While other authors of crime fiction focus on tough-guy detectives, James M. Cain wrote about ordinary people who commit horrible crimes out of greed. In Double Indemnity, the femme fatale’s body is beautiful and grotesque, for uncontrolled female sexuality may become, in Julia Kristeva’s words, “a dark, abominable and degraded power.” Cain’s Phyllis Nirdinger, enamored of the beauty of funerals, embodies Death incarnate. She is what Kristeva would call a “carnival puppet of murderous sociality”
(Kristeva 165-68) for her lover cannot resist and thus also participates in her lust for murder; he succumbs to his symptom (Zizek, Looking Awry 48-67), becoming her fellow-murderer in a reckless pursuit of pleasure /jouissance under the name of romance (without love).
The main motif in Cain’s novels is the mask of female domesticity. In Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, the un-satisfied housewives plot to kill off their older, impotent husbands with the help of their comparatively young and potent lovers. Female sexuality in both these novels is a signifying catalyst of doom – “an agent of (evil) fate . . . rendering it possible for the (male) subject to locate himself within the texture of symbolic fate” (Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 169). In Cain’s noir universe, all
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the problems start from home, as women who are trapped in the cage of patriarchal domesticity become dangerous murderesses who make use of their bodies (as well as their sex appeal) to get the things they want. Femininity here is performative while masculinity is reflexive: the femme fatales modify their bodies to represent the
womanhood desired by men, while men who surround themselves with femme fatales have their gender-based positions determined by symbolic interactions. That is, they look at themselves through the eyes of femme fatales once they choose to be their accomplices in murder. Thus these men and women are caught in a web made of their own excessive desire for each other until death tears them apart (amour fou).
James M. Cain establishes the femme fatale archetype in the noir genre with the characters of Phyllis in Double Indemnity and Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice, women who are concretized in celluloid by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner during the 1940s. The screen images of Stanwyck and Turner personify female
self-identification- at-a-distance. According to Kaja Silverman in Threshold of the Visible World, female self-identity is torn by the opposition of ideality and abjection in Lacan’s mirror stage--where the self creates a self-same otherness from which it is alienated—and to bridge this duality “feminine props” are often required (14-44). In Double Indemnity, the feminine props are Barbara Stanwyck’s sleazy platinum-blonde bangs, colossal emerald ring and anklet with the name Phyllis inscribed on it. In The Postman Always Rings Twice they are Lana Turner’s lip gloss, through which she commands the
gentleman’s attention, and the wide variety of lily-white dresses Turner wears throughout the film—which constitute an ironic contrast with the lurid aura of lust and gore (death
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dubiously embellished in pure ivory, given a purely white nuance). In particular, the image of Phyllis in Double Indemnity, molded by director Billy Wilder and designer Edith Head (who was the main stylist for the Hitchcockian blondes during the fifties), has given a signature look to film noir, for the Phyllis of the original novel has now been officially given a socio-semiotic body through cinematic adaption. Endorsed by Hollywood, the bodies of Cain’s femme fatales have become tokens of exchange, of exchanges within the patriarchal discourses of film noir, as they have been made for the purpose(s) of “deviance/exploitation/ liberation” (Waskul and Vannin 10-12).
Later on, neo-noir screenwriter/director David Lynch readopted the signature look of Phyllis in Double Indemnity in his 1995 film Lost Highway, where now Patricia Arquette is seen dressing and acting like Phyllis and female-female transgression is expressed in a series of relatively explicit moving images . In 2014, Eva Green claims that her
performance in Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For was partly inspired by Phyllis: Green wears a see-through silky night-gown that resembles the one worn by Phyllis, and holds a pistol in a defiant fashion just like Phyllis in the final sex-driven confrontation in Double Indemnity. Both Lost Highway and A Dame to Kill For are presenting, materializing the socio-semiotic body of Phyllis Nirdinger in another set of stories that feature the same ingredients created by Cain: murderous sociality; female flesh as a token that can be exchanged for money, wealth and even death; and man’s self-conflicted coveting of
adultery (his hating to be cuckolded but loving to cuckold another man, another husband).
Borde and Chaumeton define film noir in terms of “a state of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their psychological bearings”: the black and white
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images evoke “a chiaroscuro space” that envelops “a specific sense of malaise” (13). This loss of one’s bearings, of the reader’s bearings in Cain’s case, is aggravated by the
perversion of female sexuality. The film version of Double Indemnity (1944), scripted by Raymond Chandler, harbors a “chiaroscuro space” of “optical composition” in which dialogues between the characters are the main engine of the motion picture while the femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck) is kept majestically at a distance plotting her mind-games of seduction, adultery and even murder. In the mechanism of “optical composition,” there’s a gap or lack between the gazer and the gazed-at object, and voyeurism derives from this lack or in-between space: therefore the gazer can maintain his position as the “all-perceiving subject” (Marks 170-71). In the universe of classic noir, the female figure is isolated within the gap between subject and object, while the tension of noir malaise is created by the reader’s identification with the story, the narrative (Chandler’s script based on Cain’s novel) as the viewer immerses him/ herself in the words spoken by the protagonists . In brief, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) is an embodiment of classic noir “optical composition”—and here the destructive libido of Phyllis Nirdinger is forcefully sanitized by the lack or gap-between while her body-image is fetishized into bits and pieces, made ready to be visually consumed by the gaze of her audience.
In 1981, Cain’s Double Indemnity was adapted as a film for the second time: the movie was called Body Heat starring Kathleen Turner and William Hurt. Emancipated from the restraints of the Hays Code28, Body Heat is a piece of neo-noir in which the
28 The Hays code was out in 1934 to eliminate the pictures with poisonous messages which might
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intervention of colors shatters the sense of onscreen unity, and in this disrupted cosmos of neo-noir “the feminine other” and “the ethnic other” prevail (qtd. in Giltre 12). For now Kathleen Turner sheds Barbara Stanwyck’s fetishized 1940s garments and embraces her illicit sexual freedom in a couple of explicit love-scenes with William Hurt. Here Phyllis is no longer kept in a distance, and the lack-in-between cancelled while the flesh of “the feminine other” is laid bare or even harshly eroticized in director Lawrence Kasdan’s
“haptic composition” (Marks 147-62). In the domain of “haptic composition,” the viewer loses his/her sense of “psychological bearing” due to his/her “bodily identification” with the femme fatale, as if he/she were being invited to take part in the love scenes boldly projected up on the silver screen. In Body Heat, “the feminine other” triumphs in/with her
“Dionysian abandon” as Phyllis takes it all and leaves her male victims in distress. (In the novel, the guilty lovers are sentenced to the gas chamber. In the forties movie, Phyllis and Walter shoot each other so that both die.) From Double Indemnity (1944) to Body Heat (1981), then, we may witness the changing-through-time (and through film history) of the bodily representations of female sexuality.