Binary Genre Models in "Double Indemnity"

Barbara Stanwyck, photographed by A.L. Whitey Schafer and Costume by Edith Head. Publicity photo for 'Double Indemnity' (1944) directed by Billy Wilder


DOUBLE INDEMNITY SCRIPT - NEFF: He interrupts the dictation, lays down the horn on the desk. He takes his lighted cigarette from the ash tray, puffs it two or three times, and kills it. He picks up the horn again. NEFF (His voice is now quiet and contained) It began last May. About the end of May, it was. I had to run out to Glendale to deliver a policy on some dairy trucks. On the way back I remembered this auto renewal on Los Feliz. So I decided to run over there. It was one of those Calif. Spanish houses everyone was nuts about 10 or 15 years ago. This one must have cost somebody about 30,000 bucks -- that is, if he ever finished paying for it. As he goes on speaking, SLOW DISSOLVE TO: DIETRICHSON HOME - LOS FELIZ DISTRICT -

“I Won’t Tell You What I Did Then”: The (Partial) Confession of Walter Huff: Walter Huff, made even more famous by Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff portrayal in the 1944 Billy Wilder film, is often set forth as the prime example of the fall guy seduced and betrayed by the murderous femme fatale.

Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff in 'Double Indemnity' (1944)

Walter refers to his attraction to Phyllis at one point as “some kind of unhealthy excitement that came over me just at the sight of her”. He contrasts this response with the feelings the innocent Lola inspires in him: “[A] sweet peace... came over me as soon as I was with her”. Phyllis is all agitation for Walter, while Lola is safe, heimlich, the expected family romance. Their different brands of femininity appear to be defined primarily by Walter’s bodily reaction in their presence. His body constitutes their gender; his hysterical response casts Phyllis as a lethal femme fatale.

Phyllis fails to fulfill physical/aesthetic expectations of the glamorous femme fatale. She is not “beautiful,” but merely “pretty.” She dresses simply—but also androgynously. No seamed stockings, tight dresses, or veiled hats. She wears lounging pajamas on first meeting Walter, later a sailor suit, then a sweater and slacks. She is characterized as appearing “sweet” rather than seductive. Walter first describes her as having a “washed out look” and later as having teeth that are “big and white and maybe a little buck” -the linking of Phyllis’s mouth with slang for money (“buck”) is surely telling- Hollowed out and even ironized, the femme fatale consequently is made to appear less and less an independent figure than a constitutive projection performing a crucial function for Walter.

Readers are not given salivating descriptions of Phyllis’s body or face, and consequently do not participate in Walter’s desire so directly, thereby enabling readers to see Walter’s projection more clearly. Her illness is within him — maybe it always was. Walter tells us early on: “I was peeping over the edge, and all the time I was trying to pull away from it, there was something in me that kept edging a little closer, trying to get a better look”. Instead of bowing out when Walter hears Phyllis say she regrets their kiss and loves her husband, Walter pushes forward, confiding to the reader, “the thing was in me, pushing me still closer to the edge. And then I could feel it again, that she wasn’t saying what she meant”. Again, Walter locates the drive within himself, as something he “feels.”

The reliance on intuition is tested when Walter meets Phyllis for the first time. They have only spoken for a few minutes when Walter begins to suspect that Phyllis may, in hardboiled parlance, have an angle (though he mistakes what the angle is). It is at this moment when, he confides, “all of a sudden she looked at me, and I felt a chill creep straight up my back and into the roots of my hair.” It fixes Walter, even when Phyllis changes the subject. While he refers to her look’s potency, it is actually his look that seems compulsive and insistent as he “tries to keep [his] eyes off her, and couldn’t.”

Mary Ann Doane writes that the femme fatale is an “articulation of fears surrounding the loss of stability and centrality of the self, the ‘I,’ the ego. Phyllis’s presence surely “unmans” Walter here —but the “unmanning” is multi-leveled. The two take part in a dance in which Walter attempts to control the situation, while Phyllis plots behind the scenes; just when he thinks he has the power, it is revealed to be a sham, not just because Phyllis is more clever or more malevolent, but because her very presence can literally destabilize Walter.

