Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (8 page)

Harry’s dream also invokes the question that underpins so many noir dreams: shall I remain tethered to the past or try to remake myself? Ostensibly, the film suggests that Harry must dream through his living death before he can bury his old self like the corpse of poor Weary. As created by German émigré Siodmak (and émigré producer Harrison), the film also hints at the plight of the immigrant who wishes both to retain his or her old culture and to engender a new American self. But does Harry even have a self ? As Lettie points out to Deborah, Harry is easy to “impose upon.” At the end, then, does he merely allow himself to be imposed upon by Deborah, a strong woman who resembles Lettie? Has he really made a choice, or has he just let someone else choose for him? Like that of
The Chase
, this film’s saccharine ending fails to banish a sour aftertaste. It, too, draws attention to its own artifice, asking us to question the dream contrivance, to wonder whether we can ever trust what we see; it reminds us that we, like Harry, prefer dark undertones to sugary main themes.

“That Freud stuff is a lot of hooey!” declares JB (Gregory Peck), an amnesiac in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Spellbound
.
²⁰
The rest of the film seems to contradict him. Indeed, the second of its two epigraphs lauds psychoanalysis as, if not a cure for society’s ills, at least a reliable means of ensuring civility: “The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear … and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.” It’s difficult for twenty-first-century viewers not to roll their eyes at this testimony to the wondrous powers of psychoanalysis and at the religious language (“devils of unreason”) that presents it as exorcism or conversion (Morris 148).
²¹
However, the film itself presents psychiatry more ambiguously, as a profession riddled with political infighting and tainted by human foibles. As Freedman notes,
Spellbound
both enhances the patina of psychiatry and pokes fun at it (85).
²²
Moreover, its ultimate concern is not so much with opening the mental doors of Peck’s tortured amnesiac as with opening the emotional doors of Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman). Far from needing to drive devils of unreason from her soul, the film suggests, she needs to welcome warm emotions into her frozen heart. For while Dr. Petersen acts as
psychiatrist/detective for much of the film, she is also partly constituted, observes Mary Ann Doane, as the film’s analysand (
Desire
46)—the character who achieves a fuller selfhood through the therapeutic process.
²³

Early in the film she is contrasted with patient Mary Carmichael (Rhonda Fleming), a sexually aggressive woman who hates Constance, whom she calls “Miss Frozen Puss.” Those sentiments are echoed by her leering colleague, Dr. Fleurot (John Emery); indeed, the entire Green Manors medical staff act like fraternity brothers, constantly gossiping about their only female colleague and vying for dominance. This situation is supposed to change now that Constance’s mentor, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), is being replaced by Dr. Edwardes, acclaimed author of
Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex
. However, when Edwardes (Peck) shows up, his initial contribution is instead to light a spark in Constance. But something is wrong: when she traces lines on a tablecloth with her fork (Constance is constantly associated with sharp objects, as if psychoanalysis were a form of cutting), Edwardes becomes agitated and disoriented.

That evening, after the two have shared a picnic lunch, she can’t sleep. Walking upstairs (she is also associated with upward movements throughout the film), she takes his book from the library and enters his office. Hitchcock organizes the following sequence around a series of doorframe shots. First Constance stands in the threshold and then sees Edwardes nodding in his chair. From behind him we watch her hesitantly ask to discuss his book, then sheepishly admit that this is only a “subterfuge.” Approaching her, but framed in the doorway from her point of view, Edwardes declares that “something has happened to us … like lightning striking,” and crosses the threshold. A series of close-ups focuses on the two characters’ eyes to imply that his vision pierces and thaws her. As the music swells, a shot of Constance’s eyes dissolves to four doors successively opening onto bright light. The scene ends with the two passionately kissing. Clearly these are Petersen’s doors opening, not Edwardes’s: their vaginal associations are not exactly subtle. Yet what she thinks she sees—Dr. Edwardes—is false, and, almost until the moment of the climactic kiss, Peck remains framed in the doorway, as if coffined—appropriately, since the real Dr. Edwardes is dead. As we soon learn, this man is an impostor who hides a debilitating guilt complex of his own.

The blissful moment ends when “Edwardes” recoils at the sight of Constance’s striped robe; then he experiences a breakdown at the operating table (“Doors. Unlock ’em. You can’t keep people in cells! … He did it, he told me! He killed his father!”). When he signs his name, Constance sees that his signature does not match that of the real Edwardes (who had signed her book). These lines scratched
on paper, indicating his true self, rhyme with the vertical lines that prompt his flashbacks: a mental line connects them. Soon the fake Edwardes admits to killing the real Edwardes and adds, “I’m someone else. I don’t know who. … I have no memory. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing but the mirror.” The vision that seemed so penetrating when gazing at Constance becomes opaque when it comes to seeing himself. Murchison verifies that the man is an impostor by examining a photograph of the real Edwardes: vision may ratify truth or be manipulated by unconscious wishes or master technicians like psychiatrists or directors.

“Edwardes” (who recalls only that his actual initials are “JB”) leaves for New York to find himself; Constance follows, aided by a hotel detective who assumes she is a librarian or schoolteacher looking for her husband. (A bit later, JB also compares her to a “smug, know-it-all schoolteacher.”) The detective boasts that he knows such things because he’s a “psychologist … you gotta be, in my line.” If a detective has gotta be a psychologist, the rest of the film demonstrates that a psychologist has gotta be a detective too: Constance locates JB by examining his handwriting in the hotel register (he signed his name “John Brown”). “Brown” admits, “I’m haunted, but I can’t see by what.” JB, that is, can’t forget what he is unable to remember. When she advises him that a “guilt complex” “speaks for” him, he responds that she is crazier than he is, having “run off with a pair of initials”: she has fallen for an outline, a person whose identity is both hidden and disclosed by lines scratched on a surface.

