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NIGHTMARE ALLEY: FILM NOIR AND THE AMERICAN DREAM Mark Osteen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, 324 pp.
For the past fifteen years, James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (1998) has stood tall as the most perceptive and comprehensive book to read if one wants to understand the noir genre. Mark Osteen's Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream is well written, witty, thoughtful, and well researched, and yet, ultimately, this book will not replace Naremore's position on the throne.
In fact, Mark Osteen's eight-chapter work is most similar to two previous books on noir: Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (1997) and Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo's Noir Anxiety (2003). Like these three authors, Osteen uses repetition of particular ideas and insights and then supports his claims with examples from a mixture of classic noirs, unusual noirs, and non-noir dramas in order to construct an inventive reading and definition for noir. Whereas Christopher tried to make noir films fit the metaphor of the urban labyrinth, and Oliver and Trigo see noir as a psychoanalytic dream work, Osteen examines metaphors, metonymies, themes, characters, and historical archives to argue that film noir intuits the American dream as a "chimera" (249). Especially in the beginning and ending chapters, Osteen repeats the titular trope of the "nightmare alley," connecting characters and their disquieting dreams to individual films. Osteen anchors his insights about noir by maneuvering exciting and unusual paths through Ralph Waldo Emerson's versus Benjamin Franklin's American Dream theories to tropology, political and cultural theory, and feminism. Often, this esoteric approach persuades. For example, one of the strongest chapters in the book, chapter 8, "The Left-Handed Endeavor," employs the political theories...