There is another mode of destabilization that is explicitly gendered, and it is negotiated through Phyllis’s appearance. Her pajamas cling to her body as she moves in such a way that he can suddenly discern the appealing curvy shape beneath: “... I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts”. Her sailor suit pulls over her hips, hinting at her figure. Her raincoat and swimming cap promise even more hidden pleasures—but, after Walter “[gets] her peeled off,” he finds she’s wearing “just a dumb Hollywood outfit” of slacks and a sweater, though even there “it looked different on her”.

William Luhr notes about the film version of 'Double Indemnity' (scripted by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler), “The image of the crippled man on crutches applies to three men [Huff, Sachetti, Nirdlinger]... The broken leg, the crutches... symbolically point to a phallic injury, an emasculation suffered by men who became involved with this black widow... The film links this image of debilitation, deformity, death to sexual association with Phyllis.” Walter is not merely threatened by the femme fatale, but his masculinity is configured such that he identifies with, desires, and doubles the femme fatale. This complication leads us to ask if, in fact, the femme fatale is nothing more than Walter himself.

Phyllis has shifted from being Walter’s plant to being the Company’s, as their virtual executioner. She operates unknowingly as a stand-in for the Company, which is effectively a stand-in for an all-consuming capitalist economy. Femininity so equated with death in the text, ends up forming a triangulated relationship with the stranglehold of business on Walter’s desire. Both Phyllis and General Fidelity (the Company’s name signifies its insistence on allegiance) provide Walter with opportunities to enact a family romance by betraying the patriarch, be it Mr. Nirdlinger or Company founder Norton (or Keyes).

William Marling suggests that Walter’s mistake was in failing to realize that the “emerging economy needed to limit [his brand of ] aggressive rationality rather than to have insiders use what usually did not happen against it”. But rather, it seems Walter’s error was in underestimating the extent to which he had absorbed, or “caught” the Company. Walter assumed he could beat it from the inside, not understanding that he was not inside the system; the system was inside him. Phyllis, while appearing to be Walter’s disease, is in fact his symptom of the larger Company pathology he has “caught.” The disease is the Company he cannot beat because he has become it. Keyes knows that Walter cannot truly flee, and Phyllis unwittingly functions as the Company’s hit man, the long arm of the Company reaching out to annihilate the stray. But Phyllis does not truly need to assassinate Walter; Walter recognizes what he carries within him and enters into death of his own volition.

Neither Walter nor Phyllis can exit their respective gender systems, but for Phyllis, the death pact is an ecstatic communion with the system through which her femininity is defined and, if we accept her self-identification as Death, the system through which she defines herself. Conversely, for Walter, the suicide pact is a hysterical recognition of his own utter lack of agency. The systems intermesh, interlock, and leave Walter with one position, white male cog whose body and function have been prescribed for him all along. This lack of male agency amid larger social systems will prove a recurrent pattern within hardboiled fiction. While the weakness of the tough guy–as–sap in his interactions with the femme fatale is often broached, 'Double Indemnity' demonstrates the extent to which that femme fatale is merely a symbol of larger and deeply oppressive societal structures that imprison both genders in tyrannically binary models.

-"The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir" by Megan E. Abbott (2002) / 'I Can Feel Her': The White Male as Hysteric in James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler (Chapter 2)

Jake Gyllenhaal shopping groceries in N.Y. and Los Angeles

Jake Gyllenhaal is shopping groceries at Erewhon Natural Foods in Los Angeles, on August 4, 2013

The previous day Jake Gyllenhaal was seen shopping groceries with Alyssa in Tribeca, New York City on August 3, 2013

"Two months in, Jake Gyllenhaal and model Alyssa Miller's relationship seems to be keeping its happy glow. The beautiful couple were recently spotted on holiday in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where they spent plenty of time showing their adoration for one another.

