by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Shock Corridor fictionalises division, particulary that surrounded around the divided self and the divided society. It is about divided passions – director Sam Fuller stated in an interview about the film that “in our society, for some reason or another, we love to hate”. Narrative is not the only way Fuller seeks to disassemble: the form and texture of the film itself aggressively demands exploration, most notoriously with its jumps between black and white and colour footage. Ostensibly a Film Noir – at least insomuch as the murder mystery framework, the use of light and shadow, the existential anguish of the protagonist suggest it to be – Shock Corridor also presents a generic divide in its references to the Hollywood musical. While topically and dramatically distinct from the traditionally lightweight story matter of the musical, Shock Corridor still utilises song and dance routines—“numbers”– to create both meaning in their own terms, but also to provide a dual-focus narrative layer within the text as a whole. Shock Corridor is not a musical as such, but this combination of musical numbers with a thematic fascination with contradictory worlds draws significant parallels. But where the musical tends to find joyous equilibrium, Fuller’s film instead seems consciously and confrontationally askew. The famous ‘nympho’ rape sequence, for example, contradicts traditional musical genre codes by the very nature of its dark subject matter and its low-budget Noir surface, but also contains enough formal and structural similarities with the musical to make it a legitimate point of comparison. Unusual representations of insanity and violence within the film such as this can be approached via Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque and its relationship to spectacle, performance and performer and may provide a significant methodology for aligning the formal aspects of the film with a broader reading whereby a divided (dual-focused, critical/spectatorial) mind is required to understand the divided (insane) world of Shock Corridor.
The tragic conclusion to the film documents the collapse of protagonist Johnny (Peter Breck) into a state of catatonic schizophrenia, but this outcome holds little surprise for either Cathy (Constance Towers) or the spectator. Johnny’s psychological collapse was, from Johnny’s introductory voiceover announcing his defeat, inevitable. If not a self-fufilling prophecy as such, his final insanity was at least a self-motivated one. The distinction between sanity and insanity is tenuous from the outset – that Johnny and his colleagues so haphazardly tempt fate seems, for Cathy at least, to be asking for trouble. As the films primary metaphor for division, the sane/insane binary is predicated upon Johnny’s final (and seemingly irreversible) collapse into a catatonic schizophrenic state. Johnny’s “schizophrenia” (the process of division) takes different forms, where even his occupation as a journalist shifts him from an objective onlooker to a subjective centre of experience. Johnny’s decay into schizophrenia is active, loaded with high-energy visuals (such as the famous colourised waterfall sequence), and functions in stark comparison to his passive (and somewhat arrogant) resignation to his role as Deceiver, the ambitious trickster who is trumped by his own game. With his collapse, Johnny is at last liberated from his own fictions and self-delusions. As hero – or at least protagonist – of Shock Corridor, Johnny’s journey marks a shift from one narrative stream (sane) to another (insane).
The contradictions the darker elements of Shock Corridor aim to reconcile appear to share common ground with that of the traditional Hollywood musical, despite the treatment of these paradoxes being glaringly different in tone and style. Rick Altman has claimed that the Hollywood musical itself manifests a particular kind of social burden:
Society is defined by a fundamental paradox: both terms of the oppositions on which it is built (order/liberty, progress/stability, work/entertainment, and so forth) are seen as desirable, yet the terms are perceived as mutually exclusive. Every society possesses texts which obscure this paradox, prevent it from appearing threatening, and thus assure the society’s stability. The musical is one of the most important types of text to serve this function in American life. By reconciling terms previously seen as mutually exclusive, the musical succeeds in reducing an unsatisfactory paradox to a more workable configuration, a concordance of opposites.
Shock Corridor concludes with an contradictory unworkable/workable configuration – the only way to find a concordance of opposites at the films ending is to acknowledge that an acceptance of the paradoxes and contradictions of American life ultimately – and in Johnny’s case, literally – requires a schizophrenic perspective. These skills to be able to “read” fundamental narrative duality – albeit in a much more pleasant way – are not dissimilar to those required for audiences of the musical. For Altman, the musical is centred around a dual-focus narrative, “built around parallel stars of opposite sex and radically divergent values. This dual-focus structure requires the viewer to be sensitive not so much to chronology and progression…but to simultaneity and comparison”. Progression is narratively weakened to some degree in Shock Corridor if only because we know where we are going – Johnny states from the outset that things do not end well. Chronology is thus also less important, but, like the musical, an awareness of this dual-focus dominates. It is a film about schizophrenia that requires a certain degree of schizophrenic (or at least split or divided) spectatorial understanding. If Shock Corridor is a “crazy” film about “crazy” people, it is therefore perhaps reasonable to propose a certain amount of “craziness” (establishing a non-classical viewer position) is required to follow the dual strands of narrative action and broader meaning within the film.
