In an effort to make this blog as popular as possible, I will be discussing here an obscure 1947 film noir and making tenuous connections between it and James Joyce’s little-read and little-understood mysterious final novel.

It’s sure to bring readers in droves!

In all seriousness, I recently viewed Nightmare Alley (1947), and since my brain is obsessed with the structure of Finnegans Wake, I ended up viewing it as a fall, rise, fall story whose themes are addressed by Joyce’s novel. I thought it would be interesting to write about here.

It’s worth noting that even though this film (and the novel it was based on) came after Finnegans Wake, Joyce was aware of Tyrone Power, the lead actor, referencing him (as well as his father, an actor of the same name) in the quotation in my title. Before this film, Power had mainly played heroic, swashbuckling roles, and he was eager to branch out and show that he had greater range as an actor. Nightmare Alley — where he plays a scumbag swindler and conman — was reportedly his favorite movie he in which he acted.

Power plays Stan Carlisle, a carny who works in an act with a mentalist, Zeena, and her alcoholic husband, Pete. Back in the day, Zeena and Pete were a big deal in vaudeville, but those days are long gone. Pete turned to the bottle when Zeena had an affair, and the guilty Zeena has looked after him ever since. Flirting with her, Stan learns that she and Pete had devised a verbal code that had allowed them to do more impressive feats of mentalism back in the day. Stan wants to learn this code and revive the old act, with Stan taking Pete’s place, but Zeena and (especially) Pete resist. One night, Stan accidentally kills Pete by giving him a bottle of wood alcohol, believing it to be moonshine. No one knows the role Stan played here: everyone thinks Pete just drank himself to death. With Pete gone, Zeena teaches Stan the code, and he and Zeena begin the mentalism act, with Zeena as seer.

Here, the film (like the Wake) is in part examining the dynamics of the Freudian Oedipal conflict. Pete is an older man, who is like a father to the orphaned Stan. In his last scene, Pete gives a marvelous drunken performance of his old spiel, which Stan later recites verbatim in the movie when he eventually steps into Pete’s role and becomes a drunk.

Pete’s death is an accident, but Freudian psychology makes us wonder exactly how unintentional our mistakes really are. Stan’s Unconscious mind clearly wanted Pete out of the picture.

Rather than marry Zeena and truly take Pete’s place, as we might expect, Stan turns to a younger carnival girl named Molly. The rest of the carnies force him to marry Molly to preserve the girl’s reputation (a theme Joyce treats brilliantly in “The Boardinghouse” in Dubliners). Resentful of the compulsory nuptials, the married Stan and Molly flee the carnival and use the verbal code to begin practicing their own mentalism act, with the charismatic Stan now in the role as seer. He rises to fame and popularity.

Things start to fall apart when he meets a crooked psychologist with the ominous name Lilith. He wants to make the jump from mentalism to spiritualism, convincing people that he’s talking to the spirits of their dead relatives, and he plans to work with the psychologist to use information from her clients to help him pull it off. Lilith goes along with him, but ultimately double crosses him and steals all his money. The ruined Stan turns to drink and becomes a new Pete, even sinking so low as become a “circus geek,” a freakshow act at which he marvels at the beginning of the movie (“I can’t understand how anybody could get so low,” he mutters; by the end of the film, he’s learned how firsthand). Molly finds him like this, and it seems that the couple is destined to act out the later part of Zeena and Pete’s relationship all over again.

The cyclical nature of fall, rise, fall reminds me of Finnegans Wake. We don’t get to see it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, after the ending, some years hence, a new Stan figure emerges, bumps off the drunkard Stan, and starts the story all over again.

[At the beginning of the film, Stan asks, “How do you get a guy to be a geek? Is that the only one? I mean, is a guy born that way?” At the end of the film, when he accepts the role of geek, he says, “I was made for it.” The tension between being born for something and made for it by circumstances and choices — and the relationship of both ideas to fate or determinism — are food for fruitful thought]

Like Finnegans Wake, guilt plays a central and important role. In the middle of the film, the smell of wood alcohol awakens Stan’s guilt and sends him running to Lilith to confess the truth about Pete’s death, a piece of information that she uses against him. Stan’s wife, Molly, too experiences guilt over the prospect of swindling people by pretending to talk to their deceased loved ones. When Stan persuades her to dress up as the spirit of a young woman with whom a billionaire client was once infatuated, her conscience gets the best of her, and she reveals the ruse.

