The Image of Femme Fatale in The Double Indemnity Movie

The femme fatale by all accounts and dictionary definition is a woman who is attractive and uses this to seduce men who unknowingly allow her to bring disaster into their plain lives, typically for money or for criminal activities such as murder. This behavior by women characters in films may also be known as a vamp in more modern terms. The femme fatale is a staple of the film category, or period of filmmaking as some put it, of film noir. The genre of film noir is defined most definitely by its criminal point of view,“the presence of crime which gives film noir its most constant characteristic “the dynamism of violent death” is how Nino Frank evoked it, and the point is well taken… Sordidly and bizarrely, death always comes at the end of a tortured journey. In every sense of the word a noir film is a film of death”. Here, the point of and the necessity for such a dark woman character is asserted not only by what defines the film, but also by the fact that the primary reference point in previous film history, the moral center for audiences is completely skewed by the likeable villains and corrupt cops, as well as the addition of such radical women. In the film Double Indemnity, the character of Phyllis Dietrichson is no different and in some ways more unique because she is the one behind the fall of a fellow “bad guy.” Because of this ability to seduce and then control men with only her promiscuous looks and empty promises, Phyllis becomes one of the most prominent examples of the femme fatale.

Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, fits the role of the femme fatale as she cleverly recognizes the way she is viewed by the men in the film and uses this to her advantage. Her character is certainly objectified, as she realizes that men’s lustfulness toward her is the key to their minds and uses this to get what she pleases. Phyllis presents herself as an object of sex on purpose. She uses her seductiveness to marry a rich man, then to make what was a good man turn evil and murder him, to reap the rewards of the double indemnity insurance claim. She at no point directly attacks the men she meets to win power over them, until the very end when she attempts to kill Walter, the man she used to kill her husband, when he discovers what she has slyfully schemed him to do. Her power over the men in the film is not something physically demanded by her character, it is established the very moment they look at her figure and allow her deceptive words to poison their minds. For example in Walter and Phyllis’ dialogue where she says,

Walter: Why didn't you shoot again, baby? Don't tell me it's because you've been in love with me all this time.

Phyllis: [crying] No, 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 that second shot. I never thought that could happen to me. 

In the dialogue, it is Phyllis’ way of coming clean, she tells Walter that he never meant anything to her and neither did the other men she had used to get her in the position she had found herself in. This quote directly incriminates herself as a classic femme fatale using her physical beauty and to seduce men who then allowed her to bring chaos to their previously simple lives. First by making her husband-to-be fall in love with her after she killed his sick wife, then making Walter kill her husband, all while sleeping with her step daughter’s boyfriend, to attempt a risky insurance fraud that would have paid out a sum of $100,000 dollars to her as the sole beneficiary, had it not been foiled by Walter.

The character of the femme fatale is different from the women that preceded her in film because as the name “deadly woman” would suggest, she is one who is both predator and prey and seemingly detached from but also yet entangled with the men she uses. Film Noir and the use of the femme fatale originated mostly as a response to World War II, and the femme fatale is an embodiment of the post war fears that many had of women, having contributed mightily to the war effort filling roles in factories and the industry, doing “men’s work,” as the men were away in battle, might abandon their typical duties of housewife to continue the jobs they had done durng the war. Where women had previously been portrayed in films fulfilling their household duties and being completely loyal to their husbands, they were now seen on screen drinking and smoking, no longer seen as chaste and pure, almost as equals to men in the way they acted. Years. However some critics explain that this development of the femme fatale and what it later came to be perceived as was nothing new and certainly not as radical as some may think saying it may even appeal to women, “If the cycle went far beyond the films associated with film noir and included glossy historical pictures, they did not simply speak to male fantasies (and fears) but were frequently associated with female audiences and the woman's film, both through the presence of their female stars and their production values”.

In the films considered to fall into the category of film noir the femme fatale is representative of an attack on the independent working woman, portraying women of the post war era to be of a different kind of woman, that America had never seen before. The housewives living under the domestic sphere that the soldiers had left to go fight were no more, the women of the time were now shown on screen as deceptive, seductive, hardened by their environment, as manipulative and predators that never loved men, only used them. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity would become a one of the most prominent examples of the femme fatale because of her innate ability to seduce and control men with only her looks and meaningless vows of love. This new character of the femme fatale was completely different from the women that preceded her on screen because she was one who used her seductive guise to appear as both both predator and prey, detached from but entangled with the men she uses, a look for women that had never been so popular in film, defining an era of film and furthermore defining a new era of women.