by Mark Osteen
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
FILM NOIR AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
MARK OSTEEN
© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osteen, Mark.
Nightmare alley : film noir and the American dream / Mark Osteen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-0780-7 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0832-3 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-0780-9 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-0832-5 (electronic)
1. Film noir—United States—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. 3. American Dream in art. 4. National characteristics, American, in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.F54O88 2013
791.43′6556—dc23
2012017652
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Film Noir and the American Dream
1 “Someone Else’s Nightmare”: Exploring Noir Dreamscapes
2 Missing Persons: Self-Erasure and Reinvention
3 Vet Noir: Masculinity, Memory, and Trauma
4 Framed: Forging Noir Identities
5 Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space
6 Nocturnes in Black and Blue: Memory, Morality, and Jazz Melody
7 Femmes Vital: Film Noir and Women’s Work
8 Left-Handed Endeavor: Crime, Capitalism, and the Hollywood Left
Conclusion: American Nightmares
Notes
Filmography
Works Cited
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
The geek is a main attraction in Nightmare Alley’s carnival
The dream sequence in Spellbound features an array of disembodied eyes
Ole Anderson (Burt Lancaster) and Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) in The Killers
Jane Greer as femme fatale Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past
In Dark Passage Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) connects with Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall)
John Muller (Paul Henreid) prepares to cut his own face in Hollow Triumph
Floyd Bowers (Steve Brodie) and Montgomery (Robert Ryan) in Crossfire
In Act of Violence Frank Enley (Van Heflin) confesses to his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh)
Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) dreams of the eponymous Laura (Gene Tierney)
Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb) tries to control his wife, Mari (Cathy Downs), in The Dark Corner
Professor Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is entranced by a portrait in The Woman in the Window
In They Live by Night, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) fall in love
Bart (John Dall) and Annie (Peggy Cummins) at their convertible in Gun Crazy
Emmett Myers (William Talman) abducts Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Collins (Edmond O’Brien) in The Hitch-Hiker
Opening “The Great Whatsit” in Kiss Me Deadly
Lily (Ida Lupino) improvises with Pete (Cornel Wilde) in Road House
Rita Hayworth as Gilda ironically urges us to put the blame on Mame
Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is Caged
Dr. Quinada (James Mason) is dwarfed by Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) in Caught
The heist gang plans a “left-handed endeavor” in The Asphalt Jungle
In The Prowler Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) wants what he sees in the Gilvray house
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project has been long in the making, and many people have contributed to its completion. To thank everyone would require far too much space, but I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude for the help of several people in particular.
I’m grateful to Professors Julie Grossman and Paul Saint-Amour for their support. My colleagues in the English Department at Loyola University Maryland have furnished a lively intellectual community where I could test the ideas found herein. I’m particularly grateful to my colleague Paul Lukacs for suggesting the Franklin and Emerson connections. My department’s support also included encouraging me to teach courses in which my embryonic notions could grow; the students in those courses helped me develop those notions. To them I offer my hearty thanks.
Barbara Hall and the staff at the Special Collections Department of the Margaret Herrick Library deserve a special note of gratitude. The resources and staff at that institution—which for film scholars comes pretty close to heaven on earth—have deepened and enriched this project immeasurably.
I’m grateful to the anonymous reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press for perusing the manuscript so promptly and thoroughly; such alacrity is both laudable and rare.
As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Leslie Gilden, for providing a patient ear as I rattled on about sometimes obscure films, for providing a second set of eyes as we viewed the movies together, and for voicing challenges that helped me to refine my ideas in our many and various discussions of these films.
An earlier version of chapter 4 was published in the Journal of Film and Video; an earlier version of chapter 5 was published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television.
All illustrations, except those in chapter 5, were purchased from the Kobal Collection. The rest come from Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store. I thank these vendors for their assistance.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Introduction
Film Noir and the American Dream
“Is a guy born that way?”
Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power), the protagonist of Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley, asks this question about the geek, an abject figure on the lowest rung of the carnival hierarchy, whose chief task is to bite off the heads of chickens. One of the darkest films in the noir canon, Nightmare Alley traces Carlisle’s rise from carny assistant to slick mentalist performing in chic hotels, followed by a fall into destitution, which ends as Stan, now a groveling alcoholic, is hired as a carnival geek. The answer to his question is ambiguous: Stan’s cynicism, arrogance, and greed motivate the bad choices he makes, as does his relationship with the scheming psychologist Lilith Ritter. Yet the film’s circular structure and motif of tarot cards imply that Stan was indeed “born that way”—that he always has been a geek.
