Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream Read Online Free Page B

American culture. In his influential book
More Than Night
, Naremore defines film noir as a nebulous signifier of a “liminal space” lying “between Europe and America, between high modernism and ‘blood melodrama,’ and between low-budget crime movies and art cinema” (220). I endorse the spirit of this definition but would add that the best way to define noir is to examine specific films in detail and then use these explorations to generate prevailing patterns, themes, and tendencies. That is what I have sought to do in this book. The result, I hope, proves that
film noir
remains a useful term with which to designate a peculiarly interrogative, deeply moral, visually adventurous and politically aware sensibility that characterized American cinema between 1944 and 1959.
    With their often darkly expressionist mise-en-scènes, their complex narrative structures, their violent, sexual stories, their sense of doom, and their skeptical treatment of American ideals and identities, noirs provide an ideal opportunity, as Maltby notes, for an “interpretation of American culture through its shared daydreams” (42). This recognition seems to call for a psychoanalytic approach akin to that of Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo, who see in noir evidence of “condensations and displacements between various concrete anxieties over race, sex, maternity, and national identity” (xv). Yet Oliver and Trigo offer virtually no historical context for their assertions. My approach is less psychoanalytic than cultural—an effort to chart noir’s political unconscious. I argue, therefore, that noir’s alienated characters act out antisocial urges shared by their audiences, being sanctioned to enact what others keep hidden. These characters—amnesiacs, ephebes, cynical men on the make, convicts; feckless adventurers, gullible youngsters, detectives enticed by mysterious women; gangsters and thieves, traumatized veterans, female professors, boxers—become sites where anxieties about identity, class, agency, individualism, technology, consumerism, race, gender, and trauma are played out, thereby reflecting and shaping the consciousness of aculture. Film noir, in short, was an underground theater where Americans staged the most urgent concerns of a society in transition.
     
    I have argued that the film
Nightmare Alley
dramatizes a conflict in American conceptions of identity, mobility, and success. I concentrate in chapters 1 through 4 on similar themes to elucidate noir’s critique of individualism and its ethos of self-making. It is odd that, despite the frequent description of noirs as “dreamlike,” no critic has thoroughly analyzed the films’ dream sequences. The first chapter, “Someone Else’s Nightmare,” does just that, drawing from psychoanalytic theory to explore oneiric scenarios in films such as
The Chase, The Dark Past, Spellbound, Strange Illusion
, and
Uncle Harry
. Noir dreams, I find, expose pathologies that represent not just individual maladies but widely shared anxieties about self, sexuality, and, most of all, about the relations between past and present: virtually all noir dream sequences concern a character’s crippling attachment to the past. Only by severing oneself from history, these films suggest, can individuals restore an integrated identity; those who do not are doomed to remain trapped, like Stan Carlisle, in a vortex of repetition. The noir dream films, like the works treated in chapters 2 and 3 , dramatize a collective neurosis: the conflict between remembering and forgetting.
    The second chapter, “Missing Persons,” investigates noirs involving amnesia and switched identities
(Street of Chance, The Killers, Out of the Past, No Man of Her Own, Dark Passage
, and
Hollow Triumph)
, discovering in them an even more pessimistic outlook on self-fashioning. In these films, characters change their names or faces—like many real Americans who started over after the war—to escape the consequences of