Darkness at Noon: Deception and Longing in Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity”
Double Indemnity is widely considered to be the greatest film noir of all time, a fact which might elicit some confusion among those for whom the term conjures up images of trenchcoated, fedora-wearing private eyes, seedy dives, and fast-talking crooks. Director Billy Wilder’s 1944 magnum opus doesn’t turn on any of those tropes — its story flits around the edges of the workaday world, and its characters are the types of people you’d expect to find there: unremarkable insurance salesmen and bored housewives. Even its ostensible hero is as pedestrian as they come. He’s not the chain-smoking detective-for-hire we might expect, but an overworked, middle-aged claims adjuster — not exactly the definition of hard-boiled.
It’s a conventional set-up that proves, of course, to be anything but. Noir, Wilder well knew, was a genre not of plot but of mood. A noir film could be about anything, or anyone, just so long as the story eventually found its way from light to shadow. In Double Indemnity, that transition occurs with breathtaking immediacy, a reminder of perhaps the only real axiom of film noir: Beware fate. It rules over everything, and it can crush a person in the blink of an eye.
Here that person is Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray, famously playing against type) who enters a beautiful mansion on a sunny afternoon as a personable salesman, and emerges as a cold-blooded killer. The agent of his destruction, we are led to believe, is Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck in classic femme fatale mode — one noir cliche that Double Indemnity uses masterfully) the beautiful housewife he runs into, and to whom he is instantly attracted. So much so, in fact, that he would do anything to have her — even kill.
But again, things aren’t so simple. Dietrichson, it turns out, is indeed a bad seed — she has the body count to prove it — but Neff isn’t quite the love-struck patsy to her black widow, driven criminally insane by his hormones. He’s as bad as she is — and when she coolly suggests that they murder her husband — for love and profit — the idea is met with only the briefest demurral. Such a speedy concession to one’s own moral ruin might have been necessary for Double Indemnity’s screenplay, but it hardly seems a reasonable choice for a law-abiding citizen like Neff, who we are led to believe has lived a fairly uneventful existence up until this fateful decision. That he goes along with the plot suggests he was a fallen man from the first frame (as indeed he is) and driven by something more than the desire for Dietrichson — she is not so much the author of his downfall as she is the excuse for it, a fact which becomes clearer as the film goes on.
Yet, Neff’s motivations remain hard to decipher. His tough talk feels like a put-on, every line a rehearsed deception, and even his fierce affections towards Dietrichson prove notoriously short-lived. We see nothing of his life prior to his meeting Dietrichson, and save for his work association with that tenacious claims adjuster, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) he seems utterly divorced from any other human relationship. Money isn’t quite it, either, as the film makes it clear that Neff has enjoyed professional success. Importantly, however, it’s success of a debased sort — the low-level grift of the huckster, the salesman who’s lost interest in what he’s selling, if he ever had an interest in the first place.
That might provide one key to unlocking the mystery of Walter Neff. The noir cycle — whether it aspired to be or not — has emerged as one of the most pointed, and sustained, artistic critiques of the American condition yet made. The genre laid the nation bare at a time when mainstream movies dared not try — by putting the spotlight on criminals, it created empathy where it was supposed to create contempt. The real villain ended up being society itself, and American society, with its endless drive for acquisition, its imbalances of power (and their attendant corruption), and its near-pathological hypocrisy, was tailor-made to play the role.
That society is again on trial in Double Indemnity, and again in the film’s preferred milieu: the day-to-day world of the working stiff, the clock-puncher, the guy out hustling for an honest buck. In Neff, one senses a weariness in the face of this lifestyle, a contempt for normalcy that has never found an outlet before, not until Phyllis Dietrichson appears on that staircase in the middle of another dull afternoon. It’s this strange mélange of lust and boredom which motivates Neff, this rare opportunity to make his bland life and bland day job (as is typical in America, these two things are synonymous with each other) exciting again. He will use his knowledge of the insurance business to plan the perfect murder, and turn the system he has so faithfully — and so unprofitably — served on its head. In the process, he’ll regain something of his lost dignity, breaking the chains of polite respectability and indulging in the excitement which the act appears to offer him.
