Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  In any case, during the cutting sequence we never see Muller in full shot; we see only his face or head, with separate shots depicting his hands and torso. Muller’s head and body are separated, as if he is amputating himself—as the editing does. Thus Pelizzon and West are correct that the scarring scene, like the surgery sequence in Dark Passage, “links the diegetic cutting of Muller’s face with the extra-diegetic cutting of the film strip” (par. 26). If “photographic technology is presented as the domain of mishaps and flaws” (par. 28), and the film we are watching reveals the photograph’s error, Pelizzon and West continue, cinema is therefore presented as a “higher … authority” than photography. But the paradox is actually the same one found in the forgery noirs we encounter in chapter 4: the film at once asserts its superiority to photography and undermines that claim by revealing the unreliability of cinematography. Of course, the real flaw is not in the photographs but rather, as Pelizzon and West’s and Muller’s mistakes about the scar’s placement reveal, in faulty human powers of observation. Hollow Triumph questions the veracity of the cinematic medium because, like photographs, it is only as reliable as human perception. And because we humans are “scarred”—fallible, inattentive—our communication and connection can never be perfect. Hence, like those “it was only a dream” films discussed in chapter 1, Hollow Triumph denies the viewer’s belief in what he or she sees onscreen, even while immersing us in that alternate world.

  In Hollow Triumph, John Muller (Paul Henreid) stares at the photo of Dr. Bartok in a mirror as he prepares to cut his own face. Screen capture.

  With his scar in place Muller carries out his plan by getting Bartok alone in his cab and murdering him.27 We don’t witness the murder, which is rendered as a quasi-expressionist montage of faces and voices that concludes with a stop sign changing to “Go.” As in the scarring scene, the director’s and editor’s cuts hide the physical violence, again reminding us that our perceptions are subject to manipulation. But Muller’s observation is now direct, and as he examines the body, he discovers his mistake. Yet he has no choice but to proceed with the impersonation. It’s an ironic moment when the dentist who had originally noted Muller’s resemblance to Bartok fails to register the reversed scar, while boasting about his own superior powers of observation. Four out of five men, he asserts, wouldn’t notice if “the next fella was breathing or dying.” Most people are so caught up in their own “petty little … preoccupations,” he declares, “all they can think about and talk about is themselves.”

  The next scene, a montage of Dr. Bartok “treating” his patients, proves him right. He chain-smokes meditatively but says nothing as they lament their lonely, unloved lives. Ironically, the man who had boasted of his lack of interest in others now must feign such interest to maintain his imposture: he must efface himself. The patients never notice that their doctor has been supplanted by a double, and perhaps don’t care, for what they really need is someone to listen and make them feel important. The clinical setting permits them to make a connection, albeit fleeting, commodified, and one-sided, with another human. Thus, while Hollow Triumph depicts psychoanalysis as a con game, masquerade, and, as the next scenes imply (echoing Spellbound), a type of gambling, it also insinuates that it serves a necessary function in a modern urban society that lacks true intimacy. Still, the chief point is not so much, as Pelizzon and West propose, that “Bartok’s” patients prefer him to the “real” doctor (par. 12), as that the two men are the same: just as Muller was already a psychoanalyst (as was revealed in his first scene with Evelyn), so Bartok is already a thief and gambler.

  When, the next day, Evelyn tells the doctor he has been “strange,” he accuses her of “seeing somebody” (she was “seeing” him as Muller, but doesn’t “see” him as Bartok) and of bitterness. She answers, “It’s a bitter little world full of sad surprises, and you don’t go around letting people hurt you.” She hasn’t trusted anyone since she was nine years old. “You never can go back and start again, because the older you grow, the worse everything turns out.” In other words your current self incorporates the past; your experiences may scar you, but they also make you wiser. “Bartok” isn’t really listening, because her words forecast why his carefully planned masquerade will fail: in believing he can sever himself from his past, he only dooms himself to repeat his own mistakes. Like Markham, Thompson, and Parry, Muller “kills” himself to become someone else. At the end of his journey, however, he discovers the Emersonian truth that to become Bartok is only to become more himself. But first he must be subjected to further ironies. One occurs when Fred returns, looking for his brother, and passes along the news that Stancyk is about to be deported and is no longer pursuing John. Fred pleads with “Bartok”: “You don’t know him. He’s smart, got big ideas, willing to take any kind of chance.” Bartok puts him off, but Fred is right—John Muller doesn’t know himself. As the barred shadows on the wall indicate, this escapee has moved from the state’s prison to one of his own making and is now trapped in the identity he so hates and loves, in a world where no one cares for anyone else.

