Sexploiting insurance loopholes in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity.
Spoilers. So just a heads up eh.
Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when I preferred watching a movie over reading a book. Dumbass me. And one of those movies were Double Indemnity, which appeared obscurely in the list of IMDb’s Top 250 greatest movie of all time. That movie introduced me to Billy Wilder’s directing, who still is one of my favourite filmmakers to this day. Hollywood is really running out of ideas these days and rehashing shit like no tomorrow.
Why they couldn’t take a leaf out of older movies and novels such as Double Indemnity is beyond me. The story is not long. The black and white movie is not long, being less than two hours. The book is just over 150 pages and you could finish it one sitting. But the story is heavy and the implications of it, well you can pick that apart for hours on end. It is an underrated American great novel and it shit sure does deserve more attention.
The lovesong of Walter Huff, measuring life in insurance sales
Huff is a good person to talk to when it comes to any kinds of insurance. His job is pretty relaxed as he could go in and out of the office, visit potential clients and make even more sales. I don’t think sales had really changed over the past hundred years. When he visited a client due for a policy renewal, he only met Phyllis Nirdlinger, the young wife of a somewhat successful businessman.
Huff was quick to pick up that Phyllis had some hidden intentions in mind when she right off the bat asked about accident insurance to cover her husband, and not wanting to let her husband know about the purchase of the insurance. Huff was also quick to pick up that Phyllis caught a liking to him and started an affair with her. Caught in the web of things, by her design or by his own, the pair started to plot the demise of Herbert Nirdlinger for maximum insurance payout. Train accident, it seems would pay double, as it is such a rare occurrence. Thus, the double indemnity.
When Herbert broke his foot, Walter and Phyllis designed an intricate murder plan to fake Herbert’s arrival at the train, just so that he can lose his balance from the train and break his neck. For this, Herbert must have already been dead and the body placed at the position of the fall. The plan went well enough, though in the course of the act of murder, Walter and Phyllis built a secret resentment towards each other. Days after, the investigation goes swimmingly but not without a hitch.
Huff’s colleague, Keyes, seem to suspect foul play and to Huff’s fear, hitting nail right on the head on what could have possibly happened. The net is tightening around him and Phyllis. It doesn’t help that Phyllis started seeing her daughter-in-law’s boyfriend, Nino, who might or might not be tangled with the plot. The situation gets even more complicated when Huff started to fall for Lola, the victim’s daughter.
Another great novel of the sham of the American Dream
From the outside, Walter Huff is a middle-class nobody. Insurance (as I would know) is such a run of the mill sort of job that nobody would bat an eyelid of who you are. I work in tech within the insurance industry. When people ask me what I do, and I tell them that I’m in insurance, this would kill any conversation about what I do. I would then joke with them asking how’s their health coverage going to an uncomfortable laughter.
Insurance men were and are like the plagues of the earth. A taboo profession selling a perceptibly necessary thing. I wouldn’t know anybody who doesn’t drive without insurance. Most people I know would have health coverage to some level, even if they are fit marathon runners. Yet, Huff eloquently deciphered what the industry is all about, that at the bottom of it we were no better off than gambling:
“It’s the biggest gambling wheel in the world. It don’t look like it, but it is, from the way they figure the percentage on the 00 to the look on their face when they cash your chips.”
The classic American Dream, in fact, will not stand if it was not stacked on the house of card that is insurance. It is the most mid middle-class job there is. Yet, it is also an industry ripe for the picking. Huff is enigmatic — we are not surprised when he went to Phyllis for a kiss out of nowhere. Yet, when he offered Phyllis to help kill her husband, we are caught off guard. As a wifeless middle-class insurance man, we can understand the former, but the latter comes as a shock. There must have been something stirring in Huff which pushed him to a despicable crime.
But is Huff a representation of the unsatisfied middle-class? Huff who is an expert in his field, make a decent living, yet deeply unsatisfied? One thing we know is that America breeds greed and flawed systems favour the cunning. In a world with economies slowly but surely falling apart, we will see some version of Walter Huff, whether we like it or not. The Ponzi schemers, the multi-level marketing gurus, the crypto billionaires are just mere symptoms of the middle-class systemic failure. Our systems are failing us now, more than ever compared to Cain’s time.
The femme fatale: the nature of sociopathy
Barbara Stanwyck, in the 1944 version of the Billy Wilder movie plays the femme fatale to a tee, from which she won the best actress Oscar for that year. In the movie, she fools the audience with a whole spectrum of emotions which we find in the end were merely shams to get to her objectives. In the novel, we get to see the extent of her damage as she destroyed entire family trees.
What was not addressed in the novel however, was whether she really needed the money from which she benefit from murdering her victims, or whether she had done so for the thrill of it. Phyllis, in a way, has a similar background to Huff. She was a very capable nurse, running her own show. She would not have been financially struggling. Yet, it seemed that her livelihood was nowhere near enough.
The nature of sociopathy is attributed to a combination of physiological and environmental factors, but more on the latter. We can surmise that Phyllis had the innate tendencies to be a sociopath, but was pushed by the environmental factors around her. But what sorts of factors were these? How much of it can be attributed to the American Dream? I suppose it’s hard to say. Walter and Phyllis were really two sides of the same coin, but it’s worthwhile to examine Phyllis briefly from a feminist lens.
Huff is an opportunist who took advantage of the system, while we can argue that Phyllis had always been a victim of a system that had failed her. The scales are tipped unevenly for women, though being a capable nurse she may have been able to live comfortably. But with her intelligence and ambition she had hit her head too soon on the glass ceiling. With her first success, after inheriting the property of her victim, she may have stopped but kept going.
In this case, I’d argue that Phyllis had an addiction for destruction, an appetite to outsmart the system, rather than fighting for her own survival and the fatigue of being the victim to the system. Regardless of what triggered her sociopathic tendencies, Phyllis Nirdlinger is an absolutely fascinating character to decipher. It is a pity thus that the book ran too short. We only get bits and pieces of Phyllis and we are left, as readers do, to fill the gaps ourselves.
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Love the movie, love the book. Cain was a rare author in the transatlantic black and white movie era who had enjoyed the success of both his novels and his films. They certainly don’t make movies as they used to do. Storytelling had been different. Double Indemnity is a true heavyweight as Cain and Raymond Chandler (no louse himself in the context of cinema and crime literature) combined to create a packed dynamite script. But the book, with its cool, succinct prose, an unreliable narrator who could be a bit of a sociopath himself, and an unforgettable femme fatale in Phyllis Nirdlinger make the book as unmissable as the movie.