And good news for the young beauty is that Miller's father has been public about his approval of her relationship with Gyllenhaal. 'I haven’t met him yet, but he must be a great guy,' Craig Miller, Alyssa's father, told Celebuzz. He admitted that his daughter has been 'shy' about tell him details on the new relationship, but noted that he could tell she was enjoying the romance. 'She sounded really happy and so ecstatic. I haven’t heard her this happy in a long time,' he said. Gyllenhaal will certainly have plenty of opportunities to show off with Miller in the Hollywood limelight in the near future. The hunk has two new films (Enemy and Prisoners, both directed by Denis Villeneuve) premiering in just over a month. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

The Pyschological Splitting of Film Noir

Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor in "Borderline" (1950) directed by William A. Seiter

One of the strange things about travel South of the Border is that it can have one of two contrasting effects: either reveal the real you, stripped down in elemental conflict with destiny (no better example of this than 'The Wages of Fear', but see also 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre'); or it can be an opportunity for reinvention and masquerade. And this paradox, that Latin America is the site simultaneously of both truth and falsity, is not so dissimilar from the paradox that it instantiates both nature and culture at the same time.

In 'Borderline', which is a sort of film noir lite, Mexico is the site of duplicity and pretence.

Which is why the film rather goes against the conventions of noir, and becomes more a comedy of errors.

Claire Trevor plays Madeleine Haley, and ambitious young cop sent south to infiltrate and investigate a gang of drug-traffickers headed by one Pete Ritchie. She takes on the name "Gladys LaRue" and the character of, first, dancehall floozy and, then, gangster's moll to gain access to the formidable Ritchie, played by Raymond Burr. Yet she ends up kidnapped by another gang boss, who sends her North with a consignment of drugs in the company of hardman Johnny Macklin.

Little does she realize, however, that Macklin is, like her, a cop in disguise, tender-hearted Johnny McEvoy under his tough-guy exterior. Source: screened.blogspot.com

Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952) directed by Vincente Minnelli

Joseph Cotten as Holly Martin in "The Third Man" (1949) directed by Carol Reed, scripted by Graham Greene & Orson Welles

Borders and Borderers: The American film noir is a cinematic tradition whose representations are thoroughly liminal: the protagonists of these films characteristically find themselves straddling the border between competing forms of identity, as they often enter into perilous rites de passage through a nightmarish version of contemporary urban reality. Only seldom do these borderers emerge from that “dark city” (which is sometimes just a moral or psychological condition) to enjoy the transfiguration and triumph of a conventional happy ending.

In Billy Wilder’s 'Double Indemnity' (1944), an adulterous couple plot and then carry out a crime that is meant to be understood as an accident. To carry off the required elaborate masquerade, Walter and Phyllis become performers as soon as they begin plotting. In addition to playing at remaining “himself” even as he rejects that identity, Walter is even called upon to impersonate the dead man at one point.

After carrying out the murder, the pair must stay “in character,” which proves difficult after the accident theory is shown by the insurance company investigator to be untenable. A key effect of the narrative is that it highlights the willed, constructed nature of social roles, whose “naturalness” is thereby called into question. For once Walter and Phyllis determine to become other than what they were, they are forced by the very logic of their plan to inhabit self-consciously, and inauthentically, the roles they had previously performed unthinkingly: the pleasant housewife loyal to her husband and the successful insurance agent dedicated to his company’s financial well-being and the steady advancement of his own career.

Their situation comes to resemble closely that of those involved in what anthropologist Victor Turner terms “cultural performance,” those rituals and other modes of symbolic action that seem part and parcel of the everyday, but in which, Turner argues, “violence has to be done to commonsense ways of classifying the world and society” because performers must remain themselves even as they strive to inhabit another identity. Cultural performance, so Turner believes, therefore does not simply express or reflect “the social system or the cultural configuration,” but “offers a critique, direct or veiled, of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation (with lively possibilities of rejection) of the way society handles history”.

As Walter and Phyllis discover, the critical nature of the experience resides chiefly in the fact that, to quote Turner, “the ‘self’ is split up the middle—it is something that one both is and that one sees and, furthermore, acts upon as though it were another.” For anthropologists like Turner, the characteristic cultural performance is ritual, in which participants find themselves on the border between “secular living and sacred living,” in a “limbo that was not any place they were before and not yet any place. This doubleness, as James Naremore brilliantly demonstrates, also characterizes the viewer’s experience with the film’s foregrounding of performativity, for the “performances” of Walter and Phyllis as “themselves” are managed by MacMurray and Stanwyck as revealing the strain between the need to adopt one’s self as a mask and the powerful force of inner expression that defines the characters’ psychological states.

