I never hear that one is dead
Without the chance of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,
Too mighty for the Daily mind
That tilling it’s abyss,
Had Madness, had it once or, Twice
The yawning Consciousness
Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue
When Terror were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike us instant Dead—
I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger - Consciousness
Deliberately face—
The above-quoted poem (untitled, numbered 1325) by Emily Dickinson plays out the central drama of Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place. This is a drama of 1950s Hollywood romance, or more accurately, considering the overt tones of death and desire that Ray uses, this is a melodramatic tragedy of romance, of the role of masculinity in romance that proves to be unfree and subsequently violent, and of the collisions of Consciousnesses in romance and cinema. Ray’s In a Lonely Place is a noir film preoccupied with loneliness and its residence—it charts the footsteps of loneliness in the somber, tumultuous ballet of will and emotion in Laurel and Dixon’s love, a love shadowed by cruel optimism, the vulnerabilities and failings of the masculinity construct, and the consuming force of artistic talent. Throughout In a Lonely Place, Ray’s allusion to Dickinson’s poem not only heightens the romantic binaries of life and death, love and loss, hope and cynicism, the light and dark parts of humanity, and the convergence of it all, but it also instills a layer of meta-narration that serves as a loneliness-inducing barrier separating the viewer-voyeur from the byzantine dramas within.
Romance as a Prayer Room & Pyre: Laurel’s Lonely Place
This scene, with its promises of beauty in the mundanity of romance, visualizes the 1940s American bourgeois dream:
Laurel Gray: [on a scene in Dix’s script] I love the love scene—it’s very good.
Dixon Steele: Well that's because they're not always telling each other how much in love they are. A good love scene should be about something else besides love. For instance, this one. Me fixing grapefruit. You sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we're in love.
Throughout the film, Laurel transfixes on an epic romance not realized, but almost. Having run away from her former wealthy lover without a trace, she yearns for an escape from the fey indifference associated with her past relationship. She longs not to be a deadened partner, content with filling the role of color inside the set lines of domesticity. Laurel seems to find the solution to love and its weary and burnt-out flavor in Dixon—mesmerized by his abnormality and façade of stoicism, she is made alive with a sense of looking forward to something in the form of true connection or passion. “I liked his face,” she states to the police captain, and thus forms her Belief in liberation from the dull rhythm of sour monotony and lovelessness on the anvil of Dixon’s promising face.
Yet, Laurel’s fantasies begin to shatter in the abysses of Dixon’s madness, where he beats up the UCLA athlete on their drive, and by extension where she realizes his potentially homicidal capacity for violence. She becomes lost and lonely, though unvanquished, in her displacement amongst her now Bandaged Belief in a legitimate love. Though Dixon remains a symbol of salvation from the passivity and boredom of a passionless relationship, the threats of his sadism and unpredictable brutality bleed into Laurel’s dreams. In Ray’s depiction of Laurel taking pills for her nightmares in a place she once called comfort and home, he evokes the paradoxical idea of “cruel optimism,” a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility (Berlant 21). Laurel’s position of loneliness is manifested in her difficulty of detaching from her life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work—her fixation on the dark chasms of Dixon’s soul and her utopian Belief that she could heal them become the very obstacles to her happiness.
As a result, Ray illustrates how toxic romance serves as a lonely place—he challenges the fairy-tale idea of marriage and domesticity that was once alluring to the stock noir figure to be a problematic and contested space (Rybin et al. 29). His allusions to Dickinson’s poem imbues In a Lonely Place with an oxymoronic aesthetic in which Laurel’s seemingly incorruptible Beliefs and desires are Bandaged. Towards the end of the film, Laurel ponders how “Yesterday, this would've meant so much to us. Now it doesn't matter… it doesn't matter at all.” In doing so, Ray crafts her anticipation of love, connection, and Life, then floods it with overwhelming loneliness and Terror. He focuses on the “almost,” the Dickinsonian element of dichotomies and presence-absence, the desolate moments of disconnect between moments of intimacy, and the lonely, empty limbo between reality and the vision of a happily-ever-after.
