“Nightmare Alley” and the Loss of the Narrative Line

As usual I find myself revising my prejudices, if only for the purpose of forming new ones. Way back when—say, during the heyday of the French nouvelle vague—I was wont to spout a compare-and-contrast monologue linking storytelling to language. French filmmakers, I once boldly maintained, were as a rule inferior to Anglo filmmakers when it came to linear narrative, which is telling a story by plodding step by step to a climax while tying each successive frame of your story to that climax by ineffable logic.

It all stemmed, I further dared to claim, from the language each depended upon. English is a syntactical language in which meaning is constructed mostly by syntax—word order—whereas French (which I translate to make part of my living) is an inflected language, full of grammatically declined cases and gender distinctions to indicate the relationship among words in a sentence and relying only secondarily on where each word appears. (I’m not even sure if it’s possible to make the mistake of a dangling modifier in French, because your sentence will be saved by the correspondences between masculine or feminine nouns and their case-shifting pronouns, wherever you put your words).

Back when I thought I knew what I was talking about, I took this distinction whole and applied it to film, insisting that any medium born of French is constructed much more vertically, making French films adept at creating atmosphere, innuendo, and poetic imagery but lousy at storytelling, at moving from one step to another, whereas British films—ranging from classic whodunits to the many filmed stories of their voluminous, epic Dickensian novels—are masters of the horizontal, or, in other words, the well-constructed linear storyline.

That distinction seems to have been shattered recently by several new movies in English with narratives that are, in all honesty, a mess. Two of these will be flaunted at this year’s Oscars—the Guillermo del Toro remake (2021) of Edmund Goulding’s superbly noir adaptation of Nightmare Alley (1946) starring Tyrone Power (based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name), and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021), based on a 1967 novel by the obscure writer Thomas Savage.

The original film version of Nightmare Alley, about a sociopathic carnival worker who steals a complicated code used to convince audience members that he is reading their mind, has been a favorite of mine since childhood; and although Toro sticks to the basic outline of the original plot, there are absurd and melodramatic exaggerations of the original already melodramatic plot that are not even entertaining to watch, not only because of their extreme improbability but also because they bulge from the storyline like wads of wet, unfolded laundry hanging from an otherwise straight clothesline. Must Zeena the Seer, played by Toni Collette, really plunge her hand into Stanton Carlisle’s (Bradley Cooper) bathwater looking for something hard not five minutes after meeting him; or does Dr. Lilith Ritter, the psychoanalyst, need to transform into a grimacing betrayer with the hokey suddenness of a character from I Was a Teenage Werewolf during their final encounter?

This is not to claim that the story in all three vehicles—the novel and both films—was ever intended as naturalistic. It’s to say that the excesses in del Toro’s Nightmare Alley make it a Frankenstein of mismatched parts due to this tendency toward the sensational, rendered doubly annoying by the ending, which is ridiculously circular (that’s all I can presently say without being accused of revealing spoilers), something the original film had the restraint not to do.

I may be belying my own former argument by focusing on this film, since its director is Mexican, and like its Latin sister, Spanish is no less inflected than French and depends just as little on syntax for the construction of meaning. But perhaps my distinction still holds, since the screenplay for Nightmare was written What is more, the genius of this film stems not so much from its storytelling as from its hallucinatory second half, which reaches a zenith the moment we are treated to the deco-adorned office belonging to our psychoanalyst, which resembles not so much a movie set as it does an overwhelmingly saturated dream landscape. In fact, all the scenes that take place in that office between Cooper and Blanchett are the closest experience to a dream that I have ever encountered in any medium. What is more—and I don’t know whether to attribute this achievement to Blanchett or Toro or the two in congress—I still cannot get over the fact that her performance as the psychoanalyst quickly collapses into two dimensions that become the essence of the noir aesthetic, almost as if, rather than watching an actor or the character she portrays, we are seeing some perfect celluloid image magically extracted from a movie of the 40s era. But like most of the other narrative elements in this film, the portrayal of psychoanalysis reaches absurd dimensions. As I told a good friend who is a psychoanalyst from the Freudian school, “You’ll be disturbed by how many rules of psychotherapy they break for the sake of being sensational, But the whole film is worth it for about 50 minutes in which you literally feel as if you’re dreaming. It’s the closest achievement of that state of consciousness I’ve ever seen, but to enjoy it, you’ll have to leave any professional concerns at the door.”

One proof of my contention that the remade Nightmare Alley lacks narrative consistency comes from the observation that Bradley Cooper seems completely confused during the entire first half of the film, and I’m not referring to the fact that he is indeed portraying a lost and confused character in it, but saying that he cannot find the reactions he needs to sustain a narrative line; yet the moment he encounters Blanchett, his sociopathic identity flowers shockingly as if, finally, the actor has found himself in his element. And I certainly will refrain from being presumptuous and offensive enough to say that this is due to the fact that Cooper feels most at home in the full flowering of sociopathy,I and would rather blame this discrepancy on the fact that the first half of the plot meanders around the astonishing imagery of the broken-down carnival, which Toro obviously found much more compelling than any storytelling.

The Power of the Dog, another film bolstered by Oscar buzz, even lacks the transportive imagery of Nightmare, although once again, poetic visuals far outweigh narrative intelligibility. And in this case, that is an understatement. After seeing it, I realized I’d been forcing myself to have a high opinion of Jane Campion’s earlier films, which they perhaps do not deserve. It could be that what she passes off as avant-garde and vague is really just her having trouble creating a clear linear narrative, perhaps because she’s too repressed and reluctant to penetrate surfaces. But regardless, so nonarticulated is the narrative line of this new film, that its two supporting characters, tackled by two proven actors—Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons—who have both been nominated for Academy Awards, are barely delineated. The problem for Dunst is handled by just sending her to bed as a hopeless alcoholic halfway through the film and for Plemons by cutting out his tongue at every chance he would have had to express himself at key psychological moments in the narrative. Both motive and resulting behavior for a third supporting character, played by the cryptic-acting Kodi Smit-McPhee, are so buried and obscure that his character’s revenge plan is almost totally submerged until the very end, whereupon it pops up unexpectedly, obviously to provide an ending. In the meantime, we must content ourselves with strangely strangled intimations of homo-erotica and effeminacy, something that might have intrigued me as an adolescent before I became accustomed to more blatant manifestations of it.

These aren’t the only interesting films from 2021 that perplexed me because of their problems with narrative line. The gorgeously restrained Passing, directed by Rebecca Hall and sustained by a fascinating performance by Ruth Negga, about the hazards of challenging the race barrier, enchants with its low-budget use of minimalist black-and-white visuals (notably, a cloche hat from the 1920s) to suggest a particular time in history, and its performances are just as elegantly articulated. It, as well, is based upon a novel; it’s an adaptation of a book written in 1929 by Chicago author Nella Larsen. Of the three films, its storyline is the most successfully laid out; but alas, the key turning point in this story, which results in a tragic death, is a challenge not met; and as many reviewers have pointed out, what exactly happens remains in obscurity.

Could it be that all three films are suffering from the authority of the novels they chose as their skeletal structures, or did all three directors need previously published narratives as a crutch that failed them in the end? Or else—are we living in such confusing, fragmented times that the art of storytelling is also fragmented and is currently in crisis?