Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Parkson suddenly appears at the Memorial Day parade in Enley’s California hometown, limping a perpendicular path through the marchers. The moment illustrates his condition: for him the war isn’t over, so he is immune to these rituals of reconciliation and commemoration. In another sense, however, Parkson is a living Memorial Day—an embodiment of wartime trauma, a walking corpse. The bleak mise-en-scène immediately lightens when we cut to Enley, a civic leader looked on as a war hero. Whereas Parkson is bathed in shadows, often shot in singles, Enley is surrounded by a crowd of smiling admirers. Indeed, as a contractor who builds new homes, he seems to epitomize the bright postwar future. But his image is a lie constructed on willful amnesia about his term in a prison camp, when he informed his Nazi keepers of his fellow POWs’ escape plan.

  After spotting Parkson stalking him on his fishing trip, Enley returns home terrified (“I remembered something,” he tells his friend). Turning off the lights and closing the blinds, he cowers in the dark with his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh). But they can’t silence the ominous drag-scrape of Parkson’s leg, damaged because of Enley’s wartime action. The sound is the echo of Enley’s crime, his guilt come to life: Parkson’s leg embodies Enley’s moral disability.31 Just as his son Georgie is seldom seen outside his barred crib, so his father’s seemingly happy domicile is really a prison, his American dream home a fraud constructed on a crime. Because he has never come to terms with his past, he has purchased a false contentment by erecting a high wall in his mind. Both he and Parkson, in short, are still prisoners of war.

  In a harrowing scene set on the staircase of a hotel where Enley is attending a convention, Edith hears her husband’s confession. Bars and rails dominate the shadowy mise-en-scène, and Zinnemann shoots the sequence with very few cuts, to concentrate our attention on Enley’s anguished words. As the senior officer in his bunkhouse, Enley had told the Nazi commandant about his men’s imminent escape because he knew it was doomed to fail and hoped that by informing he could prevent his men from being killed. But he no longer believes in his rationale. “I was an informer,” he concludes. “It doesn’t make any difference why I did it. I betrayed my men. … The Nazis even paid me a price. They gave me food and I ate it. … I hadn’t done it just to save their lives. … Maybe that’s all I did it for: to save one man, me. … There were ten men dead, and I couldn’t even stop eating.” As he speaks, his immense shadow looms over him: his past, in pursuit. Considering the atmosphere in Hollywood at the time (the film was shot less than a year after the first HUAC hearings), one cannot help but hear in these lines a stark outline of former communists’ dilemma as well: should one inform on one’s peers if it means saving one’s career? The film’s screenwriter, Robert Richards, faced this dilemma; rather than inform, he took the Fifth Amendment (Navasky 169).

  Still, perhaps Enley is too hard on himself. In retrospect he believes he informed only to save his skin, but the circumstances were complicated, indeed, impossible: the Nazis withheld food from prisoners precisely to divide them from each other and make individual survival paramount in each one’s mind. They induced Enley to violate the soldiers’ code, which, as Nadelson describes it, reshapes the self so that “‘I’ passes insensibly into ‘we,’ ‘my’ becomes ‘our’ and individual fate loses its central importance” (23). Enley committed the grievous crime of turning “we” back into “I,” putting his own life above those of his men. In cutting himself off from the group, he branded himself a coward, one of those soldiers who, in the words of J. Glenn Gray, cannot escape death because “death is within.” The coward is doomed, writes Gray, because “the more he struggles to escape the greater is his captivity” (115). This is exactly Enley’s predicament: not merely a prisoner, he is, in fact, already dead.

  In Act of Violence, Frank Enley (Van Heflin) confesses to his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh), that he informed on his fellow POWs during the war. Kobal Collection/Art Resource, NY.

  Both of these traumatized ex-soldiers try to reenact their trauma in order to master it at last (see Nadelson 88).32 Though spiritually dead, Enley may, paradoxically, be resurrected by sacrificing himself, by restaging the traumatic circumstances and accepting the consequences he originally eschewed. Conversely, Parkson, at the mercy of his obsession (which Zinnemann illustrates by constantly placing him in doorways or pushing him into the corner of the frame), has sought release, perversely, by becoming a kind of Nazi, determined to punish a man he deems unfit to live. The men are counterparts, as Zinnemann indicates with two lap dissolves late in the film, the first from Enley to Parkson, the second from Parkson to Enley. Each is his own worst enemy, his own bête noire.

