Describing their first encounter, Walter Neff, the narrator and central male figure of the film, immediately verbalizes the way Phyllis is meant to be perceived both by the male characters and by the audience. Not surprisingly, he is not the only male character to view her this way. She is still an object that he wants to possess, to have power over, so that she will always be there for him to look at. At the same time he does not quite elevate her to the level of divinity. On an even darker level, she is definitely more desirable than his ill, older wife, and therefore serves as a welcome replacement. 1 He is incapable of accepting the obvious evidence pointing to the fact that this beautiful object murdered his first wife, she is blameless by default because she is beautiful and desirable. His admiration of her physical attractions seems to be on the borderline between what is described by Mulvey as “fetishistic scopophilia” and voyeurism.
He feels no need to provide for her after his death.Īlthough he is mostly absent from the film (in a physical sense), we can still feel the type of look he casts on his new wife from her own words and from an analysis of her position in the family. When Dietrichson is no longer around to enjoy her, she may as well cease to exist. She is a beautiful plaything, an expensive possession, a walking work of art to be looked at and shown off, but definitely not entitled to a life of her own. Phyllis on the other hand, is not a human being. Lola is his family, his flesh and blood, and he wants to make sure she will be well provided for. The sad truth is that he couldn’t care less what happens to Phyllis after he dies.
It is clear she has no true affection for her husband, especially when she begins to plot his murder in the hope of getting his insurance money. She is a beautiful and alluring woman, barely older than Lola, her husband’s daughter from a previous marriage. There is no doubt in Double Indemnity, that Phyllis Dietrichson, the dissatisfied wife of a wealthy older man is being sexually objectified both by the imagery of the film and by her position in relation to the other characters. The highly Freudian approach described by Laura Mulvey is not necessarily obvious or relevant in every film and genre, but it is very helpful in understanding Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, which vividly illustrates some of the points made by both Laura Mulvey and Molly Haskell. A very similar approach is taken by Molly Haskell in her review of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In her article “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey describes a way of analyzing and understanding cinema from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective.
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