Sexuality
Phyllis Dietrichson is a woman who shamelessly objectifies her own body, wielding it like a weapon. As a classic "femme fatale," she dresses provocatively, favoring plunging décolletage, high silts and sensual colors. She accentuates her exotic sensuality with high heels, anklets, lipstick and flashy jewelry. She moves in a sexually provocative manner, such as brushing her beautiful hair, fiddling with her lipstick, buttoning her blouse in the presence of men, and slouching seductively on her sofa. In short, everything about Phyllis amounts to a deliberate attempt to solicit the male gaze. Despite Phyllis’s boldness, she is not a feminist seeking to defend a woman’s dignity and autonomy. She accepts the fact that men hold the monopoly on official power. Although Phyllis craves wealth and power, she does not challenge patriarchy writ large. She does, however, seek to subvert it by siphoning away men’s power through sexual allure. By objecting her body, she transforms herself into a beguiling sexual object which susceptible men like Walter Neff and Nino Zachetti find irresistible.
Doubling
The film's very title anticipates the fact that doubles, pairs, and doppelgängers will factor into its thematic material and narrative devices. Before the film begins, Phyllis has already killed Mr. Dietrichson's first wife and replaced her. When Walter comes to visit her, she seems determined to kill Mr. Dietrichson and have Walter replace him. Such replacements and substitutions are totally palatable to Phyllis's warped sense of morality, which treats other people as instruments to be discarded. The film's first image—a hobbling man on crutches—could be either Walter or Mr. Dietrichson, referencing the fact that the former impersonates the latter in the murder plot. Walter later discovers that Phyllis has been manipulating Lola's boyfriend, Nino Zachetti, in much the same manner she has been manipulating him. Walter and his boss Barton Keyes are kinds of doubles, complementing each other perfectly in a professional context, but separated by a nefarious secret. The interchangeability and substitutability of the male characters highlights their instrumentality, and their vulnerability to the particularly depraved and specifically female evil that Phyllis represents.
Insurance
Insurance, in addition to informing the film's setting as a crime drama set in and around an insurance company, also works symbolically as a theme in the film. In addition to being Walter's vocation as a salesman, insurance is the medium through which he and Phyllis attempt to fraudulently acquire a fortune. Barton's job is to investigate suspicious insurance claims, so Walter develops his scheme to account for how he knows the death will be investigated—essentially using his own knowledge of the insurance industry as insurance, in the proverbial sense. Phyllis, for her part, keeps Nino Zachetti on the side as a kind of "insurance" against Walter, who eventually wises up to her scheming. Barton delivers a monologue about the job of an insurance claims man as being, "a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one," playfully suggesting that the entirety of human affairs can be productively viewed through the thematic lens of insurance.
Vice
Alcohol and tobacco are two forms of vice that appear in several scenes throughout the film, often to signal a character's susceptibility to temptation and fleeting pleasure. In their second meeting, Phyllis tells Walter she is out of beer, and a desperate Walter tracks one down later, modeling the way in which she uses her body as an erotic lure. Walter later tells Phyllis he wishes he had "pink, bubbly stuff," to serve her instead of bourbon, which suggests that their affair is intoxicating and destructive rather than romantic and idealized. When Walter passes Phyllis off as a woman named "Margie" in front of Barton, Barton supposes that she "drinks from the bottle." Wilder shows Walter smoking cigars throughout the film, and the last image of Barton affectionately lighting Walter's cigarette is a tender symbol of one man indulging another man's whims despite the fact that their bond of trust has been irreversibly damaged.
Death
The inevitable prospect of death looms over Walter and Phyllis throughout the film. Honeysuckle is a key symbol of the theme of death: after first meeting Phyllis, Walter muses via voice-over, "I never knew honeysuckle could smell like murder," and he later notes the honeysuckle smelled "stronger," on the night they carry out the plot. The framing device of Walter's confession, with which the film opens, clues the viewer into the fact that the affair between the two will lead to at least one murder, and in fact leads to three. That their scheme will result in three murders is foreshadowed by the fact that Phyllis's signal to Walter is "three honks" on the horn. In the extended metaphor about the murder plot leading them "straight down the line," Walter realizes too late that the final destination is the cemetery.
Deceit
Nearly every character in Double Indemnity, with the notable exception of Barton Keyes, is deceitful. The entire film is framed as a confession, one whose purpose is to unfold the many, overlapping layers of deceit that structure the plot. The ultimate manipulator, Phyllis deceives everyone, most obviously Walter—first by insisting that she does not, in fact, want Mr. Dietrichson dead, then by pretending like she loves him in order to coerce him into her scheme. Walter deceives Barton, in addition to more ancillary characters like Charlie, Mr. Norton, and the janitor, in the process of carrying out the murder plot. Lola deceives her parents by telling them she is going to meet a friend named Ann Robertson, rather than Nino Zachetti. Walter wonders whether Barton is deceiving him when he tells Walter they nabbed Phyllis's accomplice, but Barton has in fact vouched for Walter's integrity, providing a key counterpoint to the film's gallery of duplicitous characters.
Money
Double Indemnity is a story that revolves around a woman's attempts not only to have her oil baron husband murdered, but to profit immensely from it. Wilder presents Phyllis Dietrichson as a materialistic housewife, whose trinkets such as her anklet and lipstick signal both indulgent affluence and excessive eroticism. Although her massive house in Los Feliz contrasts with Walter's humbler apartment near West Hollywood, Phyllis is not yet satisfied with her lot in life. Her avarice leads her to formulate the accident insurance policy scheme, which Walter extends one step further by exploiting the double indemnity clause. As a salesman, Walter is necessarily in the business of soliciting clients' money. As a claims investigator at Pacific All Risk Insurance, Barton views matters of life and death as items on a balance sheet, always focusing on how a given claim affects the company's bottom line. Despite the men's shared preoccupation with money, Walter allows himself to become corrupted, while Barton remains a rigorously moral force in the story.
