See How Easy It Is To Hook 'Em?
Class and COVID, and "Nightmare Alley".
With the ongoing transition of the COVID-19 pandemic from public health issue past political struggle and into culture-war flashpoint comes a lot of unnecessary handwringing from liberals and even some leftists.
Here I’m not discussing the continual muddying of class issues, as various studies with different degrees of reliability assign more or less of the pain of the disease to people based on their voting habits, as if these are eternal and inherent qualities rather than tendencies that shift with the political wind. Nor am I referring to the impact of COVID-19 on various murkily defined racial categories, which recently have come to operate as a shorthand for economic status (itself a clunky stand-in for class). I’m not even talking about a general trust or distrust of ‘science’, which ignores the fact that – particularly with the coronavirus – science is neither static nor settled, and which does not admit the possibility that science is a value-neutral process and that its ends can be used for good or ill depending on who is charged with moving it from the realm of pure research to that of public policy.
I’m speaking more of the confusion that arises from a general stereotyping of the working class (what it means, who constitutes it, and the material conditions under which it exists) and who deserves to speak on its behalf. Because many liberals and more than a few leftists still perceive the working class of being made up of primarily white (and, unspoken but implied, conservative) blue-collar tradespeople, it is the voices of that cohort – or at least those who claim to speak for them – that tends to dominate the conversation. Of course, white people in what were once referred to as skilled and semi-skilled trades make up a far smaller segment of the American working class than they have at any point in U.S. history, so this position is flawed from its outset; but looking ever closer, the confusion becomes even more profound.
In reality, the working class –increasingly urbanized, young, and with far more tenuous employment – has far less choice in whether or not to get vaccinated and to follow safety protocols on the job and tends to simply go along with the dictates of the state in which they live. This clearly points to the obvious fact that America’s disastrous COVID-19 response has been a political problem much more than it has been a problem of individual choice; the farther down the economic ladder you are, the less ability you have to push back on the demands of your employer. The fact that employers are not making these demands, because they are not required to do so by the state, is being obscured both by the mistaken conception we have of the working class and the oversized attention being paid to exurban whites. (Additionally, when workers do push back against the failure of the state to provide adequate coronavirus protections, they are often subject to extreme hostility in the press, as is the case with public school teachers.)
Further evidence of this can be seen in the way resistance to public health measures – in particular, an unwillingness among this cohort to receive the COVID-19 vaccine – is framed as a distrust of “Big Pharma”. There is absolutely no reason for anyone in America to trust large pharmaceutical companies, who engage in constant price-gouging, restrictive copyright protection, and denial of access to life-saving medication to increase their already-huge profit margins. However, it does not follow that the vaccine itself is to be distrusted; it merely points out what an ongoing disaster it is to continue having the country’s health care administered solely by for-profit corporations. The problem is one of capitalism, not of the goods it produces; refusing to be vaccinated because you don’t trust Big Pharma is like refusing to wear shoes because you don’t like Nike. You can cure your headache with aspirin even if you don’t like Bayer AG, but they don’t make a vaccine for capitalism.
I had a great deal of trepidation going into Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. The 1947 film noir version of William Lindsay Gresham’s psycho-thriller novel, directed by Edmund Goulding, is a personal favorite, and while I recognize del Toro’s inventive visual flair and his facility for bringing grounded human emotion to the fantastic, his work often falls into an unmoored nostalgia, and relies overmuch on CGI bestiaries and other tricks of contemporary filmmaking.
As it turned out, I shouldn’t have worried. While I still slightly prefer the 1947 interpretation (for the record, I saw the standard theatrical release of del Toro’s film and not the black and white edition), Nightmare Alley is – to my eye, anyway – far and away the director’s finest work and an admirable interpretation of the book. It succeeds through its powerful visuals, which should surprise no one who has seen his other films, but what truly surprises is the dense, powerful script. Del Toro wrote it with the talented film critic (and his current spouse), Kim Morgan, whose love of noir shines through in a script that carries all the hallmarks of the noir genre – men driven by their weaknesses, women hiding their strengths, a reluctant air of inevitable violence, and an inescapable atmosphere of doom and futility – and delivers them with a force lacking in the director’s previous work.
Comparisons between the book and the two film versions are unfair but inevitable. A key moment near the end (and del Toro’s film is frankly a good 20 minutes too long, subject to the same runtime bloat that plagues contemporary cinema), that spells the ultimate downfall of ambitious hustler Stanton Carlisle’s desperate ambition, is different in all three, and there is perhaps a lesson to be learned about the direction of storytelling over the decades in seeing where it places the blame for this failure. But otherwise, del Toro’s Nightmare Alley shows more fidelity to the novel, and allows for a little more moral darkness than was possible in the censorious ‘40s. Del Toro and Morgan also let their interpretation of time and place be pinpoint-specific rather than letting in the lax contours that have robbed some of his films of their full resonance.
Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley features a tremendous cast, for the most part. Willem Dafoe’s barker is engagingly sinister, Richard Jenkins as the film’s primary antagonist is quietly terrifying, David Strathairn as the dissipated mentalist Pete is beautifully tragic, and there are great small roles for Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, Holt McCallany, and the always-welcome Jim Beaver. Cate Blanchett, in full ice-queen mode, far outdoes the tragic Helen Walker from the original film. Rooney Mara in the female lead, as the electrifying (and electrified) sideshow performer Molly, is probably a push against Coleen Gray from the 1947 version, but I have a soft spot for Gray, so my judgement can’t be trusted. The one role where Goulding’s film outshines the current one – and it’s a fairly crucial one, but not enough to deflate the very high quality of del Toro’s film – is in the role of the aging fortune-teller, Zeena. It’s not that Toni Colette does a bad job, but Joan Blondell was so perfect that there was almost no chance she would be outdone.
That brings us to Bradley Cooper in the lead role of two-bit drifter, climber, and killer Stanton Carlisle. Goulding’s film saw him played by Tyrone Power, seeking some raw meat from his usual dashing leading man roles; he personally lobbied studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck for the role, which saw a good deal of controversy as one of America’s most beloved leading men took on the part of a selfish, homicidal fraud. Typecasting doesn’t really work anymore the way it did in the old studio system, so it wasn’t as big a risk for Cooper, an actor I’m normally not that well-disposed towards. But while his performance can be a bit mannered, I was generally pleased with it, and the sense of buried emotion he brings to Carlisle’s journey from the low to the high and back again. The film’s famous ending – which I won’t spoil here, but which is telegraphed from the very beginning in the way all great noirs show the inescapability of fate – takes on a whole different tone in Cooper’s hands. Power delivers the soul-crushing last line (identical in both films) with a defiant, almost cruel scorn, accepting his downfall with the bravado of a man who almost made it to the very top. Cooper, conversely, says it through bitter laughter and helpless tears, the final and hopeless breakdown of a man who can barely remember the good times.