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Nightmare Alley
A man in a fedora, cigarette clenched between his lips, drops a dead man down a hole in the floor and after setting the wooden house on fire, trudges downhill to the desolate prairie without looking back. His name is Stan (Bradley Cooper) and he finds his way to a traveling circus. “Are you low—you need work?” a carnie asks. References not required. Gradually, Stan, a mysterious and very private man, becomes likable and then, gradually, doubts about his character return.
For Nightmare Alley, writer-director Guillermo del Toro went back to the book—hardboiled crime writer William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, adapted as a film noir in 1947. Del Toro’s fascinating version can be called neo-noir, but not unlike his Oscar-earning The Shape of Water (2017), it also exists in its own category. His Nightmare Alley is saturated in unnatural hues, its brooding palette the material from which del Toro shapes an artificial world.
Nightmare Alley begins in the Great Depression and concludes at the close of 1941 with America at war with the Axis. However, the larger social-political events are only dim echoes inside the hermetically sealed world inhabited by Stan, the story’s antihero. The circus where he finds refuge travels the road by night, the rain-slick gravel glistening like wet obsidian. The lights of the Ferris wheel revolve against a stormy sky and rise from a squalid, luridly painted labyrinth of degradation. Audiences step right up to watch the Geek, a starving wretch, devour a live chicken.
“Folks will pay good money to make themselves feel superior,” explains Clem (Willem Dafoe), the boss of an encampment of freaks whose archetypes will be familiar to fans of old Hollywood. There’s Major (Mark Povinelli), the scrappy dwarf; Bruno (Ron Perlman), the strong man; Zeena (Toni Collette), the psychic in flowing gowns; and the woman with whom Stan falls in love, Molly aka Electra (Rooney Mara), scantily clad on stage while withstanding punishing jolts of current from a pair of electrodes.
The camaraderie among carnies stops at the Geek, kept caged like an animal. Clem explains to Stan that geeks are ruined men from flophouses, fed a tincture of opium to keep them enslaved. Clem also shows Stan his collection of stillborn babies and aborted fetuses in jars preserved in wood alcohol. “Good for pickling, bad for drinking,” he explains.
Stan becomes fascinated by Zenna’s husband, the “mind-reading” Peter (David Strathairn), who works marvels with an elaborate system of visual-verbal clues from ringers in the audience and his own astute powers of observation. Peter is Nightmare Alley’s most fascinating character, a sophisticate in low places, drinking himself to death while drawing moral boundaries around his occult grifting. He calls the handwritten, mind-reading book he compiled “dangerous,” warning, if mind-reading turns into “a spook show, people get hurt.” He adds: “No man can outrun God.”
Stan convinces Molly that they can make better lives outside the circus with the “mentalist” tricks he learned from Peter. For a while his prediction comes true. Stan and Molly become the toast of Buffalo—a grey city where snowfall never ceases—with a popular mind-reading act a posh hotel nightclub. One night during their show, Stan meets Lilith Ritter (Kate Blanchett), a glacial femme fatale and psychanalyst. They play mind games with each other and devise a plot to embezzle a dangerously psychotic millionaire. She warns, “If you displease the right people, the world closes in on you very fast.”
Nightmare Alley makes visual reference to scenes from several ‘40s films noir and inhabits the same moral universe as the genre’s darkest movies. The long, cold disorienting corridors of Buffalo are as labyrinthine as the circus Stan left behind. Fate is inescapable, perhaps because character becomes fate. And yet, Nightmare Alley isn’t a genre pastiche but unmistakably the work of del Toro with its glazed Majolica surfaces and its monstrous evocations of mythology to reflect upon the recent past. Like The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley unfolds in a world slightly out of time.
