Noir films present a world in which the lines between right and wrong, hero and villain, and man and woman are all erased, disordered or inverted. In classic noir, order is generally restored in some form, as the villains are jailed or the patriarch reasserts his authority or both of those. In neo-noir, however, dislocations are more severe and are often unrightable. The femme fatales win, the law’s helplessly corrupted, audience sympathies are directed towards the wrong figures for the wrong reason.
Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) casts a fractured gaze at all of these trends. Directed by Irvin Kershner and with a story by John Carpenter, the movie’s obviously indebted most directly to Psycho. But it’s also riffing on noir stories: narratives of professional women and gendered disorder a la Laura (1944), narratives of police turned killers a la The Prowler (1951). In Kershner’s film, slashers, police procedurals, and women career melodramas all become distorted reflections of one another, looking at cracked glass through each other’s eyes.
The titular Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a celebrated fashion photographer whose controversial images are saturated in sex and violence—just like the film she’s in. Her vision and the vision of the film become confused with one another. At the gallery opening for her new photo book, Laura begins to have disturbing killer-eye slasher-cam visions of murders in which the murderer stabs out his victim’s eyes. Soon her friends and associates start dying, and it’s up to Lt. John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) to solve the case and save the girl.
Laura tells Neville that her work is about the violence she sees suffusing society. But that violence is disturbing, in part, because it’s associated with gendered disorder. Laura, as photographer of attractive, semi-nude women, is picking up the male gaze—a gaze which is also linked to sadism and murder. When she enters the killer’s vision, it’s a kind of comeuppance for her refusal to stay in her feminized place, and the ritual stabbing of eyes is a castration (because Laura is unmanning the patriarchs) and a vindictive revenge for castration.
The panicked gendered disorder isn’t just in Laura. Her agent, Donald (the wonderful René Auberjonois) is portrayed as possibly gay, and he’s killed while cross-dressing as Laura to help her escape her police escort. Laura’s models Michelle (Lisa Taylor) and Lulu (Darlanne Fluegel) are roommates and they’re murdered during what might possibly be viewed as lesbian foreplay. The New York arts demimonde, with its disco beat, its fluid sexuality and gender roles, is exciting, provocative, and a disordered nightmare. Laura isn’t in her proper place, and the result is that she’s in the place of death.
At first it seems like John Neville will restore the patriarchal virtues. He first meets Laura at her opening, where he tells her that her work’s shallow and exploitive; not the art a woman should be making. Gradually she comes to rely on him and then they fall in love. When Neville identifies the murderer, he calls Laura and tells her she’s safe and he’ll take her away. She’ll fly from her decadent milieu into a heterosexual idyll, where she’ll no longer gaze at sexy models or at violent murder scenes, but only at her man.
That’s not how the movie ends. In a final twist, it turns out that the murderer was Neville, or Neville’s split personality. He relates a tragic backstory about being neglected by his sex-worker mother and then watching his father kill her. His experience of violence is related, confusedly, to his antipathy towards Laura’s use of violence in her work. He’s the broken, mentally-ill bad viewer of violent media that the censors are always warning about; like Laura, he has over-identified.
Neville’s violence is related to media, but also to gender. When he kills, he is, perhaps, inhabiting his father, the bad patriarch, who punishes his mother for not fulfilling her female role as mother. At the same time, through the nod to Psycho, John may be inhabiting his mother—or inhabiting Laura, who sees, after all, through his eyes. He’s the homme fatale and femme fatale, his gaze and self-fractured as he sticks the knife in the mirror.
Laura finally, at Neville’s request, shoots him (and him) with the gun he gave her. Just as Neville turns out to be the killer he is pursuing, so Laura ends up as the killer who haunts her, looking with her own eyes at the murder of her loved one, as she looked through her own eyes at the murder of all her other loved ones throughout the film.
You could see this as a prototypical final girl victory; Laura seizes the instrument of violence and does unto the slasher what he’d do unto her. But the ending is less triumphant than that of most slasher finales. Laura isn’t really disempowered as target of the knife and then empowered as holder of the knife. Rather, throughout the film, she’s been traumatized by the way she identifies, or projects herself, into the killer. When she kills Neville, it’s not a victory, but a final over-determined trauma, as she turns into the violator she’s mimicked in her work and been haunted by throughout the narrative.
When you as the viewer roots for her to finish Neville off, you’re rooting for her to inhabit her worst nightmare. Laura’s compelled to witness vicarious sadistic/masochistic spectacles, over and over, just as you are. The eyes of Laura Mars are the eyes of noir, and they, and you, see wrong.