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The novella's confession is a written statement which begins with references to an already-known aspect of the murder: the "House of Death" with its "blood-red drapes" that "you've been reading about" in sensationalized newspaper accounts of the crime. 2In the film, Walter's confession "doubles" the intensity of the male discourse by directing the narrative, passing to another male, instead of directing it, extradiegetically, to an assumed but unspecified (presumably male and female) audience.3 The overt purpose of Walter's confession is to create a coherent chronology of the crime "It all began last May" accompanies a slow dissolve to a long shot of Walter's arrival at the Dietrichson house on a bright spring afternoon. The film's deep cynicism which exceeds anything in Cain's novella resides in its positing an alternate sexual relationship for Walter (i.e., a homosexual one with Keyes) as equally untenable and unrewarding, allowing for only a temporary misogynist bonding of the two men at the point of Walter's death.4 Thus the film's bitter ending, as I suggest in conclusion, is much more reflective of the war- weary mood of the mid- 1940s than the film's overt subject matter might indicate.

When the literary source for a film is of roughly the same length, narrative density, and psychological depth as could be approximated in the film version, then a study of the significant omissions, additions, and changes made in constructing the film version from the literary source can be a particularly useful basis for analyzing the film. Such is the case for the film that Billy Wilder as co-scenarist (with Raymond Chandler) and director made from James M. Cain's "hard-boiled" novella, Double Indemnity.

The plot of both the novella and the film revolves around the fatal encounter of Walter (Fred MacMurray), a lecherous, cynical insurance agent, and Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck), a heartless, scheming housewife. Together they devise an intricate plot to murder her husband and collect $100,000 in insurance money.1 The film version, though, is marked by two substantive changes: omitted was Phyllis's compulsively murderous streak and pathological devotion to "Death"; added was a third major character (elevated from the status of a minor character in the novella), Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the tough, shrewd insurance investigator who uncovers the details of the well-disguised murder plot. These two changes, in large measure, restructured the narrative thematically. What was essentially a murderous story with strong sexual overtones became a sexual story with strong murderous overtones.

Except for its brief opening and closing sequences, Double Indemnity is a film in the form of a confession. After a series of establishing shots a car veers erratically along a dark Los Angeles street, runs through a stoplight, and pulls abruptly in to the curb we follow Walter as he stumbles into the empty building housing his insurance company, rides up in the elevator, and staggers to his office. Nursing a bloodly gunshot wound in his left shoulder, he slowly and painfully lights a cigarette, sweat running down his face, and arranges himself before a dictaphone into which he begins to speak his lengthy confession: "Office memorandum. Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager. Los Angeles, July 16th, 1938. Dear Keyes: I suppose you'll call this a confession when you hear it. . . ."

Most of the rest of the film consists of Walter relating the story of how he and Phyllis came to murder her husband, giving Keyes the precise details of a crime whose general outline Keyes had already puzzled out. His confession informs Keyes that it was he, Walter Neff ("thirty-five years old, unmarried, no visible scars . . . until awhile ago that is"), who was the "other person" Keyes hypothesized had to have helped Phyllis Dietrichson plan and carry out the murder. Voice-over thus plays a key role in the organization of the narrative, not just in accentuating the series of slow dissolves between Walter dictating and the pictorial re-creation of the events, but also in providing a running, interpretative commentary often ironic, occasionally contradictory - on the events unfolding before us visually.

What is most significant about Walter's statement is its very private character, its direction to a single individual. The novella's confession is a written statement which begins with references to an already-known aspect of the murder: the "House of Death" with its "blood-red drapes" that "you've been reading about" in sensationalized newspaper accounts of the crime. 2In the film, Walter's confession "doubles" the intensity of the male discourse by directing the narrative, passing to another male, instead of directing it, extradiegetically, to an assumed but unspecified (presumably male and female) audience.3 The overt purpose of Walter's confession is to create a coherent chronology of the crime "It all began last May" accompanies a slow dissolve to a long shot of Walter's arrival at the Dietrichson house on a bright spring afternoon. The deeper purpose of the confession, however, is to acknowledge Keyes's lightness. Walter prefaces the narrative proper with a series of admissions: "You said it wasn't an accident. Check. You said it wasn't suicide. Check. You said it was murder . . . Check." Whereas Cain's Walter was brought to confess by his growing attachment to Lola Nirdlinger (she and her boyfriend were accused of plotting her father"s murder), Wilder's Walter has as his only confessional motive the desire to give Keyes the story straight and entire. In fact, Walter ruins his slim chance of escaping over the border to Mexico by spending several hours dictating this confession to Keyes.

