Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (47 page)

Though the Breen Office objected to the film’s “extremely low moral tone, with emphasis on almost animal-like instincts and passions” (they recommended that the leads’ attraction be “one of love, rather than one of lust”), the shooting style and mise-en-scène are just as responsible as the script for the film’s creeping sense of doom (Breen to Spiegel).
The Prowler
uses many extended takes—according to Losey, designed to create continuity for the actors—to generate a stifling, claustrophobic sense of entrapment that illustrates the feelings of Webb and Susan.
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Indeed, the motif of enclosure is introduced before the opening titles, as a shadowy man peeps through a window at an unidentified woman. Likewise, when Garwood and his partner, Bud Crocker (John Maxwell), investigate an alleged prowler at the Gilvray home, Garwood goes outside and stares through the window at Susan. He is the prowler, in more ways than one: no mere voyeur, he wants what John Gilvray, a radio DJ, possesses and is always on the prowl for a way to break out of his class trap (another shot in the sequence frames Garwood within a window to capture his sense of enclosure).

Later Garwood wonders what “her angle is,” and after Bud informs him that they’re “well-heeled,” he returns to her home, using the pretext of checking on Susan. The lurking camera seems to spy on them as Garwood takes liberties—rifling her drawers, then asking about her past. Learning that her acting ambitions came to naught, he asks, “Didn’t you have enough pull?” He then recounts his own past (they’re from nearby towns in Indiana): he won a basketball scholarship, but after being benched as a poor teammate (he was a scorer who never passed the ball), he told off the coach and lost his scholarship. “Just another one of my lousy breaks,” he complains. None of this was his fault; it was just bad luck. Now he’s “just another dumb cop,” a man no better than his unambitious father, who “was too yellow to risk his buck twenty an hour” as an oil-field worker. For Garwood everything is a scam. Consumed with envy and bitterness, he wants “everything free,” as Susan observes.

Most of all, he wants Susan, whose husband is rarely home, even though she plays his radio show constantly (to protest the blacklist, Losey had Trumbo serve as Gilvray’s voice; Ciment 103). His aural presence is uncanny: during Garwood’s third visit, just after he picks the lock on the safe where Gilvray keeps his cigarettes (in the process finding the will that leaves $62,000 to Susan), Gilvray mentions cigarettes on his show. After Garwood overplays his hand during the third visit and Susan slaps him and forces him to leave, he returns (wearing his uniform) to apologize. This ploy works, and when Gilvray plays the sensual tune “Baby,” he unwittingly provides the soundtrack for the inception of his wife’s affair. After the tune finishes, Gilvray signs off with, “The cost of living is going down. … I’ll be seeing you, Susan.”

But not for much longer, for Garwood now has a plan, which is briefly delayed by a dinner with Bud and his wife, where a bored Garwood listens to his partner’s tales of fools’ gold and a massacre of Indians at a place called Calico, an erstwhile mining village that is now a ghost town. The plan: Garwood asks Susan to accompany him on his two-week vacation in Las Vegas, where he will visit a motor court that he dreams of buying. “Even when you’re sleepin’ it’d be makin’ money for you!” The motel, that quintessential symbol of postmodern America, epitomizes Garwood’s rootless insecurity and desire to get something for nothing. Unfortunately, Susan can’t accompany him, for her suspicious husband has threatened to kill himself if she leaves him. This obstacle only gives Garwood a better excuse for the next part of his scheme: pretend to dump Susan so she’ll grow desperate. He declines to meet her, and when they do meet, he reminds her of their class difference: “You were brought up on Lakeview. … I couldn’t give
you any of that easy lifestyle.” He even fakes a conscience: Gilvray would “always be with us,” he tells her. “You’d start to hate me.” These are all lines in his self-scripted drama, the showstopper of which takes place when Garwood revisits the Gilvray home. Now he truly becomes a prowler: exiting his prowl car, he cuts their screen door and swings the squeaking gate for attention, which prompts a call to the police station. Garwood makes a noise that brings Gilvray outside, carrying a pistol; Garwood kills Gilvray, then grabs his gun and wounds himself in the arm.

