Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (19 page)

Just after
High Wall
opens, a disheveled man, an unconscious woman sprawled beside him, wrecks his car. The man confesses to the police that the woman—his wife, Helen (Dorothy Patrick)—was already dead before the crash, because he had strangled her. But the man, ex-bomber pilot Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) has previously had brain surgery, so he must undergo a psychiatric evaluation before he can be tried. His history is traumatic: wounded in the war, Kenet
recovered as a result of surgery. Yet he still felt “restless,” like many veterans with PTSD, and went to Burma to fly freight planes, leaving behind his wife and young son. Another “slight crack-up” there left him with a subdural hematoma that causes severe headaches, mood swings, and memory lapses; during one of these attacks he allegedly murdered his wife. But his memory of the murder has been rendered irretrievable by the hematoma. In short, Kenet is a man cut in half, a vet who can neither remember
nor
forget. The doctors, including the beautiful Ann Lorrison (Audrey Totter), insist that Kenet undergo further surgery, but he refuses, thereby reinforcing the district attorney’s suspicion that he is malingering to avoid trial.
²⁴

Kenet’s resistance isn’t merely a delaying tactic: he recognizes the grim calculus of this institution, where twenty-five hundred patients are served by a paltry twelve doctors, and where patients with a wide array of illnesses are thrown together randomly. The hospital, one of Foucault’s “carceral/therapeutic” networks, thus engenders new “procedures of individualization” (305), giving inmates institutionalized identities that strip away their agency and replace it with scientifically classified data. In this world psychiatrists have donned the robes of judges; each person under their aegis “subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviors, his aptitudes, his achievements” (Foucault 304).
²⁵
Thus we may read Kenet’s resistance as a desire to preserve his guilt and thereby his humanity, even if doing so permits his debilitating condition to persist and subjects him to a criminal indictment.

But after the death of Kenet’s mother, who had cared for his six-year-old son, Dickie, Dr. Lorrison coldly informs him that the boy will be sent to the county orphanage. “Do you know what life is like for an orphan in a public institution?” she asks threateningly. Having experienced a taste of institutional life, Kenet recoils in horror. She has recognized his hidden motive for resisting—shame. If he never stands trial, he’ll never have to face the son he abandoned. And so Kenet agrees to the surgery, which does palliate his headaches. But the doctors aren’t finished; next he must undergo “narcosynthesis”—injection with sodium pentothal—to uncover the truth about the murder they believe he is concealing.
²⁶
During the interrogation Kenet is pushed into the corner of the frame and filmed from behind the questioner’s shoulder, so that his head appears to sprout from the doctor’s body: he is now their creature. Kenet doesn’t deny his guilt; he merely wishes to preserve his own “rights” to provide for his son’s future. Yet when the doctors offer to bring Dickie to him, a panicked look crosses Kenet’s face, followed by irate shouting: “You can’t push people around like this! What
kind of doctors are you?” At his words the camera rises and pulls back, leaving him diminished and alone at the edge of the frame—one of many shots in the film that invoke the title and expose how institutions squash human autonomy.
²⁷

Under the drug’s influence Kenet recalls visiting the apartment of Helen’s employer, religious publisher Willard Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall), where Kenet found her in a compromising position. From Helen’s point of view we see Kenet’s haggard face, its right side bathed in shadow, then a close-up from his point of view of her terrified face. Kenet began to strangle her but desisted when his headache became too intense and then passed out. A now-familiar expressionist montage shows a whirlpool image, which dissolves into a spinning merry-go-round, along with tinkling music. Awakening, Kenet found the room in disarray and Helen lying dead. This flashback both disrupts and propels the narrative, at once knocking a hole in the story and providing it with a motive, as Kenet must prove he didn’t kill his wife in order to convince his son he is a good man. So he and Dr. Lorrison return to Whitcombe’s apartment so that Kenet can reenact the crime—with the doctor playing Helen. As Nadelson reminds us, Kenet is attempting to “repeat the experience to achieve mastery,
this time
” (88). The reenactment yields missing evidence: a carousel music box and Helen’s monogrammed night bag.

