Carnival of Souls: Nightmare Alley (2021)
In his new movie Nightmare Alley, director Guillermo Del Toro tries to create yet another trademark dark fairy tale but avoids the ambiguous morality of the source material.
If you ever wanted to run away to join the circus, the novel Nightmare Alley, written by William Lindsay Gresham in 1947, would stop you cold. Gresham was inspired by his encounter with an ex-carnival worker he met during the Spanish Civil War, who told him about the darker underside of the big-top. Combining his interest in tarot, psychoanalysis, and con artists, Gresham spun a tale of greed and fatalism, a world where class is a destiny you can’t escape. Guillermo del Toro’s new film is the second adaptation of the novel, and while the director’s nostalgic fascination with old-time carnivals is evidence, his movie doesn’t quite reach down your throat and grab your heart and guts like the novel — and the 1947 adaptation — do.
The Story
The setting is the rural South in the 1930’s. Stan Carlisle works at a carnival, picking up tricks from a fortune teller Madame Zeena and her alcoholic husband Pete. He wonders at the “geek,” a near-savage whose specialty is biting the heads off live chickens to the jeers of the crowd and is told that “geeks are made.” Pete holds a book of codes for a near-perfect mentalist act but dies after Stan gives him wood alcohol instead of his usual booze — perhaps accidentally. Aided by the book and his girlfriend Molly, Stan becomes the star of expensive hotels and nightclubs with his mind-reading act but finds himself hypnotized by psychiatrist Lilith Ritter. With her help, he pretends to contact the beloved dead for wealthy businessmen — but faces a spectacular fall when a disillusioned Molly leaves him, and Lilith betrays him. Spiraling downwards, Stan becomes an alcoholic who must face his eventual fate — of becoming the circus geek he once wondered about.
The Adaptation
The original version of Nightmare Alley (1947) allowed matinee idol Tyrone Power to escape his swashbuckling persona to tap into probably his darkest performance to date. First dismissed and then considered a masterpiece of noir, the movie revels in pulling the curtain back on every glittering act in the carnival — a clear implication that life is full of shiny objects and parlor tricks distracting us from its essential ugliness. The film is unrelentingly dark in its belief in the futility of the American dream, upending and mocking our fundamental belief in self-transformation and moving up in life. Tyrone Power is convincing both as an eager and ambitious carny learning the ropes and as a ruthless, desperate conman watching helplessly as his good fortune trickles through his fingers. It was as sordid as a movie could get during the era of the studio system, which strangled filmmakers with tightly controlled morality codes and forced director Edmund Goulding work around the sleazier elements of the novel — and tack on a happy ending that never appears in the book.
No one can question Guillermo del Toro as a master of the visuals of cinema, and the cinematography and colors of his movie are the first thing an audience will notice. Instead of matching the drudgery of his characters’ lives with dull colors, del Toro saturates every scene with honey-colored lighting, rich colors of vintage postcards and Annie Leibowitz’s photos in Vanity Fair’s Hollywood editions. Every frame of the movie could be a still photograph of how we view the past romantically rather than realistically. For a story about revealing the underbelly of the human soul, del Toro makes the ironic choice to coat his film in golden nostalgia, creating a glossy past that exists only in our imagination.
While del Toro avoids the tacked-on happy ending of the 1947 version (where Molly’s love gives Stan a chance at redemption), he does make significant changes to the novel. Stan’s aversion to sexuality and Lilith’s past as a rape victim are never mentioned. Unlike the earlier movie, this newest adaption does address Stan’s conflict with his father and his obsession with the mother ran away with her lover, but the result is not as satisfying as the slowly haunting clues Gresham leaves his reader about Stan’s childhood trauma. The novel and earlier version start with Stan already at the carnival, enmeshed in the life, while del Toro makes the mistake of showing Stan as an outsider who has murderously avenged himself before the story even begins. Del Toro also takes pains to portray Lilith as some type of uber-femme fatale, lighting her in George-Hurrell-esque shadows that make her as stunning as a Golden Age movie star — and just as unconnected to reality. Played by Cate Blanchett, Lilith is a creature from the Uncanny Valley, and her lack of humanity make it harder to understand how Stan could ever have connected with — or trusted her. And Cooper’s Stan seems both tougher and less sympathetic than Power’s portrayal — and not just because his earlier crime. Tyrone Power’s charm is greasy and desperate, but it still has a boyish quality of wanting to be loved. Meanwhile, Cooper, despite his moments of excitement and fear, seems already hardened by life; we never really feel his thirst for redemption or his desire for greatness. We simply have no idea what drives him, so his eventual downfall seems far less tragic.
It’s true that the script greedily plunges its hands into the darkness. Stan’s client is no heartbroken lover aching for his lost love but a violent man who forced her to have an abortion and abuses other women. Scenes of the geek’s act are shown in all their gruesome, bloody glory. And Stan is less a good man trapped by fate than a man who has killed once and kills again. But del Toro’s love of lush visuals and vibrant colors betray him here; his trademark ornateness seems artificial and undercuts the seaminess of his material. The book and the 1947 movie both have the hallucinatory quality of nightmares, that feeling of unknowable dread and despair, the inevitability of our descent into our own dark depths. But, in his adaptation, del Toro is seduced by showmanship; he captures the grandeur of the circus but never the seediness underneath.