At the inquest, Garwood is smooth and credible, full of regret for the terrible accident. He testifies that he has never seen Susan before, and she (using a microphone, as if replacing her husband) corroborates his lie. The verdict? Accidental homicide. After resigning from the police force, Garwood offers Gilvray’s brother $700 to pay for funeral expenses (the brother declines; he thinks Susan may be better off alone). Now comes the culminating act in Garwood’s drama: win Susan back. At first she rebuffs him, but he soon persuades her with his plausible explanations. Remorsefully, he avers, “I couldn’t bring myself to touch a gun again as long as I live.” Anyway, “what reason did I have” for killing Gilvray? She had already agreed to go away with him. It was a “freak accident. … I’ll swear that by the only thing I ever really loved and that’s you.” Not only does he overcome her misgivings; he even seems to believe his own lies.

They marry, and Garwood uses his victim’s bequest to buy the Vegas motor court. He seems to have achieved his dream. But the nature of this dream is revealed as Garwood leaves the motel office that first evening, the “Vacancy” sign burning brightly over his head: his success is as vacant as his values. Instead of a house—the essence of the American dream of domestic tranquility—he dwells in a motel, the architectural embodiment of his soullessness. Is the dream itself empty, or is it only hollow because he has perverted it? Either way, the plan begins to crumble when Susan informs him that she is four months pregnant. What should be joyful tidings spell disaster, for the baby’s existence proves the falseness of their testimony and implicates Garwood in Gilvray’s murder (in earlier scenes Susan had insinuated that her husband was impotent, so it couldn’t be his). Whereas Judy Tyler’s pregnancy symbolizes the family’s lost potential, Susan’s represents the price of Garwood’s dream. The frequent shots of Garwood in doorways and the long take as they discuss the pregnancy further imply their entrapment. There are always records of a baby’s birth, so where can they go?

Their solution is the same one Americans in trouble have sought for centuries: light out for the Territory, or in this case, for Calico, Bud’s ghost town. At
first the plan seems to work, as the lovers drive there in Garwood’s new Caddy and set up housekeeping in a shack, like any two kids starting out. They dance to “Baby” again (its title now given a double meaning), and Garwood pledges that “our kid’s gonna be on the beam the second he gets into the world!” There’ll be no lousy breaks for her! But as so often happens in noir, the past catches up with them. The recording of their song also includes the sign-off by the man Garwood murdered: “The cost of living is going down. … I’ll be seeing you, Susan.” No; the cost of their living is about to rise precipitously. As Garwood’s luck would have it, Susan goes into labor in the middle of a storm; and he, for once doing the right thing, drives to the nearest town to fetch a doctor, unaware that Bud and his wife plan to surprise them in Calico.

To induce the reluctant doctor to accompany him, Garwood shows him his (no longer valid) badge. The doctor determines that the baby’s heartbeat is normal, but Garwood’s is not: agitated, he paces around, now staring out the window rather than peering in from the outside. That’s not too difficult, since their house doesn’t even have a door. Worse, Susan has begun to realize the truth about him and, having seen him take the gun he swore never to touch again, accuses him of having deliberately killed Gilvray. Though he denies it, he has lost his accomplice. After the birth of their baby girl, the doctor drives away before Garwood can stop him, taking with him the baby and Garwood’s car keys. Susan has spilled everything to the doctor, and the police are on the way (the doctor recognized Garwood from newspaper stories). Garwood desperately justifies himself: “I’m no worse than anybody else. You work in a store, you knock down on the cash register; a big boss, the income tax. A ward heeler, you sell votes. A lawyer, take bribes. I was a cop, so I used a gun. But whatever I did, I did for you.” As the bank robbers in
They Live by Night
would say: they’re just thieves like us. The American dream of upward mobility is just an excuse to steal from others before they rob you. “How am I any different from those other guys?” he cries to Susan. “Some do it for a million, some for ten. I did it for sixty-two thousand.” Now she knows the whole story: his phony rejection of her, the “accident,” the courtroom lies—all a plot to take her money. Finding his spare car key on the floor, Garwood tries to flee, but his passage out of nightmare alley is, ironically, blocked by Bud’s approaching car, as if the vestiges of his own better nature are conspiring against him. All alone, with the police in pursuit, Garwood tries to escape by climbing a sand dune that represents his quest for upward mobility. As he reaches the crest (with Susan watching from the window), he is shot down, tumbling to his death in a cloud of dust. He can’t escape his unpaid debts.