The film version, then, triangulates what in the novella is a two-person relationship: Walter-Phyllis becomes Keyes- Walter-Phyllis, with Walter very much a character in the middle being pulled in opposite directions. This battle over Walter is, at base, a sexual battle. What Walter's confession ultimately affirms is the correctness of Keyes's whole attitude, both stated and implied, toward women and toward heterosexual relations in general: namely, women are duplicitous, vulgar, and untrustworthy; and heterosexual relationships are generally noisome and often lethal. The film's deep cynicism which exceeds anything in Cain's novella resides in its positing an alternate sexual relationship for Walter (i.e., a homosexual one with Keyes) as equally untenable and unrewarding, allowing for only a temporary misogynist bonding of the two men at the point of Walter's death.4 Thus the film's bitter ending, as I suggest in conclusion, is much more reflective of the war- weary mood of the mid- 1940s than the film's overt subject matter might indicate.

The filmic world of Double Indemnity is, like so many of Wilder' s filmic worlds, a world shot through with antagonisms. Not only do Walter and Phyllis make for a most "brassy couple," as the New York Times reviewer aptly termed them,3 but they also relate to each other in decidedly combative terms. Their first encounter is marked by the hostile abruptness that characterizes their relationship throughout. As Walter gazes obsessively at the purposefully provocative Phyllis in the half-light of the living room (Fig. 1), he shifts the conversation to a mode of nasty innuendo in which she quickly proves herself more than his equal:

Walter: I wish you'd tell me what's engraved on that anklet.

Phyllis: Just ray name.

Walter: As for instance?

Phyllis: Phyllis.

Walter: Phyllis. I think I like that.

Phyllis: But you're not sure?

Walter: I'd have to drive it around the block a couple of times.

Phyllis: (standing up): Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening around eight-thirty. He'll be in then.

Walter: Who?

Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren't you?

Walter: Yeah, I was, but I'm sort of getting over the idea if you know what I mean.

Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour.

Walter: How fast was I going, officer.

Phyllis; I'd say around ninety.

Walter: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

Walter: Suppose it doesn't take.

Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Walter: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.

Walter: That tears it.

Similarly, Robinson plays Keyes as unrelentingly aggressive. His Keyes immediately, almost sadistically, confronts those silly enough to challenge his nearly absolute knowledge of the insurance business, whether the challengerbe a fraudulent client or the foolish company president. Although he feels a genuine affection for Walter, Keyes can never, until the very last, dispense with the bantering, pushy tone in which he always speaks to the salesman. Even a secondary character like Nino Sachetti, Lola's boyfriend, is typified by an insistent, seemingly instinctive, aggressiveesshis first encounter with Walter, who is dropping off Lola for a date with him, is characterized by a willing belligerence on both sides:

Lola: This is Mr. Neff, Nino.

Walter: Hello, Nino.

Nino: The Name is Sachetti.

Lola: Nino, please. Mr. Neff gave me a ride from the house. I told him all about us.

Nino: Why does he have to get told about us?

Lola: We don't have to worry about Mr. Neff, Nino.

Nino: I'm not doing any worrying. Just don't you broadcast so much.

Lola: What's the matter with you, Nino? He's a friend.

Nino: I don't have any friends. And if I did, I like to pick them myself. C'mon.

Walter: Look, sonny, she needed the ride so I brought her along. Is that anything to get tough about?

