Nightmare Alley
Saturday, December 11, 2021 11:11:36 AM | (Age Not Specified)
"Nightmare Alley"
This time is in many ways the birth of modern America. In an era before television, the traveling carnival is the epitome of live, local entertainment for the masses. The visitors transformed one muddy, small-town field after another promising to mystify, provoke and make a hard life a little more magical. As much as they offered alluring fairy tales to audiences, beneath the paint, tinsel, and outrageous claims, they could be exploitive and dehumanizing to their performers. But they're also alternate communities for people who would otherwise be on the margins. Naturally drawn to the macabre and profoundly human world of carnival sideshows, Gresham’s novel as autobiographical and wants to explore the murky lines between illusion and reality, desperation and control, success, and tragedy. With sharper edges than any movie, the film is a true hardboiled tale of crime, betrayal, and scathing comeuppance. It's a tale about the dark side of American capitalism.
Indeed, in it's visceral realism, the film takes on the urgency of a moral fable; a of fate’s bill coming due, structured to end with a bang. When an audience is invested in the story of a person’s rise, their greatest fear is the fall and that fall can be very emotionally strong, "Nightmare Alley" is about fear, about greed, and it’s about manipulation. The look of the film is, per usual, meticulously composed to set an inescapable mood. It has all the dark underpinnings of what seems to be a very polite society. The world of the carnival might have some trickery and deceit, but it has the beating heart of a true community. It's the high society in this film that is far more threatening and terrifying.
Written by Gregory Mann