Both the musical and the hospital of Shock Corridor function by their own laws, where art and life, spectator and performer are blurred. Johnny infiltrates the hospital to observe, but is observed himself in a performative sense (he literally acts, be it in the riverboat mime sequence or his broader ‘performance’ as an incestuously motivated patient). And, as Jane Feuer suggests, with its seemingly spontaneous explosion into song and dance routines regardless of the environment, the musical provides a world where “stages appear and disappear, proving again and again that the stage is a world we needn’t feel any distance from and that the world is full of the spirit of musical comedy. The performers are part of our world and we’re right up there on the screen”. She continues; “The doubled identification provided by the musical’s dual registers gives a tremendous rhetorical advantage. We feel a sense of participation in the creation of entertainment (from sharing the perspective of the performers) and at the same time, we feel part of the live audience in the theatre” .
Like the musical, Shock Corridor consists of a series of numbers or routines that break up (or are broken up by, depending on your perspective) non-musical plot sequences. Says Martin Sutton:
The musical is essentially a genre that concerns itself with the romantic/ rogue imagination and its daily battle with a restraining, ‘realistic’, social order. This battle grows out of a tension between realistic plot and spectacle/ fantasy number… the number functions as a narrative interruption, a fantastical tangent that at once frustrates and releases the spectator. The plot itself, however, surrounds, regulates and keeps in check the voluptuous, non-realist excesses of the number.
The place of plot within the musical provides a useful approach to understanding the non-musical aspects of Shock Corridor (the murder mystery narrative of “Who killed Sloan in the kitchen?”). Despite the Noir-heavy style and murder investigation storyline, the story that Shock Corridor offers up through a series of musical numbers is not just one of Johnny’s collapse into schizophrenia, but of his shift from one narrative layer to another.
Before a closer look at these musical numbers, it may be fruitful to examine how the stage is literally set within Shock Corridor for these numbers to play out. As a key element of the Hollywood musical in terms of creating a “stage” area, proscenium arches are a primary visual motif throughout Shock Corridor, literally turning the supposedly ordinary space of the hospital into performance arenas. ‘The Street’ – what the inmates and staff call the corridor of the films title – is obviously not a ‘real’ street, but rather a pantomime street. Even its name denotes a space for theatrical activity. The angular lines that connote perspective and depth within the corridor create a literal frame for the action on this pantomime stage. Cathy’s “I Want Somebody to Love” sequence – the films most overt musical number – literally occurs on a stage in the nightclub in which she works. The second musical number is the canteen sequence, where the rhythm begun by Pagliacci’s table-bashing as a fight over medication breaks out is framed again by an angular, high-contrast grid pattern on the wall and ceiling that literally frames the action, creating yet another stage. Johnny’s second nightmare in the hospital has a light, supposedly coming from outside the window, but that functions as a spotlight on his face and forms an arch above his head, and as Pagliacci performs his “opera”, the sequence is interspersed with “audience” (fellow inmate) reaction shots (albeit, that reaction is to be slumped over asleep). Johnny and Trent’s (Hari Rhodes) steamboat mime sequence – another powerful musical number – begins not with a shot of them front on, but rather in profile, sitting to the edge of the shot while (again) the corridor itself creates a proscenium arch (complete with a stupefied ballet of fellow inmates in the background). And as Trent and Johnny lie in beds side by side in straight jackets, the bed heads again make clear and distinct arches above their heads, denoting the frame as a performance space. The fight sequence between Johnny and Wilkes is laden with arches, be it shadows in the hydrotherapy room or the air-conditioning pipes in the kitchen – as they arrive in ‘The Street’ for the final confrontation, there is again literally a spotlight on them. The waterfall sequence is the films final ballet, and before the music even begins, shadows form a square frame above Johnny and Pagliacci before Johnny finally choreographs himself to the ‘main stage’ again of ‘The Street’ which frames his aquatic dance routine. The Noir aspects lend generously to the creation of these proscenium arches – shadows this overt and stark are generically not just permitted, but required, in Film Noir – but while the technical justification for these arches may stem from Noir, the primary function is to create a performance space for musical numbers to unfold.
