The Hallucination Theory (Spoilers)
________________________________________________________________________________
----------- Only for people who have seen Point blank (1967) and Sergio Leone's once upon a time in america (1984) ---------
_________________________________________________________________________________
In the world of myths, allegories and fairytales, each story must have an inner as well as an outer life. The ‘outer’ is the real or credible physical universe that the characters inhabit. The ‘inner’ is the world view of the dominant character, the imposition of his thoughts upon the tale’s dynamics, which will ultimately bend, shape and subsume the finished work. Lending and extra poetic layer to Sergio Leone’s final film is the teasing proposition that the entire piece is an opium-inflated dream, living in the head of Noodles (Robert De Niro) as he lies back contemplating the nature of betrayal and its long-term ramifications.
In 1967, John Boorman had covered similar territory with his marvellously existential thriller Point Blank. Eschewing ‘reality’ and the usual conventions of the genre, the movie takes a novel approach: Walker (Lee Marvin) joins old friend Reese (John Vernon) in a successful robbery. The crime takes place on uninhabited Alcatraz Island, the victims are other syndicate figures engaged in a money-laundering operation. Later, in a cell as the loot is being divided, Reese pulls a double-cross. Walker is shot twice in the chest at close range and falls dying to the floor.
As he lays there, we hear Walker’s voice-over trying to make sense of what has happened. As the main titles roll, he laboriously makes it to his feet and tries to find a way off the island. Curiously, we never see him in motion. A series of static, beautifully shot images chart his progress until finally at the water’s edge he plunges in; but his floundering movements take him nowhere. Unable to swim because of his injuries, he merely bobs out of control atop the waves. The next shot sees Walker fully dressed and healthy on board an Alcatraz ‘tour cruise’. At this point, ostensibly the beginning of the film’s ‘proper’ narrative, Walker relentlessly sets out to find his betrayer and recover his money. The rest of the film is Walker’s revenge fantasy, a dream at the moment of death that allows him to invent a scenario wherein he will emerge victorious.
In Once Upon a Time in America, the story is that of David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson, a small-time gangster consumed by the failure of love and friendship. He’s an emotionally under-developed borderline psychopath who takes refuge from his demons in the opium den, where he can reinvent himself and his life any way he chooses.
When we first meet Noodles (in 1933, the second of the film’s three timeframes) he is coming down from a session with the opium pipe. One of the den’s Chinese workers warns him that gunmen are in the building looking for him and shows Noodles a way out through a rear door. On returning to Fat Moe’s speakeasy, Noodles realises he has to flee for his life. A badly beaten Moe instructs Noodles to take the key to the locker that houses the gang’s rainy-day money, and since the others are all believed dead, Noodles should take the money and run.
At the station, Noodles discovers the locker is empty. The money is gone and someone has betrayed him. At a loss, he purchases a one-way ticket to Buffalo (a town situated about two hours from New York) and prepares to leave. Struck by a Coney Island mural at the departure gate, he is unable to move. He remains frozen. In stasis. The next shot shows Noodles reappearing at the ticket window, but this time looking older. Thirty-five years have passed. It is 1968. Someone has summoned Noodles back from who knows where (the dead?) in order to get him to participate in a mystery.
Moving and acting like a somnambulist, Noodles encounters the surreal sight of coffins being raised up over a wall (a literal raising of the dead) and he shuffles back to Fat Moe’s, where in film-time he had previously been only five minutes before. Fat Moe is a little surprised to see him, but not much: “When d’you get back?" he asks without real curiosity as if Noodles had just popped out for a sandwich.
Reminiscing about the old days, Noodles sees a picture of his lost love Deborah, who left Noodles in 1933 to try her luck as an actress in Hollywood. “She’s a Big star now,” says Moe, matter-of-factly, as if this had just happened yesterday (which, of course, in film-time it did), although it would be preposterous for someone to struggle in Hollywood for all those years and then become and overnight success. For Noodles not to have known she was a star implies that he has been out-of-it or ‘asleep’ for three decades (this implication occurs time and again as we shall see), something that Noodles verbally reinforces in the same scene. In answer to Moe’s question: “What have you been doing all these years?” Noodles responds: “Going to bed early.”
Struggling to understand why he has been ‘drawn back’ to New York, Noodles visits the tomb of his three former associates, Max, Cockeye and Patsy. Unaccountably, he shuts the tomb door from the inside, shutting himself in and obliterating the light (is he equating his physical status with theirs?). Inside he finds another clue; a key to the very same locker. Back in the station (which figuratively and literally we have never seen him leave) he uses the key to uncover a bagful of money and a cryptic note, which leads to the strangest cut in the picture; Noodles is next seen on the deserted bank of the East River at night, wandering under an overpass with the smell of danger all around. Why is he in this place? He has not used it to get to the station before and, with his valuable bag in tow, why didn’t he get a taxi before leaving? He does half-heartedly try to hail a cab, but it rings false; the scene only has meaning in the opium ‘dream world’. It is an archetypal fear dream: the thought of being alone in a dangerous environment at night carrying a cargo people would want to steal. To emphasise this, Leone uses heightened and stylised sound-effects for the only time in the film. The abnormally loud sound increases the fear and intensifies the situation’s nightmare absurdity.
A little time passes and Noodles is in a bar watching television. His reaction to the broadcast is one of blank incredulity (has he ever seen a TV?) until he recognises Jimmy Conway (Treat Williams), a person he knew in 1933. It is interesting to note that Noodles interacts with no one in 1968 that he did not know in 1933, with the possible exception of the crypt-keeper, although if this is Noodles’ death-dream he may have seen him before too.
