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

“caused by something that happened when [he was] a child,” and everything in it “is a substitute for something else.” He eventually unearths its origins in Walker’s relations with his parents. But what is most strange about this dream—stranger even than its appearance as negative footage—is that Walker does not relate it himself. 1 Instead, the dream is described by Walker’s girlfriend, Betty (Nina Foch), who asks Collins to interpret it and quell Walker’s mania for killing. In other words, this dream is presented as someone else’s nightmare. In fact, it is twice-removed from its dreamer, since Collins recounts these events later to prove that psychoanalysis can cure social problems.
    It is a critical commonplace that films noir—with their bizarre circumstances, disorienting settings, and obsession with darkness—are “like bad dreams.” 2 Foster Hirsch further observes that noir directors, by maintaining a neutral, even clinical, stance toward their characters’ pathologies, treat the stories as if they were “
someone else’s
nightmare” (115; emphasis his).
The Dark Past
, as we’ve seen, records Walker’s dream in just that way—secondhand. But Hirsch’s phrase resonates in other directions and offers not only a means to understand noir dreams but a blueprint for a key aspect of noir’s role in American culture. Noir nightmaresare “someone else’s” in several senses. According to the Freudian theory that underpins them, dreams emerge from the unconscious. Their latent content or motivating wish is condensed or displaced into a disguised manifest content, so that the dream-work goes on, as it were, behind the dreamer’s back. Denied access to his or her own motives, the dreamer is at once him- or herself and someone else. Second, once the dream is recounted or written down, it becomes a text, not an experience—and thus no longer belongs to the dreamer. Third, noir’s tormented dreamers act as surrogates for audience members’ own struggles with renewal, reinvention, or return. But because the characters’ past identities are often abhorrent or irretrievable, they are severed from the self who dreams and from the audience as well: they become as much objects of scrutiny as of sympathy. Hence, noir dreams stage ruptures in identity and integration that are not just individual but collective.
    I thus propose that noir dream sequences dramatize key questions about identity in the World War II and postwar period. Noir’s nightmares first of all register Americans’ ambivalence about the rapidly changing postwar world, which suddenly seemed to carry as much peril as possibility. The war had cut a gap in lives and minds (as rendered explicitly in the disabled-veteran noirs discussed in chapter 3 ) that required survivors either to fashion new selves or seek to integrate past and present selves. Because the war years were filled with violent trauma, a nostalgia remained for the prewar period, which now seemed more innocent, less fraught. Not surprisingly, virtually all noir dream sequences concern a character’s crippling attachment to the past: to a traumatic experience, a lover, a parent, or a violent episode. Discovering the meaning of the dream—whether through psychoanalysis or reenactment—is believed to free the character from that past. Only by severing oneself from one’s history, the films suggest, can one either start over or craft an integrated identity; those who do not become, like Stan Carlisle, enslaved to that history.
    The noir dream films, like the switched identity films and veteran films I treat in later chapters, stage a collective neurosis that emerges from an unsolvable conflict between the need to remember and the need to forget. Conversion narratives that invoke Protestant redemption tales and allude in some instances to the biographies of their émigré directors, noir dream sequences dramatize and test the American mythos of mobile identity and