Jump Back in the Alley

(52:19)

The morning after, Nada walks the same overpass as he did in the rainy, main-title sequence, albeit now he’s limping. Together with a return to the construction site, this cues the notion of a “reset” for the film, and for our anonymous man-of-the-streets. But Nada can’t really get back there, a fact made clear in Frank’s panicked reactions to the newly minted cop-killer, like the sighting of an apparition in daylight. Refused, Nada reenters downtown (there’s the Los Angeles Athletic Club again), and then his alley, where he’s stashed the carton of Hoffman lenses in a trashcan. The low-budget recycling of the same few backdrops—overpass, construction site, Athletic Club sidewalk, alley—lends the film a theatrical-allegorical quality, like a Beckett play, or a Budd Boetticher Western where the cowboys keep riding past the same few scenic geological outcroppings.

On the street before he reaches the alley, Nada hustles nervously past the shop window featuring the rows of televisions, now displaying a news bulletin featuring a (black-and-white!) photograph of Nada himself, a piece of superefficient shorthand for the common film noir motif of the city-wide, ll-points-bulletin manhunt. The photo on the screen, rather than being, say, a blown-up still from the bank’s surveillance cameras, depicts Nada with a shorter haircut and a distinctly relaxed, unhaunted expression. This is a glimpse of happier days (in Denver?), a throb of implied backstory for this itinerant Nothingman.