Some like it cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder's double indemnity

Cinema Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 18-43

  Manon, Hugh S ^a  

^a OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950364733     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2005.0033     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity: The Complete Screenplay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 11
2. James Agee, "Films," review of Double Indemnity, The Nation, October 14, 1944, 445
3. As a means of evoking the taxonomic difficulties film noir presents, James Naremore begins his book by imagining the end-all of video stores - comprehensive and flawlessly organized. The film noir section would be located "between gothic horror and dystopian science fiction" - with Jacques Tourneurs Cat People (1942) and Don Siegels Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) marking its boundaries - and "in the center would be Double Indemnity." Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 9
4. Agee's metaphor seems to derive from a suggestion Walter makes to Phyllis early in their abrupt "courtship." In one of the exposition's many sets of double-entendres, Phyllis rather lasciviously reveals to her suitor that it is "the maid's day off." Walter responds in kind: "Seeing it's the maid's day off, maybe there's something I can do for you. Like running the vacuum cleaner." Wilder, Double Indemnity, 26
5. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 157
6. Wilder, Double Indemnity, 49
7. In the original screenplay, the unreachable object is a "can of coffee." Consequently, we may presume that the substituted words "baby food" are writer/director Wilder's own and not the contribution of the script's coauthor, Raymond Chandler. Wilder, Double Indemnity, 50-51
8. Slavoj Žižek defines the category of the sublime in precisely these terms. It is the act of "stumbling into it" that qualifies an object as sublime. "According to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls Das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire." Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 194
9. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 91
10. For a brief discussion of the specific reception of Wilder's Double Indemnity script by the Production Code Administration (PCA), see Frank Miller, Censored Hollywood: Sex, Sin, and Violence on Screen (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1994), 133-35
11. For a discussion of Joe Breen's response to Double Indemnity in the context of other films that were adapted from Cain's fiction, see Leonard Leff and Jerrold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 127-135
12. See Žižek's reading of an analogous shot from Hitchcock's Frenzy, in Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 174, n.23
13. In the film, MacMurray does not say "There isn't ..." but "There's not ..." See Wilder, Double Indemnity, 38
14. Frank P. Tomasulo, "The Maltese Phallcon: The Oedipal Trajectory of Classical Hollywood Cinema," in Bonnie Braendlin, ed., Authority and Transgression in Literature and Film (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 78
15. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1949), 133-34
16. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. C. Britton, A. Williams, B. Brewster, and A. Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 91
17. Freud, An Outline of Psycho-analysis, 91
18. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 70
19. According to Jacques Lacan, the experience of lack in attainment is a defining quality of human subjectivity. "Jouissance," which for our purposes may be defined as endless enjoyment, "is forbidden to him who speaks as such." Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 319
20. Compare the fixated kink in Walter Neff's desire to the gradual seduction of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). As William Luhr points out, the film's classic femme fatale, Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), is characterized by a "heterosexual excess in which Spade is complicit." Early in the film, when O'Shaughnessy reclines on the protagonist's sofa, Spade leans in to kiss her but is interrupted by the appearance of an interloper in the street below. Here, a classical obstacle to sexual union is established, and will persist for much of the narrative, whereas in Double Indemnity, sex itself triggers the film's inciting incident. Likewise, in strict contrast to Walter's story; consummation in The Maltese Falcon occurs near the conclusion of the film, with "subtextual hints provid[ing] a strong indication that the two have slept together." See Luhr, "Tracking The Maltese Falcon: Classical Hollywood Narration and Sam Spade," in Luhr, ed., The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, Director (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 174-75
21. For a discussion of this line of dialogue in the context of Fordism, see Naremore, More than Night, 88
22. Žižek usefully points out that the femme fatale can be defined as the woman who does not cede in her desire but who "persist[s] in it to the very end when its true nature as the death drive is revealed." See Žižek, Looking Awry, 63. This is indeed the case with Phyllis, whose desire remains fixed from the couple's initial meeting, despite Walter's (and the viewer's) ignorance that her true object of desire is never at any point the avowed happy union at "the end of the line."
