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

mirror.” The vision that seemed so penetrating when gazing at Constance becomes opaque when it comes to seeing himself. Murchison verifies that the man is an impostor by examining a photograph of the real Edwardes: vision may ratify truth or be manipulated by unconscious wishes or master technicians like psychiatrists or directors.
    “Edwardes” (who recalls only that his actual initials are “JB”) leaves for New York to find himself; Constance follows, aided by a hotel detective who assumes she is a librarian or schoolteacher looking for her husband. (A bit later, JB also compares her to a “smug, know-it-all schoolteacher.”) The detective boasts that he knows such things because he’s a “psychologist … you gotta be, in my line.” If a detective has gotta be a psychologist, the rest of the film demonstrates that a psychologist has gotta be a detective too: Constance locates JB by examining his handwriting in the hotel register (he signed his name “John Brown”). “Brown” admits, “I’m haunted, but I can’t see by what.” JB, that is, can’t forget what he is unable to remember. When she advises him that a “guilt complex” “speaks for” him, he responds that she is crazier than he is, having “run off with a pair of initials”: she has fallen for an outline, a person whose identity is both hidden and disclosed by lines scratched on a surface.
    Hoping to learn more, the lovers travel to the home of Constance’s mentor, Dr. Brulov (charmingly portrayed by Michael Chekhov), posing as honeymooners. On the journey JB again grows angry when she presses him about his guilt fantasy, railing against her “double-talk.” But it’s really JB, the man who impersonated Edwardes, who signed his name “John Brown,” and, when he gazes into a mirror, sees only the mirror, who is composed of double-talk. He is a double inside a mirror locked behind a door. Earlier he had described amnesia as the placing of whatever horrible thing you don’t want to remember “behind a closed door.” Constance remarks, “We have to open that door.” In so doing, she also opens doors to aspects of herself—teacher, detective, mother, lover, newlywed—that have been shut: her identity is far from constant. Both characters, in short, pass through a succession of identities, a series of doors, on the road to self-discovery or self-creation.
    That evening JB proves his doubleness by becoming disoriented and agitated at the sight of a chair and bathtub, and especially by the vertical lines on Constance’schenille bedspread. Zombielike, he walks downstairs with his razor (JB is associated with downward movements throughout the film), but Dr. Brulov soothes him with twin bromides—a sedative paired with platitudes about milk-drinking (Pomerance 89). The next morning, Brulov warns Constance that her lover is dangerous—“a schizophrenic, and not a valentine”—but she insists that “the heart can see deeper sometimes” than the brain, that vision may penetrate the surface only if it is not merely scientific scrutiny. She is indeed emulating JB, who had earlier intimated that he could see her heart (romance here becomes a kind of countertransference). Despite JB’s resistance (“That Freud stuff’s a lot of hooey!”), Brulov becomes JB’s “father image,” encouraging transference to jog his memory and discover the source of his trauma. The secrets to JB’s nature, he explains, are “buried in your brain.” The key to unlocking this buried treasure? Dreams, which “tell you what you are trying to hide. But they tell it to you all mixed up, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit. The problem of the analyst is to examine this puzzle, and put the pieces together in the right place, and find out what the devil you are trying to say to yourself.”
    What follows is one of the most famous dream sequences in Hollywood cinema. Though JB narrates the dream himself, it is, again, presented as someone