If you want to minimize risk and indemnify yourself against contingency and still live a life out in the open air, there is an entire industry dedicated to helping you. It’s called insurance. And it operates according to the rules of noir. In fact, insurance and noir are complementary expressions of a vision of the world in which moral, philosophical, and political differences are replaced by statistical differences that have no meaning aside from the fact that they can be noted.

Insurance, like other statistical projects, depends on numbering items in a defined population. (The population is a construct, the product of artificially dividing the world into x’s and not-x’s, for example, people with higher degrees and people without higher degrees or people living above the poverty line—another construct—and those living below it.) First you count things—things made available as things by your system of classification—and then you put to the data you have amassed any number of questions. How many of these things are there? Are they found in certain demographic areas, or are they evenly dispersed? Do they correlate with items produced by other forms of classification—age, gender, wealth, ethnic origin, skin color, I.Q.? When you have the answers to your questions, and when those answers identify patterns that are distressing or less than optimal, you come up with a plan designed to ameliorate the unhappy condition. Counting, then, is a device of control: It puts you in a position where because of the knowledge you now have and the foresight that knowledge provides, you can make things happen; you can alter configurations in the world. Counting is an assertion of potency; it is a form of pride.

That is why in the First Book of Chronicles, God reacts as He does when David numbers the people of Israel: “Go,” David says to Joab, and “number Israel from Beersheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them to me.” Joab demurs. He reminds David that all the people to be counted are God’s servants, not his, and warns him that God will be angry at this “trespass.” Joab doesn’t explain what the trespass is, but no explanation is needed: David numbers Israel so that he can assess the resources available to him in the battles Israel is constantly fighting. Like Milton’s Satan, who glories in the vast army of his fallen legions—“their number last he sums”—David wants to know what he can depend on. He forgets that it is the duty of the creature to depend solely on the Creator, Who does not need the world’s forces to accomplish His ends and has no regard for the presumptuous plans of man. (“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” the Lord asks Job.) David should have remembered that he killed Goliath with a slingshot and that Samson slew one thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass and that God can do anything with nothing. Instead, he goes ahead with his census, trusting in the numbers it reveals, and, as Joab had predicted, “God was displeased with this thing” and “smote Israel,” killing seventy thousand men.

The biblical commentator G. Campbell Morgan says of David, “The spirit of vainglory in numbers had taken possession of the people and the king.” The same vainglory, in a different form, takes possession of those who created the modern state, which, as Joan Copjec writes, was from the beginning “conceived in actuarial terms.” By this she means the very sophisticated devices of counting that make the measurement and management of whatever is being counted a possible project. David’s census is a primitive forebear of the regimes of control that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It fails because in the premodern world the answer to the question “How can we make sense of disasters visited randomly on individuals and populations?” is to be found not in method and numbers but in the will of an all-knowing and omnipotent God. David performed an act displeasing to a providential deity—He sees and attends to even the fall of a sparrow—and he was then punished by that deity, Who is famously jealous of His authority and doesn’t want His creatures to rely on other gods or their own powers or material resources, however numerous.

The story portrays a direct (if painful) relationship. There is an all-knowing and all-powerful God, and if you offend Him, break His rules, or set yourself above Him by trusting your own strength, wisdom, or ability to calculate, you will suffer the penalty. Of course that same God might inflict penalties not to punish you but to educate you or to test you (this is what happens to Job), but the model is always the same: Injuries suffered by the creature are explained by a relationship—punitive, corrective, tutelary—to the Creator. Job’s friends are mistaken when they assume that his misfortunes are the result of his having done something wrong, but they are right to assume that his misfortunes have something to do with his relationship to God.

In this model, then, disasters are not random, although they may seem to be, but are dispensed by a God Who has His reasons, reasons not known to those who receive their application. There’s not much you can do but hope and pray that you are not one of those whom God has in His sights. In another model, which François Ewald and others call the model of “juridical responsibility,” the connection between what you do and what happens to you and the remedies that may be available is more straightforward and, to some extent, reassuring. It is not a deity operating behind screens that we cannot penetrate, but a public system of law designed to take account of and, to some extent, ameliorate the unpredictability of unhappy events. An injury is suffered in a way that disturbs an order conceived as “harmonious.” That disturbance then calls for two related investigations by courts, one an investigation into the nexus of cause and fault—Whose negligence is responsible for this misfortune?—and a second into what will be required to make the injured party whole, to restore the harmonious order in relation to which the injury was an anomaly, an exception to the ordinary course of things.

