Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (6 page)

The dream’s oedipal elements are obvious enough. Unlike Al Walker’s dream, however, Paul’s blends his recollection of trauma with current events and forecasts of the future. But like Walker, Paul is tormented by guilt. He must both emulate his father and “kill” his influence, while also eliminating his rival, Brett Curtis (Warren William), the man with designs on his mother’s fortune. In the process he must also confront two patriarchal doctors: his friend, Doc Vincent (Regis Toomey), and Curtis’s co-conspirator, the psychiatrist Muhlbach (Charles Arnt). If Muhlbach and Curtis are sinister, Doc Vincent is sympathetic but skeptical: after Paul recounts his dream and reminds Vincent that, after the wreck, the train engineer saw a sign for the Acme Trucking Company, Doc dismisses him with “you’ve been working too hard at school.”

Instead of appearing to his son as a ghost, the elder Cartwright speaks to Paul in more mundane ways. He has left a letter urging the youth to guard his mother from “unscrupulous impostors,” and when Paul first meets Curtis, the two men stand with Paul’s mother, Virginia, before a large portrait of Judge Cartwright, who looms behind them like an apparition urging Paul to “list.” Though Paul rejects his mother’s claim that Curtis “looks like father,” his own duty is to “look like” his father—to judge the scheming Curtis and finish the criminology textbook his father was writing when he died. Like Hamlet’s, Paul’s determination is tested as his dreams begin to come true: Curtis gives Dorothy the “traitorous gift” (
Hamlet
1.5.42) of a bracelet, and the young man collapses upon hearing the Schumann concerto. Soon Paul finds in his father’s papers accounts of one Claude Barrington, accused but never convicted of attacks on young girls. A long slow pan left begins as Paul learns that Barrington was involved with a widow who drowned; as he finishes reading, the camera tilts upward and comes to rest on his father’s portrait. The judge has given him his orders: stop Curtis (i.e., Barrington) from marrying (and probably killing) his mother.

After Curtis and Muhlbach consult about Paul (that “persistent little devil”), Muhlbach decides that the young man “sounds like a subject for mental analysis.” So their plan takes shape: admit Paul to Muhlbach’s sanitarium, Restview Manor, to get him out of the way and, after Curtis marries Virginia, kill him off. Paul provides the ideal pretext for the first step when he faints after hearing Curtis proclaim that this opportunity is “just what I’ve been waiting for.” The dream is coming true! Muhlbach informs Paul that when “filial devotion to a mother goes beyond the borderline of normality,” it can produce hallucinations. He concludes that “it is your emotional aversion to your mother’s remarriage which produces these neurotic symptoms.” In short, Paul suffers from an oedipal complex.

The film’s vision motif emerges after Paul is admitted to his room at Restview, where Muhlbach spies on him through a two-way mirror (this scene rhymes with the earlier scene in which Judge Cartwright’s portrait seemed to gaze down at him). As patriarchal authority is transferred to the psychiatrist, Paul’s goal shifts from completing his father’s unfinished business to throwing off all the paternal influences symbolized by these phallic, panoptic gazes. To do so, he must enhance his own vision. So when Muhlbach brings him to the roof of the clinic, Paul borrows his binoculars and spots an abandoned farm building not far away, while Muhlbach looks on with evil intent. Muhlbach (implausibly) then allows Paul to take a drive with Doc Vincent; though he watches them from the roof, he cannot penetrate the inside of the building, where the two discover the remains of a car, along with a mutilated sign for the
ACME TRUCKING COMPANY
. The sign—
ME RUC OMP
—is a rebus signifying the truth: Muhlbach and Curtis conspired to kill the judge by engineering the train crash.
¹¹
After Vincent enlists the district attorney’s help, Paul confronts Muhlbach, who again locks the young man in his room. The moment arrives for Paul to assert himself: smashing through the mirror, he enters the room beyond, shattering Muhlbach’s visual control. Indeed, in breaking through the looking glass to enter the realm beyond the dream, Paul has thrown off not just Muhlbach’s and Curtis’s dominance but his father’s as well.

