No One Beats the Game: "Double Indemnity"
One of the most significant dividing lines in United States history occurred in 1920, when for the first time the national census reported that more people lived in cities than lived rurally.
This was the culmination of a myriad of trends – industrialization, immigration, interior race-based population movement, and more – that marked a radical transformation in the notion of cultural life: what it meant to work and to recreate, where people imagined themselves living, the things they wanted to own, their relationship with technology, the kinds of dreams they had (or didn't have) for themselves and their descendants, and a million other small and large changes from the way their ancestors had existed.
It didn't happen overnight, of course. Large-scale industrial factory work had been around for over a century. Automobiles were already rampant, and cities like L.A. were being specifically designed to accommodate them. Almost fifty years earlier, the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia had been comparable to any Silicon Valley tech expo from the last thirty years, promising a new world on the horizon filled with sparkling new technological advances. Like so many historical events, it was a long, slow change; at the same time, like so many of those events, it spawned ruptures and spasms in awareness, in which people suddenly seemed to become aware that the changing nature of the world wasn't an abstraction, but something happening to them.
As is often the case, the arts both reflected and spurred this process of quick conscious shock at slow change. The appearance of Edouard Manet's paintings of urban life in the 1870s stunned the art world, as did the cubist work by Picasso and Braque forty years later. The early 20th Century novels of writers like Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, in which the wrenching adjustment to this strange new modern world took place both in the characters' consciousness and in the attempts of the prose itself, did the same thing. Again and again, it was the artists who helped people understand what modernity felt like, its textures and joys and horrors and implications.
Since you've seen the title of this rumination, you probably know where I'm going with it. 1920 isn't just a convenient date in tying the American experience into this larger history; it also corresponds with the birth of the American hardboiled crime genre, which focused relentlessly on this new urban experience. The first issue of the famed Black Mask pulp magazine appeared in April of that year. It was in 1922 that Dashiell Hammett quit working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and starting writing crime fiction (much of which he published, as would Raymond Chandler ten years later, in Black Mask). In that same decade, James Cain began writing short stories, which would lead to the publication of his first novel The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, followed two years later by a serialized novel-length story called Double Indemnity.
By the early 1940s, this wave of crime writing had seeped into Hollywood, and would result in a long, almost subterranean cycle of films that gets referred to as "Film Noir." Which is to say that one way of understanding this cycle is as one of the final expressions of a century of radical cultural transformation and the art movements it spawned, which are often grouped under the loose title of Modernism.
The film version of Double Indemnity, from 1944, tells a simple, vicious tale, as was typical of Cain, who once wrote that his central theme was "the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination." (The question of the various influences on the film of Cain, who wrote the novel, Raymond Chandler, who helped write the screenplay, and Billy Wilder, who also wrote the screenplay and directed the film, is an intricate one and far too long for this piece; perhaps I'll return to it in the future.)
There are three main characters. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) wants to kill her husband and make some insurance money doing it. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is an insurance agent who decides to help her, in part because of animal attraction and in part because he already has a plan to fool his company. And Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is an adjuster for the company whose job it is to prevent anyone – from recently immigrated truck drivers to potential murderers – from collecting on a policy if they don't deserve to.
Neff's plot, which he explains to Dietrichson at the start of what promises to be a rather steamy romance, is to get her husband to sign an accident policy without knowing he has done so (he will think he's signing an auto insurance renewal) and then to kill him on a train. This will trigger a "Double Indemnity" clause in the policy, which stipulates that for certain accidental deaths the beneficiary gets twice the payout.
The specifics of the plot are ingenious. Neff and Dietrichson kill her husband on the way to the station, and then Neff impersonates the husband, getting onto the train and making his way back to the smoking deck. When no one is looking, he climbs off the slow-moving train; he and Dietrichson then leave the husband's body on the tracks. The only available evidence will seem to show that the husband fell off the smoking deck in a one-in-a-million accident and broke his neck.
But no plan is foolproof. Keyes has been at his job for twenty-six years. He knows the actuarial tables by heart, and has seen every possible scheme that a person can come up with to try to defraud an insurance company. But most of all, he relies on "a little man in his stomach" who aches when he senses something isn't right. And this little man is going bananas. Slowly, the plan begins to unravel.
Keyes increasingly begins to suspect murder. Dietrichson's step-daughter approaches Neff and tells him that she too is suspicious, and that she thinks her step-mother has killed before. Eventually, Neff realizes that Dietrichson has been using him as a patsy and probably plans to kill him once she gets her hands on the money. Trapped by his own scheming, he decides that his only way out is to murder her, which is of course the exact same decision she's made regarding him. They shoot each other in the film's penultimate scene (the whole story is framed by Neff's dying confession to Keyes) and the matter is brought to a close.
As with so many noir films, Double Indemnity is imbued with the feeling of the walls of the plot closing inescapably in. Every decision Walter Neff makes seems to pull him nearer and nearer to his own doom. Circling down into that doom like a planet with a decaying orbit, he eventually realizes there's only one place things can end: with his own moral and/or physical destruction.
One way the film delivers this feeling of inevitable doom is through the device of the train. The is, of course, the location of the murderous plot itself, but it's also the way the characters think about what's happening. At one point, Keyes explains to Neff (not knowing that he's the murderer) that when people embark on a plot like this, it's like they've found themselves on "a trolley ride" together. "They're stuck with each other, and they got to ride all the way to the end of the line, and it's a one-way trip, and the last stop is the cemetery."
Dietrichson unknowingly repeats this notion with a refrain, which she originally cribs from Neff and then repeats back to him any time she thinks he's getting cold feet. They will commit this murder, and do it properly, and follow it through to the very end, she says again and again, "Straight down the line."