  Women again serve as voices of civility and restraint. Edith reassures Frank that he “only did what [he] thought was right.” Parkson’s girlfriend, Ann (Phyllis Thaxter), rebukes him. “Are you the law? … He’s lived a decent, useful life ever since. But what have you done? What are you going to prove anyway with your vengeance, your violence? … You’re just gonna smash a few more lives.” Even Pat (Mary Astor), the frowsy barfly who befriends Enley after he rushes in despair from the convention hotel into a seamy section of LA, observes that he made “just one mistake. … Everybody makes mistakes.” But these men can hear only the voices of the past—literally, in Enley’s case, as he descends into a personal hell, dashing through darkened streets into the arms of Pat, who brings him to the corrupt lawyer Gavery (Taylor Holmes) and his minion, the assassin Johnny (Berry Kroeger). Gavery panders to Enley’s selfishness and self-hatred—the same weaknesses that victimized him during the war—to persuade him to have Parkson killed: “You’re the same man you were in Germany,” he purrs. “What do you care about one more man? You sent ten along already. Sure, you’re sorry they’re dead. That’s the respectable way to feel. Get rid of this guy and be sorry later. … It’s him or you.” Is Enley innately weak and selfish—“born that way”—or a good man who made a mistake? Can he discover his better self, or transform himself into a man capable of dying for others?

  What follows is one of the most powerful scenes in the noir canon as Enley, stumbling from Gavery into a tunnel, relives his nightmare, hearing Gavery’s insinuations, the voices of the POWs planning their escape, and that of the Nazi commandant assuring him that his men will be treated leniently. He recalls pleading with Parkson, “Don’t do it, Joe!”—words he now screams, his agonized voice echoing off the walls. The hollow tunnel amplifies Enley’s torture. Why a tunnel? Because the men he betrayed had dug a tunnel to freedom. Enley has dug his own tunnel, but its walls have collapsed, and he is about to be buried alive in this nightmare alley. Reeling toward the railroad tracks, he halts, intending to let an oncoming train smash him. At the last minute he leaps away, unable even to muster the courage to commit suicide, which, in any case, would merely prove Gavery’s accusations. Finally succumbing to Johnny’s blandishments, Enley tells him where to find Parkson and arranges to meet him on the Southern Pacific tracks at 9:00 p.m.

  In the climactic sequence Zinnemann uses the clock (as he does in High Noon) to ratchet up suspense and the approaching train’s whistle to express the men’s anguish. The wide shots of the tracks and walking men reiterate the design of the tunnel scene, implying that this reenactment—in which Enley again sets up Parkson to be shot—will eliminate Enley’s problem forever. But instead Enley dives into the bullet’s path and then attaches himself to the running board of Johnny’s car, causing it to crash into a light pole and kill them both. Is Enley’s death a just punishment for a war crime? Or is it an expiation—a cathartic reiteration of the camp incident in which he, at last, does the right thing, sacrificing himself for his fellow soldier and mastering the event? Whatever answer one proposes, the ritual of reenactment seems to close the narrative circle: Enley’s amnesia is erased, along with Parkson’s posttraumatic memory and vendetta. Yet Enley’s re-membering is only partial: his recollection may permit restitution, but he can never regain what he has lost nor become a member of the postwar w
orld. Remembering may restore the missing parts of a human or social body, but that healed body is never quite the same.

