Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  While purporting to expose the differences between originality and forgery, then, Crack-Up instead reveals a symbiotic relationship between them. Further, its depiction of Steele’s divided psyche exposes an unresolved ambivalence both about the war (which, as I argued in chapter 3, Americans wanted both to remember and to forget) and about representation and modern art: though ostensibly condemning European modernism, the film incorporates it. Even so, the portrait noirs dramatize the power of pictures to make their subjects, frame expectations, and unsettle conventional ideas about gender, selfhood, and memory.

  More broadly, the painting noirs validate the Emersonian quest to find and defend one’s “aboriginal” self even as they dramatize, with Franklinesque ingenuity, the near-impossibility of such an enterprise. These films remind us that self-reinvention may not be the result of individual choice but of the gap between reality and our representations of it. The multiplication of these forged selves raises the possibility that the ideal of self-fashioning relies on an untenable assumption about originality. In short, these films suggest that all identities are forged. In them, for better or worse, there is no cohesive subject, no Emersonian essence; there are only self-portraits that we paint and repaint, identities that we invent—or that are invented for us—again and again.

  5

  Noir’s Cars

  Automobility and Amoral Space

  Los Angeles. Night. A gray coupe careens down a dark street, hurtles through a stoplight, barely missing an oncoming truck, then pulls up unsteadily before a tall building. A wounded man emerges: Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), narrator/protagonist of Billy Wilder’s influential 1944 film noir, Double Indemnity. The speeding, out-of-control car in fact symbolizes Neff, whose life has gone crazy ever since the day he first visited half-dressed, anklet-wearing housewife (and murderer) Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), ostensibly to sell auto insurance.

  Cars serve both as the pretext for the plot’s insurance scam and as part of the film’s broader transportation motif. Recall, for example, the witty double-entendre dialogue between Neff and Phyllis, in which he suggests he needs to drive her name “around the block a few times,” to which Phyllis offers the flirtatious put-down that he’s exceeding the “speed limit.” “How fast was I going, officer?” Neff asks. “I’d say around ninety,” she answers, and so on. Recall, too, that Neff impersonates Mr. Dietrichson on a train to set up the actual murder. And remember the words of Neff’s mentor, claims investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), that murderers ride a trolley car “all the way to the end of the line and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.” If the train and trolley represent fate, the auto exemplifies the desire to flout history, destiny, and law, signifying freedom from rules and the American dream of forging a new self.

  One might argue that film noir begins with Double Indemnity’s opening scene.1 That would be appropriate, for cars figure prominently throughout the noir cycle. And though they sometimes appear in what Edward Dimendberg calls “centripetal” or “downtown” noirs (108) such as Side Street, they figure much more centrally in those set in the West and Southwest. According to Paul Fotsch it is no accident that so many noirs take place in Los Angeles, for the city’s design—a centerless string of suburbs—engendered a sense of isolation and loneliness that “created instabilities for domestic relationships” (107) which, in turn, “facilitate[d] crime” (113). The profound sense of privacy and isolation fostered by geography extends to citizens’ cars, which in films noir become not only alternative homes but amoral spaces where laws and social arrangements—marriage, class hierarchies—are suspended. Thus, for example, in Double Indemnity Neff uses his car to establish his alibi for a murder that—committed by him but engineered by Phyllis—takes place in the Dietrichsons’ sedan.2 The camera holds on Phyllis’s face as, out of the frame, Neff strangles her husband: in more ways than one Phyllis is in the driver’s seat. The murder of Dietrichson inaugurates a pattern: the remarkable number of violent crimes that occur in noir’s cars.