Dixon’s Lonely Place of Masculinity
Dixon Steele: I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.
Although a brief scene in the film, this line encapsulates the heartbeat of Dixon and Laurel’s love throughout the film. Ray’s depiction of Dixon as an alcoholic screenwriter who has not “had a hit since before the war” works to characterize his festering self-esteem and pretense towards stoicism—Dixon’s persona falls in between the lines of the masculine Cold War stereotype of an emotionless man unwilling to confront his Consciousness and the new construction of a romantic, frustrated, rock-and-roll masculinity in the early 1950s.
Dixon’s ability to shift between ferocity and tenderness across his relationship reveals a “man so bold / He dare in lonely Place,” an all-too-human boy who writes and dreams under his sullen, brooding surface. Though the film begins with Dixon insulting his agent Kesler, getting into a fistfight with the son of a studio chief, and drowning his inadequacies in liquor, Ray marks Dixon with a vision of wounded masculinity and wrestles with the social conventions of gender. In his first visit to Laurel’s apartment, Dixon nervously grips the door, eyes glimmering with apprehension and intimidation in a poor attempt to perform and conform to culturally correct ideas of masculinity, conquest, and control. Dixon’s connection with Laurel, and by extension his “chance of Life,” chronicles the emergence of a new form of masculinity and his cruelly optimistic evolution into a loquacious, emotionally needy lover:
Dixon: I've been looking for someone a long time… I didn't know her name or where she lived—I’d never seen her before. A girl was killed, and because of that, I found what I was looking for. Now I know your name, where you live, and how you look.
But ultimately, Dixon’s continuous hostile outbursts and volcanic temperaments prompt Laurel, and the audience, to doubt his innocence. Her nurturing spirit of femininity proves to be not enough for Dixon’s transformation—after learning of Laurel’s intended flight to New York, Dixon flies into a frenzied rage and almost strangles her. Here, Ray pushes the noir vision further into the darkness and tightens the close-up shot, where Dixon’s visceral reaction to losing control unveils a spiraling coalescence of fear, unresolved anger, guilt, and self-loathing that parallels the emotional volatility of Wilson’s angry question—“Why do you make me do this?” in Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (Henderson 85). This scene of Dixon’s sociopathic abuse alludes to Dickinson’s poem: “When Terror were it told / In any Tone commensurate / Would strike us instant Dead.” Upon bestowing Terror upon Laurel, she leaves him, Dead. In a Lonely Place thus engages with the multivocality of romance, for while Dixon’s words (“I was born when she kissed me…”) underscore the beautiful, vitalizing nature of love, they also function to reinscribe its limitations on toxic masculinity, its fleeting, ephemeral quality, and the fatalism of passion and Life. The film’s preoccupation with Dixon’s Jekyll-and-Hyde persona marks Ray’s preoccupation with the constructions of gender identities, one that finally functions to query and problematize the concept of masculinity as a social problem of crime, as well as a psychological issue of introspection and loneliness.
Hollywood: A Lonely Home to Artists
Dixon: You get to a lonely place in the road, and you begin to squeeze… You're driving the car, and you're strangling her. You don't see her bulging eyes or protruding tongue. Go ahead, Brub, squeeze harder. You love her, and she's deceived you. You hate her. She looks down on you. She's impressed with celebrities. She wants to get rid of you… It's wonderful to feel her throat crush under your arm.
