Double Indemnity - Femme Fatale

       During the era of film noir, roughly between 1930 and mid 1940s, women in society were generally seen as housewives, cooks, maids, mothers and not seen as all that significant in the role of society besides the roles already chosen for them. Most of the time they are seen as fragile characters or seen as a damsel in distress. What is interesting about Double Indemnity is that while the women are shown as the housewives, they also hold an underlying unusual quality. This quality was one of a darker nature, known as "femme fatale", and was portrayed by the character of Phyllis Dietrichson.
Femme fatale can be described as a beautiful and seductive woman with a sense of mystery about her.         A femme fatale brings the men who desire her to compromising, disastrous situations, and most of the time to their demise. This is the role played by Phyllis Dietrichson. She is a strong woman, confident in herself, and this is evident when seeing her for the first time. Walter Neff, an insurance salesman comes to the Dietrichson household to discuss auto insurance with Mr. Dietrichson, but when let inside the house by the main find that Mr. Dietrichson is not home, but there to greet him is Mrs. Dietrichson, standing at the top of the balcony in her towel, unfazed by the fact that another man was viewing her in such a way. When she comes down to meet Walter, then dressed, she discusses accident insurance, and right away Walter sees through her, and calls her out on her desires for her husband to be dead. Eventually, through both of their lusts and desires, they devise a plan to kill Mr. Dietrichson by making it seem like he fell off of a train to get a Double Indemnity sum from the accident insurance that Mr. Dietrichson was unware that Walter and Phyllis had made for him.
       At first, Walter and Phyllis's plan seemed to go without a hitch, and it seemed as though their murder would go unnoticed. But the men and the insurance company begin to analyze the death and come up with the exact idea of how Mr. Dietrichson was murdered, they were just unsure of who was the accomplice alongside with Phyllis. Mr. Dietrichson's daughter Lola begins to meet with Walter occasionally and reveals that not only did Lola think that Phyllis killed her father, but that Phyllis was responsible for the death of her mother as well. This accusation brings Walter to realize that maybe Phyllis is not who she seems and does not truly love him.
        Through a series of events, Walter comes to realize that Phyllis will be the fall of him, and that
she needed to be put to an end. He goes to visit her and she reveals that she never loved him and had been using him all along to get rid of her husband, and how she wanted to get rid of Lola and how she had killed Mr. Dietrichson's first wife. Phyllis shoots Walter as an attempt to kill him, but only hits his shoulder. Walter then shoots Phyllis and leaves the scene. The ending moments of the film are of Walter talking out his whole story in his boss Keyes's office.
         These chain of events really illuminate Phyllis Dietrichson's character as a morally corrupt woman who holds great desires and is willing to take down anyone who gets in her way. This is what really defines those known as the femme fatale. The femme fatale idea goes against what the typical role of women is seen as and is evident throughout the film of Double Indemnity.