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

secondary character in his own life. Late in the film, at the conclusion of Reardon’s chat with Colfax, the now-legit gangster’s face dissolves to Reardon’s: the point is that he wants to
be
Colfax, which becomes even clearer in the justly famous Green Cat sequence. 2 As Reardon and Kitty converse there, a candle rests between them, recalling the phallic bulb shining between Kitty and Swede at
their
first meeting; Reardon too is falling for her. “I’d like to have known the old Kitty Collins,” he declares, even after she has just told him how she betrayed Swede! When she suggests returning to his hotel with him, his eyes light up at this apparent sexual come-on. But she does to him what she did to Ole—“takes a powder,” as Reardon earlier put it. It’s almost as though Reardon wants to be killed, or perhaps, like Ole, he feels dead, with only the prospect of violence capable of reviving him.
    Though the convoluted story of how Ole was betrayed and disappeared—a skein of double crosses engineered by Colfax, using Kitty as bait—is finally explained, Ole’s true nature is not. Just as he exists for us only as a set of fragments, so he was even for himself a puzzle with pieces missing, a collection ofhalf-understood dreams and impulses organized around a handkerchief. At the end he remains, like Frank Thompson, broken into parts, as the coroner’s early description of his demise implies: the slugs “near tore him in half.” Perhaps Rear-don believes he can be the glue holding Ole together. But what holds Reardon together? Clearly he and the Swede are doubles, or halves of a single self. Whereas Ole could never escape his past, Reardon acquires one by sifting through Anderson’s. Their mirrored trajectories imply that self-integration, let alone self-renewal, can be for him only fleeting or imaginary. Hence, at the film’s end Rear-don is informed that the investigation that nearly cost him his life will merely generate a minuscule difference in next year’s rates. He hasn’t become a gangster, boxer, cop, or lover; come Monday, he’ll be back to work as a cipher. Similarly, the film’s structure draws the viewer’s attention to its own artful construction, reminding us that “Ole” (like the other characters, but more so) exists only as a piecemeal concoction of “cuts”:
we
put him together, living, like Reardon, vicariously but fleetingly through his exploits.
    Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), the protagonist of Jacques Tourneur’s justly celebrated
Out of the Past
, also tries to reinvent himself (in an odd coincidence that recurs several times in noir) as a gas station owner. He has changed his name to Bailey and started a new life in the small town of Bridgeport. Whereas once he engineered glamorous escapades in Acapulco and San Francisco with a beautiful, dangerous woman, he now seeks to satisfy himself as a modest businessman catering to the mobile lives of others. But his masquerade unravels when an old associate, Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine), shows up in his convertible and undoes Jeff’s conversion. Jeff, too, did something wrong once: not only did he fail to fetch Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), the girlfriend of gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), as he was paid to do; he ran off with her and then stood by as she murdered his partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie). Lacking Sam Spade’s rigorous ethics (“when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it”), he has never paid for either error. From the beginning Markham is self-divided, and when he becomes Bailey, he brings his dual nature with him. Thus, although Jeff does a lot of moving in the film, his identity isn’t really mobile: he can’t reinvent himself because he doesn’t really want to. 3
    To illustrate Jeff’s cloven self, the film contains numerous symmetries and doublings. First and foremost are the settings: on the one hand is bucolic Bridgeport and environs, on the other the corrupt cities