Recognising how Shock Corridor creates its musical performance spaces allows new approaches to the sequences that could be defined as musical in form and structure. A close-up of Cathy’s bewilderingly feathered head opens the “I Want Somebody to Love” sequence, with her literally singing and dancing upon a stage. But the song does not match the image – it is slow and sad, her movements awkward. The gyrating is off-kilter (not to mention out of time) with the music itself. The sequence is intercut with a montage of backstage action, including a stagehand carrying a large birdcage. She sings like a caged bird, her feathered head only adding to this image. The backstage shot is important, highlighting through contrast Cathy’s status as ‘On Stage’. But the spectator cannot engage with Cathy as one would a performer in a traditional Hollywood film musical number – aside from the uncomfortable anomalies between tone of song and her hideously provocative dance, the sequence is not filmed ‘right’ in terms of how sequences such as this are conventionally presented in a musical. Beginning with a slow motion pan from her feet to feathered head and a close up of her face; the camera pulls back – but too far back, making Cathy seem far too small on the screen. We are not sure if she is the centre of action – there is nothing else to look at, but the camera seems to deny us any traditional engagement with her as a singing/dancing filmic feature. As Cathy dances across the stage, the camera refuses her invitation to follow her from left to right, instead only moving at the beginning and end of the sequence from in to out. That Shock Corridor provides a clear reference to the Hollywood musical so early on is no coincidence, but is offered as a point of comparison only to defy its conventions almost simultaneously. These comparisons are built but then collapsed upon themselves precisely to support the dominant thematic concern of the film, where in a divided and insane world a divided and ‘insane’ approach may be required to understand it. It can be at the same time Film Noir or musical, but by virtue of the tense and contradictory application of these codes within this specific text, it is also neither.
As Johnny walks through the caged wire door to make his entrance onto ‘The Street’, the shadows create similar bar patterns that not only suggest a jail-like institutional tone, but are reminiscent of Cathy’s birdcage and the world of ‘backstage’ (again, through contrast, implying that The Street is a performance space). Johnny rolls his neck as he enters the stage, an actor preparing for performance. The structure of what plays out on ‘The Street’ is governed by three clear and distinct sections (Johnny’s interviews with each of the three witnesses to Sloan’s murder). While ample attention has been given to ideological readings of these politically loaded segments in regards to racial and Cold War tensions, it is in this case perhaps more fruitful to approach them as a point of comparison with a seemingly irrelevant Hollywood musical, On The Town (1949). Both Shock Corridor and On The Town are divided into three main narrative threads: the numbers that introduce the romantic storylines in On The Town are Ann Miller’s “Prehistoric Man” routine (she outright demands for a pre-theory primal man, with “no psychoanalysis”), Betty Garrett’s “Come Back to My Place” number (Frank Sinatra sings his desire to visit New York landmarks of a time past while she aggressively invites sexual contact instead, repeating “come back to my place” in reply to his various requests for cab destinations) and the “Miss Turnstyles” ballet (Vera-Ellen and Gene Kelley tells the story of Miss Turnstyles journey from small town USA to New York, laced with a nostalgia for a past America). All three numbers are predicated about an attempt to reclaim a semblance of lost past.
In Shock Corridor, this structure is mimicked by the three interview sequences with patients who cannot cope mentally with their pasts. Stuart (James Best) believes he is General Jeb Stuart and his insanity has a Civil War motif; he hides in an earlier past from a recent past to function in the present. Music governs his appearances in the film. He is introduced in the musical number in the canteen – the patients lining up to receive their food swirl awkwardly but in a distinctly choreographed pattern behind him. He whistles “Dixie”, and the aforementioned fight that Pagliacci starts creates the rhythm for the sequence. Later in the dance therapy sequence, diegetic and non-diegetic music not only mingle but become blurred – it becomes unclear what music is coming from inside his head and what music is coming from outside the world of the film. The singing may be manic, but it is most definitely still singing. Shadowed proscenium arches line the walls, the Noir lighting creating spotlights. Trent’s number starts with musical fanfare and we see his racist anti-black placard before we see him: he literally makes a theatrical entrance. The steamboat sequence is, as mentioned above, clearly a musical routine, governed by the dominating theatricality of proscenium space, diegetic and non-diegetic sound colliding and collaborating with Johnny and Trent’s hoots and honks providing vocal accompaniment. Dr Boden (Gene Evans) has literally regressed to a childhood state, but his sequence plays out startlingly differently to the first two interviews – indeed, the drawings in his sketch book are reminiscent of the childish scrawls that line the walls of the dance therapy room, Johnny’s room and the ‘nympho’ ward. Dr Boden’s number occurs less as a proscenium routine but rather as a backstage production number (as in such films as Singin’ In The Rain or Kiss Me Kate). Music begins when Dr Boden begins his game of hide and seek with Johnny and his aural flashbacks have musical accompaniment: he actually looks off screen to try to locate the source, demanding it to “leave me alone”. There is no colour flashback in the Dr Boden sequence, again making it distinct from the Trent and Stuart sequences.