Carlisle’s quest for fame is a quintessentially American tale that depicts the pursuit of happiness through individual striving, but it is an anti–Horatio Alger fable of the perils of ambition, a warning that transforming the self may also empty it of meaning. More broadly, the geek figure offers an opportunity to assess critically the American ideals of self-creation, individualism, free choice, and upward mobility. Though the geek’s pursuit of happiness is drastically attenuated—he will do anything for a drink—it nonetheless resembles those of many film noir protagonists, obsessed with a desirable goal or object—
a falcon sculpture, a seductive woman, a big score—or fleeing, like Stan, from a traumatic event. Indeed, Stan Carlisle’s life evokes questions that have troubled Americans since before the nation even existed: what is the relation between personal history and present character? Is it possible to escape from one’s past? Is identity inborn or a set of masks or performances? Nightmare Alley provides one answer to the question that lies at the heart of this book: what does film noir tell us about the American Dream?
In his study of that overused but little-understood phrase, Jim Cullen lists four dreams: those of upward mobility, equality, home ownership, and the West as a symbol of undying hope, best epitomized by Hollywood (8–9). I would add to his tally the ideals of free enterprise and personal liberty. Beneath each of these values lies an enduring faith in what the Declaration of Independence calls “the pursuit of happiness,” a phrase that, Cullen proposes, “defines the American Dream, treating happiness as a concrete and realizable objective” (38). Underpinning even that goal is the ideology of individualism—the belief that personal effort enables one to determine one’s own destiny and character; throw off the fetters of history; overcome class, gender, and racial barriers; and gain wealth and prestige. The crime films made in Hollywood between 1944 and 1959 challenge these beliefs by portraying characters whose defeat or death seems fated; by dramatizing the obstacles to class mobility and racial or gender equality; by asking whether anyone—whether detective, war veteran, or homeless woman—can truly reinvent him- or herself; by questioning whether new consumer products and technologies such as fast cars really liberate us; and by raising a skeptical eyebrow at the midcentury faith in psychoanalysis and the therapeutic ethos that supports it.
Stan Carlisle’s question has been answered in two conflicting ways throughout American cultural history. One answer, perhaps best represented by Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, portrays identity as an endless process of entrepreneurial invention. Thus young Ben leaves his childhood home in Boston to make his way to Philadelphia where, in part 2, he deliberately sculpts a new self through the sedulous application of reason and industry (see 79–86). For the rest of his life he constantly remakes himself: first a printer and publisher, he becomes at different periods a musician, an inventor, a scientist, an ambassador, a military leader, and a legislator. Franklin also inserts into his life story a letter from a friend, Benjamin Vaughan, who writes that Franklin proves “how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or greatness” (72). In this archetypal American success story, one’s past is irrelevant to one’s present and future: an American can be anything he or she wishes, so long as he or she maintains resilience and curiosity. Franklin’s story is the Protestant conversion narrative—a narrative of being born again—shorn of supernatural trappings. Whatever a Franklinesque American becomes, he or she is never merely “born that way.”
Set against this model of infinite reinvention is the philosophy presented by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his influential essay “Self-Reliance.” For Emerson, a person cannot reinvent him- or herself; instead, one must discover and refine his or her true nature by looking within. Emerson holds that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages” (29). The self must be free of fetters—on this Franklin and Emerson agree—but unlike Franklin, Emerson argues that “no man can violate his nature” (35). Self-reliance thus presumes the existence of an authentic self to be relied upon. That “aboriginal Self” cannot be escaped, for it underlies “every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present” (38, 41). Nor does mobility make a difference. Emerson writes, “I pack my trunk, … embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from” (48). The precept that no one escapes his or her nature is indeed the lesson of the “missing person” noirs I discuss in chapter 2.
But self-reliance requires an aversion to conformity; it is individualist through and through. Despite their differences, then, and putting aside the nuances overlooked in this admittedly simplified distillation of the two figures’ philosophies, it is clear that the Franklinesque and Emersonian models of identity share a foundational belief in individual choice. And this agency, according to Cullen, is the “bedrock premise” that “lies at the very core of the American Dream” (10). Without self-determination there can be no dream. But this premise also creates a problem: how to create a cohesive community composed of self-interested individuals. Cullen finds in the Puritans a balance between individualism and community that “straddles … the tension between one and many” (32); this is a balance that few noir protagonists achieve. Instead, in pursuing happiness they find themselves alienated, cast out, defeated; worse, their end seems fated, as if they have played only a minor role in engineering their own lives. As Ken Hillis comments, noir protagonists come to recognize “the difficulty—if not impossibility—of achieving modernity’s implicitly cosmopolitan promise that an individual, by dint of hard work, education, and reason, can develop a politically robust subjectivity” (4). To put it another way, film noir often paints the pursuit of happiness as a chimera and shows self-creation constrained by forces beyond individuals’ control. If, as John Orr proposes, the noir protagonist initially believes that “America is the dreamland of opportunity, where all possibilities can be considered,” his or her story ends with an awakening into a chastening reality (160). The obstacles aren’t merely character flaws; they are features of society. Thus, as Hillis notes, when noir protagonists do reach the top, they discover that life there is “as rotten as it is at the bottom” (7). In short, social mobility is seldom possible in noir and irrelevant when it does occur. Considering these patterns, John Belton suggests that noir registers a “postwar crisis of national identity” related to the “dissolution of the myth of Jeffersonian democracy” (qtd. in Chopra-Gant 152). Noir, that is, posits an inversion of equality whereby almost everyone is equally trapped. Made during a period marked by social and political upheaval, films noir test and critique both the principles of the American Dream—individualism and self-determination, liberty, equality, upward mobility, capitalist enterprise—and their practice.
