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

‘other’” (xxii). Perhaps it would be more accurate to call this a fourth or even a fifth self, one conjured out of the combination of Ballantine, Edwardes, and the selves exposed in his dream. Further, in reading Ballantine’s dream, Constance reads herself, for Ballantine saw—and created—a different Constance. Brill thus concludes that at the end “Constance and John at once remember and learn who they are” (256). Or perhaps, as Thomas Hyde determines, she forges a new identity by “tapping a suppressed capacity within herself for feeling and committed action” (154).The word
forge
points to conflicting possibilities, one of which is that, by assuming a series of roles, Constance learns that the life she has been living is an impersonation (see Morris 150). Like Ballantine and Murchison, she kills herself by using her eyes, and now she will be reborn as someone else: Mrs. Ballantine. 27 But if her emotions led her to believe in Ballantine, it was her intelligence that let her see through Murchison’s lies and trap him into self-incrimination. Like JB, she ultimately becomes neither her original self nor her second (the lover) but a unique entity melding disparate elements.
Perchance to Dream
    What dreams may come to noir characters? We have examined three major types: (1) trauma rendered into recurrent nightmares, as in
The Dark Past
and
Spellbound
. In them the dreamer is victimized by a double bind—desiring to forget what he can’t quite remember; (2) a forecast or message from beyond, as in
Strange Illusion
, where the dream becomes the apparition of a dead patriarch, urging the son to act for and transcend his father.
The Big Night
, though its nightmare is implicit rather than explicit, also fits this category, as George becomes at once his father’s agent and his rival; and (3) a warning coupled with a wish-fulfillment, as in
The Chase
and
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry
, where dreams dramatize alternate futures in which a character’s unconscious wishes come true—and, somewhat disturbingly, enable him to repress them again.
    We may further distill these categories by analyzing the dreams’ tropic arrangements and emotional content. According to the psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, who has published extensively on dreams, the most significant element in any dream is not its specific imagery but its dominant emotion, which induces the dreamer to combine images and associations from various parts of the brain to create explanatory tropes (Hartmann 4, 119). In other words, what matters is less the vehicle of the metaphor than the tenor it aims to convey. With that in mind let us review the dominant emotions in these noir dreams:
    The Dark Past:
terror, hatred
Strange Illusion:
fear, jealousy
The Big Night:
hatred, envy
The Chase:
self-hatred, illicit sexual desire
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry:
jealousy, illicit sexual desire
Spellbound
: guilt
    Guilt, in fact, motivates each of these dreams: it is the definitive noir dream tenor. And what is guilt but an attachment to a past action that prompts a need to relive it and make it right? Guilt leaves noir dreamers cowering under a table, trapped in a stifling house, steering a car that someone else is driving, or forever skiing down an endless slope. How to escape from these nightmare alleys? By re-enacting the event and then forgetting it. Yet if these noir dreams imply that the American Dream of self-reinvention is possible, they also leave a residue of doubt. For example, the surreal quality of
The Chase
’s conclusion raises questions about the durability of Chuck’s new self;
Uncle Harry
’s ending fails to erase the disturbing aspects of the protagonist’s psyche that his dream has unveiled. In reminding us of their own constructedness, these two films alert us to the artificiality of their happy conclusions. Similarly,
Spellbound
’s love story is acceptable only if we agree that women are better off as lovers than as doctors, and
The