Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (22 page)

The portrait noirs suggest that identities are
always
in flux, always a matter of performance. In so doing, they invoke the conditions of their own making, not only reminding viewers that their characters are actors staging their own fabrication but even referring to and remaking earlier versions of the same story. Thus,
I Wake Up Screaming
, itself an adaptation of Steve Fisher’s hard-boiled Hollywood-insider novel, is transformed (by the same producer) into
Laura
, one character of which is then revived (with alterations) for the same studio’s
The Dark Corner
. But that’s not the end: in 1953
I Wake Up Screaming
was remade by Fox as
Vicki
, with Jean Peters in the title role, Jeanne Crain as Jill, Elliott Reid as Christopher (his first name changed to Steve), and Richard Boone as Cornell. The story is a near-copy of the first adaptation, but the dialogue lacks its snap, and the film is missing most of the 1941 version’s witty edges. Cornell (who doesn’t kill himself in this version) is portrayed as pathetic rather than creepy.
Vicki
also acknowledges the first adaptation: at times Boone seems to be channeling (the by-then deceased) Laird Cregar, and several shots replicate those in the earlier version.
¹³
Because by 1953 the theme of celebrity fabrication was less novel,
Vicki
is more explicit about the title character’s artificiality and more unforgiving in its ironies. For example, Christopher boasts that he can sell Vicki “like a brand of coffee,” and as Christopher and Jill enter his car on their first
date, a billboard featuring Vicki’s face promoting Caress beauty products is visible behind them, at once slyly acknowledging Christopher’s creed and indicating the deceased sister’s contribution to their romance. Given the story’s self-reflexive elements—exposing how promoters and audiences create portraits of women as fantasy figures and thereby kill them—
Vicki
seems to undermine itself even as it unwinds, simultaneously eliciting viewers’ fascination with these processes and criticizing them. Less a forgery than a cover version of
I Wake Up Screaming, Vicki
adds another layer to what seems not merely a set of movies but an infinite regress of mirrors within mirrors. The next group of films brings us even closer to that condition.

“Some dreams require solitude. … At times the illusion of love may outlast the image of a dingy room, but awaken we must.” These are the words of Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), the protagonist of Renoir’s
La chienne
, but they also describe Professor Wanley of
The Woman in the Window
, and Chris Cross of
Scarlet Street
. These three films reflect one another in multiple ways. As Oliver Harris observes, because Fritz Lang’s two films employ the same lead actors (Robinson, Bennett, Duryea) performing in similar stories, they induce “a kind of vertigo of déjà vu, cross-reference and pure confusion” (7). The effect is heightened by Lang’s tendency to create a “sealed-off environment,” where, in Foster Hirsch’s description, there seems to be “no world outside the frame” (6). When we add to the mix
La chienne
, not a film noir, of course, but an earlier adaptation of
Scarlet Street
’s source material (both were based on a novel by Georges de la Fouchardière), the trio becomes a hall of mirrors filled with reverberating themes and visual echoes, all illustrating plots that also involve frames, doubles, mirrors, and portraits. In all three “the project of desire discovers itself to be within a frame, in a potentially infinite
mise-en-abîme
”—one that even swallows the viewer (Gunning 287). Together they constitute a triangular dream text revealing their directors’ reflections on the art of filmmaking and the nature of authorship.

Early in
The Woman in the Window
, psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) laments the “stodginess” that has engulfed him and his friends. With his wife and children out of town, he has a chance to break out but instead spends the evening reading the Song of Solomon. When, a bit later, he gazes through a shop window at a woman’s portrait (his friends had earlier called her their “dream girl”), his cage begins to crack. We regard the portrait from
Wanley’s point of view; in the reverse shot a faint reflection of the portrait appears to emerge from his shoulder. Lang cuts back to the painting, now juxtaposed with an actual woman’s face, before returning to Wanley and the reflection. Another shot of the painting follows, and then the camera pans left to rest on a smiling Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), the portrait’s model. As the scene continues, the portrait is placed between Wanley and Alice in every two-shot: he can’t see around the portrait to the actual woman. Wanley’s painting is not a love affair; his love affair is a painting.

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.

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 commodities. 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.