Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (3 page)

Through Lilith and a wealthy client, Mrs. Peabody, Stan meets Ezra Grindle, a rich industrialist who carries a burden of regret over the death of Dorrie, a girl he
loved and lost. Lilith and Stan engineer a swindle whereby Stan will receive $150,000 to “recall” Dorrie and permit Grindle to speak to her again. To do so, however, Stan must persuade the reluctant Molly to perform as the dead girl.
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Although Stan exhorts her to help him save Grindle’s soul, Molly demurs: mentalist acts are one thing, but this is “goin’ against God.” They might be struck dead for blasphemy! Stan assures her that his séances are “just another angle of show business.” When Molly threatens to walk out, he resorts to his final ploy: phony sincerity. Admitting that he’s a hustler but professing undying love for her, he persuades her to play Dorrie, complete with turn-of-the-century garb and parasol, in a scene staged for Grindle. (Goulding and his director of photography, Lee Garmes, employ deep focus and fog to make the bower resemble a late nineteenth-century postcard.) But the trick fails when Molly, moved by Grindle’s pleas, breaks the illusion: “I can’t, not even for you!” she cries, then flees (in the novel Grindle tries to grope Molly). Exposed as a “dirty sacrilegious thief,” Stan—or at least his plan—is ruined.

No matter: he already has the 150 grand, which he retrieves from Lilith, who has been holding it for him. But Lilith turns out to be a bigger con artist than he, having replaced the roll of high denominations with one-dollar bills. When Stan tries to get the money back, she retreats into her psychologist persona and insists that he suffers from delusions. “You must regard it all as a nightmare,” she informs him. Having learned from her research that Pete’s death was “self-administered,” she coldly tells Stan that his guilt is merely a “homicidal hallucination” and that he has made a “strange transference” to her. Just in case he doesn’t get the picture, she also reminds him that she has recorded his sessions and can, if necessary, implicate him in fraud. Confused and desperate, Stan sends Molly away: along with his money he has lost the only person who loves him; perhaps worse, he has lost the swagger that enabled his success.

His fall is as precipitous as his rise: he begins drinking heavily, moving from one seedy, dark hotel room to another, hearing the geek’s howls wherever he goes.
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Before long he has become a hobo giving stock readings to other derelicts in exchange for a slug of cheap liquor. Echoing Pete’s earlier words, he scoffs at his credulous listeners: “Every boy has a beautiful old, gray-haired mother. Everybody except maybe me.” At last he seeks work as a carnival palm reader but is told that they don’t hire boozers. On second thought, there may be a job for him—a temporary one, just until they can get “a real geek.” Stan accepts the gig: “Mister, I was made for it.” This is where the novel ends, but the film adds a semiredemptive epilogue (probably the work of producer Darryl F. Zanuck) in
which Stan—shot amid deep shadows on the barred carnival set—goes berserk, then rushes into the arms of Molly, who happens to work in the same carnival. The film gestures toward the salvation narrative that the novel deliberately eschews. We are even given a moral, as one man, echoing Stan’s question at the film’s opening, asks “How can a guy get so low?” Answer: “He reached too high.” This pat wrap-up does little to soften the disturbing tale we have witnessed and warns audiences that pursuing the American Dream may lead one down a nightmare alley. But Stan’s fault isn’t that he reaches too high; it is that he doesn’t believe in his own greatness. Like many a performer, he is actually solitary and fearful, and the alienation that permits him to rise above the masses eventually pulls him down. He wants to feel superior to others yet dreads being different, thus exemplifying the gangster’s paradox that Shadoian outlines. Indeed, the film suggests that Stan lives out his destiny, that he has always been and always will be a geek. His “geekness” lies partly in the willingness, shared by many noir protagonists, to do anything to get what he wants. Unfortunately, however, Stan doesn’t know what he wants—or, rather, he wants conflicting things: both admiration and pity. We do as well: watching him, we at once relish our moral superiority and identify with him, suspecting that we, too, are secretly geeks.

