Analysis of Femme Fatale Image in The Double Indemnity

Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir classic Double Indemnity that critics believe was the first film that began the film noir craze. Is the perfect example of female exploitation and the misinterpretations of women in the 40s. For a well-crafted film noir is not complete without an equally classic femme fatale. 

In Double Indemnity, it was actress Barbara Stanwyck who plays the beautiful, and deadly seductive Phyllis Dietrichson. A housewife who desired one thing, the death of her abusive husband. To achieve this, she sweet talks the main character Walter Neff, who is an insurance salesman into murdering him. However, if you really listen, watch the film carefully, and analyze the dialogue used by Phyllis. She doesn’t persuade Walter to kill her husband, she brilliantly manipulates him into doing something she only thought about doing. Making it seem like Walter was the one who wanted him dead and provided a way to see it done. This is done by characterizing Phyllis right from the beginning of film as a seductive manipulator. Her first appearance on the stairs above Walter in a towel is the first look you get of her and her personality. But what is the personality of a femme fatale? David Crewe states that, “By her sexuality: she is alluring and enrapturing, and film noir’s hapless protagonist is drawn to her like an insect to a spider’s web.” Deborah Walker also adds that: “The femme fatale is like a spider-woman who uses physical seductiveness with lethal ambition: a drive for personal independence within which the man is no longer a romantic object of desire. As Janey Place argues, “what she’s after is not the man. He’s another tool. What she’s after is something for herself.”  

The film immediately sexualizes Phyllis, so the audience believes one thing about her, without really knowing anything about her at all. Our eyes and Walter’s are drawn to her curves and flirtatious figure in the towel. Her tight-fitting clothes once she’s dressed, and her tempting anklet that Walter fantasizes about the most. Her body is slowly scanned over piece by piece and taken in by us and Walter. Like a prized art piece in a gallery Phyllis is not even given the dignity of being a human being. Only an object exploited and placed on a mantle to be leered at for hours lustfully. So, this is evident that Walter isn’t helping her out of the kindness of his heart, or for the money in reality, but out of pure lust. Crewe goes on to say that: “Typically, critics regard the femme fatale as the natural consequence of shifting gender roles post–World War I, as women increasingly left the home to join the workforce. Male veterans, physically and psychically wounded in the war, came home to find that women had grown in financial and sexual independence from having joined the workforce as part of the home-front war effort. Men found such powerful women both alluring and frightening– the same ambivalence felt for the femme fatale.” The shifting of gender roles and marriage were created by the millions of men that left home to go oversees to war. Once the war was over and the men returned home the domesticated house wholes never really returned to its normal state. In fact, it only seemed to complicate the matter of urban anonymity and sexual confusion more. 

Femme fatales were born from the imagination of men from their anxieties of assertive women. Women who were not afraid to voice their opinions or express their desires freely. Women who are unwilling to bow down to the male patriarchal supremacy. Once women were free to work without their husbands around to dictate their actions as a woman. Women were freed from their roles of domestic lives and were able to think and do for themselves. In other words, they were learning how to work hard and earn their own way in life without a man to help them. With all the outrageous and demeaning views of the America’s femme fatale, and the back-lash women received from being viewed in such a manner. You would think the whole world through cinema had this same view of women after the war, however, that was not case. In French film noir films, Walker states that: “The situation in France was different and ultimately led to different constructions of the fatale figure. French noir of the post-war period certainly contains many negative female characters, most of whom are petites garces (small-time, treacherous two-timers), gold-digging vamps, domineering (and ugly) matriarchs, or mégères (fish-wives). But, although they invariably, whether unwittingly or intentionally, cause trouble for the French noir hero, these women are almost always minor characters, lacking the magnificent power, visual dominance, and narrative agency of the deadly American fatale. In this sense, when one “looks for the woman” in classic French noir, the lady more or less vanishes.” It’s one thing to be labeled a deadly, manipulating spider. It is another to make a femme fatale of French noir be so insignificant that their presence is hardly noticeable. To have one’s image be so looked down upon, lacking all types of importance and control is hardly necessary to prove a point to a country through film. However, what makes the French film noir more unique is not the harsh labels, its their different desires and goals in the films. Walker continues saying that: “Though the French fatale may be ambitious and unscrupulous, whether she is out to ruin or murder an older, unattractive husband, or her lover’s wife, or to pin a murder on an innocent victim. What most often sets her apart from the American figure is her overriding and unshakeable emotional attachment to a male protagonist. French fatale as tragic or even demonic fatale is almost always a woman in love. Whose basic aim is to get and/or keep her man. Her lover is, almost without exception, the ultimate object of desire; he is not merely a tool to be used, abused, and discarded in the quest for power and independence.” Even though the French femme fatale has the same personality as the American femme fatale, their desires are completely opposite. This is another simple way to encourage women who are independent. That a man is still necessary and should be the real true object a woman should strive for, not independence from them. 

