Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream by Mark Osteen

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.
    Or maybe not. Hitchcock dissolves over the lovers’ triumphant embrace a police report stating, “new evidence uncovered. Makes surveillance essential.” The phrases hint that psychoanalytic surveillance has uncovered new evidence freeing JB and that he has exercised loving “surveillance” over Constance to unearth the warmth beneath her icy exterior. In terms of the plot, however, the lines mean that the police have found a bullet in Edwardes’s body, which proves that he was murdered. A brisk montage covers Ballantine’s arrest and jailing; those newly opened doors seem permanently closed once again. Constance’s colleagues urge her to forget it all and bury herself in work. But she is not satisfied, and her suspicions are further aroused when Murchison offhandedly mentions that he “knew Edwardes.” The words echo in her mind as she stands in a Green Manors doorway, for if Murchison knew him, why didn’t he recognize Ballantine as an impostor? Again she walks upstairs to confront a colleague, but this time it’s Murchison. When she asks him to analyze Ballantine’s dream, Murchison’s self-protective instincts collide with his scientific curiosity. The latter wins, as he unpacks the very dream images that incriminate him: the gambling house is Green Manors, and Murchison is himself the proprietor, angry at the bearded man (Edwardes)for taking his job. The dream exposes Green Manors as a hotbed of professional jealousy and sexual rivalry, a gambling club where practitioners employ a mix of gamesmanship and guesswork. The seven of clubs leads (through condensation, or metonymy) to the 21 Club in New York, where Murchison angrily confronted Edwardes. The wheel? A revolver (synecdoche)—which Murchison now points at Constance. We shift to Murchison’s point of view behind the gun as Constance, softly talking, walks out the door. Then he turns the gun on himself and shoots—us.
    In a sense Murchison has already turned the gun on himself by analyzing Ballantine’s dream. Indeed, whereas in JB’s dream the eyes are snipped, the rest of the film depicts the psychoanalytic eye as a cutting weapon capable equally of salvation or soul murder. Just as the old Ballantine and the phony Edwardes (not to mention John Brown) died because of psychiatric scrutiny, so Murchison kills himself by reading a dream through Ballantine’s eyes. He is thus exposed as Ballantine’s double—an impostor, both doctor and psychopath, an amnesiac who has “forgotten” a crime he committed. In this final turn psychoanalysis is at once glorified and debased, presented as a partial solution to its own murderous tendencies (Freedman 86). The final point-of-view shot also implicates the viewer in this analytic scrutiny. In the course of the film we have been both psychoanalyst and patient, experiencing Ballantine’s dreams and participating in their analysis. Thus, in a sense we are as guilty (or innocent) as JB or Murchison—guilty of using our eyes to cut people up, guilty of blaming and of loving them. Someone else’s nightmare is now our own. To be cured of our neurosis and our complicity in such murderous gazing, we too must be killed. Ultimately, then, the revolver—through the metonymy of dream logic—becomes the camera, a small wheel held by a man whose eye exposes our hidden desires.
    This final turn further complicates the motif of self-creation, for the eye can save as well as shoot. Constance’s eye imagined a new self for JB, one that, as Marlisa Santos explains, is neither the old Ballantine nor his blank double but a “‘third self’—the product of the unity of his blank self and his phantom