Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Remembering

  Some veterans don’t lose their memories but have been stripped of their emotional resilience and their humanity. Yet they wish to reenact or recapture their warrior life—its camaraderie, its intensity, its clear sense of purpose—and return to the very incidents that traumatized them. In these reenactment scenes, which appear in almost all of the films discussed below, noir vets display the clinical symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, characterized by “persistent, intrusive reexperiencing of the traumatic event through flashbacks and recurrent dreams with persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal” (Nadelson 90).3 Despite their constant intrusions into the vets’ minds, these experiences and their associated feelings remain largely “indigestible” (Nadelson 95): they can neither be forgotten nor integrated. Such traumatic episodes exemplify what Roger Luckhurst, paraphrasing Cathy Caruth, calls a “crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time” (Luckhurst 5; Caruth 7): that is, because the events are generally not consciously incorporated into the characters’ experiences or psyches, they are not spoken or written about. In this regard that prototypical noir narrative device, the flashback, serves an essential function.4 As Luckhurst points out, trauma “issues a challenge” to narrative. “In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explain the trauma” (79). Veterans’ combat flashbacks invariably interrupt and arrest the films’ narratives yet also contain crucial plot elements or unveil key motives. These reenactments disrupt the realistic surface of the films; even in films with conventional mise-en-scènes, filmmakers employ antirealist, expressionist techniques to depict them. Such scenes epitomize Michael Rothberg’s definition of “traumatic realism,” whereby “the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic extremity that disables Realist representation” (106): they remain unintegrated into the films’ style, as if to reflect the vets’ psychic disintegration.

  Noir veterans undergo purgative rituals in which their old selves die and new ones are born. Some also play out the conventions of what Arthur Frank calls the “restitution narrative”—the “culturally preferred narrative” of institutional medicine—in which the agent is not the patient but a drug, a doctor, or, as in many vet noirs, a woman. This process requires that the disabled or diseased body (which includes the brain) be displayed, divided into parts, commodified, and/or disciplined before being fixed (Frank 83, 86, 88). These characters submit their identities to institutional remodeling: in short, most vet noirs are stories of “social control” (Frank 82).5 These veterans’ struggles expose a cultural yearning to punish and then redeem, in which hope for restitution collides with profound anxieties about disability and memory as threats to the stability of the society and the psyche. The films thus suggest that self-reinvention may be possible, but only after extreme trauma and a kind of self-amputation.

  Readjustment

  Cognitively disabled veterans weren’t, of course, merely fictional. In 1943 the armed services began discharging so-called psychoneurotic veterans at the rate of ten thousand cases per month. The army alone had discharged 216,000 soldiers for psychiatric problems by 1944, and overall an estimated 30 percent of American war casualties were of this type (Waller 166). Physically disabled soldiers such as Homer Parrish were even more common, as the United States tallied more than 670,000 wounded during the war.6 But even able-bodied vets had to cope with a variety of readjustment problems. In his 1944 book The Veteran Comes Back sociologist Willard Waller predicted that the returning veteran would soon be “America’s gravest social problem” (13). His book provides a blueprint that the returning-veteran noirs follow point by point. He writes that veterans would return to families they scarcely knew and who had found other interests in their absence (83); that vets would need to adapt to a postwar world where combat values didn’t fit (113); and that their lost years of employment would make it difficult to find work (92). Many veterans, he writes, feel like “Immigrants in Their Native Land” (180; Waller’s italics). Waller even declares that “Every Veteran Is at least Mildly Shell-Shocked” (115)—each one forever changed by his or her experiences and troubled by the transition to peacetime. For these “Cinderellas” of the services, as another contemporary pundit named them, “the return to civilian life [was] the clang of midnight” (qtd. in Chopra-Gant 30).

  The difficulties of three such Cinderellas are movingly dramatized in The Best Years of Our Lives, a hugely popular and critically acclaimed movie that provides a nonnoir touchstone for my discussion. Homer Parrish, trained to use his hooks, is proudly dexterous when showing off to his male friends but becomes clumsy when near his pitying family (Chopra-Gant 125). They “got me nervous,” he tells his Uncle Butch (Hoagy Carmichael), by either staring at his hooks or “staring away from ’em.” Fearing he’ll be a burden, Homer resists proposing to his prewar sweetheart, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell). His pivotal moment occurs when he asks her to watch him remove the harness holding the hooks; without his prostheses he can put on his pajamas but can’t button them, nor can he open a door, read a book, or drink a glass of milk. “Dependent as a baby” without them, he confesses, he’ll always need her help. She assures him that she’ll never leave him, then maternally tucks him in.

