Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (23 page)

As both a forger and a forgery, Legrand shares this distinction with M. Godard, who suddenly reappears with a false name and no money. Through a farcical stratagem, Legrand reunites him with Adele, leaving himself free to marry Lulu. But when he goes to break the news to her, he catches her in bed with Dede. As Legrand opens the door, Renoir cuts to outside the bedroom window. The camera moves right, then holds Legrand within the window frame, and the next two shots frame him within the door. The meaning is evident: Legrand is trapped within the picture he helped to paint. Thus, when he confronts Lulu the next day as she lies in bed cutting the pages of a novel, she replies, “Take a look in the mirror.” He berates and beseeches her; she laughs at him. Then he takes up Lulu’s knife and … Renoir takes up his, cutting to a shot outside the apartment, where a crowd gathers around some musicians. We don’t need to see the murder to understand that Legrand has at last matched Godard: he has now become a lady killer.

Dede, who imagines himself as one, now drives up in his flashy convertible, goes upstairs and returns, all in full view of the crowd. He is quickly charged with the murder. Who is guilty? Like that of the paintings, the murder’s authorship is shared. Renoir even identifies Lulu’s two lovers through a brilliant camera movement in the police station. We see Dede, his back to the wall, lamenting his fate; then the camera pulls back and tracks right to reveal Legrand in the same position on the other side of the wall: they are two faces of the same portrait. But Legrand lets the police and jury view only one side and permits Dede to be framed for his murder. Ironically, he has at last come into his own as a painter—one capable of forging convincing representations of himself as a dupe and of another man as murderer.

In the epilogue Legrand meets Godard again, both of them now homeless derelicts. Though Legrand says he “wouldn’t mind” being dead, and admits to being a murderer, he doesn’t seem guilt-ridden: the two jocosely share a smoke and gaze at some paintings through a store window. Legrand briefly spots his self-portrait being loaded into a car but is more interested in twenty francs that have fallen to the sidewalk. He snatches the cash, and the two depart for a feast. As the opened-up mise-en-scène indicates, in losing his bourgeois identity Legrand has been liberated from his constricted life and lethal fantasies. It doesn’t matter that he no longer paints; he has found a soul mate. By yielding control, Legrand discovers a new self.

To remake this story, Fritz Lang teamed with Walter Wanger (who had produced
The Woman in the Window
) and Wanger’s wife, Joan Bennett, to form
Diana Productions. The notoriously autocratic Lang usually treated collaboration as interference and clashed by night and day with his American producers. On this film, however, he was afforded a great deal of freedom. Ironically, Lang used this freedom to direct an allegory about losing it. He told Peter Bogdanovich that Chris Cross’s fate is that of “an artist who cares much more for his paintings than for gaining money” (205). Thus we may read
Scarlet Street
—the story of an artist whose works are appropriated by a prostitute and her pimp—as the self-portrait of a director harnessed to mercenary producers and studio heads who “steal” his pictures and put their names on them.

Patrick McGilligan (
Fritz Lang
321) writes that Lang and screenwriter Dudley Nichols failed to find a print of
La chienne
, and Lang recalled that they tried to be “absolutely uninfluenced by it” (Bogdanovich 205). But close scrutiny reveals that he imitated or carefully revised
La chienne
in pivotal scenes. Indeed, with its borrowed plot about lost identity and forged paintings,
Scarlet Street
is itself a kind of forgery or plagiarism, a painted-over Renoir to which Lang signs his own name. Yet despite his debts to the French master, Lang displays a quite different attitude about authorship and forgery.

Protagonist Chris Cross’s unlikely name introduces an important set of motifs. First, it presages a series of double crosses: Kitty March betrays him by stealing his words, name, and money; Chris double-crosses Adele and her first husband, Homer Higgins, by forcing them to reunite; he crosses up Johnny by framing him for the murder of Kitty. These crossings constitute a series of exchanges: Chris for Kitty, Chris for Johnny, Homer for Chris. Perhaps more significant, the name signifies Chris’s erasure. Kitty rubs out Chris’s identity as a cashier and a painter and replaces it with hers; in complying with the forgery scheme, Chris commits self-erasure. In the end he even exes out his dream by testifying that he’s not a painter at all.

