Nightmare Alley
Super Quick Five Minute KDD DVD Response Thing
I made it through Nightmare Alley (1947) which I haven’t seen in years. I should say I was sucked in, chewed up and spit back out by it. Its grip on my throat was so tight that I had to get to the end so I could breathe again and therefore sleep, neither of which I could do because of the existential stranglehold this little noirish trip through hell left on me.
When I first started watching it, I vaguely remembered that the last time I saw it I was freaked out by The Geek, the old drunk who we hear wail insanely but who we never see. You know, the majorly fucked up Carnie Freak who chews off live chicken heads for a slug of alcohol. How could this fatalistic image of doom and addiction NOT freak me out?
Well as soon as I saw Tyrone Powers in his tight white t-shirt, I forgot about the geek and decided that I was going to hone my vision in on Powers’ utterly feminized sexual queer presence. I never noticed before how gorgeously sexually ambiguous Tyrone Powers looks when he bats his long black eyelashes and wears a tight white t-shirt. Unfortunately, my lust for his charcoal-eyed queer image didn’t pan out as the entire movie turned into the stuff my nightmares are made of and not my dreams. Yep, Nightmare Alley ended up being a trip through my own private nightmares, as in the one about no matter how hard I try to rise out of the muck that I will always find myself back in it. That you can't escape your origins, that you can dress the trash up but underneath you'll still find the dirt, etc.
The real nightmare in Nightmare Alley isn’t the literal Geek, but the idea that we cannot escape the geek we are destined to be. That our lives and destiny are preordained and we are determined by our class. It is fatalistic, claustrophobic and bleak as fuck. Poor Tyrone Powers (a.k.a. The Great Stanton) makes the mistake of thinking he can rise above the loser Carnie freak he is. He stupidly tries to outsmart the upper class, but quickly learns that he is no match for the rich and the educated. Watching him go down is a horrible, uncomfortable, and embarrassing affair, as we see how stupid he is all along and know from the very get-go that he is fooling no one but himself.
Top off the movie’s fatalism with various references to mysticism and God, and you’re looking at some kind of cinematic vision of a pre-ordained life in purgartory that could have appeared in a sermon by Jonathan Edwards (who to me is one of the greatest gothic horror authors of all times). And it’s all topped off with some oedipal Freudian mommy issues that conflate everything. We can’t escape the stranglehold of the “mother” and we can’t escape our class. Talk about suffocating!
And that’s why this is an awesome movie. It’s a psychoanalytical, spiritual, fatalistic film noir set in a carnival with tarot cards, chicken head eating geeks, flaming bras, and an evil lesbian psychologist villain. What more could you ask for in a movie? And despite his doomed life and the overall nihilistic overtones of the movie, Tryone Powers is still hot in his tight white t-shirt. Don’t ya think?