  Evelyn has learned the truth about Bartok, and plans to leave the country on the next ship. During their last conversation Muller/Bartok reiterates his philosophy: “You take care of yourself and that’s all!” She replies sarcastically, “Watch out for number one; always play it for yourself.” Bartok: “That’s right. … This is the way it is and you know it.” He slaps her, but by the end of the argument he has agreed to leave with her: for once the characters have revealed some genuine emotion. Then, as Bartok makes his way out of the building, the film’s most tender moment takes place. A cleaning lady stops him and hesitantly points out that his scar used to be on the other side. He smiles, touches her face, and gently squeezes her shoulder. This humble woman, who has seen him many times but whose existence he has never acknowledged, thinks he is important. Only she notices “Bartok’s” scar because no one else really sees him; they see only their idea of him, their own needs and prejudices mirrored. Not one other soul gives a damn for Victor Bartok; in abandoning his own identity, Muller has sacrificed his ties to others.

  Nor does he make it to the ship: on the way he is accosted by goons looking for Bartok, who owes Maxwell’s casino $90,000 in gambling debts. These are Bartok’s debts, not Muller’s: the eminent psychiatrist also took too many chances.28 Facing death, “Bartok” pleads that he’s really Muller: see, the scar is on the wrong side! Ironically, when Muller tries to assert his “real” identity, nobody believes him. But why should they? The film has shown not only that he is Bartok but that he always has been Bartok. John Muller has succeeded too well—erased himself and been accepted as Victor Bartok—but it is a hollow triumph, for Bartok was a hollow man. As he lies dying on the pier, he gazes up at the people waving, but not one of them is waving to him. At this moment he is neither Bartok nor Muller; he is not even a geek, for at least those pathetic figures magnetize the eyes of others. He is nobody at all—just a dying animal, frightened and alone. After he expires, bustling crowds pass his body without a second look. Muller’s exciting experiment has left him in nightmare alley with nothing, not even a name.29

  Bartok was a lie that even Muller believed. But Muller can’t escape himself, and he brings with him his own flaws—the same flaws Bartok possessed. Muller’s hyperindividualist worldview is thus exposed as empty. Yet his repellent philosophy is also enacted by virtually every other character, all those people who never notice Bartok’s reversed scar, the self-involved throngs who don’t register a dead man lying at their feet. Even more thoroughly than Dark Passage, Hollow Triumph portrays an unredeemed world of isolates where the American Dream of liberty, self-determination, self-reinvention, and the pursuit of happiness has become a grotesque travesty. In short, the ending, as Fuchs’s notes state, validates Muller’s cynicism (59). Pure freedom is embodied by the ability to change your identity at will, but that freedom generates a world that has undergone fission. In such a world, free
dom is indistinguishable from imprisonment.

  Certain autobiographical elements resonate here as well. Muller/Bartok is played by émigré Paul Henreid, and the picture was directed by Steve Sekely, born István Székely, in Budapest. Both artists changed their names, abandoned their original tongues, and remade themselves as Americans. Henreid, who also produced Hollow Triumph, tailored the role for himself. Their biographies not only lend the film an additional poignancy (how could they not have realized that the tale mirrors their own life stories?) but add veracity: who is better equipped to comment on Americans’ individualism and self-obsession, our blind pursuit of happiness and liberty at all costs, than immigrants? Of course, viewers know that Muller is fictional, being enacted by a person named (or rather, renamed) Paul Henreid. The film thus projects mirrors within mirrors, as we watch a European man pretend to be an American man impersonating a European man.

  Hollow Triumph also asks us to trust our eyes, while reminding us that we can’t trust our eyes—or rather, that we err when we don’t look closely enough. By questioning the veracity of photography and cinema, the film challenges our reliance on surface truths, our intuitive faith that what we see is what is really there. Like all of the missing person films, it also suggests that America has become a nation of guilty bystanders, a people so alienated from each other that we cannot even recognize that others are ourselves. All these stories of mistaken identity and botched vision ask us to look more closely—or, indeed, not merely to look but to listen and to feel. They also gesture toward what is not there: active empathy, an antidote to the hyperbolic self-interest and pursuit of happiness that, Hollow Triumph and Dark Passage demonstrate particularly well, cannot occur without social connection. As Fuchs’s notes state, his film presents a “charge to the audience,” an “appeal … not to be brutish” (1–2). Likewise, the missing-person noirs reveal that Franklinesque self-reinvention is possible only insofar as the self is a product of others. You cannot truly change your nature because it is not really yours; rather, it is constantly molded by the other people who perpetually make and remake you.

  3

  Vet Noir

  Masculinity, Memory, and Trauma

  “You oughta see me open a bottle of beer”: ex-sailor Homer Parrish, who has lost both hands in World War II, boasts of his hook dexterity to two other veterans in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives.1 War vets in films noir usually possess less obvious physical disabilities; more obvious ones are generally given to peripheral characters who function as counterparts to, or extensions of, nondisabled protagonists. Thus the deaf youth in Out of the Past serves as what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call a “narrative prosthesis”: a crutch on which authors lean for “representational power, disruptive potentiality and social critique” (17). Such characters enact a protagonist’s needs or other characters’ traits. Thus, according to Michael Davidson, the deaf boy mirrors Jeff Bailey’s “flawed yet stoical integrity, providing a silent riposte to the glamour of and tough-guy patter between the other males in the film” (57): he is a trustworthy alternative to the liars Whit and Kathie.