Made for It
Among the many forces that converged to create the phenomenon we call noir (I outline others below) were 1930s gangster films. Movies such as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface are fables of American entrepreneurship camouflaged as exposés or action thrillers. As Jack Shadoian notes, the 1930s gangster is “a paradigm of the American dream”: an immigrant who, by ruthless force of will and relentless energy, rises to the top of his “industry” but is eventually punished for the very qualities that have fueled his elevation (3). Shadoian astutely observes that gangster films expose a fundamental contradiction in the American psyche: “It’s fine to get ahead, but it’s wrong to get ahead. It’s good to be an individual, but then you’re set apart from others.” Such films, he continues, are often “disguised parables of social mobility as a punishable deviation from one’s assigned place” (6). In them the Franklinesque and the Emersonian visions of identity collide head-on.
Shadoian’s summary of this conflict also fits a substantial segment of noir, but the postwar milieu alters the prewar archetypes. World War II fed anxieties about identity: whether spent fighting or at home, the war years sliced a gap in citizens’ lives, and the question of authenticity became, in the postwar years, a dominant American concern. Should we forget and discard the values and personae that bind us to our former selves and start over? Or is such forgetting impossible and, when attempted, merely invites the return of the repressed? And is our country the same? Faced with such troubling questions, many citizens yearned, as Jackson Lears writes, for “a solid sense of truth beneath a tissue of misleading appearances” (Fables 346). The issue of authenticity dwells at the center of many films noir—especially those, as I sho
w in chapter 4, that explicitly concern forgery and portraiture—and manifests itself in noir’s notoriously frequent doppelgängers, double-crosses, and duplicitous dames. Adding to this crisis of identity was what Lears describes as the “heightened expectations of authenticity” that characterize modernity: the “conviction that everyone would experience ‘something thrilling and vivid’ in the normal course of events, that a failure to do so meant that one had not ‘really lived’” (356). This quest for authenticity as an essential component of the pursuit of happiness propels noir figures as diverse as former detective Jeff Markham in Out of the Past, bored bachelor Harry Quincy in The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, and Gun Crazy’s sociopath Annie Laurie Starr.
Such pursuits were, in the postwar period, increasingly linked to the material aspects of the American Dream—wealth and prosperity. As Lary May argues, the war reoriented “democratic dreams and values from the public to the private realm of consumption” (157). A character in Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, puts it pithily: “to consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream” (270). What Lears calls “packaged intensity” (Fables 357) was increasingly available in the form of consumer goods (whether they were cars, appliances, or sessions with psychiatrists), which advertisers promoted as emblems of upward mobility, freedom of choice, and individual distinction. Religion or pseudoreligion contributed to this “therapeutic ethos,” as consumer items and psychoanalytic therapy were understood as comparable modes of self-improvement (Lears, “Salvation” 11). The creation of a new self became, as Mary McAleer Balkun remarks, equivalent to “the creation of an object” (12).
The identification with consumer goods and the chance to remake identity into “a shiny commodity without a past” (Hillis 9) actuates numerous noir protagonists. Thus, for example, Maud Eames’s finishing school in Caught transmutes her into a marriageable property; Kiss Me Deadly’s Mike Hammer sculpts a hardened, cool persona by way of sports car, answering machine, and disposable women; Body and Soul’s boxer Charlie Davis is reduced to a “money machine” for promoter Roberts. At the same time, however, certain consumer products were associated with an idealized past, particularly with the faded folk communities memorialized in products such as Quaker Oats and Uncle Ben’s rice. These advertisements’ rhetorical strategies “dissolved the tension between past and present in the soothing syrup of pseudotraditionalism” (Lears, Fables 383). Paradoxically, these commodities were marketed as symbols of a realm outside of commodities. As such, they cemented a fraudulent sense of “continuous, coherent group identity” (384).
