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14 | 2 “For Money and a Woman” Rational Choice Theories and Double Indemnity Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) begins with the film’s protagonist , Walter Neff, mortally wounded and confessing to murder. “Yes, I killed him,” declares Neff. “I killed him for money and a woman. And I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?” Here the conventions of film noir, Hollywood’s most original and distinctive mode of crime drama, and rational choice theory, the oldest criminological perspective, converge in a narrative that depicts crime as the calculated choice of individuals who weigh crime’s benefits against its costs in the headlong pursuit of their own self-interests. Hollywood cinema has long relied on the image of the rational actor to explain crime. Heist films, thrillers, and noirs, in their many classic and contemporary incarnations—including such titles as The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Oceans 11 (1960; 2001), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Bottle Rocket (1996), The Departed (2006), and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)—portray individuals’ choices to pursue crime and the consequences that follow. However, as a genre, film noir may best illustrate the key points of rational choice theory due to its characteristically flawed heroes, calculating dames, voice-over narration, dark visual style, and pessimistic worldview. 1 In this chapter, we examine the main principles of rational choice theories, including their perspectives on human nature, criminal behavior, and punishment, through the lens of what many consider to be the definitive film noir, Double Indemnity—a movie nominated for seven Academy Awards and routinely listed in the top 100 films of all time.2 Rational Choice Theories The origins of the idea of crime as a rational act lie in the late eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, a historical moment that privileged reason and freedom over superstition and religious oppression. Out of this historical “For Money and a Woman” | 15 shift emerged what became known as the Classical school of criminological thought, a set of perspectives shaped most prominently by the philosophers and utilitarian social reformers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. In 1764, at the youthful age of twenty-six, Beccaria, the son of an Italian aristocrat, published a brief treatise, Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments), a work that had incalculable impact on the future of criminal justice reforms and criminology. Beccaria began by assuming that in their natural state, humans are ferociously selfish, waging constant “war” against everyone else. To reduce this endless strife, individuals must concede a small portion of their own freedom by entering into a social contract, a kind of peace agreement, with others. In doing this, they create a social order that is no longer based on the power of the strongest or the dictates of religion but instead on a liberalism authored by and representative of the people. Social stability can then be measured by its usefulness in achieving “the greatest happiness shared among the greater number.”3 At the time Beccaria wrote, criminal behavior was most often equated with sin and frequently involved cruel, excessive punishments, including torture, for all aside from powerful aristocrats. But the new ideas based upon humanist , scientific, and democratic ideals percolating through societies, including the American colonies as well as Beccaria’s Italy, challenged the stranglehold of Catholic noblemen on the criminal justice apparatus. In this period, the simple accusation of having committed a crime was enough to merit interrogation , torture, and, in some cases, a painful, public death. Beccaria advocated a new model of governance in which the fear of others would be replaced by a fear of law, and in which punishment would be calibrated to fit the crime. To develop law as a rationalizing force, he insisted that laws need to be clear and that punishment, as a mechanism for law’s enforcement, “should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen” but rather “public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, and determined by the law.”4 The state’s right to punish, a principle central to Beccaria’s sociolegal ideas, reflects his understanding of the criminal as a rational actor. He and many of his followers, in conceptualizing the democratic citizen as a rational actor who weighs the costs and benefits of crime, constructed a subject who must be deterred from committing such acts through the very idea and promise of punishment. For Beccaria, deterrence is...

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