Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (28 page)

Like most pseudodocumentary noirs,
The Night Holds Terror
sides with law enforcement, stressing its mastery of surveillance technologies such as radio, television, and teletype, as well as its control of information. The second half of the film thus tracks the police’s attempt to apprehend the thugs without letting them know (though the outlaws have access to police radio frequencies). But if the hitchhikers are frightening, there is something equally ominous about the police’s panoptic power, which reaches all the way into the Courtiers’ home to show Mrs. Courtier some mug shots. And when we recall that Mr. Courtier was abducted while returning home from his job at an airbase, we realize he is already imbricated in this same system of information, his car merely the visible tip of a vast technomilitary complex that culminates in bombs and missiles. And if subversive forces such as hitchhikers can commandeer our cars, they might also steal other, more dangerous technologies—as, in fact, Soviet spies had done a few years earlier. This association of automobiles and secret technologies becomes blatant in other postwar noirs where cars are portrayed as Trojan horses—boons whose promise of freedom distracts citizens from the presence of more lethal technologies. In these films cars are no longer merely guns; they are bombs.

In
White Heat
, for example, cars are associated with “heat”—with contained, automated combustion. By using cars in his crimes, gangster Cody Jarrett (James Cagney, in a legendary performance) would seem to participate in this mechanized world. But Cody produces heat of a different sort: far from a machine, he is a force of nature, subject to headaches and explosions of temper, and requires “tons of specialized equipment to get him cornered” (Shadoian 168). Indeed, Cody always seems hemmed in by machines, from the opening train-robbery sequence
to the prison machine shop where he’s nearly killed, to his apocalyptic demise at an oil refinery. It makes sense, then, that the FBI traps him by using electronics technician Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien), who, as Vic Pardo, worms his way into Jarrett’s confidence and ultimately switches off his power. Where Cody is ebullient, impulsive, psychotic, Fallon/Pardo is canny, emotionless, machinelike: an embodiment of chilly technologies designed to dampen and smother outlaw impulses (Shadoian 169).

Nor are Cody’s cars convertibles, for he is no youngster forced into crime by poverty, nor is he a working-class guy on the make, but a hardened criminal who craves secrecy. For Jarrett autos are hiding places. Thus, in one remarkable sequence, Jarrett; his wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo); and his (overly) beloved mother (Margaret Wycherly) take cover in a drive-in movie (the film:
Task Force
), where Cody decides to give himself up for a lesser crime to avoid a murder rap. Later, after his mother dies, he escapes from prison by hiding in a car’s trunk. But though cars and trucks permit the gang to make bigger hauls and move from place to place, they also leave tracks that enable the police and FBI to apprehend them. Cars seem to be a criminal’s best friend, but, like Pardo/Fallon, they are really Trojan horses, rats on wheels.

These themes converge in the final sequence when Jarrett and the gang (explicitly citing the
Aeneid
) hide inside an empty tanker in order to steal the refinery payroll. The scenes shot within the tank make Cody look small and cramped, suggesting that though he believes he is in charge, he is actually just a cog in Fallon/Pardo’s machinations. For he never suspects that his own Trojan horse has been signaling the police with a radio transmitter. Curiously, Fallon displays not even a hint of ambivalence about betraying a man with whom he has grown intimate. Hence, while viewers may fear Jarrett’s psychopathic violence, we likely root for him over Fallon, who seems to embody the soulless technologies increasingly used to exterminate the Cody Jarretts of the world and whose role as informer invokes the presence of “friendly” witnesses—that is, those who informed on their former friends—in midcentury Hollywood. And if the famous final apocalyptic explosion amid the refinery’s Hortonspheres alludes to the larger threat looming over the world—the atomic bomb, as I have argued elsewhere—Cody Jarrett seems less responsible for these explosions than do the police who fan his white heat.
¹⁵
For although Cody’s heat is like the gas of a speeding automobile, the government’s pervasive and intense heat—artificial, passionless, ubiquitous, and, above all, secretive—might very well lead to an all-consuming conflagration.

