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Fritz Lang's Western "Rancho Notorious" is proposed as allegory, not in the literary-historical mode, but as an attitude or perception occurring when one text is seen to double another. Wild pursues this idea of film as rebus, as a narrative "other," allowing one to see beyond the traditional or modernist view, which is antithetical to allegory.

Perhaps to a greater extent than in any other film genre, the classical Western of the 1930s and 1940s is characterized by binary oppositions, which help to build constellations of meaning. The Western avoids grey areas in favour of a well-marked white-hat/black-hat ideological binarism of protagonist and antagonist. The genre may indeed have served to furnish contemporary audiences with a needed symbolic realism that allowed them to re-synthesize what was contradictory in their lives: the greater the contradictions in our behaviour, the greater the need for a fantasy that might resolve them. Twentiethcentury capitalism increasingly regulated the behaviour of the male human subject and placed restraints upon him. He became a polite, clock-watching, productive citizen. At the same time, it became more difficult to attach villainy to a human face: where once those afflicted with the deadly sin of greed might be singled out and their miserliness condemned, now they were firmly and invisibly embedded within capitalism as its very cornerstones. The classical Western, then, provided a spectacle of greed and villainy that were clearly identifiable in a distinct individual or group, whether bandits, ranchers, or town merchants.

In his structural study of myths, Claude Levi-Strauss asserts that the function of myth is to resolve the conflicts that confront primitive societies by maintaining them in a suspension of contradiction. "The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)" (229). As such a myth, the Western of classical Hollywood cinema made it possible to believe, however fleetingly, in an existing ethical system capable of distinguishing good from evil, and of meting out justice. Once this identification made sense within the film's diegetic space, it helped the viewer make sense of the world. Viewed in this light, the Western as genre might seem comparable to a narrower, thoroughly modernist perception of allegory as antiquated, a form invested in justice and redemption, featuring innocent tales heavily appended with moral tags, and, as such, a prime producer of ideology upholding and reinforcing a social order. Such an appraisal of allegory, however, focusses solely on the techniques of a literary-historical mode and overlooks allegory as an attitude or perception occurring when one text is seen to double another. Seeking a redefinition of allegory in a postmodern perspective, Craig Owens points to the Western, the gangster saga, and science fiction-all genres associated primarily with film-as the primary vehicles for popular allegory in our time. In addition to its widespread appeal, the cinema's mode of representation is also of structural importance for the attribution of allegory. "Film composes narratives out of a succession of concrete images," Owens writes, "which makes it particularly suited to allegory's essential pictogrammatism. In allegory, the image is a hieroglyph. An allegory is a rebus, writing composed of concrete images" (74). A rebus may be defined as a puzzle in which a word, phrase, or sentence is rendered by a peculiar arrangement of letters, numerals, etcetera, often with pictures of objects whose names have the same sounds as the words represented. In the Freudian theory of the dreamwork, the dream image as rebus can hold several different meanings at once, and can hold conflicting ones simultaneously. The mechanisms of the dreamwork, translated to film, form rebuses that allow us to study juxtaposed graphics, figures, and sound, as well as configurations of objects that may emblematize the narrative or work in contradiction to it.

As a genre filmmaker, Fritz Lang constantly theorizes the medium he champions. His films in general tend to overturn habitual perceptions and presuppositions, allowing us to see how partial and tenuous they are. As early as 1963, Luc Moullet remarks that Lang's films are antigenre: if Die Frau im Mond (1928) runs counter to science fiction, so are Moonfleet (1954) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) set at variance with the laws of the adventure film and the police detective film. His Rancho Notorious (1953) may be seen as a theoretical Western, a film that subverts the binary oppositions habitual to us, while frustrating and even dismantling our horizon of expectations with respect both to the Western genre and to the "naturalistic" mode favoured and fostered by the Hollywood cinema. Critic Robin Wood has noted the purging, in Lang's films, of Hollywood's psychological realism; the director's indifference to "great performances" (or even "good acting"); his refusal to be distracted by the beauty of a scene, and the "pull in his style against the subjective, identifying tendency" (602). Wood also addresses the drive to revenge as a recurring motivation from Die Nibelungen (1924) to Die Tiger von Eschnapur (1958), but sees revenge in mystificatory terms and with a resounding return to psychology, as "the protagonist's only possible expression of protest and defiance, the nearest he can come to denying the destiny that has overtaken him" (605).