Although "moods of claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism"6 define the world view of film noir, Double Indemnity is extreme in affording its characters, most particularly Walter, virtually no respite from a series of sparring, mean-spirited interpersonal encounters. Indeed, Walter seems to provoke almost instant antagonism. For instance, the Dietrichson maid is immediately contemptuous of him, sarcastically remarking "It's in there, but they keep the liquor locked up" as she directs him to the living room, to which Walter, just as sarcastically, replies, "That's all right, i always bring my own keys."7 Even minor details of the mise-en-scènei like the fact that three prints of turn-of-the-century bare-knuckled boxers hang over the sofa in Walter's apartment help reinforce the film's atmosphere of unrelenting hostility.

By contrast, the world of Cain's novella is not so much hostile as sinister and macabre. One could even argue that the relationship between Walter Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger is essentially a solipsistic one on both sides, for it lacks the continual sexual infighting of the relationship between Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson. Since murder is, to some extent, a quantifiable crime, it is significant that Cain's Phyllis is five times as murderous as Wilder's (ten murders as opposed to two, the additional eight being patients' deaths she "arranged" while a nurse). As Keyes says in the novella, Phyllis is clearly "an out-and-out lunatic" (p. 118), or, as she herself puts it, only death really attracts her: ". . . there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I'm so beautiful then" (p. 23). As she prepares to commit suicide by jumping overboard, Phyllis propounds a similar notion, but tellingly shifts the metaphor from one of identification to one of marriage: ". . . the time has come . . . . For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved." This Phyllis has clearly displaced the function of her sexuality onto death, creating a self-sufficient, if parodistic, substitute realm in which her sexuality can operate bizarrely.

Although outwardly attracted to her, Cain's Walter is not overly disturbed by Phyllis's displaced sexuality, for her real importance to him is functional. He wants to use her to make his long-cherished challenge to the insurance system that has made him cynical about all but the monetary value of human life: "When I met Phyllis I met my plant. If that seems funny to you, that I would kill a man just to pick a stack of chips, it might not seem so funny if you were back of that wheel, instead of out front" (p. 30). The relationship of Cain's adulterous lovers is, then, chiefly a murderous one, albeit their murderous motives are dissimilar, Phyllis's being her warped devotion to "Death" and Walter's his desire to cheat the system of which he is a resentful member.

The film transforms the Walter-Phyllis relationship into an explicitly sexual one, and while this relationship shares the general aggressiveness of virtually all the film's relationships, it is also of a different order than the film's male-male relationships. This heterosexual relationship is directly fatal for both parties and when we consider that Walter and Phyllis effectively murder each other shortly after they have murdered her husband, it is obvious that the film implies heterosexual relations resemble a state of constant sexual warfare in which the parties seek not merely to aggress on each other, but to annihilate each other.

