In Double Indemnity the act of killing the husband serves as the supreme act of violence against family life, and has, in some sense, to be atoned for through the mutual destruction of the lovers in the macabre shoot-out, at the family house, which ends the film. It is perhaps most clear in this movie that the expression of sexuality and the institution of marriage are at odds with one another, and that both pleasure and death lie outside the safe circle of family relations.

Moreover, there is clearly an impetus in film noir to transgress the boundaries of this circle; for the presence of husbands on crutches or in wheelchairs (Double Indemnity, The Lady From Shanghai) suggests that impotence is somehow a normal component of the married state. Other imagery in these films suggests that a routinised boredom and a sense of stifling entrapment are characteristic of marriage. A large birdcage looms in the foreground of the family home in Scarlet Street, separating husband and wife, and the husband hovers uncertainly at the edge of the frame, holding in one hand the paint brushes which signify for him his escape into the fantasy world of his paintings. The family home in Double Indemnity is the place where three people who hate each other spend endlessly bor- ing evenings together. The husband does not merely not notice his wife, he ignores her sexually; so that it is only under Neff’s gaze that her long legs become the focal point of both the room as Neff sees it and the composition of the frame. While Neff looks at her, the husband looks at the insurance papers which function as his own death warrant, in the sense that they are the device through which the lovers plan to benefit from the large insurance payments on his death. Neff is subsequently caught up in the inescapable cycle of desire, death and retribution.