The Black Heart of Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity may not immediately seem like the type of film that has much to say about race. But the filmic language of Hollywood cinema is deeply interwoven with the racial attitudes of the culture it sought or seeks to entertain. Noir is all about transgression. And what could be more transgressive, more of a fall from grace, more of a weakness in the white imagination, than to be associated with Blackness? Whether or not Wilder was wholly conscious of this aspect of the film, his vision acted as an important model for how the genre came to be conceived and went on to develop. Consider for a moment a crucial scene in the 1947 picture Out of the Past—another iconic noir by a revelatory and deeply entertaining director, Jacques Tourneur—in which Robert Mitchum’s investigator descends into an all-Black nightclub to speak to someone who can help him in his task to find a missing woman. There’s an ease to Mitchum’s physicality that suggests he has been in such spaces before. In this way, the film marks him as someone out of step with polite and white society, a man willing to dip into the margins. Classic noir is resplendent with such scenes that mark—whether visually or thematically—its white characters with suggestions of Blackness. As Michael B. Gillespie writes in his wide-ranging masterwork Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, “Issues of narrative authority, racialization, and power deeply inform noir beyond its aesthetic profile as a high-contrast play of light and shadow.” And the Black-crafted and Black-fronted noirs that would come decades later—films such as Deep Cover (1992) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)—finally bring to the forefront the ideas about race that are nestled in the margins of classic noirs.

Of course, the sophistication of Double Indemnity cannot be attributed solely to Wilder. We have Stanwyck’s fearsome understanding and rigor in her role. And arguably as important is the influence of Chandler—creator of the iconic noir character Philip Marlowe—who, with Wilder, adapted the James M. Cain novel of the same name. There was no love lost between Wilder and Chandler. Their first and only collaboration proved to be explosive, but together they were able to refine and enliven the source text—particularly in the case of Phyllis, who comes across as a villain operating in a single register in Cain’s novel. In the book, Phyllis is introduced through Walter’s narration thusly: “A sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look.” A few pages later, Walter gets to the point of his attraction to her: “I wasn’t the only one that knew about that shape. She knew about it herself, plenty.” In the film, her introduction plays out far more deliciously, allowing Phyllis to be an active participant in and controller of the situation instead of just an object conceived through Walter’s eyes.

It’s a hot, sunny day in Los Angeles. One of the few daytime scenes in the film. Walter connives his way into the Dietrichson home past the objections of the housekeeper, in hopes of catching Mr. Dietrichson, whose car-insurance policy has lapsed. Once he enters the home, it’s as if sunlight is barred, starting the film’s descent into an intense claustrophobia. It is free of the faux-charming Americana of the scene of young white kids playing baseball outside. But Walter isn’t feeling the noose around his neck quite yet. Instead, something far different from fear has been sparked: lust.

“This is the barbed animus that powers noir: an alienation from the might, security, and sterile cruelty of white society.”

As Walter needles the maid, Phyllis approaches from above, coming to stand on the second-floor landing wearing only a towel. Her voice is abrupt until she gets a better look at Walter. “Is there anything I can do?” she then purrs, her hair aglow as if it’s radioactive. All that stands between them is that towel, a staircase, and the promise of murder yet to come. Phyllis goes to put herself together while the maid informs Walter that the family keeps the liquor locked up in the living room as she leads him there. “It’s all right, I always carry my own keys,” he quips. Such a crass statement makes clear that while Walter may look like he belongs in a Norman Rockwell painting, there’s an edge to him that existed before he walked through the Dietrichson door.

As Walter makes his pitch—as much for her as for renewing the insurance policy—Phyllis paces, eyes narrowed and directed at the floor. She rotates a lighter in her hands. The moment she looks up at him and asks, as cool as mercury, “You’re a smart insurance man, aren’t you, Mr. Neff?” it is evident that she has been working up a plan of her own. Walter is more interested in her “honey of an anklet” and what’s engraved on it. Her name. Their conversation becomes an undeniably sadomasochistic flirting session marked by the viciousness and intensity both Wilder and Chandler were known for.