In a sense, however, Chris’s erasure scarcely matters, for he is a nonentity from the start. In the opening scene, for example, his reward for twenty-five years of service to the firm of J. J. Hogarth is a watch—an appropriate present for a “fourteen-carat, seventeen-jewel cashier.” The metaphor—a trope for authentic representation and value—captures Cross’s mechanical existence. In this he resembles Professor Wanley: both are bored with their humdrum lives but too timid to escape.
¹⁸
When Chris tells his friend that he once dreamed of being a painter, the friend replies, “When we’re young we have dreams that never pan out. But we go on dreaming.” Unlike Legrand, he doesn’t mention waking up. Though the lines are not delivered by Chris, they nonetheless pinpoint a primary
difference between him and Legrand: whereas Legrand is fettered by his sense of superiority and finds release in being humbled, Cross seeks restoration in fantasy. After all, he is, like the immigrant Fritz Lang, an American, and he believes in self-remaking. Thus, when his paintings are later sold for a tidy sum, he enthuses, “It’s just like a dream!” No, it’s a nightmare, one that begins, as in so many noirs, with a single act—his “rescue” of “actress” Kitty March from a beating by her boyfriend, Johnny Prince.

That night Chris explains to Kitty his aesthetic principles. He doesn’t paint what he sees, but merely puts “a line around what I feel.” And what he feels is love: “every painting is a love affair.” Gunning describes Chris’s aesthetic as “semi-Expressionist” (327)—one similar to that of the American version of Fritz Lang. Indeed, Chris’s quasi-primitivist paintings are visual allegories that resemble Lang’s heavily symbolic films, a symbolism exemplified when Chris’s body is dissolved over an image of the wilting flower he brings home from the meeting with Kitty.
¹⁹
In his painting, however, the wan bloom is large and erect. His imaginary love affair has already begun to restore his potency—at least in his imagination.

In the real world of home, however, he remains emasculated; in one scene he even wears a frilly apron while doing the dishes—an abject image of the castrated male. But if Chris is a fake wife, so is Adele, despite being addicted to a radio show called
The Happy Household Hour
. The scene in which Adele castigates Chris about his paintings also proves that Lang viewed
La chienne
closely, for the composition and framing of the two versions are nearly identical. Like Renoir, Lang places Adele and her current husband on opposite sides of the frame (he left, she right); between and over them hangs a large oval portrait of the proudly smiling first husband (this time a cop who allegedly died while saving a woman’s life), his chest out, his arms akimbo. Homer is to Adele as Kitty is to Chris—an image of the ideal mate. But this portrait is as enhanced as Chris’s flower: as we learn later, Homer faked his death and stole money from the drowning woman. In copying this scene, Lang thus casts himself as Cross, with Renoir the heroic forerunner to be overcome.

Kitty’s lover wields his own phallic power by wangling money from her and romancing her—whenever he’s not roughing her up. It’s Johnny’s idea to sell Chris’s paintings, and his idea—after they attract the attention of an art dealer named Janeway—to attribute them to Kitty. For these two as for Lulu and Dede, paintings are merely commodities, and an artist is just a prostitute. Lang none-too-subtly depicts Johnny’s values in a characteristic lap dissolve: skulking outside
Kitty’s apartment, he is superimposed over Chris’s painting of a snake. But if the dissolve conveys Johnny’s potency and sliminess, it also implies that he is a product of Chris’s imagination. That is, by endorsing the painting scheme, Chris
creates
Johnny, just as he later frames him for the murder of Kitty. The snake, like the flower, is Chris’s imaginary self-portrait.

Still, if Chris’s paintings are forgeries, it’s not because they are copies of another painter’s work but because they are signed “Katherine March.” Hence, whereas Renoir implies that Lulu—the signer—is the forger, Lang assigns the role to Chris: he’s the one, after all, who makes a career, in Hillel Schwartz’s formulation, by “standing invisible behind names or styles in demand” (315). Indeed, his imaginary love affair embodies art critic Francis Sparshott’s explanation that “the primary erotic analogue of artistic forgery is the substitution, in conditions of desperation or poor visibility, of an alternative sex object for the loved one” (254). Chris tries to stand in for Johnny and Homer; like Cornell, Lydecker, Cathcart, and Wanley he loves not a woman but a portrait of one. Sparshott also contends that original art shows us something about the person who created it; forgery, by contrast, is a lie about the self (252–53). In that regard Chris, who pretends to be an unmarried, successful painter, is a forger from the moment he meets Kitty. And Kitty—more plagiarist than forger—perpetuates the fraud by parroting Chris’s aesthetic principles to Janeway; ironically, this lie ratifies her earlier lie to Chris that she is an actress (Janeway gushes that talking to her is “like talking to two people”). Likewise, Johnny pretends to be the boyfriend of Kitty’s roommate, Millie, and Homer pretends to be dead. All of them are self-forgers, their Franklinesque remodeling achieved for dishonest ends.

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.