#31
Post
by Sloper » Fri Jul 15, 2022 6:52 pm
I’ve honestly never had any trouble buying into the Walter/Phyllis relationship. Yes, she’s Barbara Stanwyck not Agnes Moorehead (although I’d love to see Moorehead play this role), and the first thing that draws Walter to Phyllis is erotic attraction: the barely-withheld spectacle/fantasy of her naked body sunbathing on the roof. But this is displaced onto the fun of exchanging snappy dialogue with her, and then, most powerfully, onto the ‘red hot poker’, the ‘hook’ that is too strong to let go of.
To me Phyllis seems much more interesting and convincingly seductive than the femmes fatales in Out of the Past or The Killers, and I think it’s misguided to suggest that she and Walter ‘don’t see anything in each other but an opportunity’, or that Walter just wants a chance to murder someone. There’s something irresistible about the scheme Phyllis proposes, but also about the prospect of executing this scheme with her, specifically, and the film makes us understand this through hundreds of small interactions and moments of complicity between these two. I’ll just talk about a few of these in the early part of the film.
There’s the famous ‘speed limit’ exchange, of course, where Phyllis decides she’s familiar and comfortable enough with Walter’s deliberately stupid sense of humour to engage in some lightly sado-masochistic role-play, while still putting off his advances. But things get more interesting after this.
Roscoe, I love the ‘straightening things’ moment in The Maltese Falcon, but it’s very different from ‘I wonder if you wonder’: Brigid is play-acting nervously because she’s fighting for her life, and Sam is drawn to her, in part, because of how transparent and essentially guileless her pretences are. That’s why the ending of that film carries as much emotional weight as it does.
Phyllis, on the other hand, isn’t really trying to pretend – she wants Walter to see through her. Walter comments on the ‘sameness’ of her life, and instead of shrugging and saying that’s the way she likes it, Phyllis responds, ‘I wonder if I know what you mean’. This is coy, but deliberately and beautifully so, as though she’s standing outside herself and speculating as to whether she is truly unhappy enough to catch Walter’s meaning. Walter’s response, though it makes fun of her, is also picking up on her phrasing and playing along with it – and sure enough (unlike Brigid) she doesn’t seem at all undermined or embarrassed. Fundamentally, the exchange means: ‘I can’t openly admit to understanding you.’ / ‘You don’t have to.’ The impression I’m left with here is of two people operating on the same wavelength and getting mutual pleasure from their exchange.
That impression doesn’t wear off in the next encounter, when Walter does (to an extent) undermine and embarrass Phyllis. This doesn’t feel like ‘the end’ for these two because Walter confronts Phyllis by once again ‘playing along’ with her game rather than just putting a stop to it: ‘of course it doesn’t have to be a crown block…’ I think this is the first time he calls her ‘baby’ – ‘Look baby, you can’t get away with it’ – and it’s telling that the first moment of real confrontation is heralded by the first use of this problematic term of endearment. And yes, she says he’s ‘rotten’ but they both know he’s right; he responds, ‘I think you’re swell – as long as I’m not your husband’, and he’s not simply being sarcastic. Although the conversation ends with him being thrown out, we’re supposed to understand that the two characters are still on the same page, and I’m not surprised or sceptical when Walter realises he ‘hasn’t walked out on anything’, and that her showing up at his door is ‘the most natural thing in the world’.
Then we have the scene in his apartment, and it’s worth contrasting this setting with the Dietrichson household. Walter gets the measure of that house before he even goes inside – outdated, pretentious, ruinously expensive, a trap – and I love how he feeds the goldfish while commenting on the dust hanging in the air, evoking an association between the dust and the fish-food, and between Phyllis and the fish. She’s a damsel trapped in a tower, a prisoner with an anklet ‘cutting into her leg’. Maybe Wilder wanted the blonde wig to make Phyllis seem like ‘a tramp’, but I think it’s another kind of prison wall, imposing a very ill-fitting identity on Stanwyck: look how distinctive and dynamic her hair is in other films, whipping about as she gestures frantically with her head; her enforced stillness in Double Indemnity isn’t just sinister, it’s also kind of poignant, like she’s not allowed to express real emotions.