Hoping to learn more, the lovers travel to the home of Constance’s mentor, Dr. Brulov (charmingly portrayed by Michael Chekhov), posing as honeymooners. On the journey JB again grows angry when she presses him about his guilt fantasy, railing against her “double-talk.” But it’s really JB, the man who impersonated Edwardes, who signed his name “John Brown,” and, when he gazes into a mirror, sees only the mirror, who is composed of double-talk. He is a double inside a mirror locked behind a door. Earlier he had described amnesia as the placing of whatever horrible thing you don’t want to remember “behind a closed door.” Constance remarks, “We have to open that door.” In so doing, she also opens doors to aspects of herself—teacher, detective, mother, lover, newlywed—that have been shut: her identity is far from constant. Both characters, in short, pass through a succession of identities, a series of doors, on the road to self-discovery or self-creation.

That evening JB proves his doubleness by becoming disoriented and agitated at the sight of a chair and bathtub, and especially by the vertical lines on Constance’s
chenille bedspread. Zombielike, he walks downstairs with his razor (JB is associated with downward movements throughout the film), but Dr. Brulov soothes him with twin bromides—a sedative paired with platitudes about milk-drinking (Pomerance 89). The next morning, Brulov warns Constance that her lover is dangerous—“a schizophrenic, and not a valentine”—but she insists that “the heart can see deeper sometimes” than the brain, that vision may penetrate the surface only if it is not merely scientific scrutiny. She is indeed emulating JB, who had earlier intimated that he could see her heart (romance here becomes a kind of countertransference). Despite JB’s resistance (“That Freud stuff’s a lot of hooey!”), Brulov becomes JB’s “father image,” encouraging transference to jog his memory and discover the source of his trauma. The secrets to JB’s nature, he explains, are “buried in your brain.” The key to unlocking this buried treasure? Dreams, which “tell you what you are trying to hide. But they tell it to you all mixed up, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit. The problem of the analyst is to examine this puzzle, and put the pieces together in the right place, and find out what the devil you are trying to say to yourself.”

What follows is one of the most famous dream sequences in Hollywood cinema. Though JB narrates the dream himself, it is, again, presented as someone else’s—first filtered through his narration, then illustrated by Hitchcock, with the help of Salvador Dalí. In Freudian terms the dream registers the conflict of rival selves—the narrating JB set against that ghostwriter, his own unconscious. And because JB doesn’t know his real identity, the dream is doubly removed even from his narrative presence, for the experience motivating the dream happened to the person he used to be, known now only as a “pair of initials.” Further, once Brulov and Petersen interpret the dream material, it is abstracted, dissected, and held out for the audience’s speculation: it becomes not his but
our
nightmare.

Fittingly, the dream begins with an array of disembodied, peering eyes—on the draperies, says JB, of a gambling house. A man with a large pair of scissors cuts through the draperies (an apparent allusion to the early Dalí/Bunuel film
Un chien andalou
), and then a scantily clad woman (who looks “very much like Constance” and is played by Rhonda Fleming, who earlier performed as Mary Carmichael) walks around kissing everyone. The narrator is found playing cards (most of them blank) with a bearded man, and when he overturns a seven of clubs, the man says “that makes twenty-one. I win.” Enter the angry proprietor, his face masked, to accuse them of cheating. The next portion is a different but related dream. The bearded man falls from the roof of a tall building. To the rear, the masked proprietor hides behind a chimney, holding a small, malformed wheel, which he then drops. It ends with the dreamer being chased down a hill by a “great pair of wings.”
²⁴

The first portion of the dream goes unanalyzed until the end of the film. But the second portion immediately leads somewhere, as Constance maps this nightmare alley, miraculously connecting the sled marks on the street outdoors to the vertical lines that have bothered the amnesiac. They must be a memory of ski tracks, she deduces, and by word association the three determine that the dream refers to Gabriel Valley ski resort (wings = angel = Gabriel). Amazingly skilled rhetoricians, these doctors sense that JB’s dream images operate by metonymy and synecdoche—one of the two “main dream processes,” according to Bert States (94)—which enable the dreamer to replace the source events with associated images. For some reason they decide that only reenactment can “break the spell” of JB’s childhood trauma (and may solve the mystery of the ski marks as well). So Constance and JB travel to the resort and go skiing. Just as they are about to swoosh off the cliff, JB remembers: “I killed my brother!” Cut to the face of a
grimacing boy, mutely warning another child to be careful; we then inhabit JB’s point of view as he slides down a railing, sweeping his brother onto the prongs of an iron fence. The truth emerges: “I didn’t kill my brother. It was an accident!” It’s hard to say how he knows it was an accident since the memory says nothing about his motives. Nevertheless, he is liberated by the recollection.

The past comes flooding back: his name is John Ballantine; he ran into Edwardes at the resort while recovering from “nerve shock” due to his war experiences and saw Edwardes die in a skiing accident. Constance explains that he took on Edwardes’s identity to prove to himself that the doctor wasn’t dead and hence that he couldn’t have killed him. Swift, accurate dream reading, cathartic cure: it’s all too pat.
²⁵
As Jerrold Brandell observes, the film permits only one correct interpretation, which explains not only the “distal causes and pathogenesis” of Ballantine’s disorder but also the particular form it takes (“Eighty” 66). Yet the dream also invokes a theme that reverberates throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre and the noir canon: a “wounded past envies the present and prevents its rejuvenation” (Brill 240).
²⁶
It also exemplifies the pattern I have been investigating: like Al Walker, Paul Cartwright, and Andy La Main, Ballantine is debilitated by his attachment to a traumatic past event. In breaking the chain through dream interpretation, he may be free to reinvent himself.