The film insinuates the fatality of the Walter-Phyllis relationship by carefully restricting the narrative point-of-view: namely, we see Phyllis entirely from the psychological viewpoint of the beguiled and doomed Walter. Much of his voice-over commentary implies that he was impelled by a physical desire for Phyllis which he could not control. His fatalistic comment about how she was progressively drawing him into her murderous schemes "I knew I had hold of a red-hot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off" allies his desire with a sort of auto-erotic frenzy, impellingly masturbatory. The employment of a device common in film noir, obsessively point-of-view shots (always from Walter' s angle of vision) , provides an important visual complement to the exclusivty of the male discourse established by Walter's voice-over confession. For instance, the first shot of Phyllis is a voyeuristic low-angle one of her at the top of the stairs: she has just come in from sunbathing and is draped only in a small towel. This is followed by a high-angle shot of Walter, who has come to sell insurance, gazing lewdly upward and suggestively punning: "I'd hate to think of you getting a smashed fender or something while you're not uhfully covered." The next shot of Phyllis is a close-up of her shapely calves as she descends the staircase, an anklet flashing (a shot which, incidentally, is duplicated almost exactly as the first shot of the sequence showing the second meeting of Phyllis and the increasingly entrapped Walter). Even that majority of shots of Phyllis which are not signalled as being directly from Walter's visual point-of-view nonetheless present Phyllis as Walter sees her psychologically. Almost always she is shot in the "direct, undiffused light" typical of film noir's visual style for its depiction of dangerous women, a light "which creates a hard, statuesque surface beauty that seems more seductive but less attainable, at once alluring and impenetrable." For Walter, Phyllis is undoubtedly a valuable object, a desirable and seemingly possessable commodity. Her bleached blond hair, her flashy jewelry, her vulgarly provocative dress (and undress) all appeal to Walter. Himself a rather innocuously and blandly dressed figure (both by choice and financial constraints), Walter derives from Phyllis strong visual pleasure that is, at once, sexual and economic. Since Walter's general attitude is one of sneering cynicism and a disbelief in permanent values, it is understandable that he would be taken in by Phyllis's cheap surface allure. Thus Phyllis is able to maneuver Walter throughout by playing on his shallow desire for her, combined with another potent, tangible appeal-the $100,000 they will share by murdering her husband. As Molly Haskell notes, citing Double Indemnity as a prime example, a definite change occurred in the way American films of the 1940s depicted heterosexuality: "Where once sexual antagonism was a game, a pretext, a holding action until the underlying affinity could emerge, attraction is now the illusion, the decoy, the duplicitous facade . . . . [Phyllis] is allied not with the dark forces of nature, but with the green forces of the capitalist economy."9

The scene in which Phyllis first visits Walter's apartment strongly suggests this conjunction of sexual and economic desires. Answering his doorbell one evening (several days after their second meeting), Walter is surprised to find Phyllis standing there, striking an assertive pose, her hands thrust into the pockets of her raincoat. "You forgot your hat," she says, although it is evident she has no hat with her. "Did I?" Walter replies, letting her in and playing along with the gag. ("Put it on the chair.") Eventually, after a good deal more sparring, and some overt sexual contact, he plots the murder with her.

Phyllis's opening gambit is less curious when we recall Freud's classification of hats as "unquestionably" symbols of the male sex organ.10 Since Walter's vision conditions the film, clearly Phyllis represents the Other, the female, the one defined by a lack. In a psychoanalytic interpretation of the film, Claire Johnston notes the obvious combination of fear and pleasure that Phyllis represents for Walter: "Neff s encounter with Phyllis ... is marked by a fetishistic fascination: simultaneously the dangerous site of castration and the pleasurable appearance-the object of the look-she is the source of reassuring pleasure in the face of castration anxiety."11

There is a telling ellipsis in this scene, meant to hint the act of sexual intercourse the plot logically necessitated but which censorship forbade: the scene dissolves from a medium shot of Walter and Phyllis clutching each other tightly, back to a shot of Walter continuing to dictate his confession, then back to a long shot of the two at opposite ends of a large couch. Walter is staring off into space and Phyllis is gazing into a hand mirror and adjusting her make-up. Sexual desire, having had its momentary satiation, no longer masks the estrangement underlying heterosexual relations. What re-unites the pair, spatially and psychologically, is that other primal passion-greed. They decide to go ahead with the murder of her husband.

Of course, the relationship between Walter and Phyllis is an unequal one-in effect, she is dominant and he submissive, despite the apparently equal nature of their antagonistic interchanges. Only toward the end does Walter realize what a "sucker" he has been. As this point his desire turns homicidal. Believing he can pin the Dietrichson murder on Sachetti, whom he has learned is also involved with Phyllis, Walter decides to murder her. His prized commodity has now become the chief threat to his survival (since she is the only witness to his crime), and in killing her he can simultaneously frame Sachetti for both murders. Cornering Phyllis at the darkened Dietrichson residence, Walter, his voice now hard and scornful, accuses her of manipulating one man after another for her murderous, greedy ends, an accusation that is also an implied indictment of himself for being one of those so easily beguiled by the conjunction of sexual and economic desire she represents:

Phyllis: We're both rotten.

