Expressionism revels in troubled, paroxystic souls. Some of the most compelling representations of the tense, affected male, a being and body in physical and metaphysical space, have occurred in both classic German and American expressionist and neo-expressionist cinema where a subverting male nervousness is a recurring trope. Many of these films are psychologically unsettling, constructed narratives of nervous men afflicted by fixed ideas and internal terrors: the substance of waking, protracted bad dreams. This study will initially focus on two select avant-garde expressionist American film narratives, produced during the Weimar era in Germany (1918–33), and then will comparatively analyze the trope of the nervous male in three modern American film narratives in which a neo-expressionist visual and thematic design is appropriated via industrial, generic structures. American cinema has (principally but not exclusively) produced phases of interrelated expressionist cinematic culture: the first phase an avant-garde expressionist film narrative produced during the silent era, and the second phase (produced principally post-World War II) neo-expressionism, which characteristically referenced and appropriated expressionist themes and forms in select shot sequences recalling and revising the silent era aesthetic, involving such styles and genres as film noir, adaptation, horror, and the melodrama.

The American expressionist film is a hypertextual narrative, part of an international movement. When, in “Modernism and the Cinema: Metropolis and the Expressionist Aesthetic,” Richard Murphy comprehensively surveys the compositional strategy of Fritz Lang's pivotal German expressionist narrative Metropolis (1927), he especially notes principal characteristics of the expressionist film narrative that are equally applicable to two contemporary American expressionist narratives, Melville Webber and James Watson's The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Charles Klein's The Telltale Heart (1928), namely, the distortion of temporal and spatial relationships and a destabilization of the viewer's position and knowledge as a product of guilt-driven nervousness. Murphy concludes, “within the broader context of modernism … destabilization of the coordinates of time, space and causality affects the recipient's sense of interpretive mastery.”