Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream Read Online Free
Author: Mark Osteen
Tags: United States, General, History, Performing Arts, Film & Video, History & Criticism, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
echoes and effects are everywhere in noir: in the numerous traumatized veterans that populate the films; in their many missing or displaced persons; in the tensions noir records regarding women’s role in the workplace and the domestic arena; in the postwar anti-communist backlash. Moreover, noir’s seemingly obsessive focus on psychic disorder—which helps to explain the frequent appearance of psychiatrists in the films—may suggest what Krutnik calls a national “breakdown of confidence in the defining and sustaining cultural regimentation of identity and authority” (
Lonely
55). As Philip Kemp and Warren Susman have argued, noir represents the reemergence of a “suppressed element of American culture” (Kemp 270; Susman is quoted in Neve,
Film and Politics
152). Its role as a cultural barometer is one reason why noir has come to be recognized as a watershed in American cinema and why the wealth of recent scholarship has assumed such a wide array of approaches. 9
There can be little doubt that noir is a product of a period of enormous upheaval. Massive population shifts occurred as veterans of both sexes returned home, producing dissonances in gender dynamics and definitions of domesticity. Increased racial agitation and organizing (CORE, for example, was formed inthis period) occurred as African American citizens protested in equality and police brutality, and as black veterans discovered that Jim Crow practices lingered on the home front. The most popular music of the period was jazz, a hybrid, black-originated style that encouraged emotional liberation. A burgeoning consumer culture fueled the desire for self-improvement and social mobility while limiting its scope; and the postwar economic boom was accompanied by massive layoffs, renewed labor unrest, and heightened concerns about the stability of money and the plight of the worker. Strikes and antifascist political activism prompted a crackdown by reactionary governmental and nongovernmental forces. 10 Meanwhile, fears of communism and news of the Soviet Union’s A-bomb tests terrified citizens and triggered an atmosphere of paranoia and prying. Noir both reflects this postwar hangover (residual anxieties about identity, gender, disability, and labor) and registers new fears about race, representation, capitalism, technology, privacy, and security. Amid this turmoil, films noir ask whether the American Dream of liberty and democracy is still viable and, if so, how it may be altered or fulfilled.
The above paragraph provides a version of what is dubbed (usually with pejorative connotations) the “Zeitgeist” theory: the idea that film noir (itself subject to varying definitions) reflected and shaped a peculiarly downbeat or anxious postwar mood and, as Kemp declares, exposes “the symptoms of a deformed society” (268–69; see also F. Hirsch 21). Recently this theory has come under attack. Richard Maltby, for example, observes that the Zeitgeist theory is “notoriously difficult to substantiate,” since it depends “on the selective presentation of its evidence”; it may even be circular, as angst-ridden narratives are used as evidence of social problems that allegedly generated the angst-ridden narratives (41). Will Straw remarks that noir criticism is plagued by a contradiction, having come “to be understood, conveniently, as both a conscious, programmatic intervention by politically engaged filmmakers … and a cluster of symptoms through which collective or individual psyches betrayed themselves” (132). 11 This apparent contradiction has led Steve Neale, perhaps the Zeitgeist theory’s most voluble critic, to announce that the entire category called film noir is hopelessly incoherent (174). But Straw’s observation actually exposes complexity, not contradiction: noir was
in some cases
the product of conscious interventions by politically engaged film-makers
and
, at other times, a phenomenon betraying a set of subterranean anxieties. A
Lonely
55). As Philip Kemp and Warren Susman have argued, noir represents the reemergence of a “suppressed element of American culture” (Kemp 270; Susman is quoted in Neve,
Film and Politics
152). Its role as a cultural barometer is one reason why noir has come to be recognized as a watershed in American cinema and why the wealth of recent scholarship has assumed such a wide array of approaches. 9
There can be little doubt that noir is a product of a period of enormous upheaval. Massive population shifts occurred as veterans of both sexes returned home, producing dissonances in gender dynamics and definitions of domesticity. Increased racial agitation and organizing (CORE, for example, was formed inthis period) occurred as African American citizens protested in equality and police brutality, and as black veterans discovered that Jim Crow practices lingered on the home front. The most popular music of the period was jazz, a hybrid, black-originated style that encouraged emotional liberation. A burgeoning consumer culture fueled the desire for self-improvement and social mobility while limiting its scope; and the postwar economic boom was accompanied by massive layoffs, renewed labor unrest, and heightened concerns about the stability of money and the plight of the worker. Strikes and antifascist political activism prompted a crackdown by reactionary governmental and nongovernmental forces. 10 Meanwhile, fears of communism and news of the Soviet Union’s A-bomb tests terrified citizens and triggered an atmosphere of paranoia and prying. Noir both reflects this postwar hangover (residual anxieties about identity, gender, disability, and labor) and registers new fears about race, representation, capitalism, technology, privacy, and security. Amid this turmoil, films noir ask whether the American Dream of liberty and democracy is still viable and, if so, how it may be altered or fulfilled.
The above paragraph provides a version of what is dubbed (usually with pejorative connotations) the “Zeitgeist” theory: the idea that film noir (itself subject to varying definitions) reflected and shaped a peculiarly downbeat or anxious postwar mood and, as Kemp declares, exposes “the symptoms of a deformed society” (268–69; see also F. Hirsch 21). Recently this theory has come under attack. Richard Maltby, for example, observes that the Zeitgeist theory is “notoriously difficult to substantiate,” since it depends “on the selective presentation of its evidence”; it may even be circular, as angst-ridden narratives are used as evidence of social problems that allegedly generated the angst-ridden narratives (41). Will Straw remarks that noir criticism is plagued by a contradiction, having come “to be understood, conveniently, as both a conscious, programmatic intervention by politically engaged filmmakers … and a cluster of symptoms through which collective or individual psyches betrayed themselves” (132). 11 This apparent contradiction has led Steve Neale, perhaps the Zeitgeist theory’s most voluble critic, to announce that the entire category called film noir is hopelessly incoherent (174). But Straw’s observation actually exposes complexity, not contradiction: noir was
in some cases
the product of conscious interventions by politically engaged film-makers
and
, at other times, a phenomenon betraying a set of subterranean anxieties. A
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