  Beneath this story we may discern two related political allegories. One poses the same ethical questions raised by the HUAC hearings, when the government and “patriotic” groups worked hard to rebrand the act of informing from a breach of loyalty to a patriotic duty. The second is this: a former ally, disabled by the war, invades the dwelling place of an American who shrinks in fear, blankets his home in secrecy, and enlists shady accomplices to eliminate the invader. If we read Parkson as the Soviet Union, the film acquires a new meaning: our onetime friends are now enemies threatening our way of life. They remind us of our wartime compromise—turning a blind eye to one tyrant in order to vanquish another. Even if our fear of this enemy is justified, can we end the threat without debasing our own values and becoming just like them? These questions preoccupied American politics throughout the next three decades, and the film suggests, via Park-son, that we were already imitating the very values soldiers had fought so hard to eradicate. Our fears led us to jail thousands of citizens for exercising their constitutional rights, to destroy or damage the careers of many citizens, to form alliances with dictators, and to build and maintain massive arsenals of destructive weapons. Like Frank Enley, in pursuing complete security we instead generated a pervasive sense of insecurity.

  Is defending our home worth the price of constant anguished vigilance? Can informers be forgiven if they sacrifice themselves? Is “amnesia” about one’s former associations acceptable so long as one confesses them or dies trying to rectify them? Act of Violence doesn’t answer these questions. Yet it does imply that both the loss of memory and its extraordinary persistence prevented postwar Americans from living authentically and fruitfully. In all of the vet noirs, indeed, remembering and forgetting are depicted as equally daunting obstacles to personal and national integrity and well-being. In these films one must recall the past but only as a prelude to forgetting it all over again. The American dream of self-reinvention, they suggest, cannot be accomplished without traumatic sacrifice. The disabled cognition of these veterans thus exemplifies postwar America’s crisis of memory and guilt, which never really found resolution but merely metamorphosed into a different set of fears. Noir veterans’ healing or reintegration could occur after they were broken down and then rebuilt. But into what sort of world were they reborn? Into a new America, purged of its history of violence and trauma? Or into a world shadowed by the fear of atomic destruction, a world haunted by a past that had been forcibly remolded by institutions that, in seeking to prevent history from repeating itself, instead reenacted it over and over?

  4

  Framed

  Forging Noir Identities

  “Every painting is a love affair,” according to cashier and Sunday painter Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. Cross is explaining his aesthetic principles to Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who later conspires with her lover, the slimy Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), to sign Cross’s paintings with her name. Cross’s words resonate beyond this film; indeed, they could provide the epigraph for a group of early films noir that depict men falling in love with a woman’s portrait.1 Three films in particular—I Wake Up Screaming, Laura, and The Dark Corner—feature fetishized female images that males use to bolster their own identities or to fashion new ones. These women’s portraits become, in effect, mirrors or self-portraits of the men. In these retellings of the Galatea/Pygmalion myth each man ends up creator and forger of the woman and of himself. The pictorial representations in the films also generate two types of self-reflexivity. First, in employing the typical noir device of the framed narrative or flashback, the films analogically replicate the fashioning of these characters’ framed identities within exploitative perspectives. Second, their stories of fabricated female identities invoke Hollywood’s own fabrication of female stars in the studio system.

  A second triad of painting films—Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and the film on which the latter was based, Jean Renoir’s (nonnoir) La chienne—employs painting to explore problems of originality, authorship, and replication. In testing the relation between unconscious desire and waking life, Woman explicitly depicts its female portrait as an aspect of the male psyche. Here the lines between representation and viewer become nearly invisible: the portrait is less a painting than a mirror. Scarlet Street multiplies the reflections, at once repainting Lang’s Woman and forging a copy of Renoir’s film. The latter two films also stage a debate about cinematic authorship and record the film-makers’ concerns about their position in a culture that devalues art in favor of commerce. Finally, the little-known 1946 film Crack-Up uses an art-forgery plot to complicate further these problems of authenticity, originality, and subjectivity, posing anxious but ultimately unresolved questions about the reliability of memory and pictorial representation.

  These films also enrich the discussion of self-reinvention and individualism that I have been pursuing. Whereas the dream films, missing-person movies, and vet noirs test the virtues of self-reinvention and the pursuit of happiness, ultimately finding them vexed but viable—albeit requiring immense sacrifices and often limited by social institutions and personal and national traumas—the forgery films’ complex aesthetic offers a more pointed challenge. In blurring the lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, real and representation, these films imply that human character is too malleable and complex to be framed within a single subject or explained by a single narrative. They advance the idea that identity is not an entity but a never-ending process. They thus turn upside down Franklin’s optimism about self-creation, implying that self reinvention may occur not as a result of individual choice but as an inevitable by-product of the gap between humans and our representations. Their critique of individualism is less political than philosophical and ontological, as they propose that all identities are, to some degree, forgeries.