The apotheosis of noir’s cars occurs in Robert Aldrich’s
Kiss Me Deadly
, where the automobile’s amoral space collides, almost literally, with new explosive technologies. Machines are everywhere in the world of the protagonist, “bedroom dick” Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), with his telephone answering machine and flashy Jaguar roadster. From the opening scene, when the mysterious Christina (Cloris Leachman) flags Hammer down by standing in the middle of the road and holding up her arms in an X-figure, we seem to be riding in a speeding car. Even the opening titles crawl backward (from bottom to top) as if we’re reading them from the passenger’s seat. And if Christina is a hitcher, so are the film’s viewers, barely hanging on through the film’s careening narrative, which (filled with odd camera angles, sequence shots, and strange characters) seems to swerve and dart like Hammer’s car (Silver, “
Kiss Me
” 209) as it drives us ever closer to “The Great Whatsit,” a radioactive device desired by a gang of criminals led by the mysterious Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker).

Hammer is far from a sympathetic hero: after nearly running Christina down, he callously responds, “You almost wrecked my car!” She immediately parses his personality: “You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. … You’re the kind of person who never gives in a relationship.” As she astutely discerns, Hammer’s car, far from signifying convertibility, embodies his hammer-like, inflexible character, which Shadoian compares to a “hard rubber object” (222). A man who pimps out his girlfriend/secretary, Velda (Maxine Cooper), to catch wayward husbands and whose motto is “what’s in it for me?,” Hammer has accepted as fait accompli the commodification of everything. He has also internalized the automobile’s amoral space: agile but robotic, Hammer
is
his roadster.

Cars also symbolize the rootless amorality that pervades his world. Indeed, most of the film’s characters act like automatons, Los Angeles having mutated from the sleepy suburbia of
Double Indemnity
into a city filled with human bumper cars. As a mover’s assistant puts it in the film, “people … never stand still.” Hence we hear traffic sounds constantly, even during interior scenes such as the eerie sequences set in the room of “Lily” (actually named Gabrielle, played by Gaby Rodgers), whom Hammer interrogates and then attempts to aid. The soul-destroying hollowness of Hammer’s Los Angeles indeed exemplifies Anthony Giddens’s description of modernity as “a runaway engine of enormous power which … we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder” (139). This engine lies inside the
automobile, which is once again figured as a Trojan horse—a gift whose autonomy and mobility engender amorality and anomie.
Kiss Me Deadly
’s cars signify a world where humans have become machines.

Hammer undergoes conversion, however, after Soberin’s gang runs him off the road and nearly kills him. He symbolically dies twice more, once when the gang plants a bomb in his new convertible and again when they drug him to learn what he knows about what Velda dubs the Great Whatsit. His cars symbolize this capacity for resurrection, his ability to imitate “Lazarus rose out from the grave,” as Hammer’s mechanic, Nick (Nick Dennis), names him. In fact, Hammer has at least three lives: his first life as a sleazy private eye, represented by his first car (a Jaguar XK120 roadster); his transition from roadster to quester, embodied by a convertible that he briefly drives (probably an MG TD); and his final, slightly more humanized, self, symbolized by the Corvette convertible given to him as a phony peace offering by Soberin’s gang. Another Trojan horse, this car carries not one but two bombs, the first designed to explode on ignition and the second when the car reaches a certain speed. That would be a “sweet little kiss off,” explains Hammer to Nick, for whom cars and pretty women prompt identical expletives: “Va-voom! 3D pow!” Pow indeed: cars are deadly weapons. Nick himself is murdered automotively when Soberin (identified only by the expensive shoes we earlier saw when his gang tortured Christina) releases the jack holding up a car under which Nick is working. Viewers are implicated in this murder through a brief shot taken, as it were, from the falling car’s point of view. In the aftermath we ride shotgun in Hammer’s Corvette as he kills and tortures people to avenge Nick’s death and to solve the mystery of the Great Whatsit.

