Order DOUBLE INDEMNITY here
I had done all that for her, and I never wanted to see her again as long as I lived.
That's all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate.
The least scary part of zombie movies is always Patient Zero. He's always some guy worrying about a nosebleed or skin decoloration on a dramatic soundtrack. It's never some kind of supercharged beast meant to scare the pants off the viewers. I never read James M. Cain before DOUBLE INDEMNITY and I thought his ideas explain a lot of things. In literature, Patient Zero is never constrained by the tropes of genre. James M. Cain didn't deliberately try to write noir the same way Raymond Carver didn't wake up one day and said: ''let's invent American Minimalism, yo.'' Cain just had bleak ideas about human nature and thought they would be interesting on paper. He was right. God knows he was absolutely right, but look what he started. James M. Cain traced a clear line between hardboiled literature and noir and DOUBLE INDEMNITY is an interesting Patient Zero case study.
Walter Huff is a shady, opportunistic insurance agent who falls for Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a wealthy client of his. Phyllis has a death wish for her husband and seduces Walter into planning the murder with her. The insurance pays double indemnity if the subject dies accidentally on a railroad, so Walter and Phyllis arrange Mr. Nirdlinger to disappear on a trip. They succeed in their endeavor, but the murder required a hands-on approach that was beyond Walter's ability to emotionally manage. Now he finds himself facing a cold truth: he killed a man for reasons of greed and lust he couldn't get behind anymore. What happens in DOUBLE INDEMNITY is what happens when the illusions you entertain about your own life are shattered and there is nothing left to do but to live with it.
One thing you need to know about DOUBLE INDEMNITY is that it was first serialized in Liberty Magazine. That's why it's such a short novel. The chapters were released issue by issue in Liberty, that's why it feels like such a shapeless story. DOUBLE INDEMNITY underlines the importance of existentialism and Dostoevskian drama in noir. Eluding the law is not the priority for Walter Huff. He's way to0 caught up in his own head for that. Facing a trial and incarceration is a concern for Walter, the way an imminent World War would be for us. There is a fracture in his fragile set of values that he is worried will never heal. Walter Huff is not a strong judeo-christian archetype like other men of his era and yet he keeps looking everywhere for confirmation that he is. For things he believes are due to him.
That's where I believe DOUBLE INDEMNITY is so pertinent in this day and age. Eluding the law is a romantic fantasy in literature, the same way slaying dragons and saving the girl are. It's the basis of the antihero. Existential validation is another ball game, though. It's something so contemporary. Since survival stopped being a struggle in the Occidental society, giving meaning to one's existence has become a priority. Facebook is full of people begging others to acknowledge they matter. That's how DOUBLE INDEMNITY works and it defined how a successful noir novel works. It's easy to tell tales of shootouts and car chases, but it's difficult to draw characters who want something precise out of it, aside from the cynical cliché of getting richer. Walter Huff desperately wants to matter for a woman, and that enables him to be manipulated and to talk himself into the utmost immoral pursuits.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY is (more or less) the Patient Zero of noir. It's short, low key and there were scarier beasts written down the line. Nonetheless, it was a fascinating reading. It exposes how indebted the genre is to existential philosophy and how contemporary the genre is. It's created out of concerns that didn't exist a century ago. James M. Cain invented something that's been twisted and turned and ridiculously overanalyzed in the last few years, but his ideas are clear on paper. DOUBLE INDEMNITY is a cautionnary tale in looking for validation in the wrong places. Projecting your inner, unspoken desires on someone else is a dangerous game to play because it puts you at the mercy of somebody else. It's also portraying men as a weak and malleable gender, which in my knowledge was a first back then. DOUBLE INDEMNITY survived father time for all the right reasons.