Without recourse to the psychological motivation of certain Langian heroes, there would be ample biographical evidence to argue for revenge at the directorial level once Lang had to contend with the Hollywood studios. The Ubermensch 'superman' who had directed Metropolis found himself having to abide by union laws with regard to the hours of meals for cast and crew (McGilligan 248). Worse still were the re-editings by producers who insisted upon happy endings (233), and the humiliation of having to say yes to all studio assignments, however mediocre the pro ject, or be fired.

In this essay I pursue the idea of film as rebus and attempt to instantiate the rebus as Fritz Lang's chief structuring/de-structuring figure. This conjunction will lead to a viewing of Rancho Notorious as a narrative "other" (allos = other + agoreuei = to speak), one that might allow us to see beyond the traditional or modernist view, which is antithetical to allegory. Seeing a film as a rebus serves to break down the apparent rationality of cinematographic continuity and to alert us to what may be working in the film beyond narrative and producing other, quasiunconscious, shapes of order for the viewer.

Rebus-work is seen operating in the opening credits. Over the titles, a voice on the sound track croons the first stanza of the ballad that accompanies and frames the film:

So listen to the legend of Chuck-a-Luck Listen to the wheel of Fate

As round and round, with a whisperin' sound

It spins, and spins the old, old story

Of hate, murder, and revenge.

The timing of the word revenge coincides with the name of the director as it appears onscreen. This overlay of sound and music upon the frame containing the name Fritz Lang creates a rebus inviting us to see the film as Fritz Lang's revenge on Hollywood's ideology of cinematic "realism," a mode inextricably bound to narrative closure. "Listen to the legend of Chuck-a-Luck," urges the ballad. Since a legend is, etymologically, that which must be read, we are thus enjoined to read what we see, see what we hear, and to take it both figuratively and literally. (The sheriff, embodiment of the law and upholder of the social order, will say, as he clasps the cuffs on killer Kinch, "I have a special fondness for rats that kill women.") When no naturalizing accord is permitted between what we see and what we hear, the narrative is subverted, and its ideological freight is jettisoned. Important for a consideration of the film as allegory is its disregard of visual and verbal categories: it proposes words as visual phenomena, while visual images turn into a script to be deciphered.

The plot of Rancho Notorious might best be described as "rocambolesque." As Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) pins an emerald brooch on his fiancee, Beth (Gloria Henry), they make plans to settle down on the Lost Cloud Ranch and raise a family. Later that day, bandit Kinch enters the assayer's office, where Beth is working alone, rapes and murders her, and steals the contents of the safe. Summoned to gaze upon his murdered fiancee, Haskell swears vengeance and sets out to track down her killer. He follows clues that take the form of myriad stories and reminiscences about a woman named Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich), now connected with a mysterious place called Chuck-a-Luck. An encounter with Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer), Altar's longtime beau, leads Haskell to the Chucka-Luck hideout, where Altar presides over a motley band of cutthroats who raid the region's banks, giving Altar, as owner of Chuck-a-Luck, a 10-percent cut from each heist. At her birthday soiree, Altar makes an appearance wearing the fiancee's emerald brooch. Haskell feigns a courtship of Altar in order to carry out his mission of retribution, edging out Fairmont as her current favourite. In the final shootout with a posse after a bank robbery, Altar is shot dead, and Haskell, now seemingly avenged, rides off into the sunset with Frenchy Fairmont.