“There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour,” Phyllis says with a luxurious venom in her voice. “How fast was I going, officer?” Walter asks as a caddish grin smears itself across his face. “I’d say around ninety.” She looks over his shoulder for a second before their repartee continues, eventually ending with Walter towering over her, edging himself closer. But it’s obvious that she’s the one in control of the narrative and the camera’s gaze. “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder,” he wonders. “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder,” she claps back. She has emasculated him. She has outsmarted him. And he’s utterly in love with every moment of it.

The femme fatale is often juxtaposed with her photonegative: the angelic, virginal woman in need of being protected or rescued. In Double Indemnity, this is the young Lola. Her perky, yearning voice and doe eyes situate her in a pantheon of filmic femininity. She’s not a person but a device crafted to burnish Walter’s guilt and lead him to betray Phyllis in order to save whatever is left of his own ragged soul. But what’s most important is how the lighting situates the two women along a continuum of femininity that noir considers and reconsiders—a continuum marked by racialized expectations. In Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, Eric Lott writes, “Hollywood lighting conventions demonstrate this multiplex drama of transgression,” and cites Richard Dyer—from his revelatory book White—as suggesting that “the lighting of white big-screen icons (such as Lillian Gish) has given their ethical purity a racially particular form, most especially in black-and-white film. Associations of worth and whiteness are by now so naturalized as to pass beneath conscious notice, and Hollywood has always exploited them.” Noir and its descendants make this manifest. Just consider how Lola seems to be casting her own light. She’s almost incandescent, as opposed to Phyllis’s descent into darkness. But it is Walter’s arc that forces into focus the dynamics of race and fear of Blackness that infuse noir.

Black characters figure into the story in minuscule ways in terms of screen time. But they are crucial to our understanding of Walter’s border crossing, from upstanding, obedient, stoic emblem of white society to a man consumed by darkness, visually, morally, and racially tinged. Various Black characters act as alibis for Walter: the attendant in the garage of his building to whom Walter pointedly mentions that he has been in his apartment all night; the porters on the train where he impersonates the late Mr. Dietrichson. This, along with Walter taking Lola to a Mexican restaurant in an effort to keep her suspicions about Phyllis quiet, and his thinly coded animosity toward anyone who isn’t Anglo-Saxon American, such as Lola’s boyfriend, Nino, paint a picture of the American fear of the other. This is the barbed animus that powers noir: an alienation from the might, security, and sterile cruelty of white society while placing actual Black characters in crucial narrative aspects at the margins to further tie its white main characters to the suggestion of the racialized other.

Double Indemnity wouldn’t glint with half its complexity if Wilder and Chandler, or the studio, had insisted on following Cain’s ending. In the book, Phyllis has Walter shot, and after he makes it to a hospital, he confesses to the murder of her husband in order to clear Lola, with whom he has fallen in love. In exchange for his confession, Phyllis and Walter are allowed to get on a ship, separately, bound for Mexico; when they meet each other on board, they commit to a suicide pact that causes the more intriguing aspects of the story to unravel. Blessedly, in the film, the dynamic between Lola and Walter hinges more on his growing guilt than any romanticism. The film’s ending works so much better because it allows for ambiguity, complication, and a murkier rendition of the forces involved in shaping the fates of these characters. Cain’s ending is like a cudgel, aimed particularly at women. Chandler and Wilder are far less simplistic in their characterizations, and they reshape the ending to further highlight and interrogate the differences between Walter’s loving relationship with Keyes and his passion for Phyllis.

The film operates marvelously and incisively on multiple levels. It’s a crystalline noir script marked by narrative symmetry. It’s a bruising view of the dynamics between straight men and women, particularly when lust comes into the equation. It reveals a remarkable understanding of the male fear of female desire. It’s a testament to Stanwyck’s skill as an actor, with her feminist-tinged understanding of the internal emotional lives of women. And like all the best noir, it is a warped mirror held up to the imagination of a white America that refuses to wake up from its dreams of itself.