The doublecross is a film noir fixture. James Cagney's Cody was also betrayed by a close friend in White Heat, as Jack Kerouac suffered in The Subterraneans and Big Sur. Cagney and Kerouac were even doublecrossed by Florida doubles. Director Peter Bogdanovich wrote in Pieces of Time, "I finally met James Cagney the other day--the real one. There's a bearded fellow going around lately passing himself off as the actor. I was in 
Miami when this guy was there--they made him honorary mayor of Hollywood, Florida--and a paper printed pictures of him. Didn't look like Cagney to me. When Barbra Streisand was singing in Las Vegas around Christmas, they told her Cagney was in the audience so she introduced him from the stage and when this same bearded chap stood up, she thought, "Doesn't look like Cagney to me." Cagney himself seemed rather amused at this; he told several similar incidents that have occurred over the years . . ." 47 Likewise, when Kerouac lived in St. Petersburg, "He stoutly maintained that there were several imposters passing themselves off as Jack Kerouac and they were responsible for his receiving that kind of harassment." 48
Police on the roof find a painter's scaffold, scale down on pulleyed boards. There's a birds-eye view of a 1940s parking lot in motion, a vision of Cody from On the Road: "He worked in a parking lot . . . rushed around in his ragged shoes and T-shirt and belly-hanging pants all by himself, straightening out immense noontime rushes of cars" 49 where there are hoods in sparkling rows, the little ticket shack, tall brick walls painted with the words of then, making canyons above the tar. Forced to sign a confession, the old man aims and shoots his pen at Raven but his heart gives out. "One final doublecross." Suddenly the windows and doors are blasted open. As if ready for sleep, laying down, covered by a black blanket, and full of bullets, Raven's last words ask her, "Did I do alright for you?" Veronica Lake, looking down on him maternally, nods silently with a smile. Now he can close his eyes, the same way he began the movie, on a different day.
That's the big epiphany for Raven. He has gone from believing "I'm my own police" and only showing heart to cats because, "They're on their own. They don't need anybody," to listening to Veronica Lake at night. By traveling through with him from the beginning, all along she sought to sway him into knowing, she impressed on him the meaning of the code he killed for, to see beyond the phony money and vengeance routine. That night of hiding in the train, she told him, "You know I've been figuring something. That chemical formula. I bet I know what it is. Gas--poison gas. They're selling it to our enemy . . . So tomorrow they'll ship it back in bombs . . . Do you hear what I said? It's important. This war is everybody's business. Yours too . . . Why don't you stop thinking about yourself for a minute."
If there's going to be a moment for redemption in film noir, this is it. It's a transformation repeated in so many scenes, seen in Humphrey Bogart films like Casablanca ("I'm not fighting for anything anymore, except myself. I'm the only cause I'm interested in") and Key Largo ("What do I care about Johnny Rocco, whether he lives or dies? I only care about me. Me and mine. Rocco wants to come back to America, let him. Let him be president. I fight nobody's battles but my own"). Casablanca and Key Largo endings come with the realization of involvement, dedicating one's life to a larger cause of freedom.
Veronica Lake took this lesson to her last movie, filmed in Florida, the year after Jack Kerouac died there. Filmed under the title Time is Terror, she allowed it three pages of her autobiography, hoping of it, "Some day soon, perhaps on your local television station during their daily horror film show, you'll be able to see" 50. At that time of writing though, "It sits in the can, some of the footage very good and imaginative, and will continue to sit there until the production company comes up with more money with which to go back and re-shoot master shots." 51
The film was released with a new title, Flesh Feast and does include some relevance to time and dreams and 
America: "I've got a tremendous story and very little time", "I must have enough time for experimentation", "It is as if God turned back the clock," "These Americans . . . They'e all dreamers. They want to rule the world." It's a Florida nightmare of, "That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral . . . sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film." 52 But it moves with the pace of a sleepwalker, unrolling like flypaper, long slow stretches under palms and magnolias dazed by the steady twang of birds. But when Veronica Lake's mad doctor prepares to operate upon Adolph Hitler in a suburban basement laboratory adorned with an overseeing framed, painted portrait of her mother, she delivers her alarming anti-fascist speech. Placing maggots on his face, "This one is for democracy!" she dishes them out, "It's you! Only you!" laughing maniacally, tossing handfuls of maggots like a karmic sentence on him, "Now you're going to get what you gave!"
Next page: "There oughta be a better way to die in this world than in the service of Ammunitioneers"