Carlisle is just one of the film’s objects of criticism, as it places him among gullible audiences who line up to be cheated and wealthy citizens duped by the elaborate con games called religion and psychoanalysis. Pursuing happiness through amusements or therapy, these citizens hope to fashion new identities out of consumer purchases, but their commodified selves are as bogus as the ghosts in his séances. Yet Carlisle’s fate forcibly exposes the underside of the American Dream of upward mobility, singular achievement and fungible identity: his mobility isn’t freedom; it is merely restless appetite. Nor does he ever have a home—the carnival being the antithesis of home—and his constant changes only bring him back where he started, to the no-place of the geek. This nonidentity, a subhuman persona that lacks even a name, is the accursed share of the pursuit of happiness.
Nightmare Alley
suggests, then, that Carlisle’s decisions only push him to a destiny already ordained. His commodified identity as The Great Stanton is exposed as a hollow shell, inside of which dwells the geek. Individualism personified—caring for no one else; severed from community, lovers, and friends—Carlisle is a failed Franklin brought down by the Emersonian truth that no matter where he goes, he will meet himself—someone who is, at the core, nobody at all.

Nightmare Alley
is a particularly potent challenge to the dream of upward mobility, but it is not an anomaly in film noir. But how did such pessimistic and politically provocative themes come to appear in these crime films? An answer often given is that film noir was created in part by European (mostly German Jewish) émigré directors who brought their psychologically probing, highly mannered expressionist visual style and doom-laden worldview to American cinema as war broke out.
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Other critics trace noir’s origins and themes to American hard-boiled fiction writers—Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and Woolrich—though many fail to note the wide disparities in style, politics, and sensibility even among the four authors named.
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These studies are valuable for unveiling noir’s links to particular literary and cinematic traditions. My aim, however, is to locate noir within its more immediate social, cultural, and political context: the United States in the wake of World War II.

The war and its aftermath were by far the most significant cultural influence on noir. Frank Krutnik has suggested that noir’s obsession with criminality and violence was a means of “displacing a critique of the ‘social murder’ legitimized through the war” (
Lonely
54). But its effects are even more broad and profound. As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, the war’s echoes and effects are everywhere in noir: in the numerous traumatized veterans that populate the films; in their many missing or displaced persons; in the tensions noir records regarding women’s role in the workplace and the domestic arena; in the postwar anti-communist backlash. Moreover, noir’s seemingly obsessive focus on psychic disorder—which helps to explain the frequent appearance of psychiatrists in the films—may suggest what Krutnik calls a national “breakdown of confidence in the defining and sustaining cultural regimentation of identity and authority” (
Lonely
55). As Philip Kemp and Warren Susman have argued, noir represents the reemergence of a “suppressed element of American culture” (Kemp 270; Susman is quoted in Neve,
Film and Politics
152). Its role as a cultural barometer is one reason why noir has come to be recognized as a watershed in American cinema and why the wealth of recent scholarship has assumed such a wide array of approaches.
⁹

There can be little doubt that noir is a product of a period of enormous upheaval. Massive population shifts occurred as veterans of both sexes returned home, producing dissonances in gender dynamics and definitions of domesticity. Increased racial agitation and organizing (CORE, for example, was formed in
this period) occurred as African American citizens protested in equality and police brutality, and as black veterans discovered that Jim Crow practices lingered on the home front. The most popular music of the period was jazz, a hybrid, black-originated style that encouraged emotional liberation. A burgeoning consumer culture fueled the desire for self-improvement and social mobility while limiting its scope; and the postwar economic boom was accompanied by massive layoffs, renewed labor unrest, and heightened concerns about the stability of money and the plight of the worker. Strikes and antifascist political activism prompted a crackdown by reactionary governmental and nongovernmental forces.
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Meanwhile, fears of communism and news of the Soviet Union’s A-bomb tests terrified citizens and triggered an atmosphere of paranoia and prying. Noir both reflects this postwar hangover (residual anxieties about identity, gender, disability, and labor) and registers new fears about race, representation, capitalism, technology, privacy, and security. Amid this turmoil, films noir ask whether the American Dream of liberty and democracy is still viable and, if so, how it may be altered or fulfilled.

