Avenging Angels

Travis Alexander considers what Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” can teach us about Luigi Mangione and the insurance crisis.

By Travis AlexanderMay 15, 2025

• Politics

• Film

• Noir

WHEN CHRIS WALLACE asked Bernie Sanders in 2019, during the run-up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, whether Americans who liked their insurance wouldn’t reject Medicare for All, the Vermonter responded with characteristic terseness. “People don’t like insurance companies,” he said, “they like their doctors.” It’s tempting to say that the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose company represents the cold sacrifice of human life on the altar of profit, has revealed the truth of Sanders’s diagnosis most clearly.

While the manifesto allegedly penned by suspect Luigi Mangione hits all the usual anti-corporatist beats, we can’t really know at this stage the full scope of his motivations. What we can trace more closely are the reasons so many Americans are embracing him. He supplies the internet—as good a representation as any of the collective we—with an avenging angel from a self-aware proletariat that rightly aspires to be liberated from the various depredations and indignities of insurance. Which isn’t to say that we’re thinking of this emancipation in rational terms, as a step toward Medicare for All or another single-payer model. Those are policy substitutions. Our fantasy is more inchoate, more abstract, more romantic: just being out from under the boot of the system itself, of the need to be insured. So of course, some of the glee is pragmatic and political, and some is, well, libidinal. Some is just the fantasy of escape.

That fantasy isn’t exactly new. The dream of breaking free from a world that needs insurance—often by using insurance—drives plenty of canonical noirs. Most salient among them would be The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Killers (1946), and Nightfall (1956). This convergence across history isn’t even all that surprising. The era that spawned film noir isn’t so different from our present day. Hard-boiled detective fiction emerged in the wake of the Great Depression; noir followed about a decade behind. Both reflected an America where fantasies of plenty, destiny, and exceptionalism collided, in newly crowded cities, with hard realities of scarcity, anomie, and trauma. On Black Tuesday—October 29, 1929, when the country plunged into the Great Depression—Americans learned where unfettered Gilded Age capitalism could lead. That day, the US stock market crashed due to reckless speculation leading to an evaporation of market confidence that happened, as Hemingway might say, gradually, then all at once. The ensuing decade marked an unsurprising rise of leftist sentiment, but also a doubling-down on the fantasy of self-reliance that often took the form of fraud and confidence men. The centering of detectives, private or police, suggests an unfulfilled longing for order in a world rightfully deemed lawless—even, if need be, through hyperbolic patriarchal force.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we’re living through that era’s uncanny reprisal. As after the Depression, grift and confidence are exploding. The rise of the influencer, after all, reflects a strategy for thriving in a gig economy where old-style careers replete with benefits, effective tenure, and pension are effectively defunct. Influencing, in other words, is just a new take on an old-fashioned hustle.

Thompson’s murder follows naturally from this political climate, specifically the unique anger at health insurers, which are evidently indifferent to human death and life. But even more, Mangione’s alleged crime—and the collective cultural joy that it’s inspired—marks a desire to be liberated from the world of insurance as such. The existence of insurance, in other words, stands as proof of an essentially brutal world in which life is exposed, disposed, and surrendered. The fact that insurance is even on offer means that our safety, security, and health are not promised, that it is incumbent on us individually to guard them. If we were safe, we wouldn’t need insurance; the concept itself would be useless as a business proposition. What we want deep down is not better insurance. We want no insurance.

This notion is the dramatic engine of Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir classic Double Indemnity, adapted (with help from Raymond Chandler) from a 1936 novel of the same name by James M. Cain. That text, too, turns on fantasies of murder, insurance, and escape—escape from a system represented by insurance companies more than by the general fantasy of simply striking it rich.

Going back about 80 years and examining how that fantasy plays out in Wilder’s picture promises a way of understanding not just the enduring role of insurance in the American psyche but, more importantly, the likely role Thompson’s murder could play in changing the place of insurance in our lives. It likely won’t be much of a spoiler at this juncture to say it’s not a fantasy that turns out well. Most noirs end unhappily.

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Double Indemnity follows a Pacific All-Risk Insurance salesman named Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). On a house call, Walter meets Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck); he reminds her that her husband’s car insurance has lapsed. “I’d hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you’re not fully covered,” Walter pushes. Phyllis asks Walter what kinds of insurance he sells. “All kinds. Fire, earthquake, theft, public liability, group insurance, industrial stuff, and so on right down the line.”