So the wig is of a piece with the house, the husband, the lifestyle. We get the idea, at the same time as Walter, that Phyllis is trapped in an intolerable nightmare. The snarky, foolish, erotic banter between these two seems hilariously out of place in this stuffy household, so we also understand why Walter would appeal to Phyllis – and why the appeal goes beyond just ‘this guy can help get rid of my husband’, or rather, why getting rid of the husband means more than just getting rid of the husband.
Walter’s apartment is limiting in a different way, in that it’s noticeably smaller than the Dietrichson house, it’s up a couple of flights of stairs, and it couldn’t be more sparsely decorated without actually looking like no one lives there. The line, ‘see if you can carry that as far as the living room’ is a knowing comment on the smallness of this space, but Walter is really saying ‘isn’t this better?’ The enormous Spanish-style house is effectively a goldfish bowl, whereas this apartment is an opaque, private space in which you can say and do whatever you want. You can look out at the world through the window, and instead of sun-rays and dust you get fresh air and falling rain. You can also leave the lights off and be physically intimate, and whisper in each other’s ears, and even the dolly-shot/dissolve that covers the sex scene enhances the sense of privacy and intimacy. Phyllis understands Walter’s home as quickly as he understood hers: ‘Just strangers besides you. You don’t know them and you don’t hate them.’
The witty exchanges are toned down from here on, but I think the chemistry is maintained and deepened, not only by the transition to a more intimate space, but also by the specific kinds of interaction we see between Walter and Phyllis. Take that wonderful back-and-forth while they’re embracing for the first time: ‘That perfume in your hair, what is it?’ ‘I don’t know, I bought it in Ensenada.’ ‘We oughta have some of that pink wine to go with it – the kind that bubbles. All I got is bourbon.’ ‘Bourbon is just fine, Walter.’ For me, there’s more chemistry here than in most love scenes in movies. There’s an emphasis on physical intimacy in the discussion about what Phyllis’s hair smells like, and in their breathless, sultry whispering, and in visual terms it’s cathartic to see the characters kiss and hold each other after all the shot/reverse-shot exchanges in previous scenes. But the conversation ends up being more about game-playing once again. They imagine that the perfume is fancy enough that its name would be worth remembering, or that it would go well with champagne, but they also delight in the mundanity of ‘bought it in Ensenada’, the sub-champagne bathos of ‘pink wine, the kind that bubbles’, and the even deeper bathos of bourbon and tap water served up in a tiny, dark kitchen.
I won’t keep poring over the details of what happens next, but this last example captures what I think is so compelling about the planning and execution of the murder. It all feels like a game, or a ‘ride’ to use the imagery from the film, and I love all the intricate details of how it plays out, and how Walter and Phyllis have to communicate with each other in the aisles of the grocery store or via overheard phone conversations, or in that moment that sends a shiver down my spine when she glances at him in the back of the car before driving her husband to his doom – or, of course, the famous scene where the car won’t start, and he has to lean over her to get it going. I guess I can see why not everyone would buy into all this, but for me the chemistry between these two is phenomenal.
The next question is why the relationship falls apart after the murder, after the game starts to disintegrate. It’s perhaps worth drawing a comparison with Macbeth, in which the central couple also enjoy a kind of transgressive chemistry up to and including the murder of Duncan, but then find themselves drifting apart. As with Walter’s motivations for becoming a murderer, or falling in love with Phyllis, it’s not quite clear why Macbeth or his wife like the idea of seizing the throne. Lady Macbeth says that killing the king ‘shall to all our nights and days to come give solely sovereign sway and masterdom’, and I think there’s a similar (and similarly vague, un-fulfillable) fantasy of power and liberty behind the scheme in Double Indemnity. That’s why it’s important not to dismiss or downplay the significance of the ‘opportunity’ Walter and Phyllis see in each other. Macbeth isn’t really about killing the king, and this film isn’t really about killing your spouse. The real motive lies somewhere in the chemistry between Walter and Phyllis, that energy passing between them that stops her from firing the second shot at the end, and I think it has to do with the sense of freedom they both find (however briefly) in playing these games with each other.