After Muhlbach is arrested, Paul and his friends race to the family cabin, where Curtis threatens to molest Dorothy. Wrestling with Curtis before the latter is shot and captured, Paul is knocked unconscious and experiences the dream that ends the film. In it he is walking with his mother. “Look, mother,” he declares, “we can see ahead.” They’re joined by Doc Vincent, who advises her, “Don’t look back. It’s all over.” The father is nowhere to be seen, and Paul walks out of the frame—and out of his nightmare alley—with his girlfriend, Lydia
(Mary McLeod). He has convinced one father surrogate, Doc Vincent, that he’s not crazy, and he has overcome the sexual and scientific machinations of two other older males. He has made himself a man by appropriating these men’s attributes: his father’s sense of justice, the doctors’ analytic powers, Curtis’s sexual confidence.
¹²
And he has defeated the phallic gaze of his patriarchs by borrowing their binoculars. Crafting a new identity by uniting the shards of the past and then discarding them, young Cartwright executes a feat that neither Hamlet nor many noir protagonists achieve: liberating himself from the perturbed spirits of the past.

Another young protagonist also faces Horatio’s question about revenge undertaken in the name of the father:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff?
… assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? (
Hamlet
1.4.75–80)

In Joseph Losey’s
The Big Night
George La Main (John Barrymore Jr.) watches as his father, Andy (Preston Foster), is beaten and humiliated, then seeks revenge on the man who perpetrated the beating, influential sportswriter Al Judge (Howard St. John). The film unfolds in a single night, enacting a waking oedipal dream in which a son aims to prove he is stronger than his father and in which the primal scene of a father’s beating, along with its blatant symbols (his father’s gun, Judge’s phallic cane), seems to issue from his unconscious.
¹³
Its concise nocturnal story—set on the evening of George’s sixteenth birthday—traces a rite of passage on a
Walpurgisnacht
during which George evolves from child to adult by realizing the limitations of violence and testing the varieties of masculine identity.
¹⁴
As in a fable, each scene stages a temptation or test.

Early in the film “Georgie” is visually diminished: after some other boys rough him up, a long shot uses forced perspective to make him look tiny. He is further diminished during the beating sequence. As his father and the patrons of Handy Andy’s Bar and Grill celebrate George’s birthday, Al Judge enters with his entourage and begins issuing commands: “Take off your shirt, La Main; I want to see some skin!” Forcing Andy to his hands and knees, Judge flogs him with his cane. Shockingly, Andy silently submits to this humiliation. Indeed, the dialogue and blocking suggest that he is not only stripping but being made to perform fellatio.
Meanwhile, Flanagan (Howland Chamberlain), Andy’s live-in partner of sixteen years, holds Georgie down and crushes the boy’s glasses. These queer signifiers (which also exist in the novel) both advance the vision motif and invoke the film’s explicit themes: masculinity, love, and justice. George vows to kill Judge, both to “overcome his own insecure sense of masculinity,” writes Tony Williams, and to “disavow the shameful spectacle of his … father’s symbolic castration” (“
Big Night
” 101). Like Paul Cartwright, George becomes his father’s surrogate, borrowing his gun and donning his much-too-large suit to undergo tests of manhood that his father, he believes, has failed.
¹⁵

Instead, George repeatedly proves his immaturity. Thus, for example, on the way to a boxing match (the two tickets were gifts from Andy), George tends a friend’s baby, while playing with his father’s loaded pistol. Oblivious to his risky behavior, the child’s mother praises George as a “real father.” Entering the arena, he is accosted by a man named Peckinpaugh (another “punitive father figure,” according to Williams: 102), then sits next to Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), from whom he borrows binoculars (George doesn’t watch the fight; he’s spying on Judge). Cooper’s interest at first seems paternal, but mostly he uses George as an excuse to get drunk, while occasionally manhandling him.
¹⁶
Later George follows Judge to a club where a black chanteuse sings with her band; from George’s point of view we watch the drummer’s hands become Judge’s hands flogging Andy, and as George remembers his birthday cake, the singer asks “Am I Too Young?”
¹⁷
An intoxicated George then makes his way to Cooper’s apartment, where he passes out, to be awakened by Marion (Joan Lorring), the sister of Cooper’s girlfriend. He and Marion exchange a chaste kiss, and he tells of his father’s humiliation, concluding that he’s not “a real man,” that he “turns out just to be a fake.” Yet he naively believes he can tell with one look that Cooper is “all right.”

