#24
Post
by Sloper » Wed Jul 06, 2022 1:58 pm
This is one of my favourite classic-Hollywood films: I remember becoming obsessed with Sunset Boulevard when I was 15, being amazingly excited to see this, and then having all my expectations surpassed when I finally did. It’s just such a delight on every level. Probably my favourite film score, at least for now.
Over the years and many repeat viewings, I’ve come to see it as a much more compassionate and moving film than it’s generally given credit for. It has a surprising amount of common ground with Brief Encounter: there are definite parallels between Walter/Laura, Phyllis/Alec, and Keyes/Fred, a similar framing device, and in some ways a similar ending. And this isn’t meant to be a flippant comparison: I think they’re both films about three lonely people who are all looking for some kind of love or fulfilment, and don’t know how or where to get it. The big difference in Double Indemnity is the emphasis on the ‘brokenness’ of these characters, which I guess is why it’s a quintessential film noir.
Walter is stuck in a dead-end job, terrified of being given more responsibility – he loves his boss but doesn’t want to become more like him – and, as it turns out, secretly haunted by the lure of pulling off an audacious insurance heist. He claims to have killed Dietrichson ‘for the money, and for a woman’, but maybe one of the reasons he doesn’t get either of those things is that they weren’t his real motive. He appears deeply apathetic about his work and career, so it’s fascinating that he gets excited about subverting it, and pulling one over on Keyes, and getting to tell him all about it some day.
Phyllis has a point when she says that he’s pulling away from her – when he says he’s ‘thinking about her every minute’, this seems patently untrue. What he thinks about every minute are the minutiae of the crime he’s trying to pull off, and of how he and Phyllis need to cover their tracks afterwards. It’s a wonderfully pathological twist on the ‘detective unravelling the crime’ trope, not just because we have a ‘bad guy’ in the role of the protagonist we’re supposed to root for, but because you can’t help wondering what goes on in the mind of this wise-cracking, murderous, insurance-salesman-gone-rogue, or what happened to him in the past to make him this way.
Walter introduces the word ‘rotten’ at the climax, and this becomes a key term in the final exchanges between him and Phyllis. Her plan is ‘just rotten enough’; they’re both rotten; she’s a little more rotten; are his plans for her any better? And at last Phyllis admits that she is ‘rotten to the core’…but then in the same breath realises that she isn’t: she doesn’t offer any grand, sentimental declaration of love, she just says that she couldn’t fire the second shot, and that she didn’t know that could happen to her, and that she’s not asking him to ‘buy’ anything – she just wants him to hold her.
This isn’t a perfunctory, throwaway moment of ‘deathbed repentance’, or a lame plot twist to keep Walter alive, it’s a genuine revelation that makes us (or should make us) revise our whole understanding of Phyllis. We need to ask the same question we asked about Walter: why is she really doing all this? And what is she really doing? Does she just want money and security so she can live alone in some expensive evil lair one day? Does she get a compulsive sexual thrill from betraying and murdering people?
Much of the film indicates that it’s a ‘yes’ to all of the above, but then she says ‘until a moment ago…’ In the end, deep down, she just wants a human connection, and has never been lucky enough to find one before. We’ve spent the rest of the film ‘seeing through’ her apparent affection for Walter, her complaints about the mistreatment she’s suffered, her longing for a happier life – it’s all just feminine wiles, and Walter is a sap for falling for it. Except that’s not true: there was something real in all that behaviour, like the longing of Charles Foster Kane for that lost thing (or feeling) he could never really put into words, and that no one else could access. This is why it’s so important to have Barbara Stanwyck in this role, someone who specialises in alternating (and combining) cynicism and innocence, vicious spite and tender affection.
It’s thanks to those haunting final moments of her performance that we feel genuine horror at Walter’s ice-cold ‘goodbye baby’ – and it’s hard not to feel that he’s ‘a little more rotten’ after all, if he really is unaffected by her at this moment. But then he says, ‘I wonder if she’s still lying alone up there, or if they’ve found her by now. I wonder a lot of things. They don’t matter anymore.’ Perhaps, among other things, he wonders how she really felt about him, and how he really feels about her, but still can’t bring himself to invest in the idea that these things ‘matter’.
And then there’s Keyes, who is too easily mistaken for the moral centre of the film, the character Walter should be attached to, because their friendship is somehow less toxic and dysfunctional than the central romantic affair. But Keyes, in his own way, is as much of a failed human being as Walter or Phyllis. The tale of his disastrous hair-dyeing fiancée is both very funny and very disturbing because of what it tells us about this man, and about the ‘little man’ inside him. He literally doesn’t know how to interact with anyone except by investigating them or recruiting them to be his co-investigator. He of course turns out to have been investigating Walter, as if this were an automatic reflex, though he fails to discover the truth. He is an astonishingly ‘little man’, leading an astonishingly limited existence.
And yet Walter ‘kind of always knew that Keyes had a heart as big as a house’ underneath the rage, cigar ash, and statistics. How does he know this? How has Keyes ever shown it? Somehow, Walter can tell that this insatiable bloodhound loves him, even if the closest he ever comes to saying it out loud is with the phrase ‘closer than that, Walter’.
Just as the characters in The Asphalt Jungle ‘all work for a vice’ and are all engaged in ‘left-handed forms of human endeavour’, so the three central figures in Double Indemnity are all looking for the same thing as everyone else. Rather than condemning any of them for looking in the ‘wrong’ way, I think the film invites our identification and empathy. I’ve never strangled anyone, had anyone strangled, or been pathologically fixated on chasing down insurance fraud, but this film still captures something very profound about my experience of life, and of how much time I spend pursuing goals without quite knowing why.