The Western, perhaps more than any of the studio-produced genres of classical Hollywood cinema, strives for "realism," the realism of the great American West, by practising a cinematography that invites spectators to lose themselves in the vast expanses of an unlimited terrain, to range free, and to conquer space and control it by identifying with a hero who can correctly read its geography. While the plot of Rancho Notorious seems to thumb its nose at credibility, its visual content upholds the conventions of the Western in its settings, decoys, and costumes, displaying a recognizable iconography of guns and horses, shoot-outs and punch-outs, and a stock assortment of barroom hostesses, Mexican servants, and stable boys. The cinematography and dialogue of Rancho Notorious, however, constantly refuse the spatial and psychological depth we associate with the Western. A mise-en-scene favouring the surreal use of "flag colours" (red, white, and blue for many of the U.S. sequences, and red, white, and green for the Mexican border sequences) tends to produce a flat, matte, painterly surface on which we look for patterns of symbolic relation instead of "round" characters endowed with an individual psychology. When hero Vern Haskell sits down at a table next to killer Kinch, we see that they are dressed alike, and both in near-identical green. The landscapes of Rancho Notorious, rather than romanticized, savage, or tamed, are merely phony. Trysting amidst a magnificently artificial decor of huge pyramidal boulders-leftovers, perhaps, from some Pharaonic epic and purchased cut-rate from MGM-Vern Haskell and Altar Keane earnestly discuss the weather. "It's been a long, dry summer-gets people out of sorts. My father used to say that." But what sort are they? Their very words come from elsewhere, and the quotation marks surrounding them have the effect of lifting mimesis off the floor of reality. Even the hooves of their horses can be heard to echo as they walk on and off the set. The film is peopled not with characters but with artistic configurations, stick figures whose behaviour is not determined by the psychological realism of Hollywood but rather is blueprinted elsewhere by their past cinematic roles. Ciphers void of personality, they are an affront to the American idea of the person as self-contained and indivisible entity. Noteworthy in this respect is Borges's appraisal of allegory as a mode unappreciated and even unreadable by moderns because it works away from individuation and toward types: the allegory, he states, is a fable of abstraction, while the novel tells a fable of individuals (229). In addition to refusing Hollywood's ideology of cinematic and psychological realism, Rancho Notorious also exposes the American ideology of westward expansion. In Lang's vision, Manifest Destiny has already been achieved: Americans have moved westward all the way to Hollywood, from whence they contemplate the nation's past for the purpose of turning it into images for mass consumption. The film's tale is "a souvenir of a bygone year," as its ballad tells us, but that bygone year has more to do with the past of Hollywood than with United States history. Lang presents a film text of sagacious plagiarism, of grafting and parodying, a film in which characters constantly peer over their shoulders at past roles. Marlene Dietrich, as Altar Keane at her birthday party, cannot bear to be asked "how old [she'll] be," as if remembering her days as a "glory girl" in Destry Rides Again (1939).

Indeed, it is the figure of Dietrich-as-Altar that best exemplifies Rancho's postmodern meanderings in the archival trash heap of earlier film sources. Even as Haskell searches for Altar, and revenge, the film obligingly assembles a mosaic of Marlene as the sum of her previous roles. None of these multiple personae, however, comes close to fitting the roles assigned to women by Will Wright in his various sub -categories of the Western. She does not constitute a social alternative to fighting, as is claimed for the "classical" formula. Altar herself embodies an alternative, switching back and forth between male and female roles as she changes from dress to trousers, thus problematizing her as object of desire. In addition, she presides over the alternative (both criminal and gynocractic) society of the Chuck-a-Luck Ranch. In the category of the "transitional" Western, the role played by the woman is that of co -fighter, who joins and supports the hero's way of life. But, in Rancho Notorious, Altar Keane-even were she not chief of the enemy camp-is too uncertain a personage, indeed, "a pipe dream," to be considered a reliable support. In the "professional" plot, the woman is merely irrelevant to the heroes, who form a masculine group based on the values of skill and strength (Wright 84-87). In Rancho Notorious, however, Marlene appears variously as all things to the outlaws: mother, lover, entertainer, and boss.