  In these films automobiles also become overdetermined symbols of characters’ aspirations and disappointments. For example, Tay Garnett’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice illustrates the entrapment of adulterous lovers Cora Smith (Lana Turner) and Frank Chambers (John Garfield) through their lack of a car. As they try to hitchhike their way out of Twin Oaks, the roadside diner owned by Cora’s husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway), Frank explains why they have to thumb: “Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing. But stealing his car, that’s larceny”—it means taking his identity and hope.3 But without wheels the lovers are soon soiled, saddened, and dispirited, as Cora’s increasingly smudged white outfit graphically indicates. Hitchhiking, she complains, will only lead “right back where [she] started”: the “hash house.” In Cain’s novel Cora even describes their stunted hopes in terms of auto makes: “We had all that love,” she tells Frank, “and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords” (Cain, Postman 70). Their “make” forever brands them as ordinary, dooming their aspirations to crack up on the class ceiling. Hence their scheme of self-elevation or “rebranding” via murder culminates in Nick’s car, where Frank clubs Nick to death with a bottle, while Cora sits behind the wheel. The car seems to carry the weight of karma: after getting away with Nick’s murder, they sit in the front seat and exchange a “kiss with dreams in it,” but the kiss so distracts Frank that he drives into a bridge, killing Cora and condemning himself to death row for her “murder.”

  Cora’s words demonstrate how Americans internalized their identification with cars, commodifying themselves through automotive self-extension. The selling of autos in the aftermath of World War II, when automobility was promoted as a solution to economic and social malaise, encouraged this process. During the war, passenger car production had halted as factories and workers were enlisted in the war effort. Hence, when the “government rescinded wartime curbs on car production, gasoline purchases, and speed limits,” writes Katie Mills, driving a new car became a “way to celebrate winning the war” (36). As millions of veterans returned home, landed jobs, and started families, their newly purchased cars became signs of restored consumer power and renewed possibility—of a refurbished American Dream (see Mottram 107). The material gain encoded in cars, as Ken Hillis notes, was thus “directly connected to acquiring greater agency and social status” (4). Exploiting these phenomena, some post-war writers turned road stories into a “declaration of independence,” creating from highway narratives a “broader vision of autonomy and mobility for all” (Mills 2). These two linked qualities—autonomy and mobility—unite in narratives of “automobility” (Mills 18), in which the automobile’s “synthesis of privacy and mobility” (Field 61) promised a means of bypassing class and gender barriers. Noir’s cars likewise frequently represent the propulsive aspirations of disenfranchised people who turn to crime, embodying the possibility of social mobility through automobility.

  As Kris Lackey observes, the postwar auto also offered ways of “surmounting biological limitations” and “challenging both nature and nurture” (12). In expanding the self, the car “loses its mechanical identity … and becomes a kind of bionic prosthesis” (32). Cars contributed to that conception of human identity as “a shiny commodity without a past” (Hillis 9) outlined in my introduction. It makes sense, then, that in many noirs the main car is a convertible, associated since its invention with youth, freedom, and rebellion.4 Convertibles symbolize the American belief in mobile identity: convertibles, that is, represent the very promise of convertibility. Convertibles embodied the pursuit of happiness; they were a vehicle in which to chase the American Dream. Yet in film noir the convertible’s positive aura is repeatedly shadowed by defeat and disillusion, as drivers make reckless decisions, crash against cl
ass barriers, and become victims of law-abiding citizens’ guilt over their own transgressive desires. For noir’s characters convertibility is usually a chimera, automobility a flywheel leading nowhere.

  Unlike convertibles, whose open tops encourage visibility, most new postwar cars were “mini-arsenal[s]—of privacy, seclusion and isolationism on a par with our national thinking—and a vehicular deterrent to invasion by others” (Wieder and Hall 32). The car’s symbolic power lies in its representation as a commodity identified with its owner. The figure of the hitchhiker, who appears in a number of significant noirs, challenges this aura of ownership by personifying risk, the intrusion of chaos, and the fragility of the postwar prosperity and security that automobiles embody. Though they are often loners who seem to epitomize frontier individualism, hitchers are also those who can’t afford a car; using their thumbs, they seek to attach themselves to the automobility of more prosperous citizens. Whether vagabonds, drifters, psychopaths, or simple thugs, hitchhikers both exemplify the American Dream’s individualist ideology and challenge its faith in unlimited upward movement.