The crucial item in this quest is a key that Christina hides on her body before dying; it’s the key to a locker, but it may as well be an ignition key, for the film suggests that cars are just the leading edge of a continuum leading inexorably to the atomic bomb. Like the device inside the roaring, blindingly shining box that Gabrielle opens despite Soberin’s warning, cars change everything. They even alter human bodies, as the film illustrates through its constant shots of detached hands, feet, legs. Like the bomb itself—the result of splitting atoms—automotive technologies and the capitalism that sells them as expansions of selfhood instead convert human beings into aggregates of colliding parts. No longer mere convertibles, cars have become converters transforming people into atomized automatons. Cars and bombs are both Great Whatsits whose advanced technologies paradoxically expose our most primitive impulses—terror, violence, selfishness, and greed. In
Kiss Me Deadly
automobility fosters a restless amorality that ultimately consumes everyone.

Noir’s cars seem to speed the characters toward liberation, with their promise of automobility and convertibility, but instead inevitably crash into roadblocks. They trace an arc that mimics that of postwar American society and culture: beginning as an emblem of rebirth and a remodeled American Dream, they become vehicles for a set of pervasive anxieties: the mixed desire for and dread of a convertibility that is almost invariably smothered by envy and amorality; the
fear that the machines that seem to liberate and expand us actually render us vulnerable both financially (we incur debt in order to “own” our cars and houses) and physically (by subjecting us to invasion and violence that may end in a conflagration). In these films the world has become a speeding car. But who, they prompt us to ask, is really in the driver’s seat?

A sharply creased fedora rests atop the oiled hair of a smart-talking detective, whose steely eyes gaze at a seductive blonde smoking a cigarette. When they kiss—as they inevitably will—a slinky jazz saxophone plays. Hat, blonde, smoke, jazz: to many twenty-first-century viewers these tropes are identified with film noir. But there’s a problem with this scenario: the jazz wasn’t really there. As David Butler has shown, not a single 1940s noir and only a few from the 1950s actually featured a jazz soundtrack. Our popular contemporary association of noir with jazz is, he writes, a “retrospective illusion” (166), a dream of the post-modern era.
¹

One reason for this illusion may be that, as Claudia Gorbman notes, most film music is “inaudible” (77): it reinforces the narrative, furnishes emotional effects, and outlines characters without consciously registering in viewers’ minds.
²
But jazz in noir is inaudible in a different sense, which derives partly from the invisibility of African Americans in midcentury cinema. Although black characters are no more prominent in noirs than in other Hollywood movies of the period, this whitewash took place only on the surface, leaving blackness intact beneath and allowing it to surface in the form of jazz. Noir filmmakers employed jazz as a gateway to invisible segments of society, in the process unveiling various suspicious character types and exposing hidden corners of postwar cultural consciousness. Jazz, I propose, gave noir filmmakers a means to explore shifting attitudes about race relations and equality; to dramatize anxieties about disability, sexuality, and gender; and to analyze American ambivalence about violence.

In noir, as in other midcentury Hollywood movies, jazz is, as Kathryn Kalinak has argued, a symbol of otherness (167). Racial otherness is sometimes displayed in noir’s nightclub scenes. Often the sole moments when African Americans appear, these scenes introduce viewers to an alternate America, one characterized by liberated sexuality, drug use, racial mixing, and violations of orthodox gender roles and sexual orientations. This otherness colors the depiction
of white male jazz musicians, who are almost invariably portrayed in noir as fragile
(The Man I Love)
, sexually suspect
(Nocturne)
, or ultrasensitive and unreliable
(Nightmare)
—or all of these traits at once. Alternately hypersexual and effeminate, noir jazz musicians are prone to madness, drugs, and violence. Yet the films betray a lingering respect and fascination with these geek-like figures who enact viewers’ repressed impulses, including an attraction to blackness. These white jazz musicians are, in short, “noired”—made into surrogate African Americans.