This scene in In a Lonely Place explores Dixon’s duality as a serenely aloof and stoic artist who lives in a whimsical world of supreme lucidity. As he sits aside from Brub and Sylvia, perched on the brink of his chair, Dixon paints an emotionally explicit picture of the murder of Mildred Atkins, a picture that exists purely in his lonesome imagination. Here, Ray scrutinizes the art of storytelling and the noir genre—a solitary, fantastical journey into the darkest eddies of “the Daily mind” that swirls with irrationality, hysteria, paranoia, and perversion. Intricately weaving the Dickinsonian ideas of “Madness” and the “yawning Consciousness” into the film, Ray meditates on Dixon’s and his own loneliness within Hollywood as it appears on the surface, bound in external glimmer and brilliance, pomp and show, aimless snobbery, and hypocrisy. Through this scene of Dixon’s re-enactment of the murder and his mention of celebrities, Ray abstracts his destitute mortality and dwindling Consciousness from the illusory Hollywood image, insinuating that the mundane reality of commercial, capitalistic inventions such as cinema strip artists of their humanity and leave them to wade in their bloodbath of utter loneliness.
In the characterization of Dixon, Ray strikes a balance in portraying the juxtaposing qualities of hope and cynicism with his allusion to Dickinson’s poem. He simultaneously entices and discourages the audience to believe in Dixon’s “chance of Life” and love, and explores the barren yet passionate landscape of the lonely artist’s mind. As Dixon resides in his canyon of solitary writing during his relationship and disregards Laurel’s existence, he furthers his self-imposed isolation and the masochistic pressure of success. Here, Ray contemplates the paradoxical nature of Dixon’s relationship—Laurel’s very embodiment of his inspiration and muse drives his love away from her and into his artistry and ambitions. In addition, Dixon’s dual role as a creator and a lover embodies a narrative essence in the film that is both intensely near and infinitely remote—while his dark psyche is enlivened by the dynamic pulses of Laurel’s love, his depersonalized consciousness as a self-reflexive screenwriter who “lived a few weeks while she loved me” in both his own reality and the character of his fictional screenplay ultimately situates him in a lonely place, just slightly out of reach from true connection. In a way, for Dixon, love was fictitious, constructed like a film production, and in the end, the flowering and withering of love and the tragic death of its innocence powerfully symbolize the heavy price of Dixon’s artistic talent: loneliness.
The pain of transient love, the doomed quality of the flawed hero, the curses of alcoholism, optimism, and artistic madness. Nicholas Ray presents these subversive/antisocial themes and transforms film noir into something more—psychological drama (Kennedy 54). In a Lonely Place is indeed an enunciative film; Ray’s emphasis on mapping loneliness produces the community of Hollywood in the act of writing, recording, and charting its voices in figurative spaces of romance, masculinity, and artistry. As Ray actively inflects the social relations of loneliness amongst Hollywood’s scenery of greed, worldliness, and materialism, we must ask ourselves what type of sociality Ray seeks to encourage or critique in In a Lonely Place.
In the film’s bleak, absolute ending, Laurel watches as Dixon treads away through the archway into a night of immutable solitude. Yet, there is a sense of wondrous stillness and silence in this wide shot—the ever-lonely space between their kisses of passion and all its accompanying violence is finally transformed into a momentary space of tranquillity. By fracturing the cruel optimism of Laurel and Dixon’s relationship and the conventions of a Hollywood happily-ever-after, Ray troubles the often untroubled conflation of solitude with loneliness and illuminates a world in which humans have created their own romantic, gendered cages of seclusion. Thus in doing so, he illuminates an alternate system where possibilities for connection and unity can perhaps be found starting from within, when we dare deliberately face the awful stranger that is our consciousness.
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren Gail. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Dickinson, Emily. “I Never Hear That One Is Dead (1325)”. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56457/i-never-hear-that-one-is-dead-1325.
Henderson, Kevin. “‘Why Do You Make Me Do This?’: Spectator Empathy, Self-Loathing Lawmen and Nicholas Ray’s Noir Vision in On Dangerous Ground.” Interdisciplinary Humanities, vol. 33, no. 1, 2016, p. 84–97.
Kennedy, Harlan. “The Melodramatists.” American Film, vol. 17, no. 1, 1992, p. 54–56.
Ray, Nicholas, director. In a Lonely Place. Columbia Pictures, 1950.
Rybin, Steven, and Will Scheibel. Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema. State University of New York Press, 2014.
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