Double Indemnity
All day the rain washes down and races by Danny Mota's Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a long and fat mosquito blue. There is a movie in which rain, conceptualized as fate, seduction and murderous lies, sweeps down-flowing over an apartment building in the Los Angeles basin, a moment I am convinced Hollywood came upon purely by luck. Right then a woman with blond hair stands in a dark kitchenette and stops talking—her face, lit by Billy Wilder, beams with the innocence of a girl. A girl who has swayed a man of null will to help murder her husband. The winding downhill road from her stucco and tile townhouse to his rooms, from nothing-to-worry-about to everything-gone-wrong, is honeysuckle lined. How could he have known honeysuckle is sometimes the smell of death? How much is instinct in what Hollywood knows about us and how much a blind guess at what draws us to windows where nothing means more than a storm? They didn't see Mota's Cadillac up on blocks and Dan solo in his house high on pills just so he forgets his job guarding criminals who are soul-less who average a bit more than seventeen years on the planet and who love like the rest of us to sit in a darkened movie house breathless with wonder. The cloudy night Danny's retriever died because somebody with a shovel bashed in its shameless golden head they didn't offer a reason. They offered this, a television set, and judgement: a moment at the movie's end where one man who slumps, near death, swaying by the kingdom of insurance's glass doors, about to drown in some rough reality, is given a last light by Edward G. Robinson. What looks like solace is judgment and luck.