They flirt; later, they meet again. Phyllis alleges that her husband is a cruel man. Around her husband (Tom Powers), Phyllis claims, she “can’t go on,” “can’t breathe.” Even if she killed him and had to hang for it, it would be “better than going on this way.” She and Walter cook up a plan to take out life insurance in her husband’s name, including a “double indemnity” policy that will pay twice as much if he dies on a train, and then to kill him that way. As Walter explains, such provisions are added into policies “as a sort of come-on for the customers. That means they pay double on certain accidents. The kind that almost never happen.” He confides in Phyllis, “We’re hitting it for the limit, baby. That’s why it’s got to be the train.” Once they hit that limit, they can flee together and live happily ever after on the insurance money. She accedes: “It’ll be the train, Walter. Just the way you want it. Straight down the line.”

First, they have to scheme to get Mr. Dietrichson’s signature on the policy. Walter shows up the next night when Dietrichson’s daughter Lola can witness him signing documents; in reality, his signature is being sneaked onto the bottom of the life insurance policy. Before they meet to accomplish the deed, Phyllis confides worry to her new paramour: “This is it, Walter. I’m shaking like a leaf. But it’s straight down the line for both of us. I love you, Walter.” So, they then kill him and transport his corpse in the trunk of his car. Walter boards the train posing as Dietrichson, jumps from the back of the railcar, and meets Phyllis at the car, where they extract Dietrichson’s body and leave it on the tracks. Once the corpse is discovered, Walter’s company prepares to review the insurance payout. At which point, Walter’s hypervigilant boss Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) and the owner of the company, Norton (Richard Gaines), become suspicious and investigate the death. Insurance claims, Keyes says to Walter, “are not just forms and statistics and claims for compensation. They’re alive, they’re packed with drama, with twisted hopes and crooked dreams.” And he sees something crooked in the Dietrichson claim.

The genteel dupe Norton (whom Keyes derides as “striped-pants”) is suspicious too, but his hypothesis runs to suicide, which would allow the company to deny Phyllis’s payout. Interrogating her, he asks, “Had your husband been depressed or moody lately, Mrs. Dietrichson? Did he have financial worries, for instance?” “He was perfectly all right and I don’t know of any financial worries,” she replies. Norton remains convinced that her husband took his own life. After Phyllis leaves, Keyes lets Norton have it: “You ought to take a look at the statistics on suicide sometime. You might learn a little something about the insurance business. […] You’ve never read an actuarial table in your life, have you?” Keyes is referring to the documents maintained and jealously guarded by insurance companies. Also called a “mortality table,” the actuarial table allows insurance companies to predict a policyholder’s likely lifespan, and in turn how much the company might theoretically have to pay out to/for them in the duration of their policy. Invoking it, Keyes is accusing Norton of not understanding the most basic internal machinery of the insurance industry.

Keyes knows from the tables how rarely people jump from moving trains to kill themselves. He had explained to Walter earlier, before the murder, how he—unlike the toff Norton—came by his wisdom: “To me, a claims man is a surgeon, and that desk is an operating table. And those pencils are scalpels and bone chisels. […] A claims man, Walter, is […] a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor, all in one.” So, because there’s “a bloodhound and a cop” on their trail, Walter and Phyllis have to communicate covertly. He tries to get Phyllis to drop her claim to save them, but she’s hearing nothing of it: “[N]obody’s pulling out. We went into this together, we’re coming out at the end together. It’s straight down the line for both of us, remember?”

But Walter’s problems don’t end there. Eventually, he learns that Phyllis has been two-timing him with the younger rake, Lola’s beau Nino Zachetti (Byron Barr). Maybe it’s Nino whom she actually plans to run off with. So Walter confronts her: he will beat Phyllis to the double cross. He’s the one who will pin things on Nino.  Phyllis shoots Walter once, and then Walter returns fire twice at close range. A wounded Walter then hobbles back, in the middle of the night, to Keyes’s office, where he records a voice memo to his boss admitting to everything. Keyes walks in as he’s finishing his confession. Though Walter attempts to escape, he collapses, and the two wait for the ambulance. He likely won’t make it.