Marlene's depiction in male clothing in the film's present tense opposes those of the flashbacks, where she appears as flamboyant saloon hostess, as quasi-bourgeois mistress of the major in silk dress and parasol driving her carriage and pair through the muddy streets of a frontier town, and, in the series of oneiric tracking shots in the saloon-as remembered by the sheriff's associate-the Circe who turns men into beasts. "It was a horse race, and Altar Keane was my jockey, sort of," he states uproariously. His memory jogs that of the viewer, who remembers Dietrich as the spirited Frenchie of Destry Rides Again, astride the back of a saloon customer and whipping him furiously as he tries to shake her off. These flashbacks to Altar Keane's past lives, unlike conventional flashbacks, which serve to clarify a narrative's present, offer multiple versions of Altar to the point of casting her "reality" into doubt. Haskell remarks, "I've heard so many stories about you I wasn't sure you were real. [... ] Say, is it true they once named a railroad car for you?" Which is the real Altar Keane? Is she a pipe dream? A railroad car? The sum of past roles for Joseph von Sternberg? She is everybody's cinematic memory, as her name indicates-eine altes kino `an older cinema'-and the bits and pieces of her mosaic never quite compose a unitary character. The centre of the film, then, is composed of a collage of simulacra, a pastiche of psychological integrity.

Such strategies of appropriation, accumulation, and hybridization strengthen a sense of the film as allegory. As Walter Benjamin observed, it is the common practice of allegory to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal (84-87). It is this very method of construction that led Angus Fletcher to liken allegorical structure to obsessional neurosis. Freud had proposed in Totem and Taboo that there are both neurotic and non-neurotic manifestations of similar behaviours. It is possible, he said, to find cultural analogues for the typical shapings of unbalanced behaviour that we call neuroses. Thus, obsessions find their socially acceptable counterpart in religious ritual; paranoia and philosophy share a common ground; and points of comparison may be drawn between hysteria and mimetic art. The proper analogue to allegory, Fletcher argues, is the compulsive syndrome. He identifies five areas through which he offers a psychoanalytic clarification of the nature of allegory: agency, imagery, action, causality, and theme, or ambivalence. Each of these may be considered with respect to Rancho Notorious, allowing the viewer to see how text and authorial compulsion find common ground, as Lang the auteur enacts his own revenge. By means of an overdetermined parable of revenge, he musters the utmost authorial control in order to demonstrate a vengeance/sacrifice cycle that signifies a culture out of control. As in allegory, rational technique, therefore, traces the liminal edge of irrational forms.

First, the behaviour of the agent, be that person a patient or a character in a fiction, is characterized by obsessional anxiety. Freedom of choice scarcely exists; an idea possesses the mind (Fletcher 287). For the patient, an obsession is an idea or desire that forces itself into the mind in what he experiences in an irrational manner. For the character in allegory, there is a determination to reach a goal, be it the Celestial City or the Chuck-aLuck Ranch. Rancho Notorious's ballad intones:

Now where and what is Chuck-a-Luck?

Nobody knows and the dead won't tell.

So on and on relentlessly

This man pursues his quest

Through autumn and winter

Searching the great Southwest.

This thing that drives him like a whip

Will never let him rest

Night and day, early and late,

He looks for a home, a face or a place

And deep within him burn the fires

Of hate, murder, and revenge.

Unlike the melos that keys, for example, the moral conflict in High Noon (love versus duty), this ballad contains no structuring oppositions but is rather the statement of an obsession, a tale of a "man of steel and the pas sion that drove him on and on and on and on."