Kenet’s amnesia derives from a paralyzing double-bind: he wants to be both guilty and innocent, yearns both to remember and to forget. He wanted to kill his wife, but Whitcombe did it for him. Both of them have “amnesia”: Whitcombe pretends not to remember killing Helen.
²⁸
Earlier in the film, Whitcombe served as both Kenet’s guilty conscience and his satanic tempter, urging him to plead temporary insanity and then taunting him that any accusation against Whitcombe would be ridiculed as the “ravings of a pitiful lunatic.” At the film’s conclusion, however, Kenet and Lorrison capture Whitcombe and, with the aid of sodium pentothal, induce him to confess to Helen’s murder.

Though the film ends with the promised father-son reunion and a kiss between Kenet and Ann, it leaves a sour aftertaste. Kenet ultimately remembers his past and is re-membered into society, but he has left large parts of himself behind. And his “redemption” occurs only after he has submitted to the combined forces of the medical establishment and the police, whose enforcement technologies—depicted in a montage of teletypes, radios, and phones during the pursuit of Kenet—appear omniscient. Indeed, compared to the potency and ubiquity of these medical and legal institutions, Whitcombe’s sordid little murder seems tame. And though our hero achieves the American dream of a reconstituted
home (complete with son and psychiatrist wife to care for him), we have peeked behind the curtain to glimpse what the dream hides: oppressive technologies that regulate and shape desire in socially acceptable ways. Although this atmosphere of suspicion may owe a good deal to director Bernhardt’s experiences in Nazi Germany, the film’s aura of surveillance and control also heralds the Cold War, when citizens (including one of the film’s writers) were monitored and punished for alleged subversion.
²⁹
High Wall
, then, tells a story of containment in which a disabled body—its impairments the product of an increasingly forgotten war—is segmented, disciplined, and fixed so that its possessor can be remolded into a docile bourgeois subject. He achieves the American Dream but only by subjecting himself to forces that undermine the Dream’s celebration of individual liberty.

Although the ostensible topic of Fred Zinnemann’s
Act of Violence
is the ethics of forgiveness, it also expands the paranoid atmosphere of
High Wall
. And if its theme of loyalty and the morality of informing is germane to World War II, it is even more pertinent to the mood of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when leftist filmmakers were encouraged to inform on each other, and when many were afflicted with “amnesia” about their previous political activities.
³⁰
Further, Joe Parkson’s sinister invasion of Frank Enley’s home strikingly stages Americans’ fears of being invaded or spied on by former wartime allies. These elements provide unmistakable subtexts for a story about the confrontation between veterans Enley (Van Heflin) and Parkson (Robert Ryan) over an incident that occurred when both were German POWs.

Parkson suddenly appears at the Memorial Day parade in Enley’s California hometown, limping a perpendicular path through the marchers. The moment illustrates his condition: for him the war isn’t over, so he is immune to these rituals of reconciliation and commemoration. In another sense, however, Parkson is a living Memorial Day—an embodiment of wartime trauma, a walking corpse. The bleak mise-en-scène immediately lightens when we cut to Enley, a civic leader looked on as a war hero. Whereas Parkson is bathed in shadows, often shot in singles, Enley is surrounded by a crowd of smiling admirers. Indeed, as a contractor who builds new homes, he seems to epitomize the bright postwar future. But his image is a lie constructed on willful amnesia about his term in a prison camp, when he informed his Nazi keepers of his fellow POWs’ escape plan.

After spotting Parkson stalking him on his fishing trip, Enley returns home terrified (“I remembered something,” he tells his friend). Turning off the lights and closing the blinds, he cowers in the dark with his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh).
But they can’t silence the ominous drag-scrape of Parkson’s leg, damaged because of Enley’s wartime action. The sound is the echo of Enley’s crime, his guilt come to life: Parkson’s leg embodies Enley’s moral disability.
³¹
Just as his son Georgie is seldom seen outside his barred crib, so his father’s seemingly happy domicile is really a prison, his American dream home a fraud constructed on a crime. Because he has never come to terms with his past, he has purchased a false contentment by erecting a high wall in his mind. Both he and Parkson, in short, are still prisoners of war.

