Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley isn’t just a film experience; it’s a tutorial in the practices and techniques of the psychic marketplace we live in and a dark reflection of the world we have come to accept as normal. We can no longer deny lying has become a successful business practice, and del Toro has created a lasting document showing how it’s done by the pros.
When William Lindsay Gresham’s original novel was published in 1946, it gave a seminal peek behind the curtain at the manipulations that magicians put to good use at the time. It also poked a sharp stick at the lower depths of sideshow denizens, carny hustlers, and spirit mediums who plied their trades without resistance. After all, this was during a time when war and poverty gave society no better people to listen to their bereavements and woes than such sociopaths and losers.
The treasure trove of actual “psychic secrets” that gets tipped throughout Nightmare Alley’s 150-minute running time is invaluable. Every skeptic needs to see this film, and you won’t be disappointed.
Early in my magic career, I realized that for so-called “psychic entertainers”—or those of us who were veering away from card tricks and being drawn into the New Age carnival pitch that was the Uri Geller style of those times—Nightmare Alley became a sort of rite of passage. If you ran into a fellow mentalist who hadn’t read it (or seen the 1947 filmed version), it was best to mention it, gauge the reaction, and in so doing know immediately how high or low this person was willing to go entertainment-wise. When you don’t accept you are a mortal and refuse to fall off your psychic high horse, you are termed a “shuteye” in the parlance of the carny. It’s a well-known term used “on the inside” for someone who is a believer.
The scene in both Alley films in which Stan (the protagonist, played by Bradley Cooper in the new film) gives an impromptu reading “like a father to a son” to the town sheriff who has arrived to close down the carnival is pivotal. You can learn a lot from just that one scene. There’s a line from the book showing the tightrope walk an ethical mentalist or psychic has to learn to balance in his or her mind: “How the hell shall I finish this off, Stan wondered. I can talk myself right back into the soup if I don’t quit.”
The characters all know what they are doing and carry on down the alley anyway, some more criminally than others. It’s almost as if the subtext of both films is telling us that, well, everyone believes a little bit, so why not use it? This is part of why the story is so compelling. The characters are well fleshed out. If you like your femmes fatale, I think I can safely say Cate Blanchett as Lilith Ritter, the devious psychoanalyst, sets a new record for noir smoldering in her role. She’s terrific.
We are looking at a social comment that has lain simmering in the psychic cauldron for decades. We can thank Guillermo del Toro for dragging out the old cons and dodges to not-so-subtly imply how much worse it can be today. I seriously doubt back in the 1940s any town sheriff or concerned citizen would allow the sort of unscrupulous tactics today’s psychics boldly use, such as holding psychic Zoom circles for kids five to twelve years old, infiltrating grief groups to get at the bereaved, pestering the parents of missing or murdered children, or using social media to mine for information on their marks. We see how Stan uses traditional methods for getting personal information. These time-honored techniques are still widely used today.
It’s easy if you can roll that way. As I heard from some wag years ago, it’s all about sincerity: Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. It’s not pretty or glamorous—and neither is the price we may hope gets eventually paid by these scheming grifters. Unfortunately, in our world, there are thousands of Stanton Carlyles and Lilith Ritters putting their own brand of fraud out there who go on day after day, week after week, year after year pulling the same cons we see in Nightmare Alley over and over.
Thank you, Guillermo del Toro and writers Kim Morgan and William Lindsay Gresham, for finally telling it like it really is.