Rancho Notorious might initially seem to fit the mold of the "vengeance variation" of the classical Western. In this variant, a hero leaves society because of his superior moral and physical strength, which contrasts with the pusillanimity, incompetence, or irresolution of the townspeople and the Law; in the case of Rancho Notorious, it is their unwillingness to hunt down and extirpate the villains. The viewing of many other vengeance variations before and since Rancho Notorious might indeed lead us to see, in Lang's film, the story of a man who has been grievously wronged-his fiancee outraged and murdered-who swears vengeance upon her killer and sets out to right a wrong. This seems at first to be the case: the woman's brutal exclusion serves as a trigger to set off the male agent, the hate-fortified "man of steel" who will then fulfill his compulsive desire for "murder and revenge." But any notion of Vern Haskell's superior moral qualities is quickly undercut, as the hero, hell-bent on destroying his quarry, becomes the extravagant twin of the killer he is seeking. After dispatching Ace Maguire in a barbershop melee, he shoots up the town of Gunsite on election day as a pretext to get into the same jail cell with Frenchy Fairmont, who is ostensibly a lead to the location of the Chucka-Luck Ranch, refuge of his fiancee's killer.

Now the road that goes to Chuck-a-Luck

Leads to a Western jail

And behind the bars is an outlaw

Who knows the Chuck-a-Luck trail.

But here's a man with a crazy plan

A plan that will not wait

He'll trick his way inside that jail

To reach his goal of hate, murder and revenge.

Eventually Haskell finds his way to Chuck-a-Luck, where, securely lodged in the redoubt of thieves and murderers, the garb and colours he wears make him indistinguishable from the villains. As in allegory, what we read is not what we read.

Like the undeviating, absolutist character in allegory, totally committed to a pursuit, Lang's obsessional Haskell also undergoes a withdrawal of affect. "In literature, this sets the systematic, unfeeling tone of allegories, where real violence is inherent in the well-ordered meaning" (Fletcher 288). The Western film genre, like its predecessors in literary history, demands that equilibrium be established by violence in the playing out of its narrative. Like a tragic protagonist working through one of the early psychomachias, the avenging hero, Haskell, is thus visited by both violence and affectlessness: he is humourless, unable to join in the general merriment and fellow feeling that emerge during the story-telling and joke-telling sequences. He might be compared to Aeneas, who "manages to avoid an accusation of hostility to his fellow man under the guise of his preordained `destiny"' (288). The characteristic aggressions of both these compulsive heroes serve the "higher" end of revenge, as do Christian heroes of allegory who serve the concept of a fated providential destiny.

just as the agent in allegory becomes singled down to a one-track function-the accomplishment of a fixed idea-so does the imagery undergo a similar narrowing process. To cite Fletcher, "It is found, in obsessional behavior, that the impulse to perform an irrational act is displaced onto some associatively remote item of imagery. The impulse to kill a loved one is accepted into consciousness by the neurotic mind via an object indirectly associated with the loved person. [... I The impulse becomes a little island of desire to which certain recurrent images will be attached, and in time those images will be an adequate substitute (by metonymy) for the impulse. [ ...I The fetishistic detail that fascinates the compulsive is a gemlike talisman" (289-90, emph. mine).

Central to the analysis of film as rebus is what I call, after Tom Conley, the hieroglyph, the key shifter in the film, the cipher, or marker, that replaces the concept of the sign. The hieroglyph is rather a composite sign or floating figure of unstable meaning, a shape that is constantly rearticulating itself and alerting us to what is working in the film beyond narrative. It bears comparison with the objet deperspective, or perspectival object, which Guy Rosolato calls a signifier for a representation of the unknown. The term may refer to the way the human subject (or the patient in the talking cure) allows certain nodal points to form in the discourse that he produces when describing or visualizing the world he or she sees and lives. The perspectival object "stands in" for something the subject's fear prevents him from naming. If we read the film text as we would the discourse of a patient, the concept of the perspectival object affords us an analogue of such a nodal point, or knot of tensions surfacing in the text.