But in a third model, the model of statistical calculation (of which insurance is a subset), the question “Why is this happening to me?” is answered neither by invoking a God who has His ways nor by pointing to the negligence of a legally culpable actor, but by the unhelpful assertion that your luck is bad. Things happen to people because things happen to people. The unhappy event is a matter neither of fault nor of heavenly intervention, but of chance; your misfortune is an accident intended by no one and inflicted on you for no reason.

That sounds pretty bleak and harsh, but statistical thought softens the blow by offering the possibility of taming chance and, to some extent, pulling its sting. While there is no way of predicting what will happen to you—the loss of a house or an automobile or a job or a limb or a loved one—statistical calculation can predict the rate at which it will happen to a group or class of which you are a member. “One can predict that during the next year there will be a certain number of accidents, the only unknown being who will have an accident, who will draw one of existence’s unlucky numbers,” Ewald observes. In the face of that unknown, you can pay a fee (a premium) to a business called an insurance company that assumes the risk and compensates you if you are one of those struck by the hand of fate. The company bets—this is its risk—that the sum of the premiums paid to it by all the members of the group will exceed the sum it pays out to those few (it is hoped) who suffer injury. The company also hedges the risk by investing the premiums it receives, an act that creates another risk. All this is underwritten by what is called the law of large numbers, what Theodore M. Porter explains as “the observed regularity of statistical aggregates.” Ewald explains that “risk only becomes something calculable when it is spread over a population. The work of the insurer is, precisely, to constitute that population by selecting and dividing risks.” And statistics, Copjec writes, “created a mathematical expectation within which we could come to believe in the calculability of risk.” Something that can be calculated is something that can be managed.

One of the surprising consequences of thinking about statistical aggregates rather than about single unique events is that the important features of the providential and juridical models pretty much disappear. There are no individuals with character strengths and weaknesses, just members of groups defined by general characteristics (age, gender, height, wealth, health, etc.). There is no issue of fault and responsibility, just the issue of whether or not you belong to a statistically defined category, a fact that merits neither praise nor blame. And most surprising, there are no accidents; there is no departure from the regular order of things because there is no regular order of things, just happenings that have no inherent value descriptions. I regularly drive from Fort Myers, Florida, to Sarasota on I-75, a major interstate highway. When nothing happens to me, that’s an accident, and it’s also normal. When I get a ticket or run out of gas and stall in the middle lane, that’s an accident and also normal, where normal means conforming to statistical regularities. Neither experience—trouble-free driving or interrupted driving—is a baseline. They are both just things that occur at a statistically calculable rate. And if there is no baseline, there are no anomalies that can be identified in relation to it. You can say that everything is an anomaly (an accident), or you can say that everything is ordinary. Neither term indicates a substantive difference, just a difference in nomenclature with no content, just another happening with no relationship except a statistical one to other happenings.

This of course is also the world according to noir. Here, life is a meaningless collection of incidents without a teleology, without an overarching system of values providing guidance, without a deity to whom you can be responsible and from whom you can receive protection, without an effective means of agency, without a defense against mindlessly malevolent forces that are everywhere. In the words of Charles Oakley in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, “The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?” Or listen to Rose Balestrero in Hitchcock’s Wrong Man: “They were after me, and they’ll get me. It’s no good trying; it’s useless.” It’s all a cosmic game of chance with the odds forever in favor of the house. As Erwin “Doc” Riedenschneider, the mastermind criminal in John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, ruefully observes, “What can you do against blind accidents?”

Yet Doc, played by Sam Jaffe, has spent his life trying to avoid or evade his own insight. A career criminal, he has been thinking about the perfect heist during the seven years of his most recent incarceration. The moment he gets out, he heads straight to the lair of a bookmaker who might put him in contact with a financial backer. He tells the bookmaker that his plan is so good that he could sell it for one hundred thousand dollars. Nevertheless, he says, “I prefer to execute it myself.” The preference is part financial: He can make more money if he retains control. But the larger part belongs to his professional pride: He wants to be the one who pulls it off, who succeeds in doing what others have been unable to do, who beats the odds. In the middle of the caper he remarks to his criminal colleagues, “This is the biggest one yet. Wait till you see it in the papers.” He looks forward to the recognition of his achievement more than the fruits of the heist. His peers who read the newspapers will know that he has crooked the house.