Walter: Only you're a little more rotten. You got me to take care of your husband for you, and then you get Sachetti to take care of Lola, maybe take care of me too. And then somebody else will have to come along to take care of Sachetti for you. That's the way you operate, isn't it, baby?

And if to confirm the nature of her treachery, and because she is still one step ahead of him, Phyllis then shoots Walter. Wounded, Walter taunts her to finish him off with a second shot, but she is unable to fire again. Putting her arms about his neck, Phyllis testifies to a sudden, and total, emotional reversal:

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 moment ago, when I couldn't fire that second shot. I didn't know that could happen to me.

Ironically, this first moment of truth for Phyllis also becomes her last. Convinced of her innate duplicity, Walter rejects her avowal ("Sorry, baby, I'm not buying") and shoots her (with her own gun, which she has just surrendered to him) in what two analysts appropriately term "a deadly parody of sexual climax."12

Although the film presents Phyllis chiefly as she appears to Walter, it also presents their relationship, which is emblematic of all the heterosexual relationships shown or alluded to in the film, in a knowing light that transcends any of Walter's perceptions. Periodically, the film imposes an iconographie overview meant to indicate the trapped, doomed status of Walter and the other men in Phyllis's power. For instance, when Walter comes to the Dietrichson home to provide updated insurance policies (his cover for tricking Dietrichson into also signing an accident insurance policy), we have a three-shot that is repeated several times. In it Phyllis is seated on the arm of a chair in the background, between and above, - i.e., visually dominant over - Walter and Dietrichson, who are seated on a sofa in the foreground. These are the two men, the soon-to-be murderer and his victim, whose destinies she is so powerfully controlling. In essence, Walter is about to become as much a "dead pigeon" as he believes the unsuspecting Dietrichson will soon be.

Another change from novella to film, in the character of Lola Nirdlinger/Dietrichson, indicates how insistently the Wilder-Chandler view of the story emphasizes the inherently exploitative nature of heterosexual relations. Whereas Cain's Lola is basically a sweet, decent young woman with whom Walter falls in love and for whom he agrees to make his confession, the film's Lola, although by no means the femme fatale that Phyllis is, can be coyly and demurely exploitative. From Walter she half- innocently wheedles a series of favors, whether small (a ride) or large (getting him to send Sachetti back to her). Moreover, her passivity seems almost a calculated strategy to insure an ongoing antagonistic relationship with the overbearing Sachetti. And if Walter stands in a growing "parental" relationship toward her, this relationship can only be said to have come about in a most unhealthy way, through his murder and replacement of her father. As Johnston says, "Neff has entered an impossible family, a family explicitly based on sacrificial murder, and thus socially censored."13

Double Indemnity suggests that since the outcome of heterosexual relations is likely to be exploitative at best and wholly destructive at worst, it might be wiser to eschew such relations altogether, if only in favor of a meager alternative - implicit, repressed homosexuality. This is essentially the position represented by Barton Keyes, that minor character in the novella whom Wilder and Chandler chose to foreground.

Cain's Keyes is "the most tiresome man to do business with" (p. 12), a gross physical specimen and a character whose acumen is nearly obscured by this unpleasant personality:

He gets fatter every year, and more peevish, and he's always in some kind of feud with other departments of the company, and does nothing but sit with his collar open, and sweat, and quarrel, and argue, until your head begins spinning around just to be in the same room with him. But he's a wolf on a phony claim, (p. 12).'4

About the only hint of anything more than a business relationship between Keyes and Huff comes in this rather flat exchange after Walter confesses to murdering Nirdlinger:

Keyes: I'm sorry. I've - kind of liked you, Huff.

Walter: I know. Same here. (p. 114).

Keyes, as impersonated by Robinson, is a very different figure - stocky, but he is by no means grossly fat. Moreover, he is vigorous, both physically and verbally. About fifty, Keyes still has dark, wavy hair (which contrasts him noticeably) with the washed-out looking Dietrichson, who is about the same age). Although he is consistently crabby, there is an undercurrent of rough affection, if not actual warmth, in his bantering dealings with Walter. In the film version, keyes' relationshipwith Walter is a greatly expanded one - it is as complex, nearly as troubling, and ultimately as fatal as Walter's relationship with Phyllis.