Such a figure participates in the decoupage of a film, a process that, in the work of Lang, was as meticulous as the filming itself. In Rancho Notorious, we find this talismanic figure in the green jewelled brooch, presented first on a triangle of black velvet cloth, a gift from Haskell to his fiancee. "It came from Paris, in France! Fine for star-gazin'!" proclaims the awestruck cowboy to his star-struck spectators. The brooch's shape is the same as that of the erotic volutes seen bordering the frames of the credits, and it will metamorphose first into the hand of Kinch, the rapist, clutching the chain-link barrier between him and what he has asked to see-the contents of the assayer's safe-though Haskell's bride -to -be is actually the object of his gaze. When Haskell is summoned later to gaze upon his murdered fiancee, the camera tilts slowly down the arm of the violated girl to her claw-like hand resting on the floor. It forms, again, the same shape as the brooch, which itself has been torn away. In the former place of the brooch is the torn and dishevelled bodice of her green dress. The tilt down to her hand dissolves to the hand of Kinch, bending over a stream to wipe the blood from his clawed cheek. Later, when Haskell has found his way to Altar Keane's sanctuary at Chuck-a-Luck, he sees, aghast, the missing brooch reappear, attached to her bodice. "I wish I could give you a brooch like that," he tells her. In his final confrontation with Altar, he will rip off the brooch in order to confront Kinch with it-a sure sign that Kinch's identity as killer is discovered. Haskell, whose name determines that he has to kill, cannot do so in the narrative because he fails to provoke Kinch into a draw. (Or, he fails to kill because this is a failed allegory.) The ultimate authorial revenge has the narrative of Lang's film closing on an all-male equilibrium with the second woman, Altar, brutally eliminated, shot dead when she stops the bullet intended for Frenchy Fairmont. The wound on her breast replaces the brooch as the hero disappears over the horizon with Frenchy. Steven Jenkins has observed that the brooch, appearing and disappearing throughout the film, "seems first to mark a female figure violently suppressed from the text, then metonymically to accomplish her return, and finally, to assure that the second woman, as wearer of the brooch, becomes the next bearer of the wound" (49).

If compulsivity finds its way into the form and fabric of the film by means of the ambiguous brooch shape recurring in a variety of compositional arrangements, the compulsive gesture is likewise mirrored in the actions of the central character. Fletcher reminds us that the typical action performed by the neurotic is the compulsive ritual, a highly orderly behaviour that may be symmetrical or ritualistic, or both (292). Anti-social impulses on the part of the patient are compensated for by self-imposed duties and propitiatory acts. For instance, objects may be arranged in different orders. Haskell exhibits such behaviour traits, ingratiating himself as attentive servant of Altar Keane, becoming her indispensable hand, the performer of ritual tasks mundane rather than arcane. He performs these largely self-imposed duties in the manner of a compulsive patient: unfailingly he fills her wine glass, regularly rounds up her stray cattle, and meticulously counts them. In his blind fixity he will insist upon seeing Wilson, the charming womanizer, as the bearer of the marker or of the claw-hand, while in fact the killer is seated beside him at a table dressed in garb identical to his own.

If the acts of the central character are compulsive, the action of the narrative also progresses as does that of allegory-with an apparent motion, formally imitating the circular movement of the Wheel of Fortune. The notion of narrative progress is continually undercut as the hero's desire for revenge leads to acts that produce an impression of circularity, of a narrative recommencing rather than terminating. As a result, Rancho Notorious constantly refuses the narrative closure promoted by Hollywood. Instead of narrative progress, an incessant spiralling inward is achieved by interruptions in the form of stories within stories, which serve paradoxically to propel the hero on his quest and to fix him in the same place. The ballad announces that the tale is spun by "the gambler's wheel, the wheel of Fate":

So listen to the legend of Chuck-a-Luck,

Listen to the wheel of Fate

As round and round with a whisperin sound

It spins, it spins the old, old story

Of hate murder, and revenge.

Causality, another aspect of Fletcher's psychoanalytic model, signals the neurotic tendency toward superstition, which in allegory becomes the belief in contagious magic, in the magic of names, and in oracular destiny. The oracular omen is felt to be binding. Fletcher states that "this provides the overall and sublime pattern for prophetic literature, where the hero is compelled onward and is held on his path by predestinating omens and oracles" (302). The oracle therefore pre-emptively authorizes a given line of conduct. In Rancho Notorious, the seer appears in the figure of the dying androgyne, Whitey, the outlaw with the long golden tresses (his very name whiting out the binary opposition between good and evil in the Western), from whose lips are forced the magic words "Chuck-aLuck," which fatally names and reveals the hero's destination.