But he hasn’t. As he muses later, after everything has gone wrong and at least two men are dead, “Put in hours and hours of planning. Figure everything down to the last detail. Then what? Burglar alarms start going off all over the place for no sensible reason.” “Figure” means calculate; “down to the last detail” means taking advance account of as many contingencies as you can think of. Planning of this kind is a form of insurance, a precaution, supposedly, against contingency. But in the end contingency always wins. As Doc asks, “What can you do against blind accidents?”

Yet even at this late date, he has not learned the lesson of his own pronouncement. His backer, Emmerich, wants to give up, but Doc comes up with a scheme to save the day. He says, “Go to the insurance company.” This is beyond ironic. After acknowledging that there is nothing he can do, no forethought he might exercise that will ensure his success, he turns to insurance as if its statistical schemes can save him when his own calculations could not: “They’ll listen to reason” and buy the jewels back “for as high as twenty-five percent of what they’re worth.” Of course it doesn’t work. Emmerich doesn’t go to the insurance company; he kills himself. So much for plan B. But Doc isn’t through. He goes to plan C. He’ll take the jewels and make his way to Mexico. There he’ll sell them off one by one and live safe and free to chase girls, his fantasy occupation. But he lingers too long (two minutes) in a teen hangout watching a nubile young girl dance. As he exits, two policemen take him into custody and confirm his guess that his moment of pleasure has been responsible for his capture. Earlier he had remarked that “one way or another we all work for our vice”—that is, we think we’re doing something rational, but we’re actually working for forces over which we have no control. Whether the irrationality comes from the universe or from our inner demons and compulsions, it will always have the last disorienting word no matter how many backup plans we have in reserve.

Doc is only one of the noir protagonists who knows that the plans he makes will go awry and persists anyway. No matter how often it is exposed as a will-o’-the-wisp, the lure of the place safe from the vicissitudes of a capricious world remains powerful. It is also the lure of insurance. Insurance promises that individual pain and misfortune—the effects of chance—can be, if not eliminated, at least softened by substituting for the “real-life” individual the “insurantial identity” of a member of a statistically created population who can receive compensation based on the calculated regularity of events that cannot be prevented but can be mitigated. Insurance may not eliminate chance, but, as A. Chaufon explains, “It fixes its scope; it does not abolish loss, but ensures that loss, by being shared, is not felt.” Or, perhaps, is not so grievously felt.

Even in this qualified form, the claim is a large one. “Insurance makes it possible to dream of a contractual justice where an order established by conventions will take the place of natural order,” Ewald writes. “Insurance makes it possible to envisage a solution to the problem of poverty and working-class insecurity.” That is the kind of salvational effect usually attributed to religion. The apostles of insurance do not shy away from the comparison. The historian Dan Bouk reports that one early promoter of insurance “went so far as to equate modern life insurance with the community of early Christians who sold their private possessions and ‘laid them down at the Apostles’ feet.’”

Insurance thus conceived or glorified takes on another aspect of religion. It not only establishes regularities; it promises to alter them for the better and bring us closer to the promised land. “Risk makers,” Bouk explains, “began pitching their techniques as means for altering fates and not just predicting them.” Soon, statistical writers persuaded their readers that they could construct systems that, as Porter writes, “could be presumed to generate large-scale order and regularity that would be virtually unaffected by the caprice that seemed to prevail in the actions of individuals.” An “orderly reign of facts” could replace the “confusion of politics.” Indeed, the whole human race could be improved with the help of the knowledge provided by statistical calculations. Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, called for “the establishment of a sort of scientific priesthood,” whose “high duties would have reference to the health and well-being of the nation in its broadest sense.” In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, the most famous example of an insurance-themed noir film, Barton Keyes, a claims manager at Pacific All-Risk Insurance, elevates the wielder of statistical knowledge to a position of wisdom and near omniscience. “A claims man is a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one,” he says. On this view, the skilled statistician can do everyone’s job, including the job of the priest, and do it better.

Statistics in the form of insurance can even match religion’s largest claim, the claim that one can transcend death. Heads of households have long feared death for many reasons, but one of the major ones was (and is) the fear that after they passed to the other side, the families they left behind and the businesses they built would be without protection and means of sustenance. Enter life insurance. Under its rule, death is commodified, and through this transformation a policy turns money into an extended life, life beyond death. This at least is how life insurance companies advertise themselves. A commercial that aired in 2025, for example, featured a man saying that even after his father died, “he was still able to provide for mom.” Stability, protection from contingency, freedom from perturbation (a favorite word in the pro-insurance polemic), improved health, financial security, an apolitical community of mutual respect, eternal or at least extended life—the security you couldn’t find on your own you can find in insurance.