Murder, for Neff, isn’t the point. And neither, really, is his passion for Dietrichson. He’s a man trapped in a prison so subtle it will brook no escape: the prison of his job, of his lonely life, of his own mechanical existence. It’s the prison of society itself, which promises safety but offers mostly servitude, and where a life of crime — for all its moral complications — would seem to be a short-cut out of the maze, a way to beat the house at a rigged game. Neff, frustrated by the arc of his life, and by life in general, was always looking for a way to get over, and rejecting society’s rules is a possible route to emancipation, every bit as alluring as a kiss. What is crime in a corrupt society anyway, except a desperate person’s attempt at freedom?
Phyllis Dietrichson is no less a prisoner (and no less a monster) but unlike Neff, she at least possesses the courage of her convictions. When we meet her, she at first glance appears to be enjoying the ill-gotten gains of her latest scam — orchestrating a marriage to a much older man in order to get her hands on his money — yet something isn’t quite right. She exudes something sinister, but something vulnerable, too, like a bird of prey locked tight in a gilded cage. Neff’s appearance (and his unconcealed desire) would seem to offer her the chance she needs to free herself from this entrapment, and so the chess game begins, with the pieces carefully arranged — right down to that “honey of an anklet”. In these early scenes, we see Neff seemingly in control: confident, lecherous, quick-witted. Yet he’s winning at a different game, and one which Dietrichson has no interest in playing — she’s sizing him up for something else entirely, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, openings to get what she’s truly after.
This is noir’s fatal woman par excellence — the siren whose beauty conceals ferocity, the master manipulator masquerading as the love-struck ingenue, the devil in heels who lures upstanding men down to hell with the promise of sex. One need not examine this character type too closely to see the patriarchy at work, but, as with all propaganda, it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, or at least of its own incongruity. In its grasping efforts to sustain its preferred fictions, it is ultimately undermined by them, subverting the very thing it was attempting to exalt. In noir, one feels acutely this tension: both the power of female sex appeal (the only power that the patriarchy imagines can threaten them, and thus the only one they are capable of recognizing) and the attempt to diminish that power by casting it as something wicked. Female wiles have the capacity to upend the established order, noir seems to say, to make men the controlled, instead of the controllers. Men had better beware, then, and stick instead with that loyal woman who knows her place in an ordered society (a reason why the femme fatale is usually counter-balanced onscreen by a virginal depiction of female innocence — lest the viewer have trouble telling the two apart).
But for certain women, the lesson is altogether different: here is a possible path to independence, one that turns the oppressor’s own weapons against them. To walk it, you must become the paradox, you must inhabit the stereotype, and by inhabiting it destroy it. It’s a cynical choice, but it’s a cynical world.
Yet Dietrichson, as bad as she is (and as bad as the film wants her to be) is as much a victim of Neff as he is of her. She uses sex to manipulate, but — and as noir sometimes acknowledges — it’s largely because it’s the only card she has to play, the only angle she has to get ahead in a man’s world. And it only works to a point —usually the point where men become violent. Neff, soon enough, does just that, wresting control of the whole murderous affair from Dietrichson, and eventually crushing her under the weight of his own jealousy and fear.
Whether she deserves that final comeuppance — and whether Neff deserves his — isn’t the point. Punishment for the wicked almost always comes in classic noir — a real-world consequence of the production code of the time, in which law enforcement could not be shown to be bested — but it rarely has the moral impact that the censors might have hoped, and it’s almost never satisfying for the viewer. Neff and Dietrichson, certainly, are horrible people. Both are cons, and all the world’s a stooge. But one can empathize with their plight without being moved by it, and Double Indemnity, in making its villains the center of its story, almost forces us to do so. By the end of the film we aren’t quite sure just who deserves what, and in what measure.
The most subversive element in film noir, and of Double Indemnity in particular, may be that choice of focus — you are invited to look into the eyes of the irredeemable, to walk in their shoes for a while, to imagine yourself in their place — having done horrible things, having made horrible choices, trying to reconstitute your own soul in the wake of those decisions. Neff and Dietrichson aren’t victims — the film makes no excuses for their behavior. It does, however, offer some reasons for that behavior — none of them good enough and most of them just off-screen. Yet, in doing even that, this most American of film genres suggests the least American of ideas: that the wicked deserve not just punishment, but understanding, too.
Snap judgements and contempt, after all, are painless things to practice at a distance. Empathy grows easier in close quarters, and Double Indemnity suggests — somewhat disturbingly for those who long for moral certitude — that it may have no bottom.
