Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (17 page)

Gerard has little use for facts; he’s a creature of emotion, an angry man who has gone “kill crazy.” He fits Nadelson’s description of a person “disabled in peace partly because he is not able to give up memories of war’s wonder and of a contest survived,” and whose repeated exercise of “control and dominance over terror becomes addictive” (78, 46). Gerard’s insensitivity to others is displayed in a scene with Mme. Jarnac (Micheline Cheirel as a young French woman coerced into marrying the fascist). She speaks, but her words are drowned out by the noise of departing buses, and when the din induces another posttraumatic headache for Gerard, she comments, “You are sick with fear. You’ve been hurt so deeply you cannot trust anyone. … You’re even more alone than I am.” Jarnac himself taunts Gerard similarly near the end of the film, accusing him of being a “fanatic without real purpose”—with personal, rather than political, motives. Despite Gerard’s nominal Canadian nationality, we may detect in him an implied criticism of American exceptionalism, that notorious unwillingness to negotiate or include others in our plans. Yet Gerard also enacts a more positive North American historical stereotype. Europeans dithered and appeased until North Americans took charge and triumphed over fascism, which the film depicts as a brand of hedonist decadence perpetuated by rich capitalists—in keeping with the filmmakers’ Popular Front agenda (see Langdon-Teclaw 160).
¹⁷
At the end of the film Gerard’s maverick methods are vindicated. And though his injury may have disabled him, those haunting memories have impelled him to reenact his wartime trauma and, perhaps, to prevent another war. The film’s politics, then, are conflicted, at once criticizing Gerard’s bullheadedness and celebrating his power. Like its protagonist, the film is suspended between past and future, both replaying the war and questioning the value of such reenactments.

Two later vet noirs present similar quests by ex-soldiers: each veteran seeks to repay or vindicate a friend’s death and thereby release his own feelings of loss and betrayal. In
Dead Reckoning
Captain Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart), learning that his missing war buddy was an indicted murderer, tries to clear his name. Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery), in
Ride the Pink Horse
, seeks restitution from the mobster who killed his wartime friend, Shorty Thompson. Both vets struggle with PTSD, and both encounter women who serve as catalysts—in opposite ways—for their recovery. Like
Cornered
, these films dramatize how, as Nadelson writes, trauma victims “often desperately try to regain control by repeating and revisiting the event in dreams, fantasies, or re-enactments. … They repeat the experience to achieve mastery,
this time
” (88).

Dead Reckoning
begins with ex-paratrooper Murdock recalling to a (uniformed) priest the last time he saw his friend, Sgt. Johnny Drake, just before he vanished during a train trip to Washington, where he was to receive the Medal of Honor. Rip had urged his friend to forget “that blonde” he couldn’t stop thinking about. After Johnny disappears, Rip follows him to Gulf City, Florida, and there finds a message from “Mr. Geronimo” (named for the paratroopers’ battle cry). Rip tells his confessor that “after what we’d been through, we could read each other’s minds. He knew I’d want to help and trail him.” The key clue is a Yale fraternity pin belonging to a Johnny Preston, the real name of Drake, who had joined the military to avoid imprisonment for killing a wealthy businessman. In other words Johnny gave himself “amnesia” to erase his prewar identity, then redeemed himself through combat heroism. In contrast, Rip can’t forget either his friend or the wartime values of male friendship (and homosexual attraction), loyalty, and single-minded combat.

Before Rip can locate him, however, Johnny dies, burned beyond recognition in a car crash. Seeking a letter that Johnny had written to him, Murdock breaks into the office of the gangster Martinelli (future blacklistee Morris Carnovsky), who has tried to frame Rip for another murder in Gulf City.
¹⁸
Discovered in Martinelli’s office, Murdock is blackjacked, after which he experiences a war flashback, replayed through those now-familiar expressionist techniques. “Just like going out the jump door, I was falling through space,” he says in voice-over. A shot of a man jumping from a plane is followed by one of an opening parachute. Coming to, Rip sees Martinelli and his minion, Krause (Marvin Miller), who, Martinelli tells him, “suffered an injury to his brain once” and has been a psychopath ever since. The two criminals are Rip’s and Johnny’s dark doubles, figures of “sinister homosocial bonding” (Krutnik,
Lonely
174) who also represent the fascist
nations (Italy and Germany) against which Rip and Johnny fought. This posttraumatic episode unveils Rip’s motives: he needs to relive the war not so much to redeem his lost buddy as to recreate the war’s division of the world into obvious enemies and friends. And just as he wishes both to restore his former self and to create a new one, he also desires to remember
and
to forget.

