February 2, 2022

My friend texted me yesterday asking if I had read The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy. I have. I love her writing style. It's so punchy and austere. A sentence will slice through everything and hit you in the chest. My friend asked me because Levy's writing reminded her of my writing. I still feel shaken by the compliment. Buzzing. Maybe I actually have something going for me with this writing thing, some kind of skill. To be compared to Ariel Levy. Jesus. 

MLog Time! 

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

2021

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

Written by: Guillermo del Toro, Kim Morgan

Based on: Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham

Watched: 1/22/22

Stanton (played by Bradley Cooper) disposes of a body under some floor boards in a falling-down farmhouse. Then he sets the house on fire. He joins a carnival as a hired hand. He starts working with fortune teller Zeena and her husband and double-act partner, Pete. They teach him the tricks of their trade: mentalism, secret signals, working a crowd. Stanton helps with their act, especially when Pete – a severe alcoholic – gets drunk on the job. Stanton ends up killing Pete by giving him the ethanol when Pete asks for the whiskey or whatever. Stanton has fallen in love with the girl who does the electric current, and he wants to use Pete’s book of tricks to start their own act. Oh, Stanton sleeps in the same tent where the geek is kept in his cage. The geek rips the heads off chickens using his teeth. When the geek gets ill, Stanton helps the owner dispose of him. The owner explains how to rope in a new geek. You get them hooked on opium-laced booze. You tell them it’s just temporary. Anyway, Stanton and his girl start doing fancy events with their double act. Stanton wants to do séance-type readings, which he’s been warned against, by Zeena, by his partner, everybody. He does them anyway. He starts an affair with a psychiatrist who sees rich and powerful clients. She tells him secrets about these clients and he uses that info to trick them into thinking he’s in touch with their dead relatives. He starts doing this for a particularly dangerous man, and he needs his girlfriend to come act like the man’s dead lover. Everything goes wrong, and Stanton’s girlfriend leaves him. He goes to the psychiatrist to collect his money and finds that she’s scammed him. When he gets angry, she convincingly describes him as a psychotic patient. So he has no money, and he’s killed the rich guy at this point. He gets drunk – he never drinks, but the psychiatrist seduced him into it. He really hits rock bottom. He tries to join a carnival with his mentalism skills, but that act has gone out of fashion. The carnival owner offers him the role of geek, and Stanton cries then laughs, finally saying, “Mister, I was born for it.” 

I went into this not knowing that Guillermo del Toro was the director. I just liked the poster, which was lit like a noir and looked fun. This movie is not very fun. It’s dark and fairly graphic at times. (If I had known it was del Toro….) I lost some confidence in the story when Stanton falls for the electricity girl, Molly (played by Rooney Mara). That character does nothing for me. She’s supposed to be meek and pure, but she has barely any lines. No good lines. She’s boring. Stanton first meets Zeena (played by Toni Collette) when he solicits a bath from her. (That’s one of the things she offers.) She draws him a warm bath and, once he’s in there, plunges her hand down into the water to mess with his junk. They make out. It’s very sexy. WTF would Stanton go for Molly over Zeena. It makes no sense. Then, when Stanton meets Dr. Lilith Ritter, the psychiatrist, she refuses the money from the scheme. All she wants from him is a session. It felt like the dumb male writing you’ll run into sometimes, where the powerful beautiful interesting female character wants nothing more than to listen to the male character talk about himself. Absurd. Of course, it turns out that Dr. Ritter is setting all this up in order to screw Stanton and take his money. To her it’s about power. But you find that out much later, and I was already feeling bumped. 

I could tell the whole movie, of course, that Stanton was going to end up being a geek. But the ending still surprised in Stanton’s recognition and humor at that inevitability. This movie was kind of anti-American dream. Stanton rises to wealth and power. He kills his father (that was the guy in the beginning), he throws off his origins, he makes a man of himself. But in the end, he was born for the gutter. I also wonder if this movie is being remade now because we’re in the age of success through hucksterism. (See Donald Trump, Fyre Fest, etc.) Maybe it’s a little bit of wish fulfillment for us, that people like that wouldn’t succeed, that there would be an inevitable fall. It’s kind of anti-American, though, all the same. 

Rating: ★★★