"Double Indemnity" evokes a secular limbo. Walter and Phyllis, to use the term popularized by Turner, find themselves in a liminal social space, defined by its bordering engagement with contradictory social spaces. Within this paradoxical space, the ordinary forms of everyday living are shown by Walter and Phyllis as what they always already are, that is, performances whose authenticity is by definition in question. Part of Wilder’s genius, in fact, is he stages the “random” encounters between the two “actors” in places where the contrast is greatest between their deadly plotting and the forms of everyday living they now act out. Unstable from the outset, these performances eventually breakdown completely, as Walter discovers within himself the capacity, and then the desire, to love a decent woman with whom he can imagine an ordinary life. It is, in fact, because he continues to inhabit his accustomed role that he has the opportunity to meet and get to know a woman who belongs solidly to ordinariness.

More spectacularly, Phyllis reveals herself less devoted to the coldly calculating accumulation of wealth and more driven by a psychopathic impulse to kill and passionately embrace her own destruction. In both cases, however, Walter and Phyllis discover the impossibility of remaining on the border between law-abiding normality and its oppositional heterocosm (the negative space in which the denial of the social contract plays out). The plot’s inexorable logic leads them to mutual murder. Realizing that she loves Walter after fatally wounding him, Phyllis gives herself over to her erstwhile lover’s embrace—and, shockingly, receives the answering shot he fires through her heart. Fleeing the scene, Walter eschews medical treatment for his wound, preferring instead to bleed to death while providing in his office a Dictaphone confession to the crime. This moment of Wilderian black humor suggests how Walter never manages to escape the all-too-solid identity of the company man devoted to closing the books on every case, even his own. Like the James M. Cain novel on which it is based, "Double Indemnity" exposes the self-defeating nature of that desire for self-fashioning whose trajectory it traces. So powerful is the demand that we be who we are and have been that the shedding of the self can only be achieved through the artfully inauthentic preservation of the self that has been shed.

Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten in "The Third Man" (1949)

The Noir Chronotope: In a groundbreaking study, Vivian Sobchack argues that film noir is most deeply marked by its unique representational response to a culture in transition between the collective, public experience of a world war that required the widest marshalling of all the nation’s resources and the desired, collective return to “the family unit and the suburban home as the domestic matrix of democracy”. This national experience of inbetweenness finds its most substantial visual reflex in what Sobchack argues are the “recurrent and determinate premises” of this Hollywood type, its obsession with the dark city. Earlier critics, most notably Paul Schrader, located noirness in a cinematographic style heavily indebted to Weimar filmmaking, but Sobchack importantly turns critical attention toward mise-en-scène, the characteristic settings of this film type such as “the cocktail lounge, the nightclub, the bar, the hotel room, the boardinghouse, the diner, the dance hall, the roadside café, the bus and train station, and the wayside motel”.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in "In A Lonely Place" (1950) directed by Nicholas Ray

These are the publicly accessible spaces of entertainment, dining, travel, and lodging, whose function is to provide for those literally, and also metaphorically, in transit. They substitute for what cannot be obtained in a world where nothing is “settled,” where the family home is unimaginable because it would depend on relationships (economic, sexual, and nurturant) that in noir narratives are not yet finalized. Such formal elements of mise-en-scène, Sobchack plausibly suggests, are the geographical reflexes of “existential, epistemological, and axiological uncertainty.”

The opening sequences of 'Act of Violence' juxtapose a gloomy urban neighborhood with the sun-drenched suburbs, a decaying East Coast with the vibrant prosperity of California, a young veteran, glorying in his beautiful wife and child who is celebrated for his charitable work with a lone cripple dressed in trench coat and fedora who shuffles painfully to his run-down apartment to remove a .45 automatic from the dresser drawer. An insert shot of Enley’s name and address provides something of a motive for the mission he embarks upon.