  Elsewhere in film noir disabilities represent nondisabled protagonists’ moral flaws (Davidson 73). For instance, in Murder, My Sweet Philip Marlowe’s temporary blindness indicates his inability to recognize that B-girl Velma Valento has remade herself into wealthy matron Helen Grayle; the hearing impairments of gangsters Frank Hugo in Ride the Pink Horse and Joe McClure in The Big Combo symbolize the moral “deafness” of their films’ protagonists, Lucky Gagin and Lt. Leonard Diamond, respectively, each of whom is obsessed with revenge on his darker counterpart.2

  Cognitively disabled veterans in film noir, however, play more significant roles. First, they fit the typical noir narrative of an investigator’s quest for truth and identity. Marlowe’s pursuit of Velma, for example, is a pretext for his own search for selfhood through repeated encounters with alter egos such as Moose Malloy and Lindsay Marriott. In the amnesiac vet noirs, however, this quest for selfhood becomes literal, for these returning soldiers truly don’t remember who they are. These characters lend sociopolitical weight to the noir theme of alienation and isolation by acting as synecdoches for a whole generation of displaced men and for American society in its postwar transitional phase.

  The frequent presence of disabled returning veterans in film noir reveals broad cultural tensions and traumas. One such tension involved shifting definitions of masculinity, as veterans were forced to discard wartime rituals and roles. Thus noir’s traumatized veterans are often hypermasculine, aggressive, impatient with women, and incapable or unwilling to alter their warrior mentality for the humdrum realities of civilian life (see Polan 248). Such veterans—in The Blue Dahlia, for example—define masculinity against disability: if masculinity equals strength and achievement, disability must signify weakness and inadequacy. Hence, the vets hide their cognitive or emotional dysfunctions, if they recognize them at all. Noir veterans also struggle to transfer their emotional bonds from all-male soldier “families” to heteronormative relationships and conventional domesticity, a pattern apparent not only in The Blue Dahlia but also in Crossfire and Dead Reckoning. As Frank Krutnik has observed, these films “offer a range of alternative or ‘transgressive’ representations of male desire and identity, together with a … skeptical framing of the network of male cultural authority” found in the military, law enforcement, and psychiatry. In so doing, they expose a “crisis of confidence” about male-dominated culture (Lonely 88, 91).

  As Mike Chopra-Gant notes, these characters also embody anxieties about America’s inability to “settle veterans into productive postwar roles” (151). Thus Cornered’s Lt. Gerard suffers from fugue-like attacks and pursues a vendetta against the Nazis who killed his wife; The Blue Dahlia’s Buzz has a brain injury that induces debilitating headaches and murderous rages; Lucky Gagin’s war experiences have left him a cynical cipher. Unable to forget the war, these veterans try to relive it, both to rectify wrongful deaths and to regain the moral clarity they felt in combat. Their cognitive disabilities thus function as what Mitchell and Snyder call a “master metaphor for social ills” (24)—not just for gender role adjustments but also for shifting ideas about labor and productivity, and for emerging Cold War fears of invasion.

  But perhaps most telling are those ex-GIs suffering from amnesia. Steven Kenet in High Wall, Eddie Ricks in The Crooked Way, and George Taylor in Somewhere in the Night have lost their memories because of war injuries, and their inability to retrieve their prewar identities dramatizes real-life veterans’ adjustment difficulties. More metaphorically, former POW Frank Enley, in Act of Violence, has purchased bourgeois stability at the cost of “forgetting” his questionable acts during the war, only to be reminded of them by a revenge-seeking fellow prisoner. This pair encompasses both extremes: if Enley has willed amnesia, pursuer Joe Parkson cannot forget. Both still dwell in a mental and moral prison. All these characters, indeed, dramatize postwar America’s dialectic of memory and forgetting, a dance or duel between the conflicting desires to forget and to remember the war: though citizens wished to honor their heroes, they realized that war memories might interfere with the construction of a postwar society.

  These disabled veterans thus reflect a larger existential crisis in American society as it moved from postwar to Cold War moods and discourses. The vets’ struggles to redefine masculinity and to recover or remodel their selves testify to America’s own identity crisis, presenting a powerful challenge to the national ideology of self-reinvention, that essential component of the American Dream. The vet noirs’ key question, posed directly in Somewhere in the Night, is this: does war change one’s nature, or does it merely expose hidden aspects already present? More broadly, these films ask again the question underwriting the dream and missing-person pictures: is a guy born that way? Vet noir dramatized options for American society—a society of immigrants and hence one forged from willed amnesia—to redefine or remember itself. />