Blog Entry #3

In the last half of Double Indemnity, we find out that Walter’s passion towards Phyllis turns into fear as he slowly realizes that he was just a pawn in Phyllis’ game. We also find out that Walter ironically has fallen in love with Lola and that his infatuation towards Phyllis was never genuine.  In order to protect himself from the crime, Walter decides that he must murder Phyllis.  Oddly enough, he is double-crossed when Phyllis gets to him first by shooting him in the chest and Lola and her boyfriend are wrongfully accused of the crime.  Because of his love for Lola and to keep her from being wrongly accused, Walter decides to confess to the murder of Mr. Nirdlinger to his friend and insurance investigator Keyes.  Having confessed to the murder, Keyes decides to help Walter by constructing an elaborate plot in which Walter and Phyllis are both set to flee the country on board a ship that was paid for by the insurance company.  This was done to minimize bad publicity towards the insurance company and to avoid a criminal trial.  The ending of the novel conveys Walter and Phyllis joining each other in committing suicide, which in my opinion was appropriate to the novel.

It felt like the ending to Double Indemnity was unsatisfying.  It was a bit depressing and abrupt, yet it felt like justice was served.  It was depressing in a way because it felt like throughout the whole novel, we viewed the story through the eyes of Walter and it felt like we were meant to identify with him.  He controlled the story and its tone from the beginning and I felt a little support towards him, considering him to be the misled victim.  Don’t get me wrong, he is every bit as much a murderer as Phyllis.  He committed his crime willingly because he thought it would give him something he wanted, just like Phyllis herself.  He is a criminal and the story does not deny that.   I just view his demise as a tragic fall rather than the collapse of a dangerous influence of evil.  The novel also felt like it abruptly ended in a way.  I was intrigued at how the author, Cain built up such a story and a plot that seemed to always grab my attention, but at the end, he unexpectedly makes a really odd choice in his way of ending the story.  His final sentences, “I didn’t hear the stateroom door open, but she’s beside me now while I’m writing.   I can feel her.  The moon” (Cain, Double Indemnity, 115).  It’s not the kind of choice that intrigued me, but it makes me want to know what that meant.  Those last two words just felt like it made everything weirder.  For as straightforward as noir is, the closing sentence felt out of place.  Perhaps Cain purposely did this to leave it open for the reader’s imagination just as he did in describing the murder earlier in the book.  It’s worth that in the end that a twisted sense of justice is done. Walter achieves redemption of sorts, Phyllis is left alone in the hands of Walter where pretty much we can imagine what he will do to her, and the three characters that do show the most moral principle throughout the book come out of it well. 

The book is very similar to the film, however the end is completely different.  It’s one of those books that will leave you in limbo at the end, somewhat unsatisfied. Perhaps both Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder felt the same about the ending of the novel, thus when it came to film it, I think they had to change the ending to make it more satisfying to the audience and movie viewing public. 

Blog Entry #2

Reading the first eight chapters of the novel, Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain, we can grasp some elements of film noir.  Its characters, scenario and literary elements all completely symbolize the concept of film noir from the early 1940s to the late 1950s.  The plot, which is dark in tone, is about an insurance agent named Walter Huff, an anti-hero who is led astray by greed and lust, falls for a married woman, Phyllis Nirdlinger, the seductive and deadly femme fatale, in which both characters commit the perfect crime by murdering Phyllis’ husband for insurance money.

Double Indemnity takes place mostly in Hollywood and the surrounding urban cities near Los Angeles.  It is written in both a descriptive dialogue and a first person narrative, told in the eyes of the protagonist, Walter Huff, a successful insurance salesman for General Fidelity of California.  Unlike most film noir stories, which are often about private detectives, Huff’s character is basically an ordinary guy who gets involved in a situation that he has no control over.  At first, he seems to be a good guy at heart, but when he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger while trying to sell insurance to her husband, his true character reveals him to be vulnerable, easily being tempted by both money and a woman.  He is easily swayed by his lustful and sexual desire to help Phyllis murder her husband by train accident in the effort to claim insurance money from the same company he works for; but at the same time he can be viewed as a rebel, shown by his desire to double-cross his employers.  “All right, I’m an agent.  I’m a croupier in that game.  I know all their tricks, I lie awake nights thinking up tricks, so I’ll be ready for them when they come at me.  And then one night I think up a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel myself if I could only put a plant out there to put down my bet” (Cain, Double Indemnity: 23-24).

Women in film noir are either the good girl who is characterized as reliable and trustworthy, or the femme fatales who are sultry and seductive women who are manipulative.  In the case for Double Indemnity, the woman in the novel is Phyllis Nirdlinger, a beautiful woman who is personified by her allure and dominance, entraps the hero with promises of money, sex and love.  “She was a woman maybe thirty-one or –two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.  She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas.  She had a washed-out look” (Cain, Double Indemnity, 5).  She embodies the seductress who pretends to be helpless but is gradually revealed to be manipulative and deadly.  We are still yet to learn if her character embodies the true meaning of femme fatale, in which she is ultimately responsible for the betrayal and downfall of Walter.

Double Indemnity uses descriptive dialogue to emphasize the characters and story.  To portray a dark tone with the impression of murder and death, the author illustrated it using the line, “That is how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers”  (Cain, Double Indemnity, 3).  Though we may be halfway done with the novel, it can be clearly supportable that the book has exhibited some components of film noir.  I look forward to reading it to end to see the dark nature of the story continue and if it is like most film noir stories, the femme fatale double-crosses the main character and both become doomed at the end.

Blog Entry #1

As I think about the term film noir, the first thing that comes into mind is classic Hollywood crime dramas, usually a black-and-white cinematic crime fiction film resulting in a battle between good versus evil.  This is a vague description I came up with but there is actually more to it than what meets the eye.  To understand the basis of film noir, we need to recognize its origins.

The concept of film noir can be traced back to the 1940s and 1950s, a time when America was going through a severe economic struggle known as The Great Depression along with fighting in World War II.  Novelists like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet and James M. Cain inspired the noir vision, but it was the type of film making approach of expressionism from Europe that Hollywood adopted to help ease and inspire Americans through this struggle.  It was this type of film making that Hollywood produced movies that were both popular and artistic. 

Reading, “The Neo-Noir ‘90s” by David Ansen with Tina Weingarten, it appeared that besides most of the film noir being set in a crime-infested, shadow-draped, black-and white setting, these style of movies had themes that addressed the human condition through a state of complete disorder or a luck of fortune.  These classic movies were well made with a type of style of movie making that we today don’t regularly see anymore, though the art of film noir movies are still continuously being produced today, but with a lesser degree.  Its value as a work of art continues to fascinate a handful of directors and film fanatics such as film students and critics.