Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Once the set was ready for shooting on Double Indemnity (…) I would go around
and overturn a few ashtrays in order to give the house in which Phyllis lived an
appropriately grubby look because she was not much of a housekeeper. I worked
with the cameraman to get dust into the air to give the house a sort of musty look.
We blew illuminate particles into the air and when they floated down into a shaft of
light it looked just like dust. (Horton 2001:103)
This modus operandi translates the kind of spirit that depressed sectors of American
society were experiencing during this period, and so dark streets would become emblems
of alienation, or the way characters would gaze at certain objects explained their obsessions
and be metonymic of the environments they lived in. These cinematic and visual
circumstances are on the one hand a reflection of a common ethos that constantly evoke the
dark side of American society with a clear cultural and social mainstream but also, as a
production value, a stylised vision of the country, on the other. This noir sensibility
pertains therefore to a cycle of films that share a set of visual stylists that was consistently
imposed over time. When Schrader states that “style determines the theme in every film”, I
would also add that noir style stands on its own and should not be regarded as being the
result of a unique body of films, as Part III proposes to argue.
Finally, “the wartime environment and its production constraints directly
contributed to the psychological paranoia and claustrophobia of Wilder’s film noir” (Biesen
2005:109). The supermarket scene from Double Indemnity (see fig. 66) stands as a very
clear example: Phyllis and Walter meet in one of the aisles since they cannot afford to be
observed in a normal rendezvous. This is a very expressive frame, in which we barely see
Phyllis’s face wearing dark sunglasses (perhaps working as a major symbol to shield her
eyes and her possible hidden motives from Neff) and, almost in an another dimension, tall
Walter, trying to glance over at her while she looks straight ahead. This scene is
extraordinary: we see both characters physically close together and yet their eyes can never
meet in a moment when they are conspiring to kill Phyllis’s husband. Literally now, in the
background, we see an array of “Quality Foods” products displayed harmoniously (the
mise-en-scène is very suggestive showing the two characters trapped in between the two
aisles foreshadowing their physical and moral entrapment and consequent ending) which,
during a wartime of rationing, seem almost too mundane to be looked at. During
production of the film, as a matter of fact, Paramount was forced to patrol the studio
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