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

else’s—first filtered through his narration, then illustrated by Hitchcock, with the help of Salvador Dalí. In Freudian terms the dream registers the conflict of rival selves—the narrating JB set against that ghostwriter, his own unconscious. And because JB doesn’t know his real identity, the dream is doubly removed even from his narrative presence, for the experience motivating the dream happened to the person he used to be, known now only as a “pair of initials.” Further, once Brulov and Petersen interpret the dream material, it is abstracted, dissected, and held out for the audience’s speculation: it becomes not his but
our
nightmare.
    Fittingly, the dream begins with an array of disembodied, peering eyes—on the draperies, says JB, of a gambling house. A man with a large pair of scissors cuts through the draperies (an apparent allusion to the early Dalí/Bunuel film
Un chien andalou
), and then a scantily clad woman (who looks “very much like Constance” and is played by Rhonda Fleming, who earlier performed as Mary Carmichael) walks around kissing everyone. The narrator is found playing cards (most of them blank) with a bearded man, and when he overturns a seven of clubs, the man says “that makes twenty-one. I win.” Enter the angry proprietor, his face masked, to accuse them of cheating. The next portion is a different but related dream. The bearded man falls from the roof of a tall building. To the rear, the masked proprietor hides behind a chimney, holding a small, malformed wheel, which he then drops. It ends with the dreamer being chased down a hill by a “great pair of wings.” 24
    The dream sequence in
Spellbound
features an array of disembodied eyes.
Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY
.
    The first portion of the dream goes unanalyzed until the end of the film. But the second portion immediately leads somewhere, as Constance maps this nightmare alley, miraculously connecting the sled marks on the street outdoors to the vertical lines that have bothered the amnesiac. They must be a memory of ski tracks, she deduces, and by word association the three determine that the dream refers to Gabriel Valley ski resort (wings = angel = Gabriel). Amazingly skilled rhetoricians, these doctors sense that JB’s dream images operate by metonymy and synecdoche—one of the two “main dream processes,” according to Bert States (94)—which enable the dreamer to replace the source events with associated images. For some reason they decide that only reenactment can “break the spell” of JB’s childhood trauma (and may solve the mystery of the ski marks as well). So Constance and JB travel to the resort and go skiing. Just as they are about to swoosh off the cliff, JB remembers: “I killed my brother!” Cut to the face of agrimacing boy, mutely warning another child to be careful; we then inhabit JB’s point of view as he slides down a railing, sweeping his brother onto the prongs of an iron fence. The truth emerges: “I didn’t kill my brother. It was an accident!” It’s hard to say how he knows it was an accident since the memory says nothing about his motives. Nevertheless, he is liberated by the recollection.
    The past comes flooding back: his name is John Ballantine; he ran into Edwardes at the resort while recovering from “nerve shock” due to his war experiences and saw Edwardes die in a skiing accident. Constance explains that he took on Edwardes’s identity to prove to himself that the doctor wasn’t dead and hence that he couldn’t have killed him. Swift, accurate dream reading, cathartic cure: it’s all too pat. 25 As Jerrold Brandell observes, the film permits only one correct interpretation, which explains not only the “distal causes and pathogenesis” of Ballantine’s disorder but also the particular form it takes (“Eighty” 66). Yet the dream also invokes a theme that reverberates throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre and the noir canon: a “wounded past envies the