Finally, at the heart of the compulsion neurosis, there exists "a high degree of ambivalence that is bound to accompany any extreme development of the superego, or conscience" (Fletcher 298). For Fletcher, this bipolarity of thinking is endlessly complicated by the merging of polar opposites, or binary oppositions. In the mind of the patient, the merging "proceeds by means of displacement and negation, by which is meant that in the unconscious, and in neurotic behaviour generally, anything can come to mean its opposite" (298). In his often-quoted essay "The `Uncanny,"' Freud dwelt upon the word heimlich, which in some cases comes to mean the same as its opposite, unheimlich. Another such "antithetical primal word" is the Latin altus, which means both "high" and "deep" (Fletcher 298). Because an "altar"-the site of sacrificial victimage-is a definitively tabooed object, double meanings are essential to the name. An altar, with its connotation of the most desirable (in the sense of the most holy) is also alter `the other ,; the one who has been 11 altered," or castrated. Yet she is also keen, like the blade of the knife. Her name thus manages to hold the contraries of the most desirable and the most repulsive thing the mind can conceive. Mel Ferrer's character's name, "Frenchy" Fairmont, both repeats the name that had adorned Dietrich in Destry Rides Again and marks him as culturally different and even, by extension, perverse. A "fair mounter" (as good in the saddle as he is with a six gun), he is both fair to mount (permissible) and a fair mount (not bad!). Here, the film would seem to be a reinstatement of the homoeroticism repressed from Hollywood's mythography of the saga of the winning of the West.

The ambivalence of names contributes to the ambiguity verging on contradiction that surrounds the function of woman and the attitudes toward her, an ambiguity that problematizes her place in the extreme. The film begins where it normally would end, with Haskell and his fiancee in a clinch. The sentimentality of the talk about marriage and babies ("We should have one every August") is undercut by the mention of the newborn "Burdon triplets" whom the whole town is viewing: the three little burdens. The domesticated woman then immediately becomes a memory haunting the hero. Before being raped and killed, she is glimpsed waving goodbye to Haskell beneath a large sign proclaiming ASSAYER. Readable underneath a word that signifies a trade involving rational calculation, measurement, and analysis, are the phrases "Assay her" or "Try her out." As we see repeatedly, such clashes of image, written word, or spoken word with naturalistic continuity turn the film into a rebus.

In the ambivalence of the names, then, resides yet another manifestation, in mise en abyme, of the doubling that characterizes the allegorical mode, where one text is present in palimpsest under another. What we read is other than what we read. In its play of relations between and among the writing of the titles, the lyrics of the ballad, and the image track itself, Rancho Notorious tends to flatten and to undo any allegorical force intended by Hollywood, that is, the allegory based upon what the industry supposes to be the consumer's desire: the genre film. Lang's allegorical rebus works against the genre.

A final doubling occurs in the last stanza of the ballad, resulting in a collision between sound and image. In the version crooned on the sound track, Vern Haskell and Frenchy Fairmont fight and die together:

Two men rode away from Chuck-a-Luck

And death rode beside them on the trail

For they died that day,

So the legends tell

With empty guns they fought and fell

And so ends the tale of hate, murder, and revenge.

But this written text does not synchronize with the image track, where we see Haskell and Fairmont ride off together into the setting sun. The lines "For they died that day, / So the legends tell" might well be a footnote to the closing dialogue of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which would seem to disclose John Ford's approach to myth versus history: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. It's better for the country."

As a director obliged to work within the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, Lang's strategy of revenge in Rancho Notorious would seem to be one of crafting a bogus likeness, a simulacrum, resembling one of tinseltown's major genres, a notoriously overwrought and "failed" allegory that encourages viewers to question more astutely the ideologyladen illusions projected before them.