The parallel between cinema and dreams is almost as old as film itself. Early surrealist filmmakers, for example, saw the mental production of dream images as analogous to the cutting necessary for film editing (Gabbard and Gabbard). But movie dreams are not solitary: as C. J. Pennethorne Hughes observed back in 1930, cinema is “the transmuted and regulated dream life of the people”. And if films are dreams, so dreams are often films: Jean-Louis Baudry reminds us how often a dreamer will wake and say, “It was like in a movie”. Hollywood is not called “the dream factory” for nothing. Not only do movies influence American dreams in a metaphorical sense, by furnishing stories that shape audiences’ ideas about success, selftransformation, love and a host of other themes; they also provide images and situations for actual dreams, which may resemble thrillers, horror movies, detective stories, or romances. Indeed, some of the cinematic dreams I examine below generate a kind of mise en abyme: a dream within a movie that alludes to other movie dreams. Thus, as Vicky Lebeau notes, because dreams inevitably partake of the culture at large, dream theory supports a “psychoanalytic study of culture”. Films noir serve this function better than most movie genres, for they are full of bad dreams; indeed, the picture many describe as the first film noir, Boris Ingster’s 1940 Stranger on the Third Floor, features a lengthy dream sequence that fosters the protagonist’s change of heart and forecasts his incarceration. More generally, Nicholas Christopher remarks that the noir cycle constitutes the “complex mosaic of a single, thirteen-year urban dreamscape.”
Janet Leigh and Van Heflin in "Act of Violence" (1948) directed by Fred Zinneman
Some veterans don’t lose their memories but have been stripped of their emotional resilience and their humanity. Yet they wish to reenact or recapture their warrior life —its camaraderie, its intensity, its clear sense of purpose—and return to the very incidents that traumatized them. In these reenactment scenes, which appear in almost all of the films discussed below, noir vets display the clinical symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, characterized by “persistent, intrusive reexperiencing of the traumatic event through flashbacks and recurrent dreams with persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal” (Theodore Nadelson).
Such traumatic episodes exemplify what Roger Luckhurst, paraphrasing Cathy Caruth, calls a “crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time”: that is, because the events are generally not consciously incorporated into the characters’ experiences or psyches, they are not spoken or written about. In this regard that prototypical noir narrative device, the flashback, serves an essential function. Such scenes epitomize Michael Rothberg’s definition of “traumatic realism,” whereby “the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic extremity that disables Realist representation”: they remain unintegrated into the films’ style, as if to reflect the vets’ psychic disintegration. Noir veterans undergo purgative rituals in which their old selves die and new ones are born. Some also play out the conventions of what Arthur Frank calls the “restitution narrative” —the “culturally preferred narrative” of institutional medicine—in which the agent is not the patient but a drug, a doctor, or, as in many vet noirs, a woman.
Restitution and Revenge: Two later vet noirs present similar quests by ex-soldiers: each veteran seeks to repay or vindicate a friend’s death and thereby release his own feelings of loss and betrayal ("Dead Reckoning" and "Ride the Pink Horse").
In Dead Reckoning Captain Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart), learning that his missing war buddy was an indicted murderer, tries to clear his name. Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery), in Ride the Pink Horse, seeks restitution from the mobster who killed his wartime friend, Shorty Thompson. Both vets struggle with PTSD, and both encounter women who serve as catalysts—in opposite ways—for their recovery. Like Cornered, these films dramatize how, as Nadelson writes, trauma victims “often desperately try to regain control by repeating and revisiting the event in dreams, fantasies, or re-enactments. They repeat the experience to achieve mastery, this time.”
Forging Noir Identities: “Every painting is a love affair,” according to cashier and Sunday painter Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. Cross is explaining his aesthetic principles to Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who later conspires with her lover, the slimy Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), to sign Cross’s paintings with her name. Cross’s words resonate beyond this film; indeed, they could provide the epigraph for a group of early films noir that depict men falling in love with a woman’s portrait.
Three films in particular—I Wake Up Screaming, Laura, and The Dark Corner— feature fetishized female images that males use to bolster their own identities or to fashion new ones. These women’s portraits become, in effect, mirrors or self-portraits of the men. In these retellings of the Galatea/Pygmalion myth each man ends up creator and forger of the woman and of himself. The pictorial representations in the films also generate two types of self-reflexivity. First, in employing the typical noir device of the framed narrative or flashback, the films analogically replicate the fashioning of these characters’ framed identities within exploitative perspectives. Second, their stories of fabricated female identities invoke Hollywood’s own fabrication of female stars in the studio system. Whereas the dream films, missing-person movies, and vet noirs test the virtues of selfreinvention and the pursuit of happiness, ultimately the forgery films’ complex aesthetic offers a more pointed challenge. In blurring the lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, real and representation, these films imply that human character is too malleable and complex to be framed within a single subject or explained by a single narrative. They advance the idea that identity is not an entity but a never-ending process. They thus turn upside down Franklin’s optimism about self-creation, implying that self reinvention may occur not as a result of individual choice but as an inevitable by-product of the gap between humans and our representations. Their critique of individualism is less political than philosophical and ontological, as they propose that all identities are, to some degree, forgeries.
Fractured: Steele remembers being called away from dinner with his friend Terry (Claire Trevor) by a message that his mother was ill. On the way to visit her, he became convinced his train was about to collide with another one. As the second train approaches, we see Steele and his reflection in the window: visually he is “a little fractured.” A series of quick cuts shows Steele from outside the window in full-face and in profile, both images tightly boxed within the window so that he resembles nothing so much as a portrait—of overpowering terror. He pulls the brake cord, stops the train, and collapses. But his mother was not ill, he has no train ticket, and no train wreck occurred yesterday. Perhaps, hypothesizes Lowell, his traumatic war experiences have affected his cognition. Steele is like those cognitively disabled veterans discussed in chapter 3: he can neither fully remember his traumas nor completely forget them. Yet his visual fracturing also links him to the cubist shapes and terror-ravaged faces portrayed by European modernists. Hence, his false memories indicate a rupture in his own realist aesthetic, based as it is on a congruence between representation and shared reality. Can we trust what we see or recall, especially if others don’t share our perceptions? “All of a sudden,” he confesses to Terry, “I don’t know myself. In twenty-four hours everything has become unfamiliar.” To further complicate matters, at the end Steele believes he has taken another journey, that “everybody’s nuts around this place” but himself. He remains suspended between his failure to remember what has happened to him and his inability to recover from his war injury.
Here Crack-Up (1946) augments the other vet noirs’ challenge to the American ideal of self-reinvention. If Steele, a war hero and famous exponent of truth, can’t start over, then can anyone in postwar America do so? And from what fragments will we paint our new self-portrait? Neither the shards of demolished European high culture nor embattled pictorial realism seem quite up to the task. The split portrait thus comes to represent America’s fissured psyche as well as the film’s—and indeed, film noir’s—divided aesthetic. All are a little fractured. -"Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream" (2012) by Mark Osteen
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