His investigation becomes more complex after he meets and falls for the “Cinderella with a husky voice” whom Johnny loved—“that blonde,” Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott), also the murdered man’s widow. Just after they meet, she sings a tune that offers a stark choice: “Either it’s love or it isn’t. / You can’t compromise.” But loving Johnny’s woman
would
compromise Rip’s friendship with his buddy, and Rip’s fear of women renders him incapable of intimacy. He tells Coral that “women ought to come capsule-sized, about four inches high. When a man goes out of an evening he just puts her in his pocket, … and that way he knows exactly where she is.” And “when he wants her full-sized and beautiful, he just waves his hand and there she is, full-size.” Understandably offended, Coral surprises Murdock by discerning the anxiety behind his words: “What you’re saying is … a woman may drive you out of your mind, but you wouldn’t trust her. And because you couldn’t put her in your pocket, you get all mixed up.” Rip’s confusion about Coral is displayed in the names he gives her. First calling her “Dusty” (Johnny’s nickname for her), he later dubs her “Mike”: since only men are trustworthy, he must transform her into a male. Krutnik’s analysis here is illuminating: her various names reveal a “chaotic circuit of conflicting allegiances, with Coral as: (i) Johnny’s girl; (ii) Rip’s rival in love for Johnny, and (iii) Rip’s replacement for Johnny” (
Lonely
176). Rip can love Johnny
through
her, love her instead of him, or hate her as a competitor. What he can’t do is love her—or even see her—as herself. He needs her to be a fetish, a pinup or token that a soldier might carry for comfort during combat, not a woman.

It doesn’t help that Coral gives mixed signals about her identity. After Rip accuses her of conspiring with Martinelli, she admits that she killed her husband and let Johnny take the rap, recalls her impoverished childhood in Texas, then picks up the phone to call the police so Rip can turn her in. Convinced by her story, Rip heartily kisses “Mike.” This quasi-heteronormative relationship appears to have supplanted Rip’s homosocial wartime love. But the film doesn’t end there. During a climactic confrontation Martinelli informs Rip that Coral is actually
his
wife, her Texas childhood a fabrication, and that he himself shot Chandler. Unsure whom to believe, Murdock reverts to what he knows—war. He tosses two incendiary grenades (“How would you like yourself? Medium rare?”)
and forces Martinelli to hand over Johnny’s letter. As they flee the burning building, Coral guns down Martinelli, and Rip realizes that she has set him up: he was supposed to be the first one out the door. After telling “Mike” that he’s on to her game, he concludes, “You’re going to fry, Dusty.” The rest of the scene recalls the end of
The Maltese Falcon
. “When a guy’s pal’s killed,” says Bogie’s Rip, “he ought to do something about it.” Coral: “Don’t you love me?” Rip: “That’s the tough part of it. But it’ll pass. … Then there’s one other thing: I loved him more.” Instead of meekly returning to his pocket, however, she shoots him, and their car slams into a tree. The entire sequence thus replays the circumstances of Johnny’s death—car, burned body, confused identities. But why does Rip call her “Mike” and then “Dusty”? Because Rip must now
become
Johnny, and to do so, he must turn Coral back into Dusty—Johnny’s girl, the one who earlier betrayed him—both to justify his need to punish her and to punish himself for trusting her. In sacrificing Mike
and
Dusty, he also eliminates a rival for Johnny’s affection—a full-sized woman he couldn’t control.

After the crash, the shots from Rip’s earlier PTSD awakening are repeated—except that this time it’s Coral who sees the looming faces. Formerly Johnny’s surrogate, she now becomes Rip’s, taking his place as the sacrificial victim who reenacts and pays for Johnny’s death. Rip comforts her: “It’s like going out the jump door. … Don’t fight it. Remember all the guys who’ve done it before you. … Geronimo, Mike.” In dying for Johnny and Rip, Coral has reverted to Mike, a soldier who perishes so that others may live, just like Medal of Honor–winner Johnny. And though Rip first loved her
because
she was Johnny’s girl, he can now bid her a safe, loving good-bye by placing her back within the framework of his wartime buddy relationship. Yet if her death clears Johnny’s name, it hardly purges Rip’s fear. Even with his lover(s) gone, Rip can’t accept that the war is over (Krutnik,
Lonely
181); like Gerard’s, his purpose for living has vanished. “Mike’s” death, then, fails to be truly sacrificial, because it doesn’t give Rip a new life or new identity. He has recreated the war but not won it; lacking friend and lover, he remains an emotional amputee.