  Later noirs more dramatically depict the risks of automobility. In noirs produced after the Cold War had become a pressing concern, the automobile is portrayed as a Trojan horse: a false gift whose promise of freedom from obligation actually signifies a system—enforced by government institutions that also use automotive technologies—that transforms drivers into automatons. In these films cars are metonymies for a commodified world gone mad, a realm of utter insecurity propelled by internal and external explosions that may end in the largest explosion of all—the atomic bomb. These films warn that our addiction to automobility may have turned us into machines

  Lamming It

  A linked set of early noirs mobilizes autos as potent symbols of their hapless characters’ desperation and restlessness. In these “outlaw road movie[s]” (Laderman 20) the lovers wish to break away from oppressive social circumstances yet long for a respectable domesticity they can never achieve. Postwar automotive conditions again influence these narratives. As William Beverly notes, the rapid expansion of roadways in the Southwest, where these films are set, rendered the fugitive criminal “just another face on the highway” (117); given such anonymity, the car becomes an amoral space, and a driver’s permit a license to do anything at all. Postwar cars were also much roomier than earlier vehicles: advertisements touted them as a “total environment on wheels, rivaling home for comfort and luxury” (qtd. in Mottram 107). As if inhabiting this consumer fantasy, these films’ fleeing lovers treat their cars not only as sexual fetishes, symbols of identity and murder weapons, but as living rooms, bedrooms, and nurseries. These young fugitives’ cars replace “the normative American home and its various constituents” (Beverly 141), just as the lovers themselves expose the criminal impulses lurking inside law-abiding, apparently domesticated citizens. Yet their improvised mobile domesticity never lasts: the loss of their auto adumbrates the loss of liberty and often the loss of life.

  The primary examples of this subgenre are Desperate, They Live by Night, Shockproof, and Gun Crazy, but their progenitor, Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), introduces the major motifs. Lang repeatedly displays ex-convict Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) and his wife Joan (Sylvia Sidney) being hounded by suspicious citizens such as Eddie’s bigoted boss, who fires him for tardiness when he takes an hour to go house-hunting with Joan. As Tom Gunning writes, here Lang, like the makers of films such as Caged and High Wall, depicts “American society as mimicking and reproducing the structure of a prison in its suspicious surveillance and inhuman maintenance of disciplinary protocols” (246). Eddie and Joan are the victims of a panoptic environment that, paradoxically, prevents them from becoming like everyone else. Yet the film’s ordinary citizens are fascinated by crime and criminals: wanted posters are ubiquitous; an innkeeper keeps a stash of true crime magazines; and bit-players exchange envious dialogue about the fugitives’ allegedly luxurious lifestyle. Nor do allegedly law-abiding types really abide it: we see a cop steal an Italian grocer’s apple, and two gas station attendants pilfer money from the till, then blame the theft on Eddie and Joan. These ordinary folks fit the description given them by the bank robbers in Edward Anderson’s contemporaneous novel (the source for They Live by Night): they are all “thieves like us.” The lawful need outlaws to express their own antisocial urges but repress their guilt by gleefully cooperating with the police.

  After he is wrongly accused of an armored car robbery, Eddie sneaks up on the house he and Joan have purchased and gazes at her through the window. After a cut, he’s seen from inside the house, his face trapped within the window’s box, cramped by cage-like bars. Though no longer physically in prison, Eddie is forever barred from the bourgeois domesticity he desires and has little choice but to create an alternative domestic space seemingly immune from the prejudices of those who condemn and glorify his exploits—a car. And once Joan, a straight-arrow who works in a law office, picks up Eddie in the car she “borrows” from her boss, she becomes his accomplice. “We have a right to live,” she proclaims, standing at the car door; in the next scene we see her pumping stolen gas. The car’s need for fuel acts as a metonymy for the lovers’ need for freedom; it is as if automobility itself—the desire to elevate Eddie from the criminal class to the honest working class—pushes Joan into criminality. Though they try to pass as regular citizens, features such as the bullet holes in the car window “tell too much”: the car remains associated with the criminal identities they can’t shed. After Joan (implausibly) delivers her own baby, their auto becomes their mobile home, complete with nursery, living room, and kitchen. Yet they still yearn for ordinary domesticity. “We were inside a house once, for a few minutes,” Eddie recalls wistfully. “Lots o’ people in love get to live inside a house.” “Anywhere’s our home,” Joan assures him. “In the car, out there on that cold star, anywhere’s our home.” But their home isn’t mobile enough: directly after this conversation Eddie drives into a police roadblock. Machine-gun fire pours through the back window, wounding them both and forcing them from their car, whereupon they both die. Narrow-minded people, the film suggests, will always sacrifice those like Eddie and Joan, less for their criminal deeds than from envy of the threatening (anti) social mobility and freedom figured by their speeding car.