At last George finds Judge in the apartment of Frances, his father’s fiancée, where Judge reveals that Frances was his sister and explains why he beat up Andy: Frances committed suicide after Andy refused to marry her. George spares Judge, but when the tables turn, with George taking Judge’s cane, Judge grabs George’s gun and threatens to kill him. A struggle ensues in which Judge is shot, apparently to death, and the panicked George appeals to Cooper for aid. His naive vision of the man is proven wrong when Cooper—his new, “all right” father—kicks him out. A truer form of loyalty is depicted next in a beautiful, wordless scene shot through a window, in which we watch Andy remove his son’s clothes, put him to bed, then don the jacket and meet the police. Andy is prepared to sacrifice his life
for his son. Andy—not Cooper, and not Judge, who had abjectly begged for his life when George threatened him—is the real man, the person willing to accept blame for another. Yet Andy’s protective instincts also prevent his son from taking responsibility for himself. So as Andy is being led away, George leaps up and confesses, only to discover that Judge was only superficially wounded. In the aftermath George asks his father, “What’s the use of my living? There’s nothing matters to me anymore, and nobody I matter to.” Andy replies, “You matter to me,” and divulges his big secret: George’s mother is not dead, as he has told his son; she left Andy for another man. Because Andy is still married to her, he couldn’t marry Frances. “That’s how it is with some men,” he concludes. “There’s only one woman in the whole world for them.” He believes he merited Judge’s punishment, but George will likely receive a light sentence.
¹⁸

Over the course of the film Judge and George become identified. Not only do their names sound alike, but both are, like Paul Cartwright and his father, judges: Al metes out rough justice for his sister’s death, and George presumes to judge both his father and Judge. In their final confrontation, however, George proves himself the better judge by mustering the empathy that Judge cannot. Andy and Al Judge are also counterparts: each is haunted by, and perversely attached to, a lost woman, and these allegiances trap them in an age-old ritual of punishment and revenge. George, however, is now free to forge a new identity, not by incorporating the attributes of these father figures but by sloughing off their worn-out cane and jacket. Perhaps he will see better without his glasses. In any case he has awakened from his dream of macho revenge.

Even so, the film’s definition of masculinity remains troubling. One might argue that, like his father, George wants to be punished, because in so doing he can serve as scapegoat for his father’s perceived crime and for his own violation of family roles, and because scapegoating fits the retributive justice in which he still believes. The film also leaves several vexing questions unanswered. Is Andy a long-suffering, righteous man or a pathetic fool carrying the torch for a woman who doesn’t love him? In protecting his son, is he preventing him from seeing evil or precluding him from understanding genuine goodness? Is a “real” man one who suffers for others or one who permits others to accept and exercise their own agency? And can any young man ever be free of patriarchs who stage such powerful sadomasochistic rites of protection and domination? With these questions lingering, it seems less likely that George will fashion a new dream, a new self.

Down-and-out veteran Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) finds a wallet filled with cash and returns it to its owner, wealthy Miami businessman Edward Roman (Steve Cochran). Roman is a little Caesar—a tyrant who abuses his wife and servants and kills a man who refuses to do business with him (he sics his enormous dog on the unfortunate fellow). Roman reserves his affection for his “adviser,” Gino (Peter Lorre). Why did Chuck return the wallet? asks Roman. “I guess I’m just a sucker,” he replies. Roman approves of his answer, and hires Chuck—whom he gives the doglike nickname of “Scottie”—as his new chauffeur. Adapted from Cornell Woolrich’s
The Black Path of Fear
,
The Chase
features a typically passive Woolrich protagonist. Though no ephebe like Paul or George, Chuck too desires to build a new self, and this lucky break offers a chance. Unfortunately, his self-description seems apt: unwilling or unable to see the evil around him, Chuck frequently plays the sucker. His partial blindness is also illustrated by the film’s dark, brooding mise-en-scène (courtesy of director Arthur Ripley and cinematographer Franz Planer) and by its repeated images of portholes, keyholes, and small windows.

But Roman’s desire for a driver is odd, for—in a blatant metaphor for his domineering personality—he has rigged his car so that he can operate the accelerator and brakes from the rear while the driver steers. The world’s most annoying backseat driver, Roman uses the contraption to test Chuck’s obedience by racing a train to a crossing, only to slam on the brakes at the last second. It seems, then, that Chuck has just traded his navy uniform for the suit of a trained monkey serving a sinister master. But Roman also allows him to chauffeur his aptly named wife, Lorna (Michele Morgan), to the beach, where she gazes forlornly at the crashing waves and contemplates sailing to Cuba. She even offers Chuck a thousand dollars to take her there and away from the husband she loathes. Foolishly, Chuck agrees to do it.