A similar sacrificial motif appears in
Ride the Pink Horse
, a noir set in the border town of San Pablo during La Fiesta (The Day of the Dead), which commences with the symbolic killing of a large effigy of Zozobra, the God of Gloom. Lucky Gagin, a “disillusioned patriot” and “haywire veteran,” arrives in town armed with plans to kill his personal God of Gloom by extorting $30,000 from Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), a hearing-impaired gangster who murdered Gagin’s friend Shorty Thompson.
¹⁹
Though lacking an obvious disability, Gagin is nonetheless
a casualty of the war: unwilling to feel anything for anyone, he, like Gerard, can think only of revenge. Bill Retz (future blacklistee Art Smith), a federal agent also pursuing Hugo, diagnoses Gagin’s disorder: “You’re like the rest of the boys. All cussed up because you fought a war for three years and got nothing out of it but a dangle of ribbons. Why don’t you let your Uncle Samuel take care of [Hugo]?” Gagin sneers, “Doesn’t the government work for Hugo? It did all during the war.” Gagin possesses a canceled check written by Hugo to a politician who was “making patriotic speeches” while Gagin was “getting a tan” in a “place called New Guinea.” Hoping to blackmail Hugo with it, Gagin refuses Retz’s demand to turn the check over to him: “Don’t wave any flags at me. I’ve seen enough flags.” Hugo’s hearing impairment thus represents not only the evil of governmental collaboration with organized crime but, as I noted above, Gagin’s moral deafness. Indeed, though repulsed by Hugo (whose identification with Zozobra is shown by lap dissolves from the figure to his face), Gagin is Hugo’s effigy—a replica of his own bête noire. Poised on the border between humanity and inhumanity, Gagin can either become a miniature Zozobra or a force for good: he can die or be reborn.

Throughout the film Gagin is depicted as out of place: he orders whiskey in an all-Mexican bar that serves only tequila and is frequently shown in overhead shots walking against the grain of the festive crowd, the only person not smiling. Pancho (Thomas Gomez), an affable carousel operator, tells Gagin he’s the “kind of man I like, the man with no place.” Gagin’s surly reply: “I’m nobody’s friend.” Over the course of the film he is humanized by Pancho and Pila (Wanda Hendrix), a young girl from a neighboring town who gives Gagin a good luck figurine to dispel his internal Zozobra. Indeed, the occasion of the festival is appropriate, according to Pila: “I saw his [Gagin’s] face. Dead. His eyes were closed, the skin was white. He was dead.” Like Montgomery, Johnny Preston, and other noir veterans, Gagin is a ghost in search of a new body. His desire for restitution thus involves conflicting urges: the need to kill his old self, purge his wartime trauma and become human vies with his wish to be inhumanly invulnerable.

Pila resurrects the good Gagin by eliciting his sympathy and showing him that he can’t remain isolated. Thus, after Gagin is stabbed by Hugo’s thugs, she reasons that they did it “because they are bad.” “And I’m good, huh?” “Yes,” she says, “I will take care of you.” Gagin mumbles, “You’re just … like Shorty. No brains. … It’s hot in here, hot in the jungle.” This brief flashback to the war helps Gagin slough off his rage and resentment: in “becoming” Shorty, Pila both revives Gagin’s friend and midwifes his own rebirth.
²⁰
Pancho, too, revivifies Gagin’s
trust by taking a beating from Hugo’s hoodlums rather than betraying his friend. These somewhat stereotyped characters help Gagin rediscover his lost innocence, controverting the mercenary values embraced by Hugo and his girlfriend Marjorie (Andrea King).

In the end Gagin yields to Retz, despite Hugo’s taunting that Retz will “give you a lot of gas about duty and honor. Fill you with fancy words like
responsibility, patriotism
. … And what’re you gonna have? Nothin’.” Words that Gagin could have spoken earlier in the film now bounce off him. He returns the good luck figurine to Pila, having incorporated it within himself. Gagin achieves restitution. Like the men in
Best Years
and Morrison in
The Blue Dahlia
, he is able to forget the war, remodel himself, and start anew with the support of a woman and a friend.
²¹
By forgetting, Gagin re-members himself: he recalls his past, restores his missing heart, and rejoins the human race. His restoration is thus more complete than that of most soldiers in the squad of noir vets, who are tortured by memories they can retrieve only in moments of extreme stress. Although these characters don’t use prostheses like Homer Parrish, some are able to emulate him by learning to work with others, adapt to new conditions, and integrate their old and new selves—or even produce a third identity, a phoenix figure who combines the best of both. Gagin thus embodies a Franklinesque faith in Americans’ powers of self-making, albeit tempered by a recognition of trauma’s hardening effects.