Arguably one of the most powerful sequences in Shock Corridor is the ‘nympho’ attack scene where Johnny is raped, one that interesting parallels can be drawn with the Hollywood film musical. The “Come Up to My Place” sequence in On The Town, for example, shares its depiction of a sexual conquest by an aggressive female sexual predator. What is light-hearted in On The Town and concludes in romantic conquest is outright sexual assault in Shock Corridor, but the core action is ultimately the same and both sequences are heavily invested in song. The dance therapy sequence leads directly into the rape scene, and functions as perhaps the first half of the number. As Johnny walks from dance therapy room into the ‘nympho’ ward, he smiles a content smile of control, he views himself as a director – he has worked Stuart into a song-and-dance frenzy. As Johnny enters the female room, however, his mood changes rapidly to fear he appears confused as a main girl starts slowly dancing backwards, singing a Capella (to Johnny, the other girls, or both is not made clear) “He’s mine”. This song morphs into “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”. The camera follows the women moving back and forward and circling the room. They wear costumes, identical uniforms – institutionalised showgirls. Johnny aims to walk from the door he entered to a door on the other side of the room. The room is decorated in the childlike drawings of pantomime, reminiscent of the sets in Cathy’s nightclub, the walls in Johnny’s room and the drawings in Dr Boden’s sketchbook. The women’s movements are choreographed roughly but distinctly, and as Johnny reaches the centre of the room he is circled and the camera suddenly leaps upwards, alluding to but never quite aspiring to an awkward Busby Berkley-styled shot as the ‘nymphos’, succubus-like, leap upon Johnny and drag him down to the floor. The camera follows the action, dropping also, and a blonde woman enters the frame singing “I Love Coffee / I Love Tea”. This tune duels with the up-until-now dominant “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”, the two a Capella songs resulting in aural chaos in their battle for supremacy. Aside from its powerful representation of sexual assault, this sequence denotes a pivotal moment within Shock Corridor, and that it plays out as a musical number is of no small significance in terms of performance and spectacle. The rape sequence in Shock Corridor emphasises this link between the spectator and the performer by highlighting Johnny’s role as a performer for our benefit.
The Johnny/Pagliacci relationship uncovers perhaps the greatest significance to how generic musical codes function within Shock Corridor. In the climactic fight scene between Wilkes and Johnny, Pagliacci is significantly positioned centre screen, singing and literally conducting with his hands. While superficially a sign of his continued display of operatic insanity, this moment captures precisely Pagliacci’s function within the film – he literally directs and conducts, and is in charge of, the musical elements of the film that represent a whole other generic narrative path outside of the Noir/murder mystery story. Pagliacci laughs when Johnny firsts asks who killed Sloan in the kitchen – the world of the Noir mystery is irrelevant to Pagliacci and to the world of the hospital. As the ‘second world’ of the carnivalesque, the murder narrative is connected to what is in comparison a mythological ‘first world’, the world of the Pulitzer Prize. Like Sloan (of whom little to no information is provided aside from the fact he was murdered), the Pulitzer Prize is ultimately an empty signifier in Pagliacci’s world. Pagliacci literally enters the film stage left to musical fanfare and approaches Johnny with flamboyant theatricality, grabbing the back of Johnny’s head, making his function as something quite distinct and different from a madman clear to both Johnny and the audience from the outset; “If you expect a demonstration of insanity, forget it”. Pagliacci asks Johnny repeatedly “What are you doing here?”, clarifying that he recognises that Johnny is a transgressor, he can only be rejected or assimilated into the script. By bashing the table in the canteen sequence, Pagliacci changes the entire rhythm of the scene – until that point it had been limited speech and silence, but Pagliacci converts it into a percussive explosion of cryptic and chaotic dance and violence, “Give me back my vitamins” providing verse and chorus of an anarchic, free-form musical number. In Johnny’s second nightmare, the song he imagines Cathy singing in his head is drowned out by Pagliacci’s opera – he overpowers Johnny’s music with his own. Pagliacci also plays a pivotal role in Johnny’s final ballet, the waterfall sequence. The proscenium arches formed above Johnny and Pagliacci’s head on the blank wall of ‘The Street’ are joined by music starting to denote the sound of falling rain;
Johnny: It’s beginning to rain
Pagliacci: (shrugging) I like the rain.
Pagliacci accepts the ‘second world’ of the carnivalesque, the schizophrenic ‘reality’ as opposed to what in the film is the mythic ‘first world’. What is for Johnny a total, manically-colourised breakdown is for Pagliacci nothing but another musical routine, one upon which he casts an overt and literal directorial critique: “Such a sour note, Johnny! (laughs) You’re way off key!”.
It is obviously not a case of categorising Shock Corridor as ultimately a musical or as Film Noir per se, but it is noteworthy just how much the generic codes of each are used in direct opposition within the text to create broader meaning. By acknowledging and exploring the generic depths and diversities of the film, the process of spectatorial acceptance of these contradictions becomes itself a conceptual challenge – they simply cannot be reconciled. From this perspective, Shock Corridor becomes less what has traditionally been understood as Fuller’s attack on a world gone mad, but rather a recipe for functioning within that world – to accept its divisions and its lunacies is to find (no matter how uneasily) some method of surviving it.