Any number of motifs identify Keyes as Phyllis's competitor for Walter's loyalty and affection. For instance, Keyes/Robinson is a short man (little taller than Phyllis/ Stanwyck), and he typically appears, like Phyllis, on the right side of the frame in two-shots where the tall Walter/MacMurray is on the left. Occupying the same space as Phyllis in relation to Walter, Keyes presents a series of alternatives to the appeal of Phyllis: brunette/blond, soft-features/hard-features, mind/body and, naturally, male/ female (Figs. 1 & 2).

The sexual undercurrent in the Walter-Keyes relationship is established in the very first scene between them when a grinning Walter replies mockingly "I love you too" to Keyes's grumblings against him, then performs the ritual gesture of lighting Keyes's large, cheap (and clearly phallic) cigar, a gesture he repeats in almost every scene between the two men. Already it is clear that Keyes and Walter have something of a father-son relationship, one with both erotic implications and, as befits a film full of "doubling" and mirror imagery, frequent role reversals. For example', when Keyes visits Walter's office and tries at length to convince Walter to give up sales work and become his assistant ("to work with your brain" and not just "your finger on the doorbell"), Keyes is very much the solicitous "father," concerned about his "son's" future and hoping to pass on wisdom, position, and function to him (Fig. 2). When Walter's phone rings, Keyes immediately grabs it, shifting to the (implicitly female) role of secretary-helper.is though stia maintaining his gruff manner: "There's a dame on your phone." Since the caller is Phyllis, Walter must dissemble and disguise the true content of his conversation, and so he clumsily invents a "Margie" with whom he is supposedly arranging a date. After Walter hangs up, Keyes again shifts roles, becoming the wise older man warning the younger, in a manner with clear homoerotic overtones, of the wiles of women:

Keyes: Margie! I bet she drinks from the bottle. ... I almost [got married] once. A long time ago. . . . We even had the church picked out, the dame and I. She had a white satin dress with flounces. And I was on my way to the jewelry store to buy the ring. Then suddenly that little man in here (he punches his stomach) started working on me.16

Walter: So you went back and had her investigated.

Keyes: Yeah, and the stuff that came out. She'd been dyeing her hair ever since she was sixteen. There was a manic-depressive in the family, on her mother's side. She already had one husband. He was a professional pool player in Baltimore. And as for her brother -

Walter. I get the general idea: she was a tramp from a long line of tramps.

Finally, after Walter flatly rejects Keyes's offer of the assistantship, Keyes shifts roles for a third time, becoming the rejected suitor full of pique: "I picked you for the job not because I think you're so darn smart, but because I thought you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit. I guess I was wrong. You're not smarter, Walter. You're just a little taller."

The relationship of Keyes and Walter is narcissistic on both sides. Keyes sees Walter as the only genuine, if reluctant, heir to his profession and tradition. Walter, in challenging the system, is really challenging the actuarial genius (and person) of Keyes. In plotting the murder, Walter admits, "You were the only one we ever worried about, Keyes," and Walter knows that success relies on his crucial identification with Keyes: "I had to think with your brains, Keyes." In the film's concluding scene, Keyes bends over the mortally wounded Walter, who is slumped in a doorway (Fig. 3), and when Walter makes overt reference to their long-standing identification, Keyes responds by finally admitting to the deep bond that has existed between them:

Walter. You know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes? Let me tell you. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. He was right across the desk from you.

Keyes: Closer than that, Walter.

Walter's response to Keyes's admission, delivered in a painful, breathless rush that belies its supposedly sarcastic intent, is "I love you too." After these words, the very last ones of the film, Walter struggles to get a cigarette into his mouth and Keyes, showing some tenderness, provides him with a light, thus reciprocating the ritual gesture that Walter has performed for him throughout. Then the camera pulls backwards, and the film fades out on the tableau of Keyes tending the wounded Walter.

