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

past actions. But unlike those in the dream films, these characters’ reformations seldom succeed, and some of them experience total self-erasure. Staging, then subverting, the Protestant conversion narrative and the immigrant success story, these films challenge an essential American myth, as noir’s missing persons become synecdoches for a society of mobile individuals anxiously suspended between a traumatic past and an uncertain future.
    Casual viewers associate film noir with the stereotypical hard-boiled macho detective, but noir actually depicts a diverse array of masculine types. Films featuring cognitively disabled veterans
(Act of Violence, The Blue Dahlia, Cornered, High Wall, Somewhere in the Night)
, for example, use disability to explore shifting attitudes about masculinity, achievement, and power. These films, analyzed in chapter 3 , “Vet Noir,” expose seams in the ethos of self-determination through their haunted ex-soldiers’ attempts to heal their fractured psyches by paradoxicallyreenacting the traumas that have shattered them. Though the films show that self-recreation is possible, they also demonstrate that discarding the past may require amputation of key parts of the individual and national consciousness.
    Chapter 4 , “Framed,” focuses on art forgery and portraiture films (such as
Crack-Up, The Dark Corner, I Wake Up Screaming
, and
Scarlet Street
) that ask vexing questions about representation, identity, and replication. Like the counterfeiting films I have analyzed elsewhere, the forgery films simultaneously celebrate and interrogate cinema as a medium of representation. 12 By blurring the lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, the real and its representations, these films imply that all identities are to some degree forged and that human character is too malleable and complex to be captured by any medium, including cinema. They thus train a skeptical eye on the American dream of self-reinvention, disclosing a suspicion that such operations are often a pretext for exploitation or a pathway to madness.
    The next four chapters expand the focus to explore a spectrum of social phenomena depicted in noir, each chapter targeting a cultural formation in crisis and addressing one source of the social, political, or cultural anxiety described above. “Noir’s Cars” examines how automobiles, in films such as
They Live by Night, Gun Crazy
, and
Kiss Me Deadly
, function as amoral spaces. While driving their cars, disenfranchised characters express antisocial urges and pursue fantasies of social mobility through automobility. Fittingly, the most common auto in film noir is the convertible, which perfectly symbolizes the American belief in mobile identities: convertibles, that is, represent the promise of self-convertibility. Yet the films analyzed in chapter 5 portray this vision of freedom as a trap sprung by fearful or hypocritical citizens who envy the liberation that cars allow; as a cynical ruse to entice gullible people; or as a Trojan horse used to introduce more deadly technologies that will increase mechanization and conformity and threaten American citizens.
    Chapter 6 , “Nocturnes in Black and Blue,” proposes that jazz in noir signifies shifts in racial attitudes and notions of masculinity. In
Black Angel, Nocturne, Detour
, and
Nightmare
, jazz melodies provide clues to forgotten events—often a musician/protagonist’s own violent act. Although African Americans seldom appear in the films, white musicians are “noired” through jazz’s affiliation with blackness, decadence, psychic disturbance, illicit sexuality, and interracial contact.
Sweet Smell of Success
alters this pattern, portraying jazz as an island of integrity set against a continent of corruption; and two films featuring femalejazz singers
(The Man I Love
and
Road House)
present improvisation as the basis for a creative selfhood. Contravening Hollywood’s general demonizing of jazz,