Webb Garwood is not so different from
Nightmare Alley
’s Stanton Carlisle, whose rise and fall I chronicled at the beginning of this book: both are cynics who exploit others to fulfill their selfish dreams of success. But Carlisle is tormented by guilt over the death of Pete and rendered vulnerable by Lilith; his final abjection and possible rebirth hold out a shred of hope. In contrast, Garwood is unredeemed and perhaps unredeemable. And whereas many of Carlisle’s victims (particularly Griswold) are venal strangers who deserve or even welcome their victimization, Garwood’s primary victims are those closest to him. The problem is not merely that he lacks a scintilla of empathy or guilt; it is that he has internalized the values of a society that believes self-interest rules and whose history proves that, beneath its noble-sounding principles, its real goals are to conquer and steal from others. In this regard the setting of the final scenes—a former Indian village converted into a mine and then a ghost town—is telling. Calico embodies the history of American exploitation, of stealing land and killing those who once held it, of plundering the earth of its riches, and then abandoning it once it is used up. Garwood is merely another American who pretends the past is irrelevant, that no costs are incurred in such pillage.
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Garwood epitomizes the uglier side of this early American Dream, which was, for the native peoples, a nightmare. He also represents its more contemporary vanities: hollowed out by the pursuit of “happiness” at any cost, he embodies the worst aspects of radical individualism. The cash nexus has reduced him to a set of appetites. Money, which has no smell, no feelings, and, as
Body and Soul
’s Charlie Davis reminds us, no memory, has become the measure of all. Unattached and unfeeling, it merely moves from one hand to another; the costs of living never cling to it. Like Garwood, it is void of humanity. Hence,
The Prowler
does not merely condemn a bad apple. Rather, Losey, Butler, and Trumbo declare that the American Dream has become a sham, that the remorseless pursuit of wealth and upward mobility has left in its wake wrecked lives and hollow citizens. The dream of domesticity and home ownership? Just a thin scrim covering a history of theft, violence, and exploitation. The film’s emblem of postwar America is not Gilvray’s house but the half-built shack where Garwood and Susan set up housekeeping or, better, Garwood’s motel—a symbol of the rootless, grasping persons who briefly occupy its rooms.

For these filmmakers—understandably disillusioned by their recent experiences—and, indeed, for most of noir’s creators, America’s founding principles had been voided or defiled. Individualism, as dramatized in films such as
Dark Passage
and
Hollow Triumph
, had turned people into a set of interchangeable,
depthless faces. Upward mobility, as the car films imply, had been blocked by those fiercely guarding their possessions and social standing. Self-reinvention may be possible but only after traumatic experiences obliterate what existed before; otherwise, one mistake dooms you to a life of constant insecurity. Free enterprise masks rapacity, and meaningful collective action is possible (and only briefly) in the underworld. The new technologies and consumer items that promised liberation, security, peace, and luxury instead made us paranoid, hypercompetitive, and insecure.

Yet some vestiges of the Dream remain. A few noir veterans manage either to reintegrate their prewar and postwar identities or start anew, in so doing modeling a means of recovering from the war. These films propose that we must remember trauma, recollect the selves we once were and the values we once held, so that we can either reaffirm or discard them. The portraiture films also moderate
The Prowler
’s gloomy conclusion by implying that the malleability of identity may be liberating insofar as it enables us to evade exploitation. Female filmmakers challenged discrimination by working within and around the studio system to create complex portrayals of the woman’s condition and to offer intelligent, sophisticated analyses of marriage and gender roles. A few noir jazz musicians, albeit blackened by associations with antisocial behavior, employed improvisation to engender flexible, hybrid American identities. Leftist filmmakers trenchantly criticized the depredations of capitalism and the perversion of American values, despite being hounded and jailed by self-styled patriots. Perhaps most important, the very existence of the films proved that thoughtful and committed artists were still able to present intellectually, morally, and politically challenging works within a conservative corporate system and that their work was met by audiences willing to watch and listen to them. We should do the same.