Double Indemnity - J. Miley

Nothing denotes a noir film like the lighting. It is always dark and gritty to the point of almost not being able to see what is in the shot, like this one. The shot is lit low-key (the staple of film noir) with only exactly what is needed. The only things lit are the sidewalk, Neff and a building in the background.

This shot is just after Neff has changed clothes and gone through the garage so that Charlie could see him leave the apartment. Now he is walking to the drug store to gets some dinner. At first, just before this shot, Neff is very optimistic that everything went perfectly. But in this shot, he tells Keyes that he knew something went wrong. He could “no longer hear his footsteps;”it was “the walk of a dead man.” This walk to death is very evident in this shot due to the lighting. Everything around Neff is dark; the only things visible are him and his path, which consequently leads to total darkness. This shot flips the logic of the beginning of the film in a way. At the very beginning, it seems that Neff is hurt but do not know how badly or how he got that way. In this shot though, we see Neff’s path (the “how he got there”) but do not know exactly where it leads; only that it is not going to be good and possibly to the bullet with his name on it.

Another major element of this shot concerning the lighting is the way that Neff is only half lit. Throughout the movie, Neff is depicted as the quintessential antihero- the good-guy doing the wrong thing for the wrong-if-almost-understandable reasons. At the beginning, he refuses to help Ms. Dietrichson, but comes around because of his feeling for her. After that, he barrels through the plan “straight down the line” as if he thought about it too much he would chicken out. Towards the end, he tries to escape his fate, to get off the trolley, but he cannot. Eventually he has to own up to his actions. This turmoil of the antihero is depicted in Neff in this shot. Only half of the character is lit- even in his darkest hour (having just killed a man), there is still some good in him. Like Two-Face from the Batman, Neff is almost split in two not only by the lighting but also by his wardrobe. While his suit is lightly colored (like a traditional hero), his hat is dark (much like the villains of westerns). His dual nature is pictured in full effect as he walks to his own demise.