Double Indemnity

In reading several articles about this film ahd how it realate

Why aren’t Phyllis and Walter satisfied with their lives?

In Double Indemnity, Walter and Phyllis are two lonely people living hum-drum lives with no sense of fulfillment and little to look forward to. Phyllis is nothing more than a trophy wife playing second fiddle to her husband’s daughter from his first wife. After killing his first wife, Phyllis thought that by marrying a man of means she would be the benefactor of his life insurance policy. As it turns out, he names his daughter as his benefactor and she is relegated to being ‘eye candy’ and used as a sex toy. My guess is that any sex in the marriage is robotic and for the sole pleasure of her husband. She feels powerless over her fate. Walter is an insurance salesman whose future is somewhat bleak. He doesn’t have much money, has no relationship, and receives little praise for his work. the characters take themselves very seriously, and it is characterized by shadows, low lights, silhouettes, and moral ambiguity.

What do they want?

Knowing what Walter and Phyllis lack in their lives, leads us to what they want, what they think will bring meaning and happiness into their disillusioned worlds. Phyllis wants to be seen as more than a sex object with an alluring ankle bracelet. She wants her voice to be heard and for it to carry some weight in decisions. She wants the power to determine her own fate and thinks that will come with the acquisition of money. She desires a man to love, satisfy, and respect her, taking her out of her sad darkness and out into the brightness and beauty that has eluded her. Walter is also looking for love, respect, and, of course, great sex, and he believes these can be bought with sufficient money. In addition, he wants, to gain approval from his boss, that stamp of success. As said by the gentleman who walked into the office looking for something, they both want to have access to everything on the ‘upper shelf.’

Is this what a Nihilist world would look like?

No, life in a totally Nihilist world would be much worse than that in Double Indemnity. In fact, I didn’t really consider this to be hard core nihilistic because they did try to find some kind of shallow meaning in their lives and acted as if they felt they were free to determine their own fate. I think a totally nihilistic world at best would be total chaos with destruction to the point of he non-existence of any civility. I imagine tribes fighting tribes to obtain power and goods followed by infighting within the tribes for the same. I remember teaching my second-graders about the dinosaur extinction which occurred when blockage of the sun killed all vegetation, causing the plant eaters to die out, followed by the meat eaters. With humans, it would be more like a sequence of classes of people dying out from the most powerless to those with the greatest power, whether it be physical or financial. Productive relationships would disappear because there would be no moral sense or appreciation of working as teams or being fair to all. Come to think of it, the world would deteriorate to an even worse point given that those people who previously had a GOD to give them a form of faith that held them together would lose their meaning in life and any hope for being with their creator.. Institutions of learning or justice, would cease to exist because there would be no quest for meaning or desire to find balance and equality in society. Life would revert back to a level lower to that of animals, because animals are at least driven by instincts to protect their own. Animals do not have the egos that push humans to gluttonous behavior, unbridled pride, greed of unnecessary things, a lust for sex that isn’t for breeding, or anger that becomes rage for the sake of revenge. We know by watching the daily news that we humans too often either cannot, or choose not to, exercise the will power necessary to engage in enough temperance, patience, charity, humility, or diligence to avoid violence and destruction. I guess intelligence, without “that little man inside us,” becomes a moot point in a nihilistic world.

How do you see nihilism in your life?

I have some nihilist tendencies, the first being that I’m an atheist.