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Phyllis and Walter’s plan, then—at least what Walter believes their plan to be—is to use insurance to get away from their dark, dirty Los Angeles: in other words, to use insurance to get away from a world of insurance. The name of Walter’s company characterizes this world—Pacific All-Risk—a West Coast where everything is risk, all is perilous possibility. So too does the company’s owner, Norton, give us a sense of this universe when he’s interrogating Phyllis in front of Keyes and Walter. In a world where all is risk, Norton suggests, there is always something in a claim that gives pause. So, Walter might refer to being “fully covered” when trying to sell auto insurance, but full protection is its own “come-on”: something that’s about as likely as falling off the back of a train. And to the extent that one could approach it, Phyllis is right that you’d go broke paying for it.

In fact, the most accurate portrait of insurance in all its dehumanizing glory comes from its truest evangelist: Keyes. For him, claims—as noted above—are more than just statistics and forms; he believes they encapsulate the drama of our lives. And so they do, insofar as they represent human need, loss, and hope: they are petitions for mercy. But Keyes gives away the game of the industry when he characterizes them as “crooked.” A request for redress is for Keyes—and for the profession he represents—inherently a con, a grift. It thus makes sense that he describes the adjuster’s métier as one of ferreting out deception, taking, if necessary, “scalpels and bone chisels” to the living dreams arrayed on his desk. So there’s hidden truth in Keyes’s admonition for Norton to examine the suicide statistics and “learn a little something about the insurance business.” As Keyes’s phrasing makes clear, there is an essential link between the business of insurance and suicide. The more you understand its mechanics, the more you see how one might want to kill themself.

So why wouldn’t Phyllis and Walter want out of a world saturated by risk and leading to suicide—a West Coast anything but pacific? In a bit of classic hard-boiled dialogue, they even develop a lovers’ expression to capture their pact and future freedom: “straight down the line,” meaning, perhaps, that their liberation is assured and propulsive, on a linear glide path. They say it over and over, an incantation almost.

If it’s true that going “straight down the line” could plausibly refer to going on a clear journey away from Los Angeles, Phyllis’s husband, and so on, it does so in a way that contains within it a curious connotation. Recall Keyes accusing Norton of having “never read an actuarial table in [his] life.” Insofar as it allows them to set a premium rate for a customer to both defray their eventual claim costs and to leave room, ideally, for company profit, the actuarial table is the signal technology of the insurance industry.

But tables must be read. And you read a table by going straight down the line—with names or human characteristics (morbidities, locations, genders) on one side, and corresponding values on the other. In other words, the logic of insurance, the method or operating code of insurance, beats at the heart of the language Walter and Phyllis use to articulate their escape from a world of all risk. Insurance—the idea of insurance, the logic of insurance—has wormed its way into the very fantasy of its escape or defeat. The fox wasn’t so much let into the henhouse; to stretch the aphorism a bit, the fox designed the henhouse. Or think, too, of the fact that on his original house call, Walter enumerated all the varieties of insurance the company sold, “all kinds […] right down the line.” Right down the line—again. Like a Coen brothers character who hears an expression and then starts automatically repeating it elsewhere out of context, Walter’s articulation of his and Phyllis’s catchphrase was always (under)written by insurance.

Of course, since this is a classic noir, their dream doesn’t come to pass. It wasn’t even their plan. Walter was only ever Phyllis’s useful idiot. Put differently, she had taken out her own insurance policy in the form and person of Nino. Her bets (on Walter) were always hedged, or, in the lexicon of the industry, “reinsured,” even as it’s left ambiguous whether she ever intended to leave with him. In playing both sides, Phyllis had secured her risk. And she’s right, too, to characterize Walter’s final plan to hang things on Nino as insurance all over again: “Is what you’ve got cooked up for tonight any better?” she asks him before the final exchange of bullets. And so her escape was never in reality an evasion of insurance, even if she did plan to run off to a romantic locale; it was the consummation of insurance, managed risk all the way down the table’s final fatal line.

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So, Double Indemnity is a deliciously depressing tale not only because its protagonists die in the end. It’s also a disheartening story because it reveals that there’s really no getting out from under insurance, which has wormed its way even into our dreams and fantasies. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made clear, even the fantasy of being outside the total dominion of language is only thinkable in and through language. Risk is all. The events of the last couple months therefore present an ideal time to revisit Wilder’s film, if only to gain a realistic vantage on both what the United Healthcare CEO’s murder represents (a hope to live beyond insurance) and what it augurs (that we can’t).