23. In advancing this line of argument, I am of course suspending an alternative discussion in which Phyllis's actions are theorized in terms of her duplicity. Although it becomes clear to the viewer in the third act (and gradually to Walter) that Phyllis has been in control all along, for most of the film's running time the viewer has little choice but to identify with Walter as the film's sole subject
24. Although Double Indemnity, like all Hollywood films of the period, was prohibited from depicting "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, [or] suggestive postures and gestures," or indeed any adulterous affair that could "throw sympathy against marriage as an institution," censorship alone cannot explain Walter's strange disconnection from Phyllis. It is not unusual that we never actually see Walter coupling with Phyllis (no film in 1944 could depict anything so explicit); rather, the anomaly is that, from the beginning of Act II, we never see Walter desiring her. Walter's forecasted death at the end of the film, along with Phyllis's onscreen demise, would have provided ample "compensating moral value" to mitigate both the film's murder plot and its depiction of adultery. And although Walter's self-restraint certainly does nothing to flaunt the Production Code, it would be a mistake to view PCA censorship as the cause of Walter's fetishism, especially given the apparently unrestrained sexual communion that occurs at the end of Act I. Our best indicator that sex has occurred is the displaced corner of an area rug that Walter straightens with his shoe just after Phyllis exits the apartment. This none-too-subtle signifier that they had sex on the floor represents yet another of Wilder's impish invitations to double-entendre
25. For a reprint of the particular applications of the Hollywood Production Code, see Miller, Censored Hollywood, 295-97
26. Henry Krips, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 9
27. According to Žižek, perversion (of which fetishism is one specific type) always bears the structure of a "closed loop": "It is quite normal to say to the beloved woman, 'I would love you even if you were wrinkled and mutilated!'; a perverse person is the one who intentionally mutilates the woman, distorts her beautiful face, so that he can continue to love her, thereby proving the sublime nature of his love." Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 194. In undertaking the cover-up, Neff engages in just such a sacrifice, although his mutilation enacts an even more classic pledge: "I would love you even if we could never see each other again."
28. Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1972), 166
29. Claire Johnston, "Double Indemnity," in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI Publishing, 1980), 102-3
30. Brian Gallagher, "'I Love You Too': Sexual Warfare and Homoeroticism in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity," Literature-Film-Quarterly 15, no. 4 (fall 1987): 237-46
31. and Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2001), 110
32. As scripted, the film ends not with this line but with Walter in the gas chamber, looking out at a visibly distraught Keyes. Naremore provides a definitive analysis of why this conclusion was eliminated, suggesting that the original ending - shot by Wilder at great expense, and later discarded - was "a logical outgrowth of several important motifs in Double Indemnity" and ultimately a more resoundingly noir way to conclude. See Naremore, More than Night, 81-95
33. James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, 1936 (New York: Vintage, 1978), 7-8
34. Charlotte Chandler, Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, a Personal Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 121
35. In a 1931 editorial, columnist Walter Lippmann summarizes the pleasure of pretelevisual headline news: Arnold Rothstein was murdered in a hotel which is a ten-minute walk from my home; Jack Diamond was shot in a hotel which is not much farther away. ... As far as I could observe my friends and myself, it seems that we enjoyed the Rothstein and Diamond affairs. For we city dwellers are connoisseurs of celebrated crimes, and here were two specimens which after examination turned out to be pretty good. In Lippmann's view, it is the bemusement with which the average American greets the tales of crime and murder delivered daily to his doorstep that permits the underworld free reign. Lippmann, "The Underworld: A Stultified Conscience," Forum 85, no. 2 (February 1931), 66
36. This logic reappears in the minor film noir Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950). Dr. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) and Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue) are on the lam after Jeff accidentally kills Margo's husband. At one point, Margo appears in a new set of clothes and dark sunglasses - "in case the police put out a description," she says. Jeff returns, "You're right. Better take those dark glasses off, though. It's a dead giveaway."
37. Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 169