Well, not really. The power of insurance to outflank and thereby tame chance depends on the establishment of a baseline law of averages that enables prediction and opens up the path to proactive remedies. What if that baseline were no longer in place because the law of averages had failed and calculations relying on them were upset by events that were not supposed to have occurred?

This is not a hypothetical question. It is one that follows from today’s realities: from the wildfires in Los Angeles; three disastrous once-in-a-century hurricanes in two years in southwest Florida; the destruction of the arts district in Asheville, North Carolina, by never-before-seen floods; not to mention numerous events in other countries. What do insurance companies do in the face of these developments? They deny claims, stop writing policies, abandon states, file for bankruptcy, go out of business. In 2025, Robert Kuttner predicted in the American Prospect that “the next casualty of the epic Los Angeles fires, appropriately, will be the casualty industry.” What is the cause of insurance failures? The factors cited usually include faulty risk assessment, too-risky investments (the risk managers cannot manage their own risks), natural disasters, and the big one, climate change. Each of these is a tacit admission that the model doesn’t work. Risk assessment is supposedly the insurance companies’ forte. They fall down on the other end when they invest premium funds unwisely. A disaster is by definition a disruption of normal functioning, but since such disruptions are precisely what insurance promises to mitigate, citing them as a reason for inadequate performance is tantamount to acknowledging that you can’t do what you claim to be able to do. Finally, climate change is a large placeholder for the unpredictable and uncontrollable forces in the face of which insurance is impotent.

To be sure, like Doc in The Asphalt Jungle, the industry has backup plans. One is switching from actual loss insurance to parametric insurance, in which payout at a fixed rate is rendered when a predefined measurable threshold (a Category Five hurricane, for example, or so many inches of rainfall) is reached. The advantage to the insuree is that you know what you’re getting. The potentially major disadvantage is the possibility, indeed likelihood, that actual losses will be much greater than the payout. You have paid someone else to assume your risk, but that someone else, after accepting your payment, sends a large part of the risk back to you. (Doesn’t sound like insurance to me.) Another backup plan is re-insurance, which is insurance for insurance companies that offload their risk to other insurance companies for a large fee. The advantage is that the “ceding” company stabilizes its losses, but the cost of re-insurance may be so large that the company, like an ordinary homeowner, may decide it isn’t worth it and may just take its chances. And then there is the possibility that the re-insurer becomes insolvent, in which case all the parties down the chain are once again at risk, unless perhaps they are rescued by the last resort or backup of the federal Treasury, which is itself deep in debt and not as secure as we like to believe.

It should be clear now why insurance figures in so many noirs (at least twenty by my count). If the world has been emptied of God—and, along with His disappearance, teleology has gone too—what is left is the landscape of insurance. It’s just one thing after another, incidents that can be aggregated but not interpreted because they have no meaning. All we have are “open-ended collections of randomly occurring facts,” in Ewald’s phrase. These statistical facts lose their status as “indices of some higher meaning; they refer back to nothing but themselves,” and they have “no cause, or past, or future.” They simply are. There is no narrative in relation to which individual instances signify. Indeed, Ewald concludes, “The world as perceived for statistical ends makes no sense.”

This is exactly the world assumed and presented by both insurance and noir: Lots of things happen, and there’s no point in asking why, no point in being a theologian or a philosopher. Rather, let’s just try to get a statistical handle on random occurrences and figure out a way to navigate a terrain we can’t fully or directly control. That way is insurance, a numerical technology emptied of substantive value that is perfectly suited to a landscape—the noir landscape—emptied of substantive value. Not medicine, not law, not teaching, not preaching—in that landscape insurance is the only practice that has a chance (but not much of a chance, as it turns out) of generating favorable outcomes. Ye shall know the numbers, and the numbers shall make you free.

Free of what? Free of the house, of the cosmos with its multiple and unchartable ways of tripping you up. The hubris of insurance, matched by the hubris of defiant risk-takers, is the claim to offset or outmaneuver chance, to be able to forge a path between the minefields of blind accident. Insurance companies say, We can defeat contingency; the foolhardy noir character responds, I can defeat the defeater of contingency and be the smartest of them all.

