Double Psycho Misogyny

Wilder and Hitchcock and their evil smile

Above is a famous still from Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) is sitting in her stopped car, looking straight ahead as, offscreen, her lover and accomplice Walter (Fred MacMurray) strangles her husband as per their intricate, preconceived plot.

Stanwyck is isolated in the dark, her head slightly tilted. There’s just a hint of a smug smile in the curve of her lips, the self-satisfied narrowing of her eyes. Phyllis at other points in the film feigns flirtatiousness, passion, innocence, nervousness. But this is the moment when she looks happiest and most honest—the moment when her plans bear bleak fruit, and Walter, seduced by lust and greed, murders at her behest the man she married.

The above is an even more famous image, from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is making her getaway after stealing $40,000 from the office where she works.

The similarity here is almost certainly intentional. Hitchcock was a Billy Wilder fan in general, and a fan of Double Indemnity in particular. When Wilder’s film came out, Hitchcock took out ads in support of it reading “The two most important words in movies today are ‘Billy Wilder’!” Hitch also admired the score so much that he hired the composer Miklós Rózsa, to work on his own Spellbound.

Hitchcock had seen Double Indemnity and it had directly influenced his own movie making. It’s hard in that context to see Marion’s smile as anything other than a direct quote.

So, what does that quote mean? Phyllis is one of the all-time misogynist caricatures in Hollywood film; she is a heartless, evil, sociopathic seductress. She admits as much herself: “I never loved you, Walter, not you or anybody. I’m rotten to the heart.” She does have one instant of sort-of/maybe affection for Walter and fails to kill him when she could and should. Thanks to that moment of weakness, he murders her instead, and we’re supposed to see that as justice.

Marion is, at least in theory, a much less malevolent figure. She makes a bad choice, lifting a bag of cash from her place of employment in hopes that the windfall will allow her to marry her boyfriend who (unlike Phyllis) she truly loves. She’s not evil; she’s just taken a wrong turn.

And yet, there’s that chilling little smile, as if the spirit of Phyllis is possessing her. Marion in this moment is remembering (in voice over) how she low key flirted with the client who left the money in her care. Like Phyllis, Marion is reveling in her power to seduce men in the pursuit of criminality. It’s a smile of self-contained feminine evil—a smile which suggests that femininity, when self-contained and pursuing its own goals in spite of, and despite of, patriarchy, is definitionally evil.

In the visual reference to Phyllis, then, Hitchcock is suggesting that women who break the (patriarchal) law by acting or plotting in their own interests are essentially possessed by the iconic femme fatale. For women, in this misogynist logic, there are no missteps; there is only the path of demure acquiescence to authority, or the unleashing of the demonic, twisted, sexualized (un)feminine. Marion tastes disobedience, power, and lawlessness, and in doing so she becomes the femme fatale. Which means that, like the femme fatale, she deserves death—and is forthwith dispatched in the infamous shower scene. Though, like Phyllis, she is only killed after she renounces her criminal acts and returns to the patriarchal fold; patriarchy demands its traitors kneel and confess themselves before they are dispatched.

Even after Marion’s death, though, the smile isn’t done. It creeps back into the film at the very end.

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is sitting alone in police custody after being arrested for various murders, including Marion’s. We hear his thoughts—which are in fact his mother’s thoughts. Norman believes he is his mother. The smile, lifted first from Phyllis, then from Marion, is a sign of gendered disorder. Norman has become, not just a woman, but a femme fatale, who revels in her ability to deceive and manipulate. Her harmless appearance (“Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly,”) conceals resentment and murderous, luxurious intent.

If you see Psycho as a story about the continuation of Phyllis’ smile, then not just Marion, but Norman’s mother is a parallel to Wilder’s villain. Like Phyllis, Mother insinuates herself into men, driving them to murder and wrong. Like Phyllis, Mother waits in the background, smiling to herself as the men she controls do her dirty work. Like Phyllis, Mother is a warning and a nightmare about women with agency and power, and about what happens when women no longer respect the patriarchal norms of marriage, government, taboo, gender roles, or even identity. The smile flits from mouth to mouth because, when women loose themselves from patriarchal control, even the bonds of dream, desire, and self are fractured. The evil feminine is not tied down to one body, but peers out of every nook and cranny of a disordered world. Women, and their smiles, become legion.

By referencing Phyllis, Hitchcock signals that this insinuating, creepy feminine can’t even be contained in a single film. But he also tips his own hand, or smile. After all, it is not Marion Crane who watched Double Indemnity. The smile, here, doesn’t actually belong to women. It is elicited at the behest of the directors. It isn’t women who defy patriarchy and infiltrate men; it's male directors who enforce patriarchy by scrawling their own misogyny across the faces of disparate women and disparate films. Phyllis’ smile is Billy Wilders’; Marion’s smile is Hitchcock’s. And what they are smiling at, just like the femme fatales, is their ability to corrupt, and then to murder in such a way that those they have corrupted are blamed.