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Circles recur in Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley: whether it is the spinning wheel behind Molly's stage act; the carousel that whirrs as she and Stan dance together; the spiralling maze inside the carnival; or the motifs of eyes which watch you from the forehead of a pickled baby or Stan's blindfold.
The story itself comes full circle at its conclusion, as Zeena's tarot prophecy of Stanton as the hanged man is realised. "Everything needed to lead to that ending, and the way we see it is partially relief," says del Toro. "There is a downfall, yes, but there's also the relief of being found out, and as Stanton says: 'We all want to be found out.'"
When Stanton finds his way to another carnival that happens to have purchased some of the oddities from the one he used to work at, we see him entering this place of winners and losers more down on his luck than he once was in this arena. Speaking to the carnival boss their conversation recalls the one he had with his old boss, in which Clem had revealed the tactics of how he lures someone into being their geek – the degraded performer who carries out shocking acts in a kind of freak-show.
Stan is just desperate enough that he takes the drink this new trickster offers him, knowing he drink is likely being laced with opium, and knowing this will seal his fate. Even as the carnival owner tells him, in an almost wink of an aside to the audience, that it's only temporary, he knows the truth.
"In the Greek tragedy, drama comes from the God's being against you and destiny is something that is imposed upon you," the director explains. "In the American version of tragedy, which is noir for me in many ways, the inexorable downfall comes from the decisions of man."
Del Toro reminds us that this downfall is something we have been warned is coming throughout the movie: "We give him all the tools to be happy in the movie, quite literally we hand him a happy ending over and over, but he wants more and it's not enough."
He continues: "The idea for me is that he is constantly waking up from a dream in the movie: he wakes up and he's in the fairground; he wakes up in that luxury hotel; he wakes and he is a vagabond with nothing around the campfire. It is almost like these things happen to him. It isn't until the end that he realises that he did it, when he says, 'Sir, I was born for it.'"