This is what Rex Black (Laurence Harvey) says to his wife Stella (Lee Remick) in Carol Reed’s neo-noir The Running Man. Rex, charming but feckless, is the pilot and owner of a plane he uses to transport freight. One day the plane crashes. Rex escapes, but when he visits his insurance company to finalize what he anticipates will be a twenty-thousand-pound payout, he is told that his policy had expired two days before the accident; he had forgotten to send in the renewal check. Rex and Stella protest, but the claims adjuster tells them, smugly, that “this is an insurance company and we have certain rules. . . . We’re not a charity, you know.” Rex is furious and devises a plan. Like Harry Lime in Reed’s masterpiece The Third Man, Rex fakes his own death after insuring himself for fifty thousand pounds. He goes up in a glider plane, ditches it just before it crashes, and makes his way to Brighton, where he rents a room under an assumed name. The plan is to wait until Stella gets the payout on the policy. They will then rendezvous in Málaga, Spain, and live happily ever after. Rex insists several times that they are doing nothing wrong: “We’re only getting back what they really owe us.”

Viewers learn all this in a flashback. The film opens, in imitation of The Third Man, with Rex’s funeral, well attended and adorned by the apparently grieving widow, who afterward hosts a reception at the couple’s apartment. After the friends and mourners leave, Rex pops out of a room and the plotters embrace in celebration. But then the doorbell rings. The caller is Stephen Maddox (Alan Bates), a representative of the insurance company, who tells Stella (Rex of course has retreated) that he has a few questions. Obviously smitten, he asks his questions—mostly about suicide—and then leaves.

When Stella catches up with Rex in Spain, he has transformed himself into Jim Jerome, a blond and mustached Australian sheep farmer. He takes on the personality of a rich playboy and exhibits the appropriate arrogance. Stella doesn’t like Jim. Rex replies that he doesn’t like him either and will get rid of him as soon as he gets him insured. Rex has enjoyed faking his death and crooking the insurance company, so he wants to do it again and again. He will then have no personality, just a succession of short-term identities that emerge in response to insurance opportunities. Stella sees what he is becoming and doesn’t hold back: “You just like taking risks. You think you’re far too clever for him and everyone else in the world.”

The “him” in Stella’s statement is the insurance agent, who has appeared in Spain out of nowhere, much to the consternation of the Blacks. There follows a period when the three of them go around together in an atmosphere of tension. What does he know? (He has never met or seen Rex.) Why is he there? What is he writing in that little notebook? Stella decides to look in his room while he is out. She hopes to find the notebook. While she is searching for it, he comes in and asks why she is there. She replies, “Why do you think?,” more than implying that she shares the sexual desire he so obviously feels. They make love, leaving viewers with an interpretive problem: Is Stella just falling in with her husband’s schemes and taking on the amorality he more and more displays, or is she genuinely attracted to the insurance agent? But before we lose ourselves in that question (which is never answered), Stephen reveals something that puts a new twist on everything. He is no longer an insurance agent; he now sells paint (how banal); he’s been hanging around only because he was interested in her. Suddenly we’re watching a movie other than the one we thought we were watching. In this new movie Stella has nothing to worry about, except the possibility that Rex will find out about her indiscretion. But when Rex becomes increasingly erratic and tries to run Stephen’s car over a cliff, she tells her husband about the affair. He accosts her in a church, and when police intervene, he flees, drives to an airport, steals a plane, and crashes it. (Back to the beginning.) He is dragged out of the plane, and as he dies he declares it a pity that he wasn’t insured. Stella walks away allowing the authorities to believe that it is Jim who has died—as in fact he has, along with Rex. She is left alone, rich, and compromised.

Not a great noir, but one that features many classic noir elements: Two ordinary people slide into criminality; one of them likes it and wants to go further; the other keeps saying that she hopes life can be normal when this is all over; they hold onto the vain belief that it can ever be over once the line has been crossed; a safe space turns out to be dangerous when someone who is most likely a pursuer appears; a femme fatale does nothing overtly wrong but is the victim of her own beauty; a twist—no one is pursuing them but themselves—comes too late to avoid sexual betrayal; and, in the end, everyone’s hopes are disappointed.

What distinguishes The Running Man is the focus on insurance not simply as a plot device but as a mode of being, a way of manipulating the world so that its meaninglessness can be made to work for you if you are clever and run fast enough. Rex is not only the running man; he is the insurance man—they are the same thing—for he seeks a renewed and perpetual but discontinuous life in the succession of identities he plans to assume, insure, and kill off as he brings the curtain down on former lives that harbor vulnerabilities he repeatedly escapes. But in this film as in others, you can never run fast enough. The running man, the insurance man, and the smartest man, the man who boasts he can beat the odds and win the game, perish together.