I appreciated how the movie exposed the cold reading tactics of charlatans. “Cold reading” is a technique where purported psychics use a combination of open-ended questions, general statements, and educated guesswork in the moment to make it seem as if “spirits” are giving them information that they supposedly could not have possibly known. I personally find the dynamics by which people fool each other to be interesting, so allow me to give an extended example. A cold reader might say to a middle-aged person, “I see an older male figure, whose name is associated with G or B (or some kind of -ee sound). I can see that something’s the matter with his legs. But he’s pointing to his chest, as if there’s some malfunction in the middle of his body. Heart, stomach…is any of this familiar to you?” And of course the person will say something like “That’s my Great Uncle Bernard! He died of heart failure last year!! And he walked with a cane!” And the cold reader could reply with something along the lines of “Oh yes, I can see him tapping the ground with the cane, all around you as if to create a circle of protection. He’s watching over you.”

The target will remember this encounter as “The psychic saw the spirit of my Uncle Bernard, told me his name and how he died, and even knew he walked with a cane!”

In fact, the cold reader said none of those things and knew none of them. Instead, the cold reader threw out questions and guesses and then was supplied all the information by the target. After all, the chances that a middle-aged person has lost an older male relative is incredibly high; many names and nicknames can be linked to -ee sounds; and the odds that a deceased relative had a problem with his legs and at least one internal organ are practically certain. The cold reader just has to be charismatic, go with what the target says, and write off any misses as mysterious, inscrutable signs from the spirits (“I don’t seem to be able to interpret right now…but remember this because it will be important in the future”).

Good cold readers can size up a target right away, since strangers are constantly revealing things about themselves, from how they dress, how they speak, how old they are, what race they are, their body language (and the way they react to questions), and dozens of other verbal and non-verbal clues. I suspect that some (and possibly many) cold readers are not consciously intending to dupe people but are themselves fooled by their own good people-reading skills into thinking they have magic powers.

Different from cold reading is “hot reading,” where the psychic does research on the target ahead of time, which is what Stan was trying to do with information from the psychologist.

There’s a great scene early in the film where Stan cold reads a sheriff who has come to shut down the carnival. Stan finds himself adding a little religious, spiritual messaging to the reading, and he makes quite an impression on the sheriff, who ultimately leaves them alone. Stan confesses to the rest of the carnies later that he learned this religious talk from the orphanage in which he grew up, where the caretakers would preach religion to the orphans on Sundays after “beating us black and blue the rest of the week.”

It’s brief, but it’s there: the origin of this religious flimflam man owes itself to abusive indoctrination. He saw firsthand how hypocrites wield these stories and spin narratives to trap their victims, and when he grows up, he masters that narrative power for himself. He is only undone by someone who wields it even better than he does: Lilith, who urges him to think that everything he confessed to her is a delusion, a “nightmare” that was never real.

Stan moves in dreams and stories, manipulating them to gain power over others. It’s interesting to consider the close relationship between storytelling, duping people (or bilking them), gaining power over others, and dreaming. I can’t help but think about how Joyce’s own father was a great storyteller: John Joyce is all over Ulysses in the form of Simon Dedalus, telling amusing stories, flirting with barmaids, and signing. “It’s the droll way he comes out with the things,” thinks Bloom about Simon Dedalus. “Knows how to tell a story too.” Larger than life to young James, Joyce’s father is one of the main models of HCE in the Wake, down to being the victim of an attempted mugging in Phoenix Park. Out of experience, James Joyce, like his father before him, weaves the dream of art.

[Ellman’s biography, page 22, discusses John Joyce’s persistent appearance in James’ works: “This reckless, talemted man, convinced that he was the victim of circumstances, never at a loss for a retort, fearfully sentimental and acid by turns, drinking, spending, talking, singing, became identified in his son James’s mind with something like the life-force itself.” On page 34, Ellman notes that John Joyce defended his “collector’s pouch” against an “assailant” in Phoenix Park, an incident to be remembered “only in Finnegans Wake.”]

This talk of spiritualist flim flammery reminds me of the part of Finnegans Wake where Joyce makes fun of séances (which also makes me think of the bit from Ulysses Chapter 12 [Cyclops], where a similar mockery occurs when the spirit of Paddy Dignam is contacted by the narrator).

In Finnegans Wake III.3, the Four Old Men are interrogating Shaun/Yawn, and as HCE’s voice begins to pour through him, they take on the role of seers at a séance. Here is HCE’s message:

—Old Whitehowth he is speaking again. Ope Eustace tube! Pity poor whiteoath! Dear gone mummeries, goby! Tell the woyld I have lived true thousand hells. Pity, please, lady, for poor O.W. in this profundust snobbing I have caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs hoar, mummery failend, snowdrift to my ellpow, deff as Adder. I askt you, dear lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits. I gave you of the tree. I gave two smells, three eats. My freeandies, my celeberrimates: my happy bossoms, my allfalling fruits of my boom. Pity poor Haveth Childers Everywhere with Mudder!

