Upside Down Puzzle

"One of the things about detective stories or murder stories, is that no matter how bad they are, I've never seen anybody walk out on one because it's a riddle, it's a puzzle, and you want to puzzle it out," said Edward Dymtryk, a director from the documentary Film Noir. This quote is a great example of describing the main theme in the film, Double Indemnity. Overall, this movie is surrounded with murder, from beginning to end. This quote touched on both, Phyllis and Neff murdering Mr. Dietrichman, and as Barton Keyes, a claims adjuster or the detective in this case, tries to solve the puzzle. The movie grabs our attention as we anticipate and try to figure out, what is going to come next.

In the documentary, I believe that Kathryn Bigelow's description of the femme fatale best identifies Phyllis from Double Indemnity. She says, "There is a certain kind of male fantasy to this violent woman, who is uncontrollable, kind of like an untamed animal, and mere I think there is something very seductive about that." Phyllis is far from the traditional typical woman that was portrayed back in that time. She was definitely seductive, uncontrollable, violent, and Neff never stood a chance in the beginning. Phyllis also played out the classical traditional femme fatale figure in a way of, "getting the man into bed and then into trouble," quoted by actress Marie Windsor.



Double Indemnity is filled with many "film noir" elements. The movie is generally dark and is filled with scenes of shadows and low-key lighting. I especially noticed the Venetian blinds creating striped shadows, or characters entering from the darkness, and even the amount of light shown on character's faces. The documentary even explained how they would show the female in low angle shots and the male in high angle shots to show visual dominance in Double Indemnity. The choice of music and sound extremely helped create the"film noir" style by matching the highs and lows of the different scenes. It went well with the dramatic and darkness of the film.




I believe color in so-called "neo-noir" movies compared to the black-and-white cinematography in the original style is best described in the film noir documentary. It explained that color brings in a relationship to the real world because the real world is in color, and in black-and-white, it is more abstract and stylized. Christopher Nolan's Memento was filled with the "film noir" style. First, the film starts off with a classic film noir style by introducing murder. Second, the film has a definite femme fatale in the character of Natalie. We later realize that she is actually lying to Leonard and uses his condition to her benefit. Lastly, the movie is shown in a non chronological order, which is also used in classic noir films. Memento is actually shown in two different ways. The color sequences are shown in reverse order and chronologically in black-and-white.



In conclusion, after watching Double Indemnity, I noticed many similarities in Memento. Or would it sound more correct to say Memento was similar to Double Indemnity in many ways? Which ever way you look at it, I believe that Christopher Nolan would agree that both film's overlap and "meet" at some point in dealing with the topic of "film noir."