Robert Ryan and Janet Leigh in "Act of Violence" (1948) directed by Fred Zinnemann

Intercutting joins these two worlds until Parkson arrives in California, where he seems out of place (as upon his arrival he walks across the Memorial Day parade whose purpose in part is to celebrate the man he has come to kill). Enley hastens to a place that is transparently “other,” a paradoxical projection of Enley’s desires and his moral needs that exemplifies what Iser identifies as one of the most important characteristics of fictionality, the way in which it “becomes the epitome of inner-worldly totality, since it provides the paradoxical opportunity for human beings simultaneously to be in the midst of life and to overstep it”.

This doubleness is figured by the fact that Enley’s flight (he abandons both Parkson and Edith, thereby surrendering what anchors his self to the past and the present as well) actually moves him toward a reclamation of his true self, as he pays the price for his betrayal and simultaneously saves Parkson from having to commit murder.

From the uptown hotel, Enley hurries fearfully (and ever descending—one shot shows him stumbling down a huge flight of stairs) toward the dark side of the city, which seems a jumble of decaying factories, run-down tenements, and streets empty of passersby. As in the pastoral, the laying aside of identity (Enley here dons the mask of anonymity) leads him to what Iser calls the “counterimage . . . permitting what was excluded by reality,” as the world reshaped by the imagination allows the inner truth of the world imprisoned by mimesis to emerge.

Van Heflin as Frank R. Enley in "Act Of Violence", directed by Fred Zinnemann for MGM.

In this journey, imaged at a length far in excess of its importance to the narrative, the film engages with what Northrop Frye calls “the fabulous . . . something admitted not to be true” but which nonetheless possesses great significance. But it is also a place where “great rewards, of wisdom or wealth, may await the explorer,” even though, at its “structural core is the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of identity.” Even to the very end, Enley is liminal man, inhabiting the permeable border between past and present, between a self he has become and the self he would reclaim. -"The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality" (2007) by R. Barton Palmer

Happy Anniversary, Raymond Chandler!

Q: Isn't this dark aspect of the middle class what Chandler was describing with the image of meek housewives feeling the edge of a knife as they stare at their husbands' necks?

Wilder: Chandler was more of a cynic than me, because he was more of a romantic than I ever was. He has his own odd rules and thought Hollywood was just a bunch of phonies. I can't say he was completely wrong, but [he] never really understood movies and how they work. He couldn't structure a picture. He had enough trouble with books. But his dialogue. I put up with a lot of crap because of that. And after a couple of weeks with him and that foul pipe smoke, I managed to cough up a few good lines myself. We kept him on during the shooting, to discuss any dialogue changes. Source: imagesjournal."

Producers, Chandler found, were generally ‘low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat and the artistic integrity of a slot machine’, though there were enough ‘able and humane’ ones to give hope. The same proportion of integrity applied, Chandler decided, to the world of agents, directors and publicists: there were abundant bad ones to make Hollywood stink, but always enough decent, friendly and amusing ones to make working there enjoyable. Had that not been the case, he insisted, the money alone would not have been enough to keep him there: Money buys pathetically little in Hollywood beyond the pleasure of living in an unreal world, associating with a narrow group of people who think, talk and drink nothing but pictures, most of them bad, and the doubtful pleasure of watching famous actors and actresses guzzle in some of the rudest restaurants in the world.

Edward G. Robinson and Fred MacMurray as Barton Keyes and Walter Neff in "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder

In the character of Keyes, played by Edward G. Robinson, Chandler also had a Marlowe-type figure to play with. Keyes is Neff’s colleague, and nemesis, at the insurance company, where he is the company’s chief claims investigator. In Cain’s novel, he was a minor character of authority, but in the screenplay he is a fully sketched and cynical bachelor. He is fond of Neff and has an innate suspicion of all women which, in the case of Mrs Dietrichson, proves justified. At the start of the film he tries to persuade Neff to change departments and work under him as an investigator. It is a promotion, but Neff turns it down because he likes selling. Keyes isn’t impressed: ‘I thought you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit. Guess I was wrong. You’re not smarter, just taller.’ Like Chandler, Keyes is a suspicious eccentric in his mid fifties and, like Chandler, he smokes throughout the film. It has been suggested by one critic that the screenplay version of the Neff–Keyes relationship became a subconscious commentary by Wilder and Chandler on their own working relationship: antipathy tempered by grudging respect. -"Raymond Chandler: A Biography" (2010) by Tom Hiney