And here is their comment:

That was Communicator, a former colonel. A disincarnated spirit, called Sebastion, from the Rivera in Januero, (he is not all hear) may fernspreak shortly with messuages from my deadported. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appunkment for a future date. Hello, Commudicate! How’s the buttes? Everscepistic! He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby. He has had some indiejestings, poor thing, for quite a little while, confused by his tonguer of baubble. A way with him! Poor Felix Culapert! Ring his mind, ye staples, (bonze!) in my ould reekeries’ ballyheart and in my krumlin and in aroundisements and stremmis! Sacks eleathury! Sacks eleathury! Bam! I deplore over him ruely. Mongrieff! O Hone! Guestermed with the nobelities, to die bronxitic in achershous! So enjoying of old thick whiles, in haute white toff’s hoyt of our formed reflections, with stock of eisen all his prop, so buckely hosiered from the Royal Leg, and his puertos mugnum, he would puffout a dhymful bock. And the how he would husband her that verikerfully, his cigare divane! (He would redden her with his vestas, but ’tis naught.) With us his nephos and his neberls, mest incensed and befogged by him and his smoke thereof. But he shall have his glad stein of our zober beerbest in Oscarshal’s winetavern. Buen retiro! The boyce voyce is still flautish and his mounth still wears that soldier’s scarlet though the flaxafloyeds are peppered with salsedine. It is bycause of what he was ascend into his prisonce on account off. I whit it wel. Hence his deepraised words. Some day I may tell of his second storey. Mood! Mood! It looks like someone other bearing my burdens. I cannot let it. Kanes nought.

The reference to “Eustace tube” (through which HCE communicates?) recalls his encounter with the Cad in I.2, where the Cad is “diagnosing through eustacetube” the nature of HCE (that he is like a prehistoric man). The eustace tube connects the middle ear to the throat and nose (perhaps echoing the three parts of HCE, the Three Soldiers — Shem, Shaun, and the shame that sunders’em [the Cad]). This body part will be recalled in I.4, when the witness (a version of Shaun, though more amalgamated with Shem at this point) is called an “eye, ear, nose and throat witness.”

Apparently, the spirit of the deceased here in III.3 is confused and doesn’t realize he’s dead. He is a skeptic who does not believe in “our psychous of the Real Absence,” a play on the phrase “Real Presence” — of God in the Eucharist. Perhaps this line works as a reference to the way our conscious minds tend not to believe that the self is an illusion. Each of us being represented by HCE, we refuse to accept that we are ultimately absent, that there is no “I,” no unchanging eternal essence underlying the appearances in consciousness.

The Old Men recall how HCE would “husband” his “cigare divane,” giving a mental image of him grossly and lewdly sucking and puffing on Freud’s favorite symbol, recalling a moment in I.3 when HCE tips a cigar to a young man: “he tips un a topping swank cheroot, none of your swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and how manfally he says, pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan, he was to just pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana.”

His nephews (the Three Soldiers) are “befogged by him and his smoke thereof.” This recalls for me the idea that the sons could smell the rude odors of the Father, expressed in several passages, most notably in II.2: “Match of a matchness, like your Bigdud dadder in the boudeville song, Gorotsky Gollovar’s Troubles, raucking his flavourite turvku in the smukking precincts of lydias, with Mary Owens and Dolly Monks seesidling to edge his cropulence and Blake-Roche, Kingston and Dockrell auriscenting him from afurz.”

The Father’s defecation, flatulence, and/or gross smoke is part of his assault on the next generation, who tell stories/gossip of him in his absence, as we all do of the past and of scapegoats, as all artists do of humanity itself, for Here Comes Everybody: “It is bycause of what he was ascend into his prisonce on account off […] Some day I may tell of his second storey.”

Under this framework, we could consider Edmund Goulding, the director of Nightmare Alley, and his actors to be all versions of the Three Soldiers, telling tales of scandalous and disgusting secrets of Humanity that they peep at and sense/scent.

HCE’s words in the III.3 séance are “deepraised.” When artists make Humanity speak through them — like spiritualists summoning the ghosts of the past — when they give voice to feelings that resonate with many of us and our Unconscious minds, they raise these words from the deep of the Unconscious. They are simultaneously depraved words and depressed words, which many dispraise. At the same time, many others praise them deeply.

It is a testament to Joyce’s skill as an artist that he compresses so many complex ideas into a single word.