Nightmare Alley showed that loving yourself is the key to accepting love
by Ben Kuchera
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Learning to love yourself is often the first step toward a healthy relationship. It can also be the hardest step.
This is one of those pieces of life advice that we’ve heard so often that the words might feel almost meaningless. But Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 film about carnival life in the 1940s, addiction, and the human need to be understood, drives the point home in a way that rips you open more than it offers comfort. The movie is a warning about what happens when you achieve everything you’ve ever dreamed about without healing the wounds that let it all leak right back out.
Bradley Cooper plays Stanley Carlisle, a drifter with a pretty face and an easy charm. Carlisle is running from something, like many people who find themselves joining a traveling carnival, but the movie takes its time revealing what that something is. Quick flashbacks hint at a neglectful father and a life of poverty. Carlisle is a sponge for the culture of the carnival, learning the basics of performing a psychic act, and helping others improve their own acts with his intuitive sense for human psychology.
The structure of Nightmare Alley plays an interesting trick by setting up most of the stakes in the opening scenes. We see where Carlisle is, we get hints about where he’s coming from, and then we’re given a dark peek into what his future may be.
A lifetime of deprivation and isolation without healing prevented Carlisle from fully establishing a sense of identity. He doesn’t really know who he is. But in the carnival environment, that’s advantageous for him. His natural understanding of people paired with his good looks means that he can become anything people need him to be.
“If you’re good at reading people, it’s mostly because you learned as a child,” Carlisle’s mentor Pete Krumbein tells Carlisle. “Trying to stay one step ahead of whatever tormented you. Now, if they really did a number on you, then that crack, it’s a hollow. And there’ll never be enough. There’s no filling that in.”
The movie throws its theme in our faces, and it’s told to us by multiple characters:
People often want to be seen. In fact, a lot of them are eagerly awaiting the arrival of someone caring who can simply see and accept them.
Carlisle eventually runs off with Molly Cahill, played by Rooney Mara, to launch an upscale, impressive psychic theater show. The methods they use to convince the marks that they’re talking to dead relatives may have all come from old carnie traditions, but soon it’s not enough. Carlisle has been warned not to do a “spook show,” a performance in which the audience actually believes they’re speaking with the dead, but he wants to see how far he can take the deception.
Constructing a fictional version of the afterlife for grieving aristocrats is a dangerous game, and as Nightmare Alley progresses and Carlisle and Molly find more success while drifting away from each other, things begin to get more serious… and violent. Carlisle’s descent into hell begins so slowly he doesn’t even feel the ground begin to tilt under his feet.
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The effects of a negative self-image
Carlisle’s biggest issue is that he doesn’t love himself, he doesn’t know himself, and maybe getting to the point where he did would require quite a lot of work due to his traumatic upbringing. “Forget about loving anyone else. In the end, if your core sense of self is painfully disturbed or deficient, you won’t be able to love yourself,” Dr. Leon F. Seltzer writes in Psychology Today.
This is the basic explanation for why Carlisle’s relationship with his father mirrors his relationship with his wife and even his success. Ghosts and repeating patterns follow him everywhere. His line of thinking might be: if my father couldn’t love me, how could anyone else? It’s a false notion, of course, but deep-seated beliefs like these take effort to shake.
“In virtually all these cases, such individuals’ upbringings were marked by non-loving parental abuse or neglect,” Dr. Seltzer continues. “And regrettably, these experiences left them with grave doubts about their attractiveness, competence, or basic human worth. Never having availed themselves of the opportunity to undergo longer-term therapy (likely because they didn’t think they could be helped), they couldn’t internalize their later-day accomplishments. And so their negative, outdated beliefs about themselves continued to undermine, even nullify, the many positive things they’d achieved since childhood.”
Not only do people with a lack of positive self-image find it harder to be vulnerable and share themselves with others, but, in many cases, they never believe that anyone truly loves them for who they are. Carlisle isn’t just hurting people who are willing to pay for a little hope — he’s constantly turning his back on the people in his life who care for him in ways his father never did. Carlisle knows that to love is to be vulnerable, and, in his view, to be vulnerable is to be taken advantage of. He regards even his loved ones with suspicion and fear.
“If you don’t love yourself — if you are critical and unaccepting of yourself — you probably find it difficult to believe other people can really accept and love you,” Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps wrote in WebMD. “Feeling flawed, you may create distance between yourself and others to avoid rejection. Or, you may do whatever you can to earn acceptance and create closeness, even if that means hiding your real self behind a façade.”
Until you love yourself, every relationship can feel like a road to a new kind of hell, and Carlisle has no interest in the story ending any other way. “I was born for it,” Carlisle gasps during the final scene, after he’s lost everything and is offered only hell moving forward. He never believed the good times would last.
Nightmare Alley is a bruising, deliberate meditation on self-loathing and generational trauma. Things could have been different if Carlisle believed that any of these people actually cared for him, that they saw what made him special, and that it had nothing to do with parlor tricks or his good looks. But that emptiness spreads. Carlisle’s father had it; Carlisle has it; and it creates a chain of abuse that hurts everyone it touches.
Learning how to break the generational cycle of abuse and alienation if we suffered through it as children may be some of the most important work we do in our lives. If we can’t be kind and curious with ourselves, it’s unlikely we'll be able to offer the same kindness to others. While films like Nightmare Alley don’t offer many solutions to these challenges, they do show what can happen if you ignore the battle. If the road to hell doesn’t find you, you may go looking for it yourself. And if you can’t find it? Some people get to work building their own.