Double Indemnity: Necessity, Grace, Confessions

First of all, anything that I write about movies will contain spoilers. I really liked last night's movie watching experience because before hand, a film critic got up and explained what happens. Then we watched it. Then we discussed it.

Necessity and Chance:

Leon Kass kept pushing the audience to think about the relationship between chance and necessity. On the one hand, the theme is an insurance fraud perpetrated by an insurance salesman (he likens himself to the man behind the roulette wheel who is supposed to watch for cheaters, and, in the meantime, cooks up the perfect scam himself). Insurance is a sort of allowance for chance and managing of its effects. Keyes, on the other hand, is the guys who looks out for fraud--for people who've attempted to hide their actions as chance. Keyes' action is moral--he calls himself a "a doctor and a bloodhound... and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one." What is this, if not a picture of God? We see the image of the hound of heaven, the justice of God, and even a little bit of His mercy.

Walter and Phyllis' actions you might think of as the opposite of love (I found their kiss at the beginning to be absolutely unpersuasive as any sort of romance, even from Walter's perspective)--whereas love is open and risk taking and vulnerable, they are calculating and controlling and precise in the murder (whose implementation has been reduced to rote memorization). Once they commit the murder, the language turns to necessity. Keyes says to Walter about the murders he is pursuing, "They've committed a *murder*! And it's not like taking a trolley ride together where they can get off at different stops. They're stuck with each other and they got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it's a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery." Ironically, in order to avoid this necessity of ending up at the cemetery with Phyllis, he seeks to control everything even further by shooting her. He squashes out love as any sort of excuse and reveals himself as a vicious man who is also narcissistic.

Grace:

There is always the question of who is redeemed at the end. Phyllis has been, the entire time, using Walter for his insurance expertise. She shoots him toward the end but doesn't kill him. He turns around and walks toward her and she can't shoot him again. This is the first little glimmer that she has a heart or could love someone. What's interesting is that she doesn't care whether Walter believes her or not; she doesn't demand that anyone recognize that she has a change of heart, even a little one--so it clearly isn't just a convenient change of heart. She simply wants him to hold her. And then he kills her. So that's Phyllis.

Well, Walter does not finish his plan, which could have at least temporarily allowed him to avoid being discovered. Somehow he loses his guts or gets some goodness or something and doesn't let Nino show up at her house and get caught by the police. Rather, he gives Nino a nickel to call Lola. This means that maybe Phyllis' love and change got to him a bit.

Confessions:

Additionally, there is the confession aspect of the film, which is absolutely central. Walter feels compelled to confess to Keyes through the dictaphone. It is this confession, in fact, which means that he gets caught. The energy he spends recounting the whole story could have gotten him over the boarder. Keyes finds him in Keyes' office recording his confession. When Walter passes out on the way to the elevator, Keyes calls the ambulance and also asks for the police. There's something about Walter that it seems wanted to be caught. And there's regret in the way that he confesses.

What stuck out to me most was how much the narration in the film reminded me of Augustine's Confessions. The way that Walter talks about Keyes when he's confessing is almost as if he's omniscient: "maybe you already knew that it was me and were just playing with me." And, in a sense, he is--as soon as the little man in Keyes' chest who tells him that a claim is fraudulent starts to react, the audience knows that Walter and Phyllis will get caught. The catching, though, is slow; it isn't immediate. This is the hound of heaven idea--in this slow chasing that God does of sinners; there is time for them to regret and allow themselves to be caught (and there is mercy there).

Walter and Keyes are friends--they sarcastically acknowledge their love for each other, but this admission is obviously true. They light each other's cigar/cigarette. Keyes sees Walter's intelligence; Walter sees Keyes' kind heart.

Walter: "Know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes? I'll tell ya. 'Cause the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya."
Keyes: "Closer than that, Walter."
Walter: "I love you, too."
...
Keyes: "Now that's enough out of you, Walter. Now get outta here before I throw my desk at you."
[looks in his pocket for a match]
Walter: takes a match of his own and lights Keyes' cigar] "I love you, too."
[voiceover]
"I really did, too, you old crab. Always yelling your head off, always sore at everybody. You never fooled me with your song and dance, not for a second. I kinda always knew that behind all the cigar ashes on your vest was a heart as big as a house."

And this, too, reminds me of the Confessions and of God--He hates sin, right, but he's still loathe to find sins in those He created (this is the judgment and mercy of God being attached to each other).