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

Big Night
furnishes a dubiously sacrificial, even masochistic, image of manhood. Only
Strange Illusion
and
The Dark Past
offer relatively straightforward endorsements of self-reinvention, and they suggest that looking backward is valuable insofar as doing so frees one from the past. The self, newly cleansed by psychotherapy or the power of love, may be infinitely renewable, but only if its eyes are at least half closed.

2

Missing Persons
Self-Erasure and Reinvention
    Mr. Flitcraft of Tacoma is blessed with a wife, two children, a successful real estate business, and the “rest of the appurtenances of successful American living” (Hammett 442), including a golf game at four o’clock each afternoon. Then one day a beam falls from a high building, barely missing him; that day he leaves Tacoma without telling anyone, wanders for a few years, and ends up in Spokane. There, as Charles Pierce, he marries, has a child, owns a prosperous automobile business, and gets away for a four o’clock golf game almost every afternoon.
    Private investigator Sam Spade tells this story to an unimpressed Brigid O’Shaughnessy in Dashiell Hammett’s novel
The Maltese Falcon
. Neither Spade nor Hammett explains this curious, meditative digression in an otherwise fast-paced tale. Spade does, however, delve briefly into Flitcraft’s motives. After the beam falls, Spade says, Flitcraft feels “like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works” (444). He had believed life to be a “clean orderly sane responsible affair,” but the falling beam had shown him it was none of those things. This good citizen-husband-father could be wiped out between office and restaurant by a simple accident. Neither orderly nor sane, human life is but a collection of random occurrences governed—or not governed—by luck. He was out of step with the workings of the world; to bring himself in step, “he would change his life at random by simply going away” (444). But the most interesting part to me (and, I think, to Spade) is that Flitcraft reconstitutes the life he had left: “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling” (445).
    Although John Huston’s film adaptation omits this vignette, it nonetheless introduces a major theme of film noir: that of an absurd cosmos ruled by unseen forces that limit human agency. You cope best by forgetting its absurdity, but you must remain alert, for a beam could fall on you at any moment. Foster Hirsch reads the episode as a coded defense of Spade’s philosophy, linking it with the detective’s later assertion that “when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed todo something about it” (581–82); Hirsch writes, “In the face of uncertainty and duplicity, Sam Spade retains his honor” (31). I wish to use a different reading of this story as the keynote for this chapter.
    Everyone in Hammett’s novel pretends to be someone else: Brigid first gives her name as Miss Wonderly, then fakes love for Sam, then plays both ends against the middle; Gutman swears that he loves Wilmer, his gunman, like his own son, but barely hesitates to set him up as the fall guy when their plan to take the falcon fails; even Spade feigns anger when he doesn’t feel it. In
The Maltese Falcon
identity seems fluid, as fungible as the falcon, which inspires each character’s dreams (it’s “the stuff that dreams are made of,” according to Spade’s memorable final line in the film version). But near the end of the novel—just after the line that Hirsch quotes—Spade explains why Brigid must pay for murdering his partner, Miles Archer: “I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, … but it’s not the natural thing” (582). Similarly, Flitcraft starts a new life that ends up identical to the one he abandoned. The novel and