Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (20 page)

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 world. 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?

“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.

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.

During Cornell’s confession Vicky’s portrait remains in the frame between the two men: she is both the link and the wedge between them. The composition links two brands of framing, connoting that Cornell’s attempted framing of Frankie follows from his fetishistic framing of Vicky. The narrative flashbacks enact a similar process: each narrator puts Vicky together piece by piece, yet the parts never quite cohere, and she remains fragmented, two-dimensional. Through her, however,
I Wake Up Screaming
encourages us to reflect on its status as constructed artifact, a series of pictures mirroring the audience’s and the Hollywood production system’s forging of idealized identities. Like Grable and (as I show below) Gene Tierney, Vicky allows herself to become a commodity. As such she exists only as a function of others’ belief in her—of audience members who not only consume the creations of real-world Frankie Christophers but who also partake of Ed Cornell’s fetishizing impulses.

Made at the same studio, Fox, and by the same producer, Darryl F. Zanuck,
Laura
is an elaborate repainting of
I Wake Up Screaming
that similarly calls attention to its own fictional status. Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) and columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) fall in love with competing portraits of aspiring (and murdered) advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). McPherson and Lydecker form two parts of a single male psyche: the investigator and the murderer, the one who will love her and the one who has loved her, the macho detective and the ambiguously gay snob.
³
To Lydecker Laura was a prize objet d’art for his collection; to McPherson her mysterious death makes her intriguingly enigmatic.