  Director Douglas Sirk’s little-known Shockproof, scripted by Helen Deutsch and Samuel Fuller, is a distaff version of the same story. This time the man, Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde), is a parole officer in love with an ex-convict named Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), who cannot sever her tie to oily gambler Harry Wesson (John Baragrey). After Griff receives a mysterious phone call from Harry that ends in a gunshot, Griff picks up Jenny in his car. During the drive she tells him that she accidentally shot Harry: here, as in several other noirs, the car serves as the engine of narrative itself.5 When she finishes her story, Griff turns both the car and himself around and takes Jenny on the lam. During their journey cars become symbols of sexual license (though they allegedly marry in secret offscreen, this is an unconvincing nod to the Breen Office) and shifting identities. Those two meanings ingeniously converge when Griff and Jenny steal a newlywed couple’s car, its hanging cans and “Just Married” sign covering the license plate. Though not literally a convertible, the car nevertheless represents their mobile identities: Jenny dyes her hair (back to its original brunette shade), and Griff assumes a nom de guerre. But as we saw in the missing-person noirs, the freedom to become anybody eventually turns them into nobodies, as represented by their increasingly humble modes of transportation: car, bus, then freight train. Their downward flight briefly comes to rest in an oil driller’s shack that, for Griff, proves that they’re “living like pigs.” Unable to bear the thought of a life of perpetual downward mobility, the lovers turn themselves in. Griff had unwittingly forecast this prospect while earlier explaining a western movie to his younger brother: criminals, he explained, usually give up when “corrosion�
�� sets in. When he decides to give up, Griff cites this line, suggesting that the lovers’ flight has transmuted them into worn-out car parts. As in You Only Live Once, cars’ amoral space devolves into amorphousness, and unending automobility becomes a traveling prison cell.

  Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night opens with an overhead shot of a car holding three escaped convicts: young Bowie Bowers (Farley Granger) and his mentors Chicamaw (Jay C. Flippen) and T-Dub (Howard Da Silva). The car gets a flat, and while fixing the tire, Bowie talks of his dream of owning a gas station with Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), the grubby daughter of an accomplice. At once Bowie’s conscience (“fine company you’re runnin’ with,” she admonishes, standing above him in the frame) and his motive for mobility, Keechie hopes to fix Bowie as he does the tire. Alas, as an escaped convict with no money or prospects, Bowie has little choice but to drive the getaway car for his partners, who understand that their criminal identities are embodied in their getaway cars and thus always burn them after heists.

  Soon, however, Chicamaw’s reckless driving causes a crash that injures Bowie, implicates him in two murders, and forces him temporarily to exit the motorway. Nursed back to health by Keechie, Bowie falls in love and marries her. Whereas Keechie’s blossoming is blatantly displayed in Cathy O’Donnell’s flattering new makeup and clothes, Bowie’s rebirth is illustrated by his postnuptial car—a dashing convertible, which embodies his wish to convert from impoverished ex-convict to up-and-coming man about town. As in You Only Live Once, the convertible becomes a mobile home, complete with dining room and, of course, bedroom (Keechie soon becomes pregnant). After a final job results in the death of his cronies, Bowie and Keechie flee to New Orleans, where they try to impersonate ordinary newlyweds. But a sequence depicting their outing to a park and a nightclub (they are mystified by golf and disdain dancing) dramatizes their status as permanent outcasts. At evening’s end a chanteuse sums up their condition: they’re just two kids in a “red wagon,” she sings, and even if it’s “all [their] own,” it’s going nowhere. Bowie, the song continues, cannot forever use Keechie as his “spare tire,” for eventually “you get burned when you play with fire.” As in Shock-proof and You Only Live Once, the end of automobility (here, in a motel) signals the end of the male’s life (in the novel both die). Their convertible provided only the illusion of transformation; its mobility was merely geographic, never social, and even that movement was circular. Little more than children, Bowie and Keechie were merely play-acting in their wagon, briefly enacting a fantasy of rising from poverty.