The above paragraph provides a version of what is dubbed (usually with pejorative connotations) the “Zeitgeist” theory: the idea that film noir (itself subject to varying definitions) reflected and shaped a peculiarly downbeat or anxious postwar mood and, as Kemp declares, exposes “the symptoms of a deformed society” (268–69; see also F. Hirsch 21). Recently this theory has come under attack. Richard Maltby, for example, observes that the Zeitgeist theory is “notoriously difficult to substantiate,” since it depends “on the selective presentation of its evidence”; it may even be circular, as angst-ridden narratives are used as evidence of social problems that allegedly generated the angst-ridden narratives (41). Will Straw remarks that noir criticism is plagued by a contradiction, having come “to be understood, conveniently, as both a conscious, programmatic intervention by politically engaged filmmakers … and a cluster of symptoms through which collective or individual psyches betrayed themselves” (132).
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This apparent contradiction has led Steve Neale, perhaps the Zeitgeist theory’s most voluble critic, to announce that the entire category called film noir is hopelessly incoherent (174). But Straw’s observation actually exposes complexity, not contradiction: noir was
in some cases
the product of conscious interventions by politically engaged film-makers
and
, at other times, a phenomenon betraying a set of subterranean anxieties. A substantial number of crime films were made by radical leftist writers, directors, actors, and producers who, I suggest in
chapter 8
, deliberately set out to critique certain cherished American beliefs and values in order to awaken
audiences from their slumbers. But the anxieties, hypocrisies, and frauds illuminated by these filmmakers were part of a larger set of fears and dissatisfactions that simmered beneath the surface of the culture and exerted pressure on the daily activities of ordinary people.

Influenced by Neale’s argument, Mike Chopra-Gant argues that noir has been overrated as a sign of postwar America’s mood. Noirs, he points out, were not among the most popular films of the era, and we should instead look to the period’s hit movies to discern the real mood of the times. In contrast to noir’s disturbing, downbeat stories, he proposes, Hollywood’s mainstream films “represent an effort to reinvigorate” American myths and to “reinstate the cornerstones of American identity” (25). But if mainstream films sought to “reinvigorate” and “reinstate” American myths, that itself suggests that those myths were perceived to be imperiled. Chopra-Gant also acknowledges the difficulties in determining how many movies were seen by how many people (see 183–88). In any case, just because a lot of people see a film does not mean that it lingers in their minds, reflects their mood, or affects their behavior. In fact, one of the most influential Hollywood films—influential, that is, for the industry and other filmmakers—was Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity
, a film firmly ensconced in the noir canon. I would also point out that two of the top-grossing films of 1946 (see Chopra-Gant 13) were
The Best Years of Our Lives
, a provocative, realistic story about veterans’ readjustment that contains strong noir undertones, and
Notorious
, a romance-thriller with an atomic-bomb plot. These popular films
do
deal with anxieties that troubled the postwar world. Nicholas Spencer, quoting historian William Graebner, stakes out a middle ground by observing that American culture in the 1940s was swept by two broad, conflicting trends: “On the one hand, culture was characterized by nostalgia, sentimentalism, a belief in scientific progress, and a pervasive yearning for … a ‘culture of the whole.’ … On the other hand, it was a time when irony, historical contingency, a feeling of historical exhaustion and cultural fragmentation, and an attraction to existentialism borne [
sic
] of a sense of meaninglessness were evident” (Spencer 118–19). Noir reflects that latter strain.

Attempts to define
film noir
have generally failed to capture its complex, even contradictory, themes and manifestations. Of course,
film noir
is a retrospective critical construction; as Neale points out, most of the movies we call noir were at the time referred to simply as melodramas (180). Beyond genre concerns, the conditions of production also helped to create the cross-generic phenomenon we call noir. The bulk of the films, as James Naremore reminds us, were not Poverty Row creations but midlevel products of major Hollywood studios. In the wake of
the
Loews v. Paramount
decision of 1948, a substantial number of noirs were made by independent companies such as Enterprise, Horizon, and Diana Productions, which offered greater creative freedom for their artists. In short,
noir
is the name we apply to a certain oppositional sensibility that was cultivated both within and at the margins of the industrial Hollywood system. Adopting and expanding genres that included the women’s picture, the gangster movie, the hard-boiled detective story, the neorealist pseudodocumentary, the romance-thriller, the psychological study, and the social-problem picture, among others, filmmakers produced a counternarrative to the story of “reinvigoration,” one that challenged not just the current practices but also the philosophical foundations of American culture. In his influential book
More Than Night
, Naremore defines film noir as a nebulous signifier of a “liminal space” lying “between Europe and America, between high modernism and ‘blood melodrama,’ and between low-budget crime movies and art cinema” (220). I endorse the spirit of this definition but would add that the best way to define noir is to examine specific films in detail and then use these explorations to generate prevailing patterns, themes, and tendencies. That is what I have sought to do in this book. The result, I hope, proves that
film noir
remains a useful term with which to designate a peculiarly interrogative, deeply moral, visually adventurous and politically aware sensibility that characterized American cinema between 1944 and 1959.