  “All I want is to be treated like everybody else,” Homer protests. In fact he is treated much like the two able-bodied vets he meets on the plane home, middle-aged banker Al Stephenson (Fredric March), and soda-jerk-cum-bombardier Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), both of whom are alternately patronized and lionized by their families and friends. Early in the film Al’s wife, Millie (Myrna Loy), indulges his desire to go out on the town with her and daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), but he and Fred both end up passed out in the backseat of Al’s car. Millie comments, “They make a lovely couple, don’t they?” Peggy adds, “They’ll be very happy together.” Behaving more like soldiers on weekend leave than adult civilians, the men cleave to each other—and to wartime carousing rituals—rather than to their female loved ones; as Waller explains, they “Feel at Home Only with other Veterans” (177). The next morning, as a hungover Al sits in his bedroom, reflected simultaneously in two mirrors, we see that he is divided between his grand soldier identity and his ordinary civilian self. Gazing at a photo of himself wearing a business suit, he seems to wonder if he is the same person he used to be. At the end of the scene Al tosses his military boots out the window; this change from military to civilian garb (seen in many vet noirs: Chopra-Gant 102) signifies his resumption of his old identity (but of course his old clothes don’t fit). His war experience earns him a promotion and raise, so he seems to refute the melancholy words of his favorite song, “Among My Souvenirs”: “There’s nothing left for me / Of days that used to be,” although his alcoholism (exacerbated by the war) leaves lingering doubts.

  Fred’s transition is less smooth: of the three he is most like an immigrant in his own country.7 He’s also the only one clearly plagued by posttraumatic stress. Thus, on the night of the binge he awakens Peggy, asleep in the next room, with his cries. The film veers into noir territory as cinematographer Gregg Toland briefly abandons the solemn deep-focus photography employed in the rest of the film for quasi expressionism. We hear low rumbles of a plane’s engines, and then, as dim light seeps through venetian blinds, Fred’s anguished visage becomes the face of PTSD: “It’s on fire!” he shouts. “Godorski, get outta that plane! … She’s burning up! Get out! Get out!” Peggy soothes him back to sleep, but Fred’s waking hours are also a bad dream. He has come to loathe Marie (Virginia Mayo), the shallow, materialistic woman he married just before enlisting and, upon resuming his job at the drugstore, endures multiple blows to his manhood: a boss who pointedly informs him that his war experience is irrelevant (a pattern Waller notes [92]), a supervisor who was once his underling, and an emasculating post at the ladies’ perfume count
er. Suspended between states, Fred cannot let go of the war, recapture his prewar identity, or remake himself. When at last he visits an airfield filled with derelict bombers, an overhead shot renders him tiny and alone, and as he enters the nose of a B-17 bomber called “Round Trip,” he breaks into a sweat, then makes a round trip back to the war. But when he exits the plane, he is offered a job recycling plane parts for prefabricated houses. Like the plane, Fred is war surplus—a used part who will be refitted for the postwar world with a new job and a marriage to Peggy.

  If Best Years displays a “blend of optimism and wariness” about veterans’ ability to assimilate (Dixon 165), its vets’ restitutions are nevertheless relatively complete, as each one is healed by the love of a good woman. The first vet noirs follow a similar trajectory, while shading the situation in darker hues. The Blue Dahlia, a “dystopian” version of Best Years (Chopra-Gant 169), depicts the postwar world as an “emotional minefield” (Dixon 175) where veterans are ill-equipped to sidestep explosions. The most vulnerable of this film’s three navy vets, Buzz (William Bendix), wears a metal plate in his head, and in the opening scene he flies into a violent rage when another soldier plays loud jazz (“monkey music”) on the juke. As Buzz loses his cool, we hear the low rumbling that signifies a combat flashback. Buzz’s friends, Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) and George Copeland (Hugh Beaumont), manage to placate him, but Morrison’s disability is nearly as severe, as becomes apparent when he angrily confronts his cheating wife, Helen (Doris Dowling), and her lover, nightclub owner Eddie Harwood (Howard Da Silva), at a party. Helen dismisses her friends by announcing that her husband “probably wants to beat me up,” and Ladd’s grim demeanor hints at the truth in her quip. For Morrison, as for many vets, “mortal combat remains at his emotional center and his perceptions, and he continues to yearn for the focused arousal state he once found in war” (Nadelson 57).8 Helen (who is soon murdered) diagnoses Morrison’s condition more simply: he has “learned to like hurting people.” Buzz, originally written to be the murderer until the navy forced the filmmakers to change the story, is Johnny’s double, the man who could perpetrate the crime that Johnny “desired but was not able to commit” (Krutnik, Lonely 68).9 Each vet is a casualty, a man who, when not at war, is simply at sea.