Although, at the time of the war the women of France had no real reason to escape their families, unlike the American women since their families were not so affected by the war. French women were eager to return home to their homes so that they could rebuild their broken families. Nevertheless, that does not excuse the fact the women there weren’t exploited in a different manner. American women slowly began to gain their freedom politically by being able to vote in 1919. While French women still struggled to escape the dominance of man and was granted the privilege years later in 1944. Yet, even still their women were held back as minor individuals thanks to the Code Civil and was more or less not considered to hold positions of power. Along with that a number of French noirs films were created to reflect the loss of male pride because of the war. Those fears were directed onto the French women, making them what Deborah Walker calls “scapegoats for a nation’s shame.” Creating women who sleep with men for money, power, secrets, and pleasure. So, the fear of independence from domestic life was not the fear the French had from their women, it was the sexual infidelity with the enemy. It was considered the ultimate betrayal to their nation. After the Liberation, the punishment for such crimes were as cruel as shaving their women’s heads for collaborating with Germans. 

However, what if the femme fatale doesn’t follow the rules of the character? Misinterpretation of women and the femme fatale of Double Indemnity would be the flashbacks of memories only in one point of view. Richard Armstrong explains that: “Phyllis Dietrichson is rotten because we see her through Walter Neff's and claims investigator Barton Keyes' eyes. Memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. It is ontologically valid to say that the world continues to exist while your eyes are closed. But when you open them you interpret what you see not objectively but for yourself.” As long as we are only shown one side of the story, we can only interpret what information is given to us. Phyllis’s story was never shown, only pieces of memories could be placed by her dialogue but enough for us to see the facts and truth of her life. For example, since we were in the point of view of Walter, we knew just how much he lusted for Phyllis and how easily he was able to succumb to her charms. He was weak minded and full of greed, that’s what lead him to murder. Without knowing the truth of Phyllis’s life for ourselves, we cannot label her as a true femme fatale without her point of view. For all we know, she could have good reason for wanting her husband dead other than her being abused by him. If Phyllis’s point of view is not shown, it leaves things open for her character to not be the women we think she is. However, this movie is a male’s fantasies of women like Phyllis based on her actions and looks, not her past pains or struggles. With this in mind, Mark Jancovich believes that: “The femme fatale is therefore claimed to operate as a demonization of the independent working woman at a time when there was a concerted effort to persuade women to surrender the jobs that they had taken on during the war and to return to their roles as wives and mothers within the domestic sphere.”

Phyllis Dietrichson’s femme fatale character and in fact all femme fatale characters, are a direct attack on women who have tried to escape the life of domestic housewife living. Men have retaliated by creating the femme fatale image of women to discourage viewers from seeing a specific type of woman. Which is a woman breaking from the system that controls her life and her actions towards man. Phyllis wishes her husband was dead, nothing more. It was the acts of a man, and a man alone, that set the wheels in motion for murder. In the end, they were both doomed to go to the grave together as victims of their own selfish desires. Dick Bernard states that: “If the criminal was a woman, elegantly attired and handsomely coiffured, she could be a noir icon: a femme fatale with a gun resting against her Jean Louis gown. One expected the deed to result in her death or imprisonment; all that mattered was that it be done in the grand manner.” This is how Hollywood gets away with distracting us from the truth of the matter of the femme fatale. If the woman is killed for her injustice act, then justice is then served, and the matter is over and done. 

However, what if the male in question, like Walter, lived when Phyllis shot him at the house? Then somehow found a way to cover up another murder and get away Scott free? Then, the audience would notice the double standard and the unfairness of the whole situation. Making it look intentional that the only person to blame here was Phyllis, the femme fatale. By her very nature and her horrible actions towards the opposite sex, she should be punished and nothing more. However, Bernard goes on to state that: “In a vintage noir, the femme noire that is killed by her lover (Double Indemnity), If the male gets away with murdering the femme noire, he still has to pay.” By doing this, both parties are punished accordingly, and the hidden message is overlooked. A femme fatale can’t be seen as martyr or else it gives the working woman ammunition against the male-controlled system. However, to label Phyllis as a heartless, dangerous, and lethal femme fatale without considering what motivated her is irresponsible. It all goes back to that old saying that, “Monsters are made, not born.” 

So, in closing, Phyllis Dietrichson might have been a femme fatale, who desired her husband’s death and manipulated men using her looks to achieve that goal. However, she is a victim of her own circumstance. She is a woman being held captive by the world class system and the understanding of her place in the world. Which is under a man’s control. Wrong or right, Phyllis tries desperately to break free from the control of men by using the only tools she knows that works against them, her looks. In the end, it is not murder that is Phyllis’s gravest crime, but the arrogant assumption that she can defeat a man and bend him to her will.” Despite Water’s criminality, this renders him the hero of the piece. He’s the character the audience is supposed to identify with and root for, so much as one wants to root for a killer and thief. And even though he committed the crimes, he did so under the spell of Phyllis, who was doomed to fail from the beginning because she was a mere woman.