Mark Osteen - Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

FILM NOIR AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

MARK OSTEEN

2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2013

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osteen, Mark.

Nightmare alley : film noir and the American dream / Mark Osteen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4214-0780-7 (hdbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4214-0832-3 (electronic) ISBN 1-4214-0780-9 (hdbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 1-4214-0832-5 (electronic)

1. Film noirUnited StatesHistory and criticism. 2. Motion picturesSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 3. American Dream in art. 4. National characteristics, American, in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.F54O88 2013

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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This project has been long in the making, and many people have contributed to its completion. To thank everyone would require far too much space, but I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude for the help of several people in particular.

Im grateful to Professors Julie Grossman and Paul Saint-Amour for their support. My colleagues in the English Department at Loyola University Maryland have furnished a lively intellectual community where I could test the ideas found herein. Im particularly grateful to my colleague Paul Lukacs for suggesting the Franklin and Emerson connections. My departments support also included encouraging me to teach courses in which my embryonic notions could grow; the students in those courses helped me develop those notions. To them I offer my hearty thanks.

Barbara Hall and the staff at the Special Collections Department of the Margaret Herrick Library deserve a special note of gratitude. The resources and staff at that institutionwhich for film scholars comes pretty close to heaven on earthhave deepened and enriched this project immeasurably.

Im grateful to the anonymous reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press for perusing the manuscript so promptly and thoroughly; such alacrity is both laudable and rare.

As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Leslie Gilden, for providing a patient ear as I rattled on about sometimes obscure films, for providing a second set of eyes as we viewed the movies together, and for voicing challenges that helped me to refine my ideas in our many and various discussions of these films.

An earlier version of was published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television.

All illustrations, except those in

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Is a guy born that way?

Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power), the protagonist of Edmund Gouldings Nightmare Alley, asks this question about the geek, an abject figure on the lowest rung of the carnival hierarchy, whose chief task is to bite off the heads of chickens. One of the darkest films in the noir canon, Nightmare Alley traces Carlisles rise from carny assistant to slick mentalist performing in chic hotels, followed by a fall into destitution, which ends as Stan, now a groveling alcoholic, is hired as a carnival geek. The answer to his question is ambiguous: Stans cynicism, arrogance, and greed motivate the bad choices he makes, as does his relationship with the scheming psychologist Lilith Ritter. Yet the films circular structure and motif of tarot cards imply that Stan was indeed born that waythat he always has been a geek.

Carlisles quest for fame is a quintessentially American tale that depicts the pursuit of happiness through individual striving, but it is an antiHoratio Alger fable of the perils of ambition, a warning that transforming the self may also empty it of meaning. More broadly, the geek figure offers an opportunity to assess critically the American ideals of self-creation, individualism, free choice, and upward mobility. Though the geeks pursuit of happiness is drastically attenuatedhe will do anything for a drinkit nonetheless resembles those of many film noir protagonists, obsessed with a desirable goal or objecta falcon sculpture, a seductive woman, a big scoreor fleeing, like Stan, from a traumatic event. Indeed, Stan Carlisles life evokes questions that have troubled Americans since before the nation even existed: what is the relation between personal history and present character? Is it possible to escape from ones past? Is identity inborn or a set of masks or performances? Nightmare Alley provides one answer to the question that lies at the heart of this book: what does film noir tell us about the American Dream?

In his study of that overused but little-understood phrase, Jim Cullen lists four dreams: those of upward mobility, equality, home ownership, and the West as a symbol of undying hope, best epitomized by Hollywood (89). I would add to his tally the ideals of free enterprise and personal liberty. Beneath each of these values lies an enduring faith in what the Declaration of Independence calls the pursuit of happiness, a phrase that, Cullen proposes, defines the American Dream, treating happiness as a concrete and realizable objective (38). Underpinning even that goal is the ideology of individualismthe belief that personal effort enables one to determine ones own destiny and character; throw off the fetters of history; overcome class, gender, and racial barriers; and gain wealth and prestige. The crime films made in Hollywood between 1944 and 1959 challenge these beliefs by portraying characters whose defeat or death seems fated; by dramatizing the obstacles to class mobility and racial or gender equality; by asking whether anyonewhether detective, war veteran, or homeless womancan truly reinvent him- or herself; by questioning whether new consumer products and technologies such as fast cars really liberate us; and by raising a skeptical eyebrow at the midcentury faith in psychoanalysis and the therapeutic ethos that supports it.

Stan Carlisles question has been answered in two conflicting ways throughout American cultural history. One answer, perhaps best represented by Benjamin Franklins Autobiography, portrays identity as an endless process of entrepreneurial invention. Thus young Ben leaves his childhood home in Boston to make his way to Philadelphia where, in part 2, he deliberately sculpts a new self through the sedulous application of reason and industry (see 7986). For the rest of his life he constantly remakes himself: first a printer and publisher, he becomes at different periods a musician, an inventor, a scientist, an ambassador, a military leader, and a legislator. Franklin also inserts into his life story a letter from a friend, Benjamin Vaughan, who writes that Franklin proves how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or greatness (72). In this archetypal American success story, ones past is irrelevant to ones present and future: an American can be anything he or she wishes, so long as he or she maintains resilience and curiosity. Franklins story is the Protestant conversion narrativea narrative of being born againshorn of supernatural trappings. Whatever a Franklinesque American becomes, he or she is never merely born that way.