E. Ann Kaplan notes that in film noir "the woman functions as the obstacle to the male quest,"i7 i^ observation that holds true for Double Indemnity in a paradoxical way. The major narrative is an embedded one, a retrospect in which Phyllis blocks an acknowledgment and strengthening of the male bonding of Walter and Keyes (even though the very repressed nature of their homoerotic attraction to each other insured that very little would have occurred overtly anyway). But that retrospect is carefully positioned in the present, as part of Walter's confession, and in the present Phyllis is dead and no obstacle per se. (As Todorov observes, narratively "death is nothing but the impossibility of speaking."18 Thus the story, framed as it is, is without female discourse.) Yet it is only the wound, literal and symbolic, that Phyllis has left on Walter (her "castrating" mark) that allows him to envision and complete his "male quest"- by freely giving his confession to Keyes as a pledge of the bond between them, a bond strengthened by Walter's admission of his past sexual blindness and his present (misogynist) sexual insight. Ultimately, then, homoeroticism, like heterosexuality, becomes allied with death.

If Walter comes round to Keyes's sour view of women and Keyes to an acceptance of his essential bond with Walter, there still exists an absolute barrier between them: Keyes stands as a representative of the patriarchal Law, while Walter stands as a transgressor of the Law , as the unsuccessful but unrepentant challenger of its authority . Since Walter is an inversion of Keyes, he must be destroyed by Keyes even as he is acknowledged by him. Just before the final reconciliation scene described above, Keyes bluntly tells Walter, "You're all washed up," then calls for an ambulance and for the police - only then, with Walter's doom assured, can Keyes relent. Walter may be a "double" for Keyes, but his is an evil double. Both to acknowledge him and to let him escape would make Keyes liable for a kind of moral "double indemnity." Thus their final scene can only be a "love-death."

Although the Wilder-Chandler Double Indemnity paid nominal tribute to ideals of justice and the maintenance of order - both murderers do come to suitably nasty ends - it was, within the confines of the Hollywood films of the period, rather a dark and even subversive piece. Four decades after its making, Double Indemnity remains a profoundly cynical film (unlike some of Wilder' s later efforts, which can be cheaply, flippantly cynical). Consider, for instance, that the closing scene recalls those battlefield scenes in films like The Birth of a Nation and Patton, wherein normal heterosexual decorum is temporarily suspended and a dying comrade can be stroked, caressed and kissed. Wilder's allusive iconography in this final scene therefore suggests the hopelessly fatal quality of even normal (seemingly non-combatant) life, conditioned as it is by the treachery of sexuality. The film positions the possibility of male bonding at a point where sexual warfare has already inflicted a fatal, perhaps inevitable, wound and implies that sexuality - explicitly male sexuality - is a trap from which it is nearly impossible to escape. The "love" between Walter and Keyes can only be spoken of in terms of the jesting and death that are its negation.

In general, the transformation oí Double Indemnity from printed to screen form was a broadening process: Cain's novella is a relatively single-minded word, with a headlong (if careless) stylistic verve and a chronologically straightforward, two-character plot. The Wilder-Chandler version is a disrupted narrative which not only adds a third major character, but which also touches on and suggests a good many more themes and issues than can neatly be resolved with the diegesis, thus leaving a more disquieting impression than Cain's novella. One small shift exemplifies the difference in tenor of the two versions of Double Indemnity: Cain's specifically ironic "General Fidelity Insurance Company" becomes the more fatalistic, daring "Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company" in the film. Where Cain favors a bitter irony, the filmmakers favor an ironic bitterness.

The deeper pessimism of the film version is, quite possibly, a reflection of the period of its making - that is, four years into a catastrophic world war. By then, the fairly straightforward depiction of psycho-sexual tension ("warfare") in the novella probably appeared too simple and singular, and it was therefore reworked into a whole complex nexus of sexual alliances, overt and latent, admissible and unspeakable - the sum of which more accurately mirrored a sense of a world in the grip of fatally destructive, but only partially discernible, human drives.