  Dream Girls

  In I Wake Up Screaming the murder of model Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis) precipitates a search for her killer. Four witnesses recall, in ten flashbacks, the circumstances leading to her death. Promoter Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature) relates how he “discovered” Vicky while she was working as a waitress and collaborated with washed-up actor Robin Ray (Alan Mowbray) and columnist Larry Evans (Allyn Joslyn) to create her as a “face.” Christopher—real name, Botticelli—aims to paint her as a goddess. Yet the flashback structure suggests that each narrator has imagined a somewhat different Vicky: Ray, for example, testifies that “the very sight of her gave me new hope” that he might revive his career. Vicky’s image would refresh his image. Although Vicky insists to Frankie, “I’m a very attractive girl. You didn’t create that. I’m no Frankenstein, you know,” Frankie implies (as does the film) that she is just that—a synthetic creature pasted together from fragments of others’ aspirations. Like Charles Foster Kane she remains a puzzle, a mirror within a mirror—a canvas on which others paint their own desires and values.

  Vicky has always known she would be somebody, and now she has a chance to pursue her version of the American Dream (“Over the Rainbow” is played when Christopher first takes her on as a client). But her sister, Jill (Betty Grable), is less sanguine and reminds Vicky of her class origins: what do people like Frankie Christopher, she asks, have to do with “people like us?” She also warns her that “one week your face is on the cover of a magazine, and the next it’s in the ashcan.” Vicky dismisses the admonition. “From that moment on,” Jill recalls, “life became just one great dizzy world for her”; before long she even “fancie[d] herself as a chanteuse.” Grable’s presence injects a curiously self-reflexive note into this examination of celebrity. Her career followed a path similar to Vicky’s, largely because her mother, Lillian, pushed her toward stardom at an early age and insisted that her daughter “make as many publicity and personal appearances as possible” (Billman 3)
. Like Vicky, Betty was groomed to be a singer, despite her so-so voice. Lillian’s promotion paid off: after a series of lightweight roles in the 1930s, Grable grew wildly famous as one of the GIs’ favorite pinups during World War II. She became identified with—even subsumed by—an iconic picture of herself in a bathing suit, her back to the camera, peeking flirtatiously over her shoulder. Betty Grable became a pinup photo.2 The performance in I Wake Up Screaming, Grable’s second and last dramatic role (Pastos 56), exposes her limitations as an actress: her picture doesn’t fit this frame. Yet her presence also obscures the lines between the real and the representation, reminding us of the artificiality of all actors’ personae and inserting a mirror into the film’s pictorial frame.

  In a sense Vicky’s death scarcely matters, so long as her picture lives on. This fact becomes clear when Jill later recounts how she found Vicky’s body. Christopher bends over the corpse, a circular portrait of Vicky behind him; Jill then moves upstage so that her face is next to Vicky’s portrait. The juxtaposition reveals a real woman next to a two-dimensional one, Betty Grable beside her cinematic mirror image. Frankie, who had pursued but failed to win Vicky, protests to Jill that he never loved her, that “when a man really loves a woman, he doesn’t want to plaster her face all over the papers and magazines. He wants to keep her to himself. Right in here.” Another man—Inspector Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar)—wants to do both: it’s his job, he asserts, to “look at people.” Throughout the film he doggedly pursues Frankie, apparently convinced that he is the murderer. Near the end, however, we discover that Cornell has covered his apartment walls with photos of the dead woman, turning it into a creepy Vicky Lynn shrine. Christopher “took her away from me,” he laments. Cornell had wooed her, but when she became a minor celebrity, “she started gettin’ too good for me.” In death she is his alone. “I’m a sick man,” he admits, before taking poison. Yet his pathological obsession is merely an enlargement of the other males’ attempts to portray a Vicky who might enhance their own images or help them forge a new one. Each of them shares the guilt.