Trains were, of course, one of the great symbols of American industrial progress in the 19th Century, signifying the triumph of the industrial world over the vast spaces that had up until that point helped define the country. But Keyes' and Dietrichson's invocations point to another, physically determined element of trains: there is no way they can deviate from their course. Symbol-reading in film is a perilous business, because more often than not symbols can mean whatever we want them to mean (a train may also signify a newfound freedom of movement, or a bit of nostalgia in an automobile-infested world, etc.) but here I think it's worth noting that both characters go to images of inevitability when they try to explain their notion of what's happening. What springs to their mind is a vision of tracks leading inevitably and irrevocably to a single location.
There is an argument to be made, that is, that Double Indemnity, as well as a great number of other noir films, is tied into a kind of terror at the unstoppable, industrial rushing-forward of things, an almost unplaceable horror at where the world is taking us and at the fact that we cannot deviate from that destination. But what is that destination? The city, modernity, a world increasingly defined by concrete and skyscrapers and faceless strangers passing in the street.
It's often said that social atomization was one of the defining elements of this new modern condition. At least in part, this is an attempt to describe the psychological effects of moving from the countryside or a small town, where everyone knows each other (for better and worse) and the organization of the community is neat and orderly (you understand what everyone does for a living, how they relate to each other, who to go to when you need help, who to avoid when there's trouble, etc.) to a city, in which everyone is a stranger and the rules of connection are invisible. In the city, you're surrounded by people, but don't know them. What they do for a living, what they think, whether they're friendly or dangerous – all of this is a secret. The result, particularly for newcomers, is loneliness, alienation, guardedness, distrust.
The film gestures at this in a fascinating way through the character of Phyllis Dietrichson. The treatment in noir and hardboiled crime of women is frequently disastrous. The vast majority of early hardboiled writers – as well as noir screenwriters and directors – were men. There's a long-running trope in the genre which locates in female characters the central mechanisms of deceit, betrayal, and violence that propel the plot; there are acclaimed writers such as Mickey Spillane in whose work misogyny is not so much even a pillar as it is the point.
Phyllis Dietrichson's character certainly has an element of this. She lures Walter Neff through pure, and deceptive, sexuality; she lies to him from the beginning; and it's what is presented as her feminine duplicity (as opposed to the reactive masculine straightforwardness of Neff and Keyes) that seems to be the source of the moral corruption in the film. There's at least one side of the film that suggests it is female manipulation that carries men to their doom. And yet there's also a very strange moment at the end of the film which runs against this.
After she has shot Neff, wounding him but not killing him, Dietrichson says: "I never loved you, Walter, not you or anybody else. I'm rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said. That's all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn't fire a second shot."
What are we to make of this? Is she, once again, lying to him as she has throughout, perhaps realizing that he won't die and hoping, against herself, that he can still be manipulated into serving some purpose? Or has she really, in this moment of violence, discovered the ability to love that has escaped her for her whole life? The film is agnostic on the question, and this fluidity seems to be part of the point. Perhaps she is telling the truth, and perhaps she is lying, and perhaps she (like Neff and the audience) can't quite tell them apart any longer.
But the moment does suggest that she is aware of love, and regrets that it is a possibility that has never been offered to her. But why? Well, what have we seen of her life? She's isolated in a large house in the suburbs; she's identified by Neff and the other men in the film with her looks and the accoutrements of money – namely, an expensive anklet she wears throughout – rather than with any qualities of human personality; she has no outlet for any of her energies except for shopping, for which her husband berates her; her existence is, very clearly, isolated and loveless.
It would be going too far, I think, to argue for a kind of feminist awareness on the part of the whole film; but Phyllis Dietrichson is clearly an alienated, socially atomized character in a way that precisely reflects many of the concerns expressed by Modernist artists.
And this alienation extends beyond her through the rest of the film in a myriad of ways. At risk of running on too long, I'll only mention one: Neff and Keyes are insurance men. One of the signal conditions of modernity, it has been argued over and over again, is contingency. Risk. A feeling of being at the mercy of unknowable events, rather than in tune with the agrarian rhythms of rural society. And what is the great hedge against this risk? Insurance. (One remembers that Franz Kafka was also an insurance man, and was thus able to see the world through that lens.)
Neff and Keyes are creatures of a world of chaos, a world which had, in the previous century, somehow suddenly grown to be bigger than it was possible to comprehend, a world filled with hidden threats and desperate schemes. They are creatures of office buildings and vaguely-sensed corporate bosses, creatures for whom life itself can be reduced to probabilities and actuarial tables, creatures who make their living off of atomization and alienation.
In a small rural town, one needs no insurance, because if disaster strikes the community responds; in modern life, with no social webbing, the only thing one can fall back on is the monthly premium paid with clock-like devotion to a far-off company with the hope of staving off the strange arbitrariness of this modern life.
Keyes, the adjuster, is of course the most primal representative of this. His responsibility is ensuring that no one escapes the system or breaks the rules. But Neff chafes. He reveals that even before he met Dietrichson he had figured out a plan to commit a perfect murder and defraud the company. The comparison he makes in this regard is to a roulette dealer who feels the urge to rig his own game and take some of the casino money for himself, simply to see if he can get away with it.
The analogy is an apt one. Like the insurance game, roulette is a game in which the odds – the cold, mathematical, inhuman numbers – determine everything. Neff's alienation comes from being trapped in this world; he feels an inexplicable urge to defy it, to prove that the numbers can be beaten, that the contingencies and faceless abstractions of modernity can be bent and broken.
Few of us will, like Walter Neff, commit murder. But many of us will feel desperation in the face of the large, impersonal mechanism that seem to control our lives. So, despite his murderous proclivities, perhaps Neff's urge to defy those mechanisms is not inexplicable at all, but simply human.
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