experiences have left him a cynical cipher. Unable to forget the war, these veterans try to relive it, both to rectify wrongful deaths and to regain the moral clarity they felt in combat. Their cognitive disabilities thus function as what Mitchell and Snyder call a “master metaphor for social ills” (24)—not just for gender role adjustments but also for shifting ideas about labor and productivity, and for emerging Cold War fears of invasion.

But perhaps most telling are those ex-GIs suffering from amnesia. Steven Kenet in
High Wall
, Eddie Ricks in
The Crooked Way
, and George Taylor in
Somewhere in the Night
have lost their memories because of war injuries, and their inability to retrieve their prewar identities dramatizes real-life veterans’ adjustment difficulties. More metaphorically, former POW Frank Enley, in
Act of Violence
, has purchased bourgeois stability at the cost of “forgetting” his questionable acts during the war, only to be reminded of them by a revenge-seeking fellow
prisoner. This pair encompasses both extremes: if Enley has willed amnesia, pursuer Joe Parkson cannot forget. Both still dwell in a mental and moral prison. All these characters, indeed, dramatize postwar America’s dialectic of memory and forgetting, a dance or duel between the conflicting desires to forget and to remember the war: though citizens wished to honor their heroes, they realized that war memories might interfere with the construction of a postwar society.

These disabled veterans thus reflect a larger existential crisis in American society as it moved from postwar to Cold War moods and discourses. The vets’ struggles to redefine masculinity and to recover or remodel their selves testify to America’s own identity crisis, presenting a powerful challenge to the national ideology of self-reinvention, that essential component of the American Dream. The vet noirs’ key question, posed directly in
Somewhere in the Night
, is this: does war change one’s nature, or does it merely expose hidden aspects already present? More broadly, these films ask again the question underwriting the dream and missing-person pictures: is a guy born that way? Vet noir dramatized options for American society—a society of immigrants and hence one forged from willed amnesia—to redefine or remember itself.

Some veterans don’t lose their memories but have been stripped of their emotional resilience and their humanity. Yet they wish to reenact or recapture their warrior life—its camaraderie, its intensity, its clear sense of purpose—and return to the very incidents that traumatized them. In these reenactment scenes, which appear in almost all of the films discussed below, noir vets display the clinical symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, characterized by “persistent, intrusive reexperiencing of the traumatic event through flashbacks and recurrent dreams with persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal” (Nadelson 90).
³
Despite their constant intrusions into the vets’ minds, these experiences and their associated feelings remain largely “indigestible” (Nadelson 95): they can neither be forgotten nor integrated. Such traumatic episodes exemplify what Roger Luckhurst, paraphrasing Cathy Caruth, calls a “crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time” (Luckhurst 5; Caruth 7): that is, because the events are generally not consciously incorporated into the characters’ experiences or psyches, they are not spoken or written about. In this regard that prototypical noir narrative device, the flashback, serves an essential
function.
⁴
As Luckhurst points out, trauma “issues a challenge” to narrative. “In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explain the trauma” (79). Veterans’ combat flashbacks invariably interrupt and arrest the films’ narratives yet also contain crucial plot elements or unveil key motives. These reenactments disrupt the realistic surface of the films; even in films with conventional mise-en-scènes, filmmakers employ antirealist, expressionist techniques to depict them. Such scenes epitomize Michael Rothberg’s definition of “traumatic realism,” whereby “the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic extremity that disables Realist representation” (106): they remain unintegrated into the films’ style, as if to reflect the vets’ psychic disintegration.

Noir veterans undergo purgative rituals in which their old selves die and new ones are born. Some also play out the conventions of what Arthur Frank calls the “restitution narrative”—the “culturally preferred narrative” of institutional medicine—in which the agent is not the patient but a drug, a doctor, or, as in many vet noirs, a woman. This process requires that the disabled or diseased body (which includes the brain) be displayed, divided into parts, commodified, and/or disciplined before being fixed (Frank 83, 86, 88). These characters submit their identities to institutional remodeling: in short, most vet noirs are stories of “social control” (Frank 82).
⁵
These veterans’ struggles expose a cultural yearning to punish and then redeem, in which hope for restitution collides with profound anxieties about disability and memory as threats to the stability of the society and the psyche. The films thus suggest that self-reinvention may be possible, but only after extreme trauma and a kind of self-amputation.

Cognitively disabled veterans weren’t, of course, merely fictional. In 1943 the armed services began discharging so-called psychoneurotic veterans at the rate of ten thousand cases per month. The army alone had discharged 216,000 soldiers for psychiatric problems by 1944, and overall an estimated 30 percent of American war casualties were of this type (Waller 166). Physically disabled soldiers such as Homer Parrish were even more common, as the United States tallied more than 670,000 wounded during the war.
⁶
But even able-bodied vets had to cope with a variety of readjustment problems. In his 1944 book
The Veteran Comes Back
sociologist Willard Waller predicted that the returning veteran would soon be “America’s gravest social problem” (13). His book provides a blueprint that the returning-veteran noirs follow point by point. He writes that
veterans would return to families they scarcely knew and who had found other interests in their absence (83); that vets would need to adapt to a postwar world where combat values didn’t fit (113); and that their lost years of employment would make it difficult to find work (92). Many veterans, he writes, feel like “
Immigrants in Their Native Land
” (180; Waller’s italics). Waller even declares that “Every Veteran Is at least Mildly Shell-Shocked” (115)—each one forever changed by his or her experiences and troubled by the transition to peacetime. For these “Cinderellas” of the services, as another contemporary pundit named them, “the return to civilian life [was] the clang of midnight” (qtd. in Chopra-Gant 30).

The difficulties of three such Cinderellas are movingly dramatized in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, a hugely popular and critically acclaimed movie that provides a nonnoir touchstone for my discussion. Homer Parrish, trained to use his hooks, is proudly dexterous when showing off to his male friends but becomes clumsy when near his pitying family (Chopra-Gant 125). They “got me nervous,” he tells his Uncle Butch (Hoagy Carmichael), by either staring at his hooks or “staring away from ’em.” Fearing he’ll be a burden, Homer resists proposing to his prewar sweetheart, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell). His pivotal moment occurs when he asks her to watch him remove the harness holding the hooks; without his prostheses he can put on his pajamas but can’t button them, nor can he open a door, read a book, or drink a glass of milk. “Dependent as a baby” without them, he confesses, he’ll always need her help. She assures him that she’ll never leave him, then maternally tucks him in.