Next, Noodles is at an old folks’ home where he encounters an aged Carol (Tuesday Weld). She furnishes him with vital information about the identity of the secretive Senator Bailey and Noodles’ old girlfriend Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), who Noodles fails to identify in a group photo. Visiting with Deborah backstage after watching her in a stage production of Antony and Cleopatra he is mesmerised by her ageless beauty (she is literally just as he remembered her). Deborah urges Noodles not to face the ‘truth’ because he will be hurt by it and asks him to leave by a side door (a recurring motif for Noodles). He refuses and allows himself to be pulled another way, thus making it clear to him that his old pal Max still lives and has a son named David, and that his lost love Deborah has been cohabiting with Max (another betrayal).
In the movie’s penultimate scene, after Noodles has declined to carry out the contract on Senator Bailey, he leaves the house (again by a side door). He stands watching and waiting. Bailey (Max) comes down the path and walks into the road. A garbage truck starts its engine and journeys across the screen from right to left. As it passes Max he disappears, presumably jumping into the whirring machinery. As the truck passes Noodles and departs the frame, the number ‘35’ can clearly be seen in red on the truck’s rear side panel, 35 being the exact number of years since Noodles and Max ended their friendship. Coincidence?
As Noodles continues to watch the disappearing truck he is seen framed in front of a Chinese pagoda-style building. The truck’s red tail lights turn white and Noodles is momentarily blinded by the glare. The white light becomes a parade of vintage cars from the 30s with tuxedo-clad revellers, and a recording of God Bless America fills the soundtrack. The combination of the Chinese building and 30s apparitions ‘pulls’ Noodles back into 1933, the time that it appears he never left.
The dream theory is given weight by the psychology that would drive a character like Noodles. Noodles has been a petty criminal all his life. His girlfriend Deborah, the only woman he has cared for, chastises him early on about his inability to rise above the lowlife status he has ordained for himself. It is the “stink of the streets” that Noodles professes to love that turns Deborah off. No matter how much money Noodles makes, he will never be clean enough for her. Just how furious this makes Noodles is clarified in the brilliant juxtaposition from the bordello to the romantic restaurant scene.
After engaging in some offensive horseplay with a prostitute (Tuesday Weld) who he had previously raped, Noodles feigns moral indignation and haughtily leaves for a rendezvous with Deborah. At a beautiful hotel that he has exclusively booked for the evening, Noodles makes his big pitch and she turns him down. Stewing and unable to control himself, he rapes her in the limousine on the way home. As a result of this incident, Deborah is out of his life for good. Noodles take solace in his drug addiction.
His emotional immaturity is possibly attributable to his ten-year jail sentence received at the age of seventeen. He is a young punk with no worldly understanding. He has no grasp of the big picture, but is extremely arrogant and ego-driven. The callous brutality that Noodles and Max deal in renders them unsympathetic criminals; their allegiance is only to each other and both are hugely sentimental, as many crooks are. At one stage they even play ‘God’ by switching babies in a maternity ward and not returning them to the right parents (“Some we give the good life…others get it up the ass!”). It is finally sentimentality that does Noodles in. On top of his stunted intellect and egocentric behaviour lies his narcissism, which will be both his undoing and his salvation.
Fearful of Max’s ambition, Noodles feels he should exercise a little crowd control. Max runs the business, Noodles goes along. But Max is getting too big for Noodles. Max has powerful political allies and his tentacles embrace multiple seats of power. Noodles, basically, is a lazy good-for-nothing content to live the life of Reilly. Max is becoming increasingly unstable, maybe even deranged, and wants to knock off a big, well-guarded bank that will most likely end in all their deaths. Noodles thinks it’s a good idea to turn Max in, give him a spell in jail, cool his heels. The consequence of Noodles’ betrayal is the deaths of Max, Cockeye and Patsy.
Turning to the opium den once again, Noodles realises his life is over. His girlfriend is gone. His best friends are dead. Both occurrences are his fault. In the misery and liberation of the opium dream, Noodles invents and alternate scenario that allows him to absolve himself from responsibility and guilt. In the future-world of the dream, it is Max who is the betrayer. He faked his own death, stole all the money and ended up living with Noodles’ girl. And, entirely in keeping with Noodles’ sentimental narcissism, had a son who is given Noodles’ name, David. Noodles is vindicated. He can revel in righteousness, play the victim/martyr and even be benevolent and equally sentimental in return (he chooses not to ice Bailey/Max, preferring to bathe in the golden glow of the long-ago friendship).
When Noodles smiles his beatific smile at the end of the film, it is the smile of escape from blame and guilt. It is a mental release, but not a physical one, for, as we know, the consequences of the botched robbery involve syndicate retribution; the hired guns are in the den looking for Noodles.
At the climax of Point Blank, Walker is in a position to step forward and pick up the bag that contains his $93,000. He has orchestrated every manoeuvre that has led to this moment. But he can’t. With the money in sight he cleaves to the shadows, his face partially obscured. His name is called but he doesn’t move. He is physically not able to collect the cash. His dream is over. He has nowhere to go. He has no further place in the physical world. He’s dead.
Noodles’ frozen smile represents the same thing. He is going nowhere. As soon as he wakes from the opium dream he will be assassinated by the hired guns. In his dream he leaves New York for thirty-five years, but he doesn’t leave. We saw him motionless at the station (going to Buffalo isn’t far enough to save him). He can’t communicate with anyone in 1968 that he didn’t already know because he isn’t there. And, like Walker, once Noodles’ dream reaches its point of resolution it has to founder because there is no future beyond that. It is possible to view Once Upon a Time in America as completely circular; it stops at precisely the time it begins - Noodles smiles and one second later Eve steps into the room and is killed. Noodles lives in the closed, unending ‘reality’ of his dream, for outside it he is ninety-nine and forty-four-hundredths of a per cent dead.