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

powers of psychoanalysis and at the religious language (“devils of unreason”) that presents it as exorcism or conversion (Morris 148). 21 However, the film itself presents psychiatry more ambiguously, as a profession riddled with political infighting and tainted by human foibles. As Freedman notes,
Spellbound
both enhances the patina of psychiatry and pokes fun at it (85). 22 Moreover, its ultimate concern is not so much with opening the mental doors of Peck’s tortured amnesiac as with opening the emotional doors of Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman). Far from needing to drive devils of unreason from her soul, the film suggests, she needs to welcome warm emotions into her frozen heart. For while Dr. Petersen acts aspsychiatrist/detective for much of the film, she is also partly constituted, observes Mary Ann Doane, as the film’s analysand (
Desire
46)—the character who achieves a fuller selfhood through the therapeutic process. 23
    Early in the film she is contrasted with patient Mary Carmichael (Rhonda Fleming), a sexually aggressive woman who hates Constance, whom she calls “Miss Frozen Puss.” Those sentiments are echoed by her leering colleague, Dr. Fleurot (John Emery); indeed, the entire Green Manors medical staff act like fraternity brothers, constantly gossiping about their only female colleague and vying for dominance. This situation is supposed to change now that Constance’s mentor, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), is being replaced by Dr. Edwardes, acclaimed author of
Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex
. However, when Edwardes (Peck) shows up, his initial contribution is instead to light a spark in Constance. But something is wrong: when she traces lines on a tablecloth with her fork (Constance is constantly associated with sharp objects, as if psychoanalysis were a form of cutting), Edwardes becomes agitated and disoriented.
    That evening, after the two have shared a picnic lunch, she can’t sleep. Walking upstairs (she is also associated with upward movements throughout the film), she takes his book from the library and enters his office. Hitchcock organizes the following sequence around a series of doorframe shots. First Constance stands in the threshold and then sees Edwardes nodding in his chair. From behind him we watch her hesitantly ask to discuss his book, then sheepishly admit that this is only a “subterfuge.” Approaching her, but framed in the doorway from her point of view, Edwardes declares that “something has happened to us … like lightning striking,” and crosses the threshold. A series of close-ups focuses on the two characters’ eyes to imply that his vision pierces and thaws her. As the music swells, a shot of Constance’s eyes dissolves to four doors successively opening onto bright light. The scene ends with the two passionately kissing. Clearly these are Petersen’s doors opening, not Edwardes’s: their vaginal associations are not exactly subtle. Yet what she thinks she sees—Dr. Edwardes—is false, and, almost until the moment of the climactic kiss, Peck remains framed in the doorway, as if coffined—appropriately, since the real Dr. Edwardes is dead. As we soon learn, this man is an impostor who hides a debilitating guilt complex of his own.
    The blissful moment ends when “Edwardes” recoils at the sight of Constance’s striped robe; then he experiences a breakdown at the operating table (“Doors. Unlock ’em. You can’t keep people in cells! … He did it, he told me! He killed his father!”). When he signs his name, Constance sees that his signature does not match that of the real Edwardes (who had signed her book). These lines scratchedon paper, indicating his true self, rhyme with the vertical lines that prompt his flashbacks: a mental line connects them. Soon the fake Edwardes admits to killing the real Edwardes and adds, “I’m someone else. I don’t know who. … I have no memory. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing nothing but the