In a harrowing scene set on the staircase of a hotel where Enley is attending a convention, Edith hears her husband’s confession. Bars and rails dominate the shadowy mise-en-scène, and Zinnemann shoots the sequence with very few cuts, to concentrate our attention on Enley’s anguished words. As the senior officer in his bunkhouse, Enley had told the Nazi commandant about his men’s imminent escape because he knew it was doomed to fail and hoped that by informing he could prevent his men from being killed. But he no longer believes in his rationale. “I was an informer,” he concludes. “It doesn’t make any difference why I did it. I betrayed my men. … The Nazis even paid me a price. They gave me food and I ate it. … I hadn’t done it just to save their lives. … Maybe that’s all I did it for: to save one man, me. … There were ten men dead, and I couldn’t even stop eating.” As he speaks, his immense shadow looms over him: his past, in pursuit. Considering the atmosphere in Hollywood at the time (the film was shot less than a year after the first HUAC hearings), one cannot help but hear in these lines a stark outline of former communists’ dilemma as well: should one inform on one’s peers if it means saving one’s career? The film’s screenwriter, Robert Richards, faced this dilemma; rather than inform, he took the Fifth Amendment (Navasky 169).

Still, perhaps Enley is too hard on himself. In retrospect he believes he informed only to save his skin, but the circumstances were complicated, indeed, impossible: the Nazis withheld food from prisoners precisely to divide them from each other and make individual survival paramount in each one’s mind. They induced Enley to violate the soldiers’ code, which, as Nadelson describes it, reshapes the self so that “‘I’ passes insensibly into ‘we,’ ‘my’ becomes ‘our’ and individual fate loses its central importance” (23). Enley committed the grievous crime of turning “we” back into “I,” putting his own life above those of his men. In cutting himself off from the group, he branded himself a coward, one of those soldiers who, in the words of J. Glenn Gray, cannot escape death because “death is within.” The coward is doomed, writes Gray, because “the more he struggles to escape the greater is his captivity” (115). This is exactly Enley’s predicament: not merely a prisoner, he is, in fact, already dead.

Both of these traumatized ex-soldiers try to reenact their trauma in order to master it at last (see Nadelson 88).
³²
Though spiritually dead, Enley may, paradoxically, be resurrected by sacrificing himself, by restaging the traumatic circumstances and accepting the consequences he originally eschewed. Conversely, Parkson, at the mercy of his obsession (which Zinnemann illustrates by constantly placing him in doorways or pushing him into the corner of the frame), has sought release, perversely, by
becoming
a kind of Nazi, determined to punish a man he deems unfit to live. The men are counterparts, as Zinnemann indicates with two lap dissolves late in the film, the first from Enley to Parkson, the second from Parkson to Enley. Each is his own worst enemy, his own bête noire.

Women again serve as voices of civility and restraint. Edith reassures Frank that he “only did what [he] thought was right.” Parkson’s girlfriend, Ann (Phyllis Thaxter), rebukes him. “Are you the law? … He’s lived a decent, useful life ever since. But what have you done? What are you going to prove anyway with your vengeance, your violence? … You’re just gonna smash a few more lives.” Even Pat (Mary Astor), the frowsy barfly who befriends Enley after he rushes in despair from the convention hotel into a seamy section of LA, observes that he made “just one mistake. … Everybody makes mistakes.” But these men can hear only the voices of the past—literally, in Enley’s case, as he descends into a personal hell, dashing through darkened streets into the arms of Pat, who brings him to the corrupt lawyer Gavery (Taylor Holmes) and his minion, the assassin Johnny (Berry Kroeger). Gavery panders to Enley’s selfishness and self-hatred—the same weaknesses that victimized him during the war—to persuade him to have Parkson killed: “You’re the same man you were in Germany,” he purrs. “What do you care about one more man? You sent ten along already. Sure, you’re sorry they’re dead. That’s the respectable way to feel. Get rid of this guy and be sorry later. … It’s him or you.” Is Enley innately weak and selfish—“born that way”—or a good man who made a mistake? Can he discover his better self, or transform himself into a man capable of dying for others?