  In the opening scene a sign behind the vets’ heads reads, “Second Home.” The problem is that they no longer have a first home. So these vets, like those in Best Years, cling to their all-male surrogate family, with Buzz serving as rebellious son, George as mother, and Johnny as hypermale father (see Krutnik, Lonely 69). Buzz’s constant pawing of Johnny also implies homoerotic yearnings he cannot express. Buzz’s disability renders him both uncontrollably masculine and dangerously dependent—“a sexual inscrutability otherwise unspeakable” that Davidson finds in many of noir’s disabled characters (59). For men like Buzz and Johnny, writes Nadelson, “women are dangerous … [because] their loyalty is never that of comrades” (150).10 A minor character named Leo states the fear more bluntly: all women are “poison.”

  Not quite all: at his words we dissolve to the face of Harwood’s wife, Joyce (Veronica Lake), who picks up Morrison during a rainstorm and later protects him from both her husband and the police hunting him for Helen’s murder. Although she empathizes with Morrison, he is unable to trust her and tells her his name is Jimmy Moore. Eventually, however, his relationship with Joyce unveils a pattern that subtends most vet noirs: a woman enables the veteran to release his rage and rediscover or remodel his identity. Women represent the civilian world where antisocial males must be punished, deflected into heterosexuality, or soothed by a maternal presence. Yet females remain dangerous. In this regard the film’s title is significant. The Blue Dahlia is the name of Eddie Harwood’s night club, and he uses the flowers as a calling card. But the same flowers remind Morrison of Helen’s infidelity and of the lost domestic world that once included his son, killed when an inebriated Helen crashed their car. Dahlia petals were also found in the room where Helen was murdered; the sight of Joyce’s plucking them later upsets Buzz and prompts him to recall the night in question. The dahlias are thus linked both to Buzz’s cognitive disability and to a major source of Johnny’s alienation: the unbridgeable gap between military and civilian domains and the alienation that breeds violence in this “second home.” Once they are pulled from the flower, these petals, like the veterans’ psyches, can’t be reattached.

  Though the murder mystery is eventually solved (a preposterous climax exposes Dad Newell [Will Wright], the detective at Helen’s apartment complex, as Helen’s killer), and Johnny ends up with Joyce, Buzz’s amnesia and liability to violence are never fixed, and his readjustment remains very much in doubt.11 The same is true in Crossfire, a film made by the trio of producer Adrian Scott, director Edward Dmytryk (both former Communists who were later indicted as members of the Hollywood Ten), and writer John Paxton. Though this film’s primary target is anti-Semitism, the novel from which Crossfire was adapted, Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole, focuses on the problems of soldiers caught between war and peace.12 The novel’s title refers to the feelings of noncombatant soldiers immured in a “brick casket filled with living corpses” for whom “real war would [be] a gift” (Brooks 9, 73). Only hatred can “overcome their despair and loneliness” (81)—emotions palpable in the novel’s protagonist, Jeff Mitchell, who entertains thoughts of killing his supposedly unfaithful wife. Like Fred Derry and Johnny Morrison, Mitchell is neither quite a soldier nor quite a civilian: he lies about having killed “Japs” (110) yet hates the uniform that tells “the world everything about him” (140).

  Mitchell’s sergeant, Monty Crawford (named Montgomery in the film), despises just about everyone and murders a gay man (who becomes a Jewish man named Samuels in the film). In contrast to the novel’s all-too-obvious mouthpiece for fascist doctrine, the film’s Monty voices many veterans’ rage. Montgomery (played with frightening intensity by Robert Ryan) was doubtless a bigot before the war, but his military experience has hardened him into the picture of Waller’s angry veteran who resents those who didn’t fight (97) and for whom the civilian world is confusing and frightening (113). Indeed, as Capt. Finlay (Robert Young), the police detective who solves the murder, observes, “He was dead for a long time. He just didn’t know it”: Montgomery’s humanity died in the war.13 Samuels (Sam Levene), the Jewish veteran who becomes Montgomery’s victim, explains the problem to Mitchell (George Cooper) in a famous speech:

  For four years now we’ve been focusing our mind on … one little peanut. The win-the-war peanut. … All at once, no peanut. Now … we don’t know what we’re supposed to do. … We’re too used to fightin’, but we just don’t know what to fight. You can feel the tension in the air. A whole lot of fight and hate that doesn’t know where to go. A guy like you maybe starts hatin’ himself. … One of these days maybe we’ll all learn to shift gears. Maybe we’ll stop hatin’ and start likin’ things again.

  Whereas Montgomery’s “peanut”—his PTSD—is manifest in violence, Mitchell’s is passivity and hopelessness. A “sensitive, artist-type,” Mitchell miserably wanders around Washington, DC, missing his wife and wearing a uniform that looks too large for him. As Robert Mitchum’s big-brotherly Sgt. Keeley explains, “He’s got snakes”: Mitchell is depressed and paralyzed by a feeling of meaninglessness. These vets’ problems are illustrated in two striking cinematic moments. Just before Montgomery murders Samuels, the camera assumes Mitchell’s point of view to show Montgomery’s face blurring and splitting in two. This device at once captures Mitchell’s drunken, alienated perceptions and the dissolution of Montgomery’s psyche. In the second sequence a southern soldier named Leroy, at the behest of Finlay, baits Montgomery into hunting down Floyd Bowers, who had witnessed the murder of Samuels (and whom Montgomery has already killed; but Leroy suggests that Floyd is not dead). As Floyd and Montgomery stand at the sink shaving, Montgomery’s face is shown in a small mirror hanging slightly above and to the left of Leroy�
�s reflected face; Monty (already dead spiritually and soon to die bodily) is coffined by his hatred and prejudice. But Leroy, who once shared his bigotry, is free to move and to give up his war “peanut.”14 The two thus exemplify the choices for noir vets.

  Single-source lighting casts eerie shadows on the faces of Floyd Bowers (Steve Brodie) and Montgomery (Robert Ryan) in Crossfire, just before Montgomery murders Floyd. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  When Mitchell’s wife, Mary (Jacqueline White), at last arrives and persuades him to give himself up, she is confronted by the bar girl, Ginny (Gloria Grahame), who can provide Mitchell’s alibi. “Where were you when he needed you?” she asks Mary—as if the women abandoned the soldiers rather than the reverse. The war fractured marriages, but Mary and Ginny represent civilizing virtues—heterosexual domesticity, above all—that seem nearly as powerful as those espoused by Finlay (“our spokesman,” according to Scott: Ceplair and Englund 453), who, with the Capitol building behind him, teaches Leroy a lesson in “real American history”—a tale of the dangers of prejudice and violence against minorities—designed to counteract Montgomery’s bigotry. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was less sanguine about these sentiments: the film drew the committee’s attention and effectively ended Scott’s career. But perhaps Crossfire’s leftist ideals offended them less than its portrayal of American soldiers as incapacitated, murderous, and lost.

  Restitution and Revenge

  Montgomery’s crime is motivated by a specific hatred but also by unfocused rage and a burning desire for a scapegoat. The same is true in Cornered, the previous film by the Scott/Dmytryk/Paxton trio, in which Lt. Lawrence Gerard (Dick Powell) pursues a vendetta against the Nazis whom he believes killed Celeste, his French war bride.15 Sporting a long scar across his temple and subject to fugue-like attacks and blackouts, Gerard is every bit as cognitively disabled as Buzz or Fred Derry, and when Celeste’s father (who chides Gerard for his obsession) lists the names of civilians who died alongside her, Gerard “hears” her name shouted amidst gunfire and nearly passes out. To find the collaborator responsible (a man named Jarnac), and to relieve his feelings of helplessness and guilt, Gerard is compelled to reenact the war and win it all over again. He angrily accuses Celeste’s father of forgetting “too easily,” but his own problem, like that of many noir vets, is that he can’t stop remembering it.16 Gerard explains: “War does something to your memory. Gets sharper. You forget the way people looked and remember the important things. That kind of remembering keeps you warm on cold nights.” To keep the flame alive, he flies to Argentina to pursue the hiding Germans, then blunders and blusters about, nearly ruining the careful plans of the cadre of antifascists who have preceded him. “There’s no place in our program for revenge or